Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [58]
Ramona watched Mae’s theatrics; she knew the children were commodities to Mae, as much as she called them pudding and doll baby; she knew Mae cared about their well-being only as long as there was payment from the state associated with their well-being. So now Ramona was itching to ask, couldn’t wait to ask, even though she already knew, she asked it quickly, loudly, for her own satisfaction, she asked it. “What the boy look like?”
“Tall and skinny,” Bliss blurted, “looked like someone who thought he was cute all his life. Big old hands. Ugh, I can’t even imagine how my sister felt having those old nasty hands squeezing all over her like he was giving someone a massage or something. I mean, he squeezed her so hard her long dress coat went way up over the top of her knees.”
“Bliss,” Tyrone said quietly, “sh-h, I’m sure we all get the idea.”
“Not unh,” Bliss half whined, half shouted. “You get the idea because you were there, Tyrone. They weren’t there, they don’t know how disgusting it was. I’m just trying to make them see it.”
“And you did a good job of describing it, sugarplum,” Mae said to Bliss as she looked at her with her one good eye and smiled. “I sure don’t hope I run into that no-count, no-home-trained, disrespectful hoodlum. I might be tempted to knock him into next week.”
“Well, pick which day you want him to land on,” Ramona said with a smirk. “Here he comes walking up the steps right now.”
Shern stayed up in the bedroom facedown on the twin bed with the pillow covering her head, still in the Empire-waist green velvet dress she’d worn to church. Bliss couldn’t talk her into coming down for dinner, nor Victoria, even though she had at least responded to the sound of Victoria limping, pulled her head from under the pillow long enough to ask her how was her leg. Then retreated again where the only thing remotely comforting to her this Sunday afternoon was the feel of her own breaths under the dark tent the pillow made.
She relived the horror of the feel of that hand against her, and then the sound that drummed through her head, a screech, then a thundering bang that she felt in her chest, as if she’d just watched a car filled with every person she’d ever loved barrel into an eighteen-wheeler and explode. That’s how she felt at Bliss’s screech and then her proclamation, “That’s him. That’s the nasty good-for-nothing that squeezed my sister’s butt.”
And then Mae, saying, “You must be mistaken, young lady. That’s my nephew, Addison, a fine young man he is. Gonna be living right here with us for the next few to several weeks.”
The very thought of living under the same roof together, and a ball of yarn started spinning in the pit of her stomach. She’d have to pass him in the hall, see him across the dinner table, God forbid, go in the bathroom right after he came out. What if she were caught in the house with just him? What if he tried to touch her again? He might even go farther next time. Might try to take her the way her neighbor around the corner had been taken after the holiday party at the law firm where she’d interned over Christmas. “A disgrace the way they spoiled that child,” her mother had said. “Slipped something in her drink. And now she’s ruined. A real lady she was too.” But this thing whom Mae had the nerve to call a fine young man might be brazen enough to try something with her head-on and staring her straight in her eyes.
Now even the feel of her breaths blowing back against her face had ceased to comfort her, and she tried not to think about the one thing that could still the spinning in her stomach right now, the sound of her mother’s voice. She knew if she dwelled on her mother and the impossibility of hearing her voice, a piercing hurt would mix with the anger and humiliation she was feeling over that horrible boy’s hand, and she might be thrown into a fit of hysterical crying that would be all-consuming. So she dwelt on the next best