Dream With Little Angels (2 page)

T
he Daileys lived on the other side of town. Mr. and Mrs. Dailey had two daughters, Ella Jane and Mary Ann. Even though Ella Jane went to my school, I didn't really know her well on account of she was a year below me. But Carry knew Mary Ann, who was a grade ahead of her. They rode on the same bus to school every day.

Carry had been home a couple hours when Dewey's mother called him for dinner from up the street. A rumble in my stomach told me it was time for me to be doing the same, so I went inside to find Carry sitting on the sofa talking on the phone. I figured that's what she'd been doing since she came in. Most of her time at home these days was spent talking on the phone. She didn't speak much to anyone else, though. Especially not to me.

I didn't bother asking her about dinner. It became apparent early on in the summer that, unless I wanted to starve to death, I better learn how to fix my own food. Luckily it wasn't hard. My mother always left us something in the fridge ready to be heated up. Today it was leftover green bean casserole. I was just spooning a portion out on a plate when my mother came in the door. Right away, I knew something was wrong. She wasn't supposed to be home until eight.

She marched straight into the living room and told Carry to get off the phone. “I've been trying to call for an hour and a half!” she said.

Sitting up from where she had been strewn across the sofa, Carry told the person on the other end of the line that she had to go. “My mother is flippin' out 'bout somethin'.”

I half expected my mother to blow up from the look my sister gave her. “What's so important?” she asked after hanging up.

“You get that tone out of your voice right now, Caroline Josephine!” my mother said.

Carry's gaze fell to the carpet. “Sorry,” she said.

My mother's voice went quiet. “Mary Ann Dailey's gone missin',” she said.

Carry looked up, surprised. “She was just on the bus with me twenty minutes ago. I saw her get off at her spot.” I almost laughed out loud when she said
twenty minutes
.

“It was closer to two hours ago,” my mother said, “but, yes, I know. I've already spoken to a lot of your friends. She got off the bus, but never showed up at her home. Mrs. Dailey called the station a half hour later.”

Carry flopped back down across the sofa, her blond hair bunching up against the worn armrest. “She's probably downtown or something, hangin' out with friends. It's Friday night. Even here in this stupid little town, we do have lives.” That tone was still in her voice. Even
I
could hear it, and sometimes I wasn't so good with that sort of thing.

“Well, that's a possibility,” my mother said. “I have Chris driving around looking for her.”

Christopher Jackson was the other officer who worked with my mother at the Alvin Police Station. He started a few years back, and I still remembered how much of an uproar some folks made about it on account of him being black. There were still folks occasionally outright refusing to acknowledge his authority, and whenever that happened, Police Chief Montgomery went and paid them a little visit. After that, they generally didn't make such a fuss anymore. I like Officer Jackson. He was always very nice to me and Carry whenever he saw us.

The telephone rang and on reflex Carry sat up, her hand jerking toward it. My mother beat her to it. “I'll get it.” Carry sneered at her as she answered. When my mother either didn't notice the sneer or just chose to ignore it, Carry dropped the sneer onto me. I turned away, looking up and listening to my mother's side of the phone conversation.

“Hello? Yes, Mrs. Dailey. No, not yet. We're doin' our best. I've got an officer checkin' around there right now. No, ma'am.” There were lots of pauses between my mother's responses, but this one was the longest. Finally, she said, “Mrs. Dailey? Listen, I'd appreciate it if from now on you call through the station instead of my home. No, ma'am, I understand that, but there's always one of us there who can answer any of your inquiries. Well, ma'am, I appreciate that and it's nice of you to say so, but, no, that ain't the way it works. I promise to call as soon as we know anythin'. In the meantime, if you think of anyplace else she may have gone, let us know. Just try to stay calm. There's no need to worry yet. You know how girls her age are. Yes, ma'am, you certainly did tell me that already. Thank you, ma'am.”

She hung up and let out an exhausted sigh. I looked up at her expectantly, realizing I was still holding the plate of cold casserole.

“Why is she calling you at home?” I asked.

She sighed. “Cuz she don't want to talk to Chris. Says only another parent could possibly understand what she's goin' through.”

“But it's really cuz Officer Jackson's black, ain't it?”

My mother hesitated. “I don't know, honey. Maybe. Maybe not. She's pretty stricken with grief right now. I would be too if it were you or Caroline that went missin'.” She looked to Carry. “Caroline, are you absolutely certain there ain't nowhere else you can think of where she might be? Someplace maybe her other friends wouldn't want to have told me about?” This caught my attention. Seemed like a weird thing to be asking my sister. “Like, does Mary Ann have a boyfriend, maybe?”

Carry shifted uncomfortably on the sofa cushion, looking to me like she wanted to bolt from the room. “I hardly know her, Mom,” she said.

“But you ride the bus with her every day. You must hear things. You must see her at school.” Squatting down, my mother had reached out and gently pushed Carry's bangs off her face. “This is important, honey. It's not like you're tattlin' on your friends when it's somethin' like this.”

A tinge of anger flashed in Carry's blue eyes, as though my mother had just offended her. I didn't quite understand why. “I know it's important,” she said. “You think I'm lyin'? I don't
know
if she has a boyfriend.”

“Are you absolutely
certain?
” I wondered why my mother thought my sister might be confused on such a point.

Carry got real angry now. “Yes! I'm absolutely certain! To the best of my knowledge, Mary Ann Dailey does
not
have a boyfriend! My Lord, is this how you treat all your witnesses? Or is it just
me
you don't believe?” Jumping up from the sofa, she stomped out of the room. I heard the slam of her bedroom door following shortly thereafter.

My mother looked down at me in frustration.

“This part of the hard part you tol' me 'bout?” I asked.

She nodded, frowning.

“Hope it don't last long,” I said.

“Oh, we got a while to go yet.” My mother's attention drifted to the living room window that looked out over the front lawn. Thick, yellow drapes hung down on either side of it. She didn't seem to be looking at anything in particular, and I got the feeling her thoughts were someplace else entirely.

My eyes were drawn to Mr. Farrow's garage door squatting across the road with its white-toothed sneer. The view was partially obscured by the cedar shrub growing between our front steps and the living room window. The shrub was in much need of trimming, just as the lawn was starting to be in serious want of mowing. My mother used to pay Luther Willard King ten dollars to ride his bike over and do all the yard work every couple weeks, but it had been a while since he came around. My mother told me Luther Willard's father had gotten very sick near the end of school last year, and Luther Willard didn't have time to come out and help her anymore. His own mother needed his help now.

Even though he wasn't working, my mother still got me to ride my bike all the way across town every two weeks to give him the ten dollars anyway. It was a long way to his house. The Kings lived down Oakdale Road, in a section of town known as Cloverdale where most of the other black people in Alvin lived.

“How come he still gets paid for doin' nothin'?” I asked the first time she sent me.

“He ain't doin' nothin',” my mother said. “He's lookin' after that family. He's got three younger sisters, a mama, and a really sick papa to tend to.”

“How do they all live off ten dollars every two weeks?” The youngest two were twins and only three years old, but I thought even three-year-olds must eat more than ten dollars' worth of food every two weeks.

“They get other money, too. But not a lot. Our ten dollars means a lot more to them than it does to us.”

That hadn't made much sense then. To me, ten dollars was ten dollars, no matter how you looked at it, or who was doing the looking. Then, the first time I brought it over, I figured out what she meant. The farther you went down Oakdale, the deeper you went into Cloverdale and the more rundown the homes became. The ride to Luther Willard's took me all the way past Blackberry Creek, almost to the turnoff leading to Cornflower Lake; one of the prettiest yet poorest areas in all of Alvin.

The Kings lived in an old green shotgun house that looked just about ready to fall in on itself. Some of the wooden slats were missing from the front, and the roof drooped to one side. I left my bike lying on the edge of the road and stepped across the yard where the twins sat, their legs almost as black as their shadows being cast by the early-afternoon sun. They played there in the dirt; there was no real lawn to speak of. Neither of the girls had shirts or shoes on, and their shorts were dusty and torn. They looked up at me with interest as I passed, their eyes and teeth bright white against their smudged brown faces, a swarm of midges buzzing over their heads. I noticed a thick caking of dried mud beneath their fingernails and toenails.

I climbed the broken steps to the porch and opened the screen, nearly pulling it off its hinges. Most of the screen was busted. I knocked on the wooden door behind it and glanced back at the two girls. They no longer paid any mind to me, they were back to playing in the dirt. Leaning against the side of the house, I recognized Luther Willard's bike. Most of the white paint had flecked off since I last saw it, and it looked more rusted than I remembered it.

The other King daughter answered the door. She wasn't nearly as dirty as the two in the yard, and her clothes looked recently scrubbed, although awfully worn out for a girl who couldn't have been no older than six, and probably outgrew things at least once a year. I reckoned they were hand-me-downs from someone who probably over-wore them in the first place.

“Luther round?” I asked.

She stood quietly considering me, and for a minute I thought she wasn't going to answer. Eventually, though, she nodded and trod off inside. From one of the rooms, someone suddenly began coughing something fierce, with wheezy breaths drawn in between sounding so thin, I expected them to end the life of whoever they were coming from at any moment.

The coughing continued as Luther Willard, wearing a gray T-shirt and worn jeans, appeared in the doorway, looking at me, puzzled. He had short, curly black hair and scratched at the back of his neck as I held out the ten dollars to him. “This is from my mama,” I said.

I thought he was going to cry, so much disappointment fell over his face. “Tell her I'm sorry, but I can't do her work this week,” he said. “I probably won't be able to for quite some time.”

“She knows,” I said, still holding out the bill. “She says she's gonna pay you anyway, on account of she doesn't want to lose your services once you're ready to come back.” My mother had told me to say this, explaining most folks don't like accepting anything that even slightly smells of charity. But they have no trouble taking the money so long as you can give them any reason to feel it's okay.

This one felt a bit farfetched even to me, and as Luther Willard stood there thinking it over, the summer sun beamed down hot on my neck and back. His father coughed and wheezed up a hurricane in the back room, and I thought for sure Luther Willard was just going to send me back with the money, making my entire ride out here a complete waste of time. A trickle of sweat ran from under my unkempt hair, winding its way down the side of my face until I wiped it off the edge of my chin with my arm.

Finally, Luther Willard took the bill from my hand and a great big grin spread across his thick lips. “You tell your mama I'll be round as soon as I can and that I'll make sure she's got the prettiest little yard in all of Alvin,” he said.

I said I would do just that, but really I was just happy he took the money.

The twins once again watched me as I walked back to my bike, only this time I noticed different things about 'em. Somewhere in those big brown eyes was a mixture of sadness and hope that made me understand what my mother had meant. Ten dollars was not the same value no matter who was doing the looking at it, and these people saw a lot more in it than we did.

Since then, Luther Willard had accepted my ten dollar delivery every second Saturday without question, always reminding me to tell my mother how beautiful her yard was gonna be when he finally came back to work for her. And each time he told me this, it was over top of the sounds of death wheezing out of a room somewhere behind him that grew worse each and every trip. I couldn't imagine living with those sounds every day.

Now I just lived with the silence of Carry completely ignoring me.

I looked back at my mother, still standing there, staring off into space. I guessed she was puzzling about where it was Mary Ann Dailey might have run off to. Or maybe she was weighing whether or not to believe Carry about Mary Ann not having a boyfriend. That thought brought a weird feeling, because until this summer, my sister's virtue was never called into question.