Calling Me Home (39 page)

41

Dorrie, Present Day

W
E LEFT
C
INCINNATI
the next morning a different way from how we’d entered it. Instead of crossing the main bridge back into Kentucky, Miss Isabelle directed me back toward Newport, toward the area where Nell lived, except we drove the other way down the main road until we came to a sign.

WELCOME TO
SHALERVILLE.

“That’s where it was.” She pointed her trembling finger at the side of the road. Now, a huge old oak tree was the only thing keeping the welcome sign company. I pictured it in my mind, the sign that would have kept me from crossing the city limit after dark all those years ago—and not that far in the past. Miss Isabelle thought maybe the signs had come down around the late 1960s. But Nell had told us hardly any black folks lived in the area even to this day, except for a small population in Newport and in one little town nearby that had a university.

Back home in Texas, even when no sign stood at the side of the road, I still wouldn’t be safe driving through some towns, especially at night—heaven forbid I had a flat tire or something and had to walk anywhere. There’d been plenty of small communities like that near my East Texas hometown. For all I knew, there were places like that close to the big city where Miss Isabelle and I lived now. These little sundown towns had been established everywhere—north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line, east or west of the Great Divide. Maybe it wasn’t as in your face now as it had been back then, maybe it was no longer politically correct to keep someone out of your town just because of skin color, but that didn’t stop some folks.

We drove up the main street of her hometown, and then Miss Isabelle directed me into another cemetery—the biggest, hilliest cemetery I’d ever seen. Gravestones dotted every available surface, no matter how steep, and narrow driving surfaces ran in every direction, up and down and around the hills. A fancy old stone building rose from one of the hills, and another one in a lower spot housed mowers and landscaping equipment. Workmen performing various tasks ignored us as the car crawled the tiny streets of this town populated by the dead.

Miss Isabelle knew her way this time. She asked me to stop first in an out-of-the-way corner. We stayed in the car, but she pointed out a tiny headstone so dark with damp and age, the writing wasn’t visible from my window.

“That’s Aunt Bertie,” she said. “One time, when I was still a girl, I followed Mother here. She didn’t know I was only steps behind her as she walked this road to tend her sister’s grave. I wouldn’t have known where she was buried otherwise.”

She studied the grave for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice broke in places. “I hid behind a tree and watched. My mother lay over this grave and she cried, Dorrie. It was the only time I ever saw her cry.”

A moment later, we pulled close to the edge of a road to park, and she pointed out a family marker. McAllister.

“Will you help me, Dorrie?”

I helped her from the car, which seemed more difficult every time she attempted it. She’d brought a cane on our trip, but she had refused it before, insisting I leave it in the trunk. She asked for it this time. We walked as close as we could get to the marker, though we had to stand back a distance. Her mother’s and father’s names were etched on flat stones nearby, as well as Jack’s and his wife’s. The stones were skewed on their crumbling concrete bases, her mother’s tipped at an odd angle into the grass. Miss Isabelle clucked her tongue. “All those years ago, Mother thought us better than anybody else in town, and now look—nobody even tends their graves.” But her eyes were cloudy, emotion-filled again. After a minute, she whispered words I strained to hear and understand. “Thank you, Daddy. Thank you for helping my little girl live.”

Tears clogged my throat.

We drove all day and into the evening, only making pit stops for gas and bathroom breaks and sweet snacks—all Miss Isabelle would agree to eat. Along the way, she paged listlessly through her crossword puzzle books when I asked her to read me a few clues. I pretended I was sleepy and needed her to keep me awake.

Somewhere around Memphis, she talked about what happened after Dane was born. Max’s company expanded, and he was offered a promotion and a raise, but they had to move to Texas to take it. Miss Isabelle said she was perfectly fine leaving the place where everything seemed to hold excruciating memories.

In Texas, they made a quiet life. She and Max struggled, but they maintained their marriage. Once, though, shortly after their move to Texas, Max made no secret of seeing a woman two or three times, someone he’d met at an office party. Miss Isabelle didn’t react. She felt she had no right—still guilty for deceiving him all those years earlier. The affair fizzled when Max realized nothing would change. He was only trying to get her attention. He broke it off and returned his steady, careful attention to Isabelle and their household. They settled into a life with few bumps after that—other than a brief period while Dane served in Vietnam. He returned safe, if cynical.

“What about those big things you promised Robert you were going to do, Miss Isabelle? Did you do any of the things you dreamed about all those years ago?”

“Oh, Dorrie, not really. Nothing too big. I tried to be a good wife and mother.”

We talked about the neighborhood where they’d lived in far east Fort Worth. A prosperous new community when they moved there, Poly Heights later fell victim to blight when the racial makeup began to shift. Isabelle and Max stayed even while white flight was in full swing. I could tell she was a respected part of her community, though she didn’t say it. She volunteered in her neighborhood, tutored schoolchildren, helped children and adults alike apply for library cards, and encouraged her neighbors to fill out voter-registration forms. She joined civic groups that pushed the school administration to make more efforts to desegregate. The schools had remained mostly segregated by virtue of districting lines, even when the enrollment rules changed.

So in her own little ways, Miss Isabelle had done some pretty big things—things most women like her wouldn’t have dreamed of doing. I knew the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived until they finally moved, after Max retired, to the smaller, easier-to-maintain suburban home where I did her hair now. Poly was the kind of neighborhood white folks ditched at the first signs of diversity in those days. It was one of the few older neighborhoods in Fort Worth mostly untouched by young professionals now that it was cool to live in the city again.

Max died peacefully in his sleep at almost eighty. Dane grew up and moved away to Hawaii. He lived and worked there until he passed only a few weeks after a cancer diagnosis. He left behind a wife and a couple of grandkids, whom Miss Isabelle seldom saw while he was alive, and even less after he died and his wife remarried. They sent her cards at birthdays and holidays, but it had been years since any of the kids had visited and months since she’d heard from them by phone. She felt like maybe it was her fault. “It’s hard to keep up relationships long-distance these days, Dorrie,” she said, “especially if they aren’t so strong to begin with.” She wasn’t sure she’d ever allowed Dane to depend on her as much as she should have. Had she kept him at arm’s length? Was her ability to love damaged by her losses?

“It’s hard to keep up relationships where they’re in your face,” I said, thinking about all my fears about trusting men, and the disaster with my child awaiting me at home. These things seemed almost petty to me now. But they were mine.

“I was lucky, you know, Dorrie,” she said, surprising me out of the blue the next day. We’d finally stopped overnight in another generic roadside hotel. We’d been too tired to converse after we’d climbed in the car that morning. “I was loved by two good men.”

I thought about it. I had to agree. “I hope to be so lucky one day,” I said, “but I hope I don’t have to experience as much heartache to get there. One good man is plenty, thank you.”

“Remember this, Dorrie: Some men are just plain bad news. Then there are good men. They’ll do. Then there are good men you love. If you find one of the last kind, you’d better hang on to him with everything you have.”

She was right. I had a feeling Teague was one of the last kind. I wondered if he’d heard my message, and if he’d be patient enough to wait while I got my mess with Stevie Junior all straightened out, then patient enough to deal with me. Because I had another feeling. I had a feeling I could love him if I pushed back the barriers in my own heart.

We pulled into her driveway late that afternoon, bone-tired and weary. Before I reached to open my car door, Miss Isabelle put a hand on my closest one. “When I learned Robert had died, I thought my life was over. I eventually loved Max in my own way, and Dane was a good boy and I was a good mother and I loved him, of course. But it always seemed like something was missing, like losing my little girl and losing Robert had left two holes in my heart.

“But then I met you, and you stuck with me even when I was cranky and acting like a foolish old woman. God gave me a blessing. He brought me a little piece of the family I’d lost. Through you, Dorrie.” She shushed me when I started to protest—not because I wasn’t honored, but because I couldn’t accept that the things I’d done, so small, could begin to touch the empty places in her heart. “Don’t deny me now. Dorrie, you’ve become like a daughter to me.”

The tears bubbled up and poured out of my eyes. I couldn’t help blubbering like a fool.

“Oh, stop now. You’re embarrassing me. I just love you like you’re my own child, Dorrie. It’s simple and nothing to get excited about. It’s not like I have a pile of money to leave you. I’m probably more trouble than I’m worth.” I laughed through my choked throat, and she patted my hand.

I pulled her suitcase from the trunk and moved mine to my car. I walked her into the house, checked all the doors and windows. Everything was secure. I put the crossword books on her kitchen table, but she pushed them back at me, saying I should keep them as a memento of our trip. She snorted after she said it. But I
would
keep them, and I’d remember every bit of her story when I thumbed through them, even while so many of the squares remained empty.

It felt different, leaving her that night, as though she’d changed while we were on the road, going from a feisty old woman who’d needed a little extra help to a fragile thing I was scared to leave alone. I forced my feet to walk to the entryway.

“One more thing, Dorrie.”

I turned back. She supported herself against one of the chairs, which looked like it had been in her formal living room thirty years or more. “I’m firing you.”

I gawked. What in the hell? I’d been doing her hair over a decade—no way I’d quit now, no matter what she said.

“If you’re like a daughter to me, should I be paying you to come over here and do my hair every Monday afternoon? You ought to be doing it for free.” She chuckled then, and I did, too, though my heart did a jiggity jig, uneasy about these things she kept springing on me.

She pulled her key chain out of the massive purse of mystery. “There’s an extra house key on here. Take it off and keep it. You go ahead and let yourself in whenever you come by. If you have time to work on my hair while we visit, you can.”

I shrugged, but we both knew I intended to show up every single Monday morning and do her hair like I always had. I’d never take another dime from her, either. “Okay, Miss Isabelle,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

It was awkward then. Was I supposed to hug her? Kiss her? Now that I was her honorary daughter, it seemed appropriate, but neither of us was the touchy-feely type.

Maybe, though, one day in the future, I’d surprise her with a quick hug and peck on the cheek. I mean, I’d seen her in her underwear, right? What secrets were left between us?

42

Dorrie, Present Day

S
TEVIE
J
UNIOR WAITED
for me at home, subdued and all hangdog, like I was going to tear into him, rip him to pieces right there. A few days earlier, I probably would have. But I’d realized now what was most important. Part of that was not pushing my son away when he needed me most.

“Hey, sugar. What’s the latest?” I called out, letting myself in the house, dragging my suitcase behind me and dropping it on my bed. I’d worry about unpacking later. Stevie was sprawled on our ratty old sofa. I’d wanted to replace it for years with something that would make our house look a little classier. Today, it looked familiar and comfortable. It looked like home.

Stevie dragged himself to a sitting position and hunched over his hands, which he clenched in one overgrown fist under his chin. He looked surprised at my casual greeting, his shoulders stiff and tensed up, as if my mood were too good to be true.

I dropped into the recliner catty-corner to the couch, equally familiar and welcoming. My list of what seemed important a week ago had different entries now. “Bailey talk to her parents?”

“Um, no. I actually don’t think she’ll be talking to them, Mom.”

My heart felt like it had stopped for a few beats, then resumed beating dully in my chest, as if it didn’t want to but would plug on. So, it was too late to talk over anything. Too late to assure Stevie I’d support whatever choices he made as long as he tried his best to use the brain the good Lord had given him. I sighed.

“She lost the baby.”

I jerked my head back and stared at my son. His eyes gleamed. I knew then how seriously he’d taken this whole mess. It wasn’t in his plans, but now he was experiencing a loss he’d never expected to deal with at only seventeen years old.

I pushed myself up and dropped down next to him, wrapping my arm around shoulders that seemed so broad, but were the same ones I’d held all the years he’d been mine.

“Honey, really?” I couldn’t help feeling the tiniest bit relieved. It was only human, I guess, for the mother of a kid who’d done something dumb to feel relieved the consequences wouldn’t be so harsh. But I hurt more than I expected, too. This had been my grandchild, after all. Even if I wasn’t ready to be a grandma, a piece of my heritage had passed into another realm without me having a chance to love the little guy or gal.