Big Cherry Holler (37 page)
Authors: Adriana Trigiani
“She’s on a royal tear.” Worley takes a sip of coffee.
“Jesus, does she have to get personal like that?” Spec dumps cream into his coffee.
“It’s only gonna get worse, boys,” Fleeta bellows from the kitchen.
I made a run over to Johnson City to pick up some olive oil Jack Mac ordered; he’s become quite the Italian chef. Sometimes he jokes he
wants to open a restaurant, and I guess I glare at him so intently, he drops the subject. It never dawns on him that folks around here are not interested in sampling pesto made with fresh basil; they much prefer their own cuisine, biscuits and gravy and the like. The soda fountain at the Mutual is all the food service I can handle, and it’s strictly lunch fare. Pearl and I were surprised when we saw the profit sheets for 1989. With our local economy shot to hell, it’s a good thing Pearl is such a risk taker; the fountain did more business than the pharmacy.
As I cut through Wild Cat Holler and head back into Cracker’s Neck, I practice the opening to The Talk About Sex between Etta and me. There is so much to say on the subject, I wrestle with whether I should begin with the physical and segue into the emotions, or if I should just start out asking her about her feelings and what she knows already, or if I should make it a family meeting and invite her father into the discussion (I’m chicken to go it alone). It bothers me that I want Jack there. Why is this so hard? I want the sort of closeness I had with my mother. She was my protector and I was her defender. We never talked about sex, but I surely felt I could ask her anything if I wanted to. There weren’t any gaps in our relationship. I would have done anything for her. I didn’t test her, though, and I’m sure I saw the world as she did, so there were never any arguments.
As I drive up to our house, negotiating all the pits where the stones have settled on the road, I see Otto and Worley on my roof. This reminds me of the days when the father-son team used to come by my house down in town and repair everything that needed fixing. As I jump out of the Jeep, I see a third figure on the roof. My daughter.
“Etta, what are you doing up there?”
“Helping Otto and Worley.”
“I want you to go inside.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not safe.”
“It’s safe,” Etta says defiantly.
“I got an eye on her, Miss Ave,” Worley says without looking up.
“Me too,” Otto says to reassure me.
“Go inside anyway, Etta.”
Etta looks so small from the ground below. As she gingerly crawls across the roof toward the window, it reminds me of when she first learned to crawl and, instead of being thrilled that my baby was learning a new skill, I was terrified that she was beginning to move in the world without me.
“Etta! Watch it!”
The toe of Etta’s shoe got caught where a shingle has not been bolted. She tries to pry her shoe free, but she can’t. Her other foot hits a slick spot and she begins to slide toward the gutter. I can hear the buttons on her barn jacket catch on the shingles. Otto and Worley drop their tools and crawl toward her, but Etta’s weight against the slope of the roof makes her slide even faster.
“Ave, git the ladder! Git the ladder!”
The ladder is propped against the far side of the roof. For a moment, I’m frozen, thinking I can catch Etta if she falls. But I know this isn’t possible. The drop is almost twenty feet, time is passing, the fabric on her jacket tears away as she slides. It brings me back to the present. I heave the ladder from the side of the house to the front gutter, where her feet are dangling dangerously over the edge. Worley has thrown his body sideways across the roof and has grabbed one of Etta’s hands, which stops her from falling.
“Come up, Ave. Come up and git her.” Worley pants. Otto attempts to crawl toward Etta, but he is afraid to disrupt the precarious balance of their weight on the roof, so he stops. I dig the feet of the ladder into the soft earth and climb up quickly. I feel confident when I get to Etta’s feet and can get a grip on her legs. She feels so small in my arms, I remember what it was like when I could control everything
to keep her safe. I carefully pull her toward me. Worley lets go when I have a good grip on her. Then, using Etta’s weight, I slide her onto the first step of the ladder, shielding her with my body.
“Do you think you can climb down?” I ask her. Etta barely whispers a reply, and we descend the ladder, one step at a time. I try not to look to the ground below, it seems so far away. With each step I take, and each one Etta takes, I breathe a little easier. When we reach the ground, Otto and Worley are there to help us off the ladder.
“Sorry about that, Miss Ave. We thought she was safe up ’ere with us,” Otto says quietly.
“That’s okay,” I tell him. Then I turn to my daughter, who examines the palms of her hands, streaked with a little blood, where the shingles burned them during her downward slide. I wince. I have never been able to stand it when she bleeds.
“Come on, let’s wash up.” I take Etta into the house, and hold on until we are out of Otto and Worley’s earshot. I don’t think I have ever been this furious at her.
“What in the hell were you thinking, Etta?” I yell so loudly, she is taken aback. “You are not allowed on the roof. You know that. I don’t care who is here doing what, you know the rules. You could’ve fallen and broken your neck.”
“But I didn’t!” She turns on me.
“What?”
“I didn’t!”
“Because you’re lucky. Lucky I was there to catch you!”
“Yeah, I’m lucky you were there,” Etta says in a tone of voice I’ve never heard before.
“Are you mocking me?”
“What do you care anyway?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t care about me.”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“All the time.” Etta storms off and up the stairs. I follow her.
“Stop right there!”
She turns and faces me.
“That’s a very cruel thing to say to me. I care about you. Of course I care. But when you do something stupid, something you know you’re not supposed to do, you can’t turn around and blame me for it. You’re the one who’s wrong here. Not me.”
“That’s all you care about. Who’s right and who’s wrong.”
“Watch your tone.”
“You just don’t want me to die like Joe. That’s all.” Etta slams her bedroom door shut. For a moment, I think of honoring her privacy, but my anger gets the best of me. I throw the door open.
“What is the matter with you?”
Etta cries on the bed. She is sobbing so hard, harder than I have ever seen her cry before. My heart breaks and I go to sit beside her. She pulls away.
“Go,” she says through her tears.
“No. We need to talk about this.”
“I don’t want to talk to you. I want Daddy.”
When I attempt to reach out to her again, she gets up off the bed and goes to the old easy chair with the broken foot and throws herself into it and away from me. I have never seen this sort of emotion from my daughter, and I am stunned. But I am also so hurt that I don’t know what to say. So I rely on my rule about being consistent in my discipline. I’m not going to let her off the hook. “Dad is not going to bail you out of this one. You need to think about what you did this afternoon. And about the way you talked to me.”
I leave the room and close the door quietly behind me. I walk down the front stairs and go through the screen door to the porch. I sit down on the steps as I have done so many times at twilight. Otto and Worley pack up their truck without saying a word. They take full
responsibility for Etta being on the roof, and I don’t want to say anything more. They get into their truck and wave solemnly as they descend the hill.
I lean back on the stairs and take a deep breath. The mountains, still green at the end of summer, seem to intersect like those in a pop-up book. This old stone house seems hidden in its folds, like an abandoned castle, with me its wizened housekeeper, taken for granted and obsolete. I feel myself hitting the wall common to all mothers: the day your daughter turns on you. And it happened on such an ordinary day in Cracker’s Neck Holler. Nothing strange or different or particularly dramatic in the weather or the wind. The sky meets the top of the mountains in a ruffle of deep blue. The sun sets in streaks of golden pink as it slips behind Skeens Ridge. I get lost in the quiet, the color, and the breeze, and I’m back in simpler times, the time before we had the children, when this house was a place where we made love and ate good food and tended the garden.
The cool at twilight soothes the throbbing in my head. I am making a mess of motherhood. What do I know about children, really? I was an only child. Maybe I baby-sat here and there, but I never had a grand plan that included children. When I found out I was pregnant, I made Iva Lou order me every book on parenthood from the county library. I read each and every one, picking and choosing concepts that made sense and figuring out how to implement them. When my kids came along, I thought everything would fall into place. But my daughter is her own person, and she isn’t who I thought she’d be. And I know that I have disappointed her too—she needs an outdoorsy, athletic mom, one who encourages her to take risks. My goal is to keep her safe, and she resents that. I am filled with dread at what lies ahead. How do I stop fearing the future? No book can tell me that.
The high beams on Jack’s pickup truck light up the field as he takes the turn up the holler road. He slows down to check the mailbox, and I see him throw a few envelopes on the front seat. Then he
guns the engine again, spitting gravel under his wheels. Soon I hear my daughter’s footsteps as she skips down the stairs. The screen door flies open and she runs past me, down the steps, and over the path to meet her father as he parks. I hear the muffled start to her version of The Roof Disaster and wish for a moment that I weren’t the mother, but the housekeeper, so I wouldn’t have to rat her out. I have to be consistent and train her so that at some point later in her life when she must make hard decisions, she will call back to these days, find the wisdom borne of experience and make the right choice (yeah right). I have to be the bad guy. Jack puts his arm around Etta as they walk up the path. I stand up. Etta passes by in a businesslike huff without looking at me. She bangs the screen door behind her.
“Are you okay?” Jack puts his arm around me.
“I guess.”
“We’re going to have to come up with a doozy of a punishment.”
“Great.”
“It’s all a part of life, Ave.”
As we walk up the stairs, I want to tell my husband that I wish this wasn’t my life, but I can’t. I have to find a way to love my job as a mother, and I’m going to need him to help me do it.
Big Cherry Holler
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by The Glory of Everything Company
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2002 by The Glory of Everything Company and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book contains an excerpt from the novel
Milk Glass Moon
by Adriana Trigiani. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002090322
eISBN: 978-1-58836-010-6
This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.
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