The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [23]
“How do you want your eggs?” she said. She didn’t look at me, only set the eggs and bacon on the counter, took the pan to the sink and filled it.
She finished with the water, headed for the stove.
“Well?” she said, started peeling off bacon into the skillet.
“Stop it,” I said.
She paused a second, held a strip over the others. Then she went right on, dropped a last piece in, tore a paper towel from the roll underneath the cupboard, wiped her hands.
“I said stop it.” I took a step toward her, put my hand to her shoulder like Unc did to me all the time.
But this was my mom. I’d never touched her that way before, in comfort.
She gave way, her shoulders heaving, and I turned her to me, put my arms around my mom, felt her face on my own shoulder. Slowly she put her arms around me, too, and for a second that first night here came back to me, us finally finding the source of that smell we’ve grown used to over all these years: the paper mill.
Don’t cry about it, I’d said then. But I’d been wrong. Crying, I saw only now, was about the best thing anybody could have done.
“You cry,” I whispered. “You go ahead and cry.”
Slowly she nodded, her face still on my shoulder, and she cried, hard and long, the two of us alone in the kitchen.
I lay there in bed, thought I heard the tapping in a dream, but then heard it for real, right there at the window: tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
I sat up, felt the cool of the room through my T-shirt; Mom turned the heat down at night to save money, and for a second there was in my head the idea of Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons floating into this room here, tonight, and I thought again of the paperweight, remembered it was in the pocket of my jeans, on the floor in front of my dresser.
Then, tap tap tap.
Matt or Tyrone or Jessup, I thought. Somebody’d seen something on the news, figured out maybe it was my uncle’s place all this was going on at and was over here to bug me about it. And my bed was next to the window, after all, for exactly this reason: easy out and easy back in whenever we felt like going over to the tracks.
I pulled back the curtains, gray in the dark.
It was a black person, just the head and shoulders at the sill, and for a second I thought, Tyrone. Then I saw the long hair down to the shoulders, a white hairband holding it all back, and I thought, LaKeisha, or Deevonne.
The only light out there was the same old dull gray cloud up above the blinking smokestack of the paper mill, and I saw it wasn’t LaKeisha or Deevonne.
It was Dorcas. Miss Dinah Gaillard’s daughter, Benjamin’s sister, looking in at me.
I’d seen her last just yesterday morning, when she and her momma’d cooked up breakfast at the hunt club. I’d known her all my life, this black girl who couldn’t talk or hear, but I’d only known her out to Hungry Neck.
Now here she was in North Charleston and looking in my window, and it made me inch back and away.
She looked behind her, like maybe there was somebody watching her, then lifted a hand up, and I could see something in it, white and square.
She pressed it to the glass: a piece of paper, writing on it, but it was too dark to read.
She moved the paper up and down, quick: Read this.
I finally stood from the bed, held the quilt around me like a cape for the cold and the fact, too, I was just in my underwear, and I went to the dresser, pulled on my jeans, and found in the top drawer the pocket flashlight I kept in there. I looked at the alarm clock on the dresser, saw by the pale hands it was a little after one.
I went to the window, cupped my hand over the flashlight, held it just below the piece of paper against the glass, and clicked it on.
Leland is with us, it read. He isn’t aware of my being here to get you, but I can tell he needs your help, whether he likes it or not. But we need to go, now.
It was printed, the letters perfect, and I clicked off the light, let my eyes adjust for a few seconds.