Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [55]
Ramona complied and peeled the low-heeled, snug-fitting shoes from Mae’s feet and let the shoes hit the floor in thuds.
Mae sighed and flexed her toes while Ramona went through her bag to find her slippers. “Where those new little girls?” Mae asked in a voice that sounded like it was ready for sleep. “What they like? Did they mind you all right? I know they did. Vie said they seem to be nice little things even if they do come from money.”
Ramona was stone again. She had almost forgotten she was going to have to tell Mae about Victoria’s fall, about her knee, the tooth chipped in the corner. She thought she’d have two more days. And now Mae was back two days early, hadn’t even given the child enough time to heal.
“They at church,” Ramona said into the overnight bag.
“Speak up, girl, what you over there mumbling about?”
Mae’s head was resting against the back of the couch. Ramona wondered if the blue-stitched seam irritated Mae’s neck like it did her own. She wished at that moment that it did, that it would scratch Mae’s neck like the point of a straight pin.
“At church,” Ramona almost shouted it. “Two of them anyhow.”
“Why only two?” Mae shifted her head and nestled it deeper along the couch back. Her red wig was crooked, and Ramona fought the impulse to go straighten it out.
“One of them couldn’t go, that middle one, fell yesterday and hurt her leg and chipped her tooth. She’ll be fine, though. A little scrape.” Ramona rushed her words all in one breath.
Mae sat up slowly. With the sun pouring in through the window and stopping as a wide slat of a beam just above her head, she looked like a red-hatted circus seal getting ready to do an alley-oop over a diving board. “What you mean, hurt herself?” Her words were deliberate. Her head went through the sunbeam and scattered it.
“Awl, Mae, it’s just a little scrape; it’s not like she’s hurt bad.” Ramona walked toward her mother with her powder blue slippers in her hands.
“Don’t you know my livelihood depends on my perfect record with my fosters?” Mae barked. “I don’t be turning back no damaged kids. How dare you let one of my fosters get hurt when you supposed to be minding them.” She was sitting straight up. “Tell her to come here; let me see what harm you let happen while I’m away trying to tend to my sick baby sister. Sometimes you the most useless, inept person I’ve ever seen in all my born days. Call her down here, right now, I said.”
But she didn’t have to call her down. Victoria was already standing at the top of the steps. “Do you want me, Ramona?” she asked in a voice that had just awakened from a nap.
“It’s Mae that want you, sugar.” Mae softened her tone. “Come on here and let Mae meet that baby girl and see how that lil darling hurt herself.”
Victoria held the banister and tried with everything in her to walk normally down the stairs. The blue-bordered plastic runner had almost tripped her earlier. She looked at Mae sitting there, her eye drooping, her wig crooked, scowling at Ramona. She looked shorter, meaner than she did on the picture propped next to the color glossy of President Kennedy inside the glass-cased china cabinet. Suddenly as her feet left the bottom step for the living-room floor, she was afraid of Mae, more afraid than she’d ever been of Ramona. She almost wanted to run to Ramona, to hide behind her tulip-laden duster. Her sisters, she knew, would never understand this sudden need she had for Ramona to shield her from Mae.
“How you fall, doll baby? Tell Mae what happened to you.”
Victoria thought that she should keep her lips clamped shut to hide her chipped teeth. She pushed her voice through her barely opened lips. “I’m not that hurt.”
“That’s a mighty big dressing over your knee for you to be not that hurt. Come a little closer, and let Mae get a welcome hug and a good look at this doll baby.”
Victoria took baby steps; she limped less that way. She tried to sift through the air in that room that was so confused