Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [31]
“Get away from them gals,” he yelled to Larry.
Larry had just picked Bliss up and was trying to kiss her cheek, while Shern kicked and punched at him and Bliss tried to claw his face. Victoria hobbled from the sidelines, screaming, “Please, God, make him go away.”
“Hey, Larry, you old crazy fool,” Mister called, “put that little gal down, put her down, I say.”
“You the crazy one,” Larry yelled back. “You ain’t even got enough sense to live in a house, living in an abandoned factory and you calling me crazy.”
“I’ll tell you what, though,” Mister shot back, “I bet I got a baseball bat in there with your name all over it, don’t make me go whip it out.”
Larry turned to look at Mister directly.
“Oh, yes, I will, try me, just try me.”
Larry coughed a low-pitched cough that sounded like a lion’s growl. “But these my grandkids. Look at them, look just like me.”
“Am not!” Bliss gave Larry one final kick and wrenched herself free while he and Mister argued. She and Shern each grabbed Victoria under the arms and ran like hell to get back to Mae’s.
5
Five minutes bled into ten to fifteen to an hour. Ramona turned the knob on the gas stove to lower the flame under the hot dogs and baked beans. She went into the living room yet again straight to the window and watched the night and the wind shaking hands on the front porch. No girls yet. Didn’t matter how turned around they must have gotten trying to find their way to and from the library, they were an hour late. What a whipping she wanted to give them for making her worry like this, like the kind she’d been raised on: an ironing cord strapping right around the meaty part of her calf until red welts came up in a pattern that would have been beautiful were it not against skin. That’s what those girls needed in her mind; that’s what the whole band of fosters had needed over the years. The ones taken from their parents by the courts, the ones given up on, the truants, the orphans, the runaways.
She went back in the kitchen and lifted the lid from the pot and counted the hot dogs, which looked like logs turning over in red-dirt mud. Mae always told her that it was bad luck to count food; she counted now for spite. Two apiece, that was it; she dared one of them to ask for the extras.
She wiped at her sweater and folded the edges along the waist of her Wranglers and went back into the living room and looked out the window for signs of those three. Nothing, just the dark porch air.
She lifted the cover on the boxy hi-fi stereo. Her stack of Sam Cooke 45s were already disked up and sitting on the spindle, waiting to fall. She flicked the lever and sat on the velvet ottoman and waited for the stereo to go through its rotations. The ottoman was the only piece of sitting-on furniture in the room that wasn’t swathed in custom-made plastic covers. The covers were seam-stitched in royal blue thread; Mae insisted that they match the carpet. Ramona tried not to look at the royal blue–bordered chair covers. Tried not to remind herself how much money Mae squandered. Mae had even taken to calling Lit Brothers furniture department, pretended to be Ramona, and ordered nightstands, lamps, face-sized mirrors. When Ramona challenged her shortened paycheck with the bony-necked accountant, said she’d only charged a Maybelline face powder and a tube of lipstick that week, and the accounting person came down on the selling floor and pulled Ramona from a customer who was just about to purchase a half dozen Hawaiian print shirts and showed Ramona the order sheet for a nightstand and lamp and mirror, Ramona had feigned a lapse in memory, focused on the bones jutting out in the accountant’s neck, and said yes, she’d ordered the nightstand and lamp and mirror but she didn’t think the deductions would start until the following week. She was too embarrassed to let anyone know her own mother