Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [65]
“And what you gonna do, you gonna hit your mother back, huh? You just try it and I’ll have Bernie put your ass under the jail, you worthless, mean, no-good hussy.”
“If I am worthless, if I am mean, you made me that way.”
“Awl, get outta my face, go cock your legs open for that little ol poor country boy you saddled up with. That’s why you let that little girl get hurt like that. Go on and get out of my face before I hit you in your mouth this time. Disrespecting me, you—you.”
“You just a crazy miserable old lady.”
A slap.
Sobbing. “You just wait and see, I’m getting outta here, just wait and see.” Footsteps on the stairs. The plastic on the couch in the living room screaming, then settling to a low, steady moan.
Shern jumped up from the toilet and slid along the plastic hallway runner back into the bedroom. She closed the door and leaned against the door to catch her breath. She undid her soft lime green robe and tossed it on the other bed and squeezed back into the bed her sisters shared. She burrowed her head in her arms and prayed for morning to find them back in their real home, prayed that she was caught in a nightmare that she hadn’t been able to wake from. She didn’t know, though, that there had been another Donald Booker sighting on Dead Block that evening. That Hettie had hollered across Addison Street to Mae, “Hear that evil spirit of that missing white boy was kicking up in the park again and now the Lawsons can’t find their German shepherd puppy.” And that whenever there was a Donald Booker sighting, which happened five, six times a year and was never, ever substantiated, an agitation between Mae and Ramona would sprout up like a well-fertilized weed and cause such consternation, arguments, even fights sometimes worse than the one they’d just had. All Shern knew was that the bad air between Mae and Ramona might spread to her sisters and her, might cause Mae to slap at them.
Her chest was on fire. She got up again and grabbed her lime green robe and wrapped herself in it. She climbed back in bed, nestled her head under the robe’s collar, and pushed her finger through the hole in the pocket her mother had cut. She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed her sobs as she thought about the sound of her uncle Blue’s voice earlier that day. Eventually she fell back to sleep dreaming about the aunts and uncles.
12
Blue’s sherry-induced euphoria of Sunday afternoon had lifted this Monday morning, and now his clear head told him he had hung up the phone too fast. He stood next to Til as she mixed around in the steaming pot of linseed and coconut oils for the next batch of soap they were readying.
Til didn’t even have to turn to look at him to see something was wrong. Blue was the closest to her in age, and from the time they were children, whenever he stood right next to her not saying anything, just weighing down the air with his sighs, she knew something had bothered him so deeply he was getting ready to cry. “What’s the matter, Blue?” she asked, pausing over the huge pot to reverse the direction she stirred. “Hangover wrapping around you like a spider’s web?”
“For your information my mind’s quite clear, thank you.”
“Well, what then? Don’t tell me you and Show didn’t finish fashioning the molds. Now, you’re the ones who insisted on doing ovals instead of squares this year, so it’s up to you to have those molds ready when the tallow is.”
“Molds done, Til. Coconut flecks heaped in a mound ready to be pinched into the honey, cellophane wrappings measured and cut, Ness and Show just counted them out, two thousand, right?”
“So if everything’s in order”—Til stopped stirring and looked directly at Blue—“why does the air all around you feel like it’s wearing steel-plated boots?”
Blue couldn’t hold it. Started crying like he was five years old. “I can’t believe what I did, Til, Til, I feel so bad.”
Til banged her wooden ladle against the side of the stove. “Stop crying, Blue. Now toughen up and tell me what you did.”
Ness and Show were standing in the kitchen doorway. Show carried the vat of honey for