Orchard of Hope (26 page)

“More than ready.” She picked up her purse and stepped out on the landing at the top of the steps, pulling the door shut behind her. “I guess I should have just said yes, right? But truth is, I’m nervous as a cat. It’s no telling what I might say. And why do you think they say that about cats being nervous? Do you think cats act all that nervous?”

“Aunt Love’s cat is pretty nervous whenever Jocie’s dog is around.” David put his hand on her elbow as they started down the steps. “But you don’t have any reason to be nervous. I’m the one who has a reason to be nervous.”

“You? Why would you be nervous? You’ve surely had dozens of dates.”

“Back in another lifetime,” David said. “But what do you say we forget that four-letter word, D-A-T-E, and just think about having a good time?”

“Sounds good to me,” Leigh said. “But I’m not sure everybody else will cooperate. We’ll be the center of attention wherever we go. The preacher and that girl who’s been chasing him.”

“Have you been chasing me?”

“As fast as I can. That’s why I’ve been doing all that walking.” Leigh smiled over at him. Her blush was fading. “So I’ll be in better shape and can run faster than you.”

“I never could run very fast.” David opened the car door for her. “And you’re right about us being the center of attention. We already are.” He lowered his voice a little, leaning in toward Leigh. “I think Mrs. Simpson is taking notes.”

Leigh laughed. “She is the curious type, but at least she won’t have to worry about my music being too loud tonight.”

“No, she’ll be able to hear fine while she’s calling everybody in the county.” David gave Leigh a quick smile as he closed her door.

“So what’s the surprise?” Leigh asked when he got in behind the wheel.

“That there isn’t one?” David gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry, but things were pretty crazy this afternoon.”

“That’s okay. I can run back up to my apartment and get the bread and peanut butter for a picnic at the
Banner
office if you want.”

David laughed. That, he decided, was the best thing about Leigh. She made him laugh. Everywhere else he had to be so responsible. He had to take care of people. Not that he didn’t laugh with them. He did. But there was something different about laughing with Leigh. Something he’d been missing for years. Maybe something he’d been missing forever. “We’ll save the peanut butter for another time,” he said. “We’ll just go out to the Family Diner. No candles on the table, but then Zella already thinks I’m hopeless. This will just prove her right.” He started the motor and pulled out on the road.

“On this date—” Leigh slapped her hand over her mouth for a second before she went on. “Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that word. Anyway, on this whatever we’re having, it’s what
I
think that’s important. And I think candles on the table are way overrated.”

David stopped at the end of the street before turning to head out to the restaurant on the other side of town. He looked over at Leigh. She was wearing a blue dress the same color as her eyes, and her hair lay in soft waves on her shoulders. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’re beautiful?”

Her cheeks went rosy again, but she didn’t turn her eyes away from his. “Only my mother when I was a little girl.”

“You’re beautiful, Leigh Jacobson,” David said as he reached across the seat and took her hand.

After that, it didn’t seem to matter to either one of them that everybody at the Family Diner found a reason to come over and talk to them with a big “well, can you believe this” smile spread across his or her face. It didn’t seem to matter that Jane Ellen, their waitress, hovered around their table to make sure she didn’t miss anything of note. It didn’t seem to matter that the baked potatoes had been cooked too long and the iced tea was a little watered down.

It didn’t even seem to matter that when he took Leigh home, they had to talk in whispers as they sat on the top step of the stairs to her apartment to keep from rousing Mrs. Simpson. It didn’t seem to matter that the outside air even at going on eleven p.m. was still warm as bathwater.

Nothing mattered but the way their words and laughter seemed to reach across the divide between their souls and embrace. Sometimes the Lord surprised a person with the most unexpected of blessings.

27

The first Sunday in September when Cassidy Hearndon’s mama got her up and said they were going to the white people’s church, Cassidy thought about sticking her finger down her throat and making herself throw up. She’d done it back in Chicago a time or two so she wouldn’t have to go to school. It had worked then. It might work now, but then her mother would make her stay inside and it was way too hot to be stuck in the house all day shut up in the back bedroom to make sure she didn’t share her sickness with none of the rest of the family. Not that the scaredy-cat sickness was catching or anything.

Cassidy picked up the dress her mother had laid out for her to wear. It was the white one with red tulips growing all over the skirt, her very favorite, but she didn’t want to put it on. Not till she had to. It was cooler just standing there in her slip and underpants.

“What in the world is wrong with you, Cassidy Marie?” her mama asked. “Stop moping around and get dressed.”

“It’s too hot to get all dressed up and go to church,” Cassidy complained.

“The good Lord didn’t say it was too hot when he paid the price for our sins, young missy.”

“Then why can’t we go up to the church in town? They like us up there.”

“Now listen to you. We aren’t going to church to make people like us,” her mama said. “We’re going to church to worship, and the good Lord has put a church right down at the end of our road for us to do that. We don’t have to spend a half hour and gasoline we can’t afford driving to town.”

“But they look at me funny.” Cassidy traced one of the tulips on the skirt of the dress with her finger. She loved tulips. They’d had tulips in their yard in Chicago. Red and yellow and purple tulips.

“Probably not a bit funnier than you look at them. And Miss Sally will be there. She thinks you’re the sweetest little thing. And that preacher’s daughter. What did Noah say her name was?”

“Jocie.”

“That’s right. Jocie. She’s nice as she can be. And friendly to boot.”

“She just wants to play with the twins.”

“So play with the twins with her,” Cassidy’s mama said. “Now get your dress on so you can hold Elise while I fix her hair. That child has a positive aversion to combs.”

“I could stay here and help Daddy haul rocks.” Cassidy didn’t know why she said it. Her mama would never let her miss church to haul rocks. Her mother didn’t even think her daddy should miss church to haul rocks, but sometimes her mama didn’t get her way when it came to Cassidy’s daddy.

“Stop talking nonsense and get dressed. Now!”

Cassidy turned away from her to pull her dress over her head so that her mama wouldn’t see the tears sneaking out the sides of her eyes. Her mama couldn’t understand about the scaredy-cat sickness. She was beautiful and brave and not afraid of anything. Not even of the police down in Alabama when they’d put her in jail last summer. Cassidy had been scared. She’d thought she might never see her mama again the way they said she’d never see Uncle Darnell again. Even her daddy had been scared. He’d tried to hide it by acting mad and yelling in the phone, but Cassidy had known. When a person was scared herself, she could almost smell the same thing on somebody else.

Cassidy rubbed the front of her dress close against her face as she pulled it down to wipe the tears away, but her mama saw them anyway. She came over and buttoned up the back of Cassidy’s dress. Then she turned Cassidy around to face her. She put her hand under Cassidy’s chin and tipped her face up. “Now, honey, you dry up those tears, because your mama isn’t going to ever let anybody hurt you. Not ever.”

“Yes, Mama,” Cassidy said as she wiped the last of the tears off her cheeks. She wanted to believe her. She used to believe her. Now she just pretended to believe her.

Noah said that was a sign she was growing up. He said that for sure their mama wanted to protect them, but that sometimes she got carried away making the world better for everybody, and she couldn’t always keep her promises because of what he called her commitment to “the greater good.” When Cassidy had asked Noah what “the greater good” was, he said it was too hard to explain, but that it had to do with how people like them got treated because of the color of their skin and how they might get treated on down the road years from now. He said if she kept her eyes and ears open, she might understand it better someday.

So she had listened when her mama was talking to her daddy or on the telephone, and she had watched what was going on around her and in the papers her mama got in the mail. That’s how come she knew about those girls down south who weren’t much older than her getting killed in church, and they were at their own black church, not some white church.

She sometimes thought about asking Noah about the three girls, if he knew whether they’d been scared like her, but some things were too scary to talk about. And he might not be able to tell her nothing like that would ever happen to her. He’d told her once he’d do his best to never tell her something he didn’t know for absolutely sure was true. That’s why he told her nobody could protect somebody else all the time no matter how much they might want to, but that he was getting big enough to protect her most of the time, and for sure he’d never let what happened to her on that march in Birmingham last year ever happen again.

For a minute the memory slipped to the front of Cassidy’s mind—the thick slobber dripping off that big dog’s teeth right in front of her face and the sight of Noah getting knocked clear off the street by the firemen shooting their water hoses at them. But she blocked out the thoughts. There were some things a person couldn’t think about, or she’d just crawl in some dark cave somewhere and never come out. Besides, she knew Noah meant it. He wouldn’t let anything like that happen again. He’d promised, and Noah didn’t make promises unless he was positive certain he could keep them.

Still, she didn’t think he could keep the people out there at the church at the end of the road from looking at her like she had two heads or something. Especially since they were looking at him the same way. Except for Miss Sally and Mr. Harvey and the preacher’s family. And there was that little girl with pigtails who had grinned at her the last time they were there a couple of weeks ago. The little girl had pointed at her own pigtails and then at Cassidy’s. And at least Cassidy’s mama wasn’t making them go to Sunday school. She said the white church folks needed time to get used to them being there.

Cassidy wrapped her arms around Elise and held her tight while her mama made tiny braids in her hair. Elise kicked her feet and screamed, but both Cassidy and her mama just ignored her. They could talk to Elise till they didn’t have any words left, and she’d still scream and fight when they did her hair. So it was better to just hold her down and get it over with.

“I wish we were still in Chicago,” Cassidy said when Elise stopped screaming for a minute to catch her breath.

“Chicago, Chicago,” her mama said. “You and Noah both. Always talking about Chicago. What was so great about Chicago?”

“Saundra,” Cassidy said. Saundra had lived next door, and they’d played paper dolls together every day. Now she had to play paper dolls by herself. She’d tried playing with Elise, but Elise had torn the head off her favorite girl doll, Sue Ellen. Not on purpose, but Sue Ellen lost her head anyway. Her mama taped it back on for Cassidy, but now the doll’s head fell over frontwards all the time like she was praying. And a person got tired of playing her paper dolls were in church praying all the time.

“Saundra was a sweet little friend for you. Why don’t you write her a letter and see how she’s doing?” Cassidy’s mama said. “But you’ll make friends here. You’ve been going to school a couple of weeks. I’ll bet you’ve already met some nice girls. Maybe we could invite one of them over sometime.”

“None of them live close like Saundra did,” Cassidy said. School actually hadn’t been all that bad. She liked school, sitting in her own desk, filling up the lines on her notebook paper. The work had been easy. She’d done most of it already last year in Chicago, and her mama said they’d move on to some new things soon. But she hadn’t really made any friends.

“That might be a problem,” Cassidy’s mama said as she fastened another braid on Elise’s head.

“It is,” Cassidy said as she loosened her hold on Elise just a smidgen. Elise had given up on screaming and was just snuffling a little now. She whispered in the little girl’s ear. “Mama’s almost through and you’re going to look so cute.”

“Don’t wanna look cute.” Elise stuck her lip out in a pout.

“But you can’t help yourself. You just are. Cute as a bug,” her mama said as she touched Elise’s nose with the comb before she picked up another bit of hair. Her fingers worked fast as she braided the strands of hair even as she returned to Cassidy’s problem of having somebody to play paper dolls with. “Miss Sally lives just over the hill. While she’s not a little girl or anything, it’s good to have friends of all ages. She told me she was coming over this afternoon with last year’s Sears Roebuck catalogue so the two of you could cut out some of the models and glue them on cardboard to make you some new paper dolls.”

“There aren’t any black people in the Sears Roebuck catalogue,” Cassidy said.

“True enough.” Her mama sounded put out, but Cassidy wasn’t sure whether it was at her or at the Sears Roebuck catalogue. “But if Miss Sally’s nice enough to come help you make some paper dolls, you’d better be nice enough to play with them. You hear me, missy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cassidy said. She didn’t mind playing with Miss Sally. Miss Sally was extra nice. She smelled like spearmint chewing gum, and she was always smiling. Best of all, she didn’t just look right past Cassidy and start talking about how cute the twins were the way most people did. Cassidy loved Elise and Eli, but them being born had made her almost disappear in front of most people’s eyes, so it was good having somebody that thought she, Cassidy Marie Hearndon, was special all by herself. Even if she was a scaredy-cat.