Prayers and Lies (32 page)

Not long after, Mother and Daddy left for the airport. Only then did I think of Tracy. She wasn’t upstairs. Was she still asleep?

Reana Mae tiptoed down the stairs to the basement and leaned her ear close to Tracy’s bedroom door. Then she tiptoed back up.

“She’s still sleepin’, all right,” she said. “Snorin’, too.”

She shook her head. “Even Mama didn’t sleep till suppertime.”

“Should we start dinner?”

A big pan of water sat on the stove. On the cutting board lay a dozen red tomatoes. Beside them was a bowl of chopped onions and peppers. “Looks like Mother was making spaghetti.”

We chopped tomatoes and minced garlic, turned the heat on under the water, and sautéed the vegetables while I told Reana about DarlaJean and my Grandmother Araminta. By the time the station wagon crunched into the driveway, dinner was ready. Reana Mae set the table while I drained the pasta. Mother’s face brightened when she walked into the kitchen.

“Thank you, girls.” She kissed each of us. “That’s a big help.”

“Should we get Tracy up?” I asked, watching Mother stir, then taste the spaghetti sauce.

“I think we’ll just let her sleep,” she said, sprinkling basil into the sauce.

So we sat down to supper, just the three of us.

“How long is Daddy gonna be in Florida?” I asked, buttering a saltine and dipping it in the sauce on my plate.

“I don’t know, honey. I guess until DarlaJean gets out of the hospital.”

“But what if …?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “We won’t know anything till Daddy gets down there.”

Right then we heard a door creak open in the basement. A few minutes later, Tracy appeared, her face pale, her hair matted. She still wore her nightgown.

“Spaghetti for breakfast?” she asked, staring blankly at us.

“It’s supper,” Mother said quietly. “Sit down now and get some food in your tummy. You’ll feel better.”

So Tracy sat and ate spaghetti with butter and Parmesan cheese instead of sauce, like she always did. No one spoke for a while. I didn’t look up from my plate, except to steal a glance at Reana Mae now and then. She was watching Tracy closely, like she might pounce on her at any minute.

“Where’s Daddy?” Tracy finally asked, after her second plate of noodles.

So Mother told her about DarlaJean. Tracy sat quietly for a moment, then asked, “Will Grandmother come to live with us?”

“Maybe, I just don’t know,” Mother said.

“She’d better take Melinda’s room,” Tracy said firmly. “So she doesn’t have to use the stairs.”

“Let’s not worry about that yet,” Mother said.

Tracy pushed her chair from the table. “I gotta call Lynette,” she said.

“Tracy, wait. I need to talk to you.” Mother’s voice was firm and soft. “Bethany, will you and Reana Mae clean up here?”

I nodded, even though we had cooked and it didn’t seem fair that we had to wash the dishes, too.

Mother and Tracy walked down the hall toward Mother’s room. We listened intently while we washed and dried the plates and pans, but we couldn’t hear a word spoken. Finally, as I was putting away the last of the silverware, Tracy came back through the kitchen. She glared at us balefully, then disappeared down the stairs to her room again.

“Grounded,” Reana said.

I nodded, hanging the dish towel to dry. “How long do you think?”

“Not as long as she deserves, that’s for damn certain,” Reana Mae said grimly as she switched off the light in the room. “Not nearly as long as she deserves.”

Daddy called the next morning while we were dressing for church. I could hear Mother’s voice rise and fall, then the clicking of her high heels in the hallway.

Tracy walked half a block behind us on the way to church, sulking and staring at Mother’s back.

“What did Daddy say?” I asked.

“DarlaJean is very sick,” Mother answered. “They’re afraid she’s not going to make it.”

“How’s Grandmother?” Tracy’s voice came from just behind me now.

“She’s very upset,” Mother said. “She’s so sick herself. This is very upsetting for her.”

I spent Sunday morning at church, praying hard for Aunt DJ.

Mother sat quietly beside me. I wondered if she was praying for DarlaJean, too. Her eyes were closed, her head bent, her lips moving slightly. Mother always looked like that in church. Calm and serene, her back straight, her dark curls wound neatly, tightly in place. Church was her solace and her refuge. I’d read a story once about a woman who became a nun. We weren’t Catholic, but I could see my mother as a nun, praying all day on a string of beads, kneeling on those little benches fastened to the pews in church. She’d have been good at that.

I squeezed my eyes closed, willing myself to at least look like I was praying. It was warm in the sanctuary. My sweater itched the back of my neck. The lady in front of us wore too much perfume. The heavy aroma tickled at my nose.
I
opened one eye to look at my sister beside me. Her angelic face fairly glowed, surrounded by her soft auburn tresses. Her long lashes fluttered now and then over her closed eyes. Her hands lay loosely in her lap. She didn’t move at all. She might have been a statue—ANGEL
AT PRAYER
, the sign below her would read. And she looked like that. She really did. No one watching her in church could have imagined that just two nights before, she had been swearing at our parents, smashing lamps, and vomiting on her homecoming dress.

I
couldn’t see Reana Mae, sitting on the other side of Mother, but
I
knew what she would look like if
I
could. Her eyes would be open, staring straight ahead at the back of the old man’s head before her. Her mouth would be set in a firm, flat line. She never bowed her head in church, never closed her eyes, never even sang the hymns. She wouldn’t have come at all if Mother hadn’t insisted on it.

Reana Mae did not believe in church or God or Jesus. “
A
load of crap,” she called it, though not in front of Mother.

“All them people prayin’ all them years, and look at the world,” she said disdainfully. “Why don’t God do something about all the wickedness, if he’s real? Why don’t he stop people killin’ each other and all that?

“Plus,” and this was the cornerstone of her argument, “why’d he let all them Jews get killed, if they were his chosen people? That just don’t make sense.”

She had given our Sunday school teacher fits in junior high with questions like that. Mrs. Russell was a nice old lady, but she wasn’t prepared to discuss the theological ramifications of the Holocaust with a thirteen-year-old.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she’d repeated again and again. “God has a plan. We just can’t understand it yet.”

“You got that right,” Reana Mad hissed back at her more than once. “
I
don’t understand it at all.”

She was quiet in Sunday school these days. She liked the teacher better, for one thing. Velva Dreese had been a missionary to the Philippines for years and years, and Reana Mae loved hearing about other places. But she still didn’t believe in God.

That night, Daddy called to tell us that Aunt DJ had died during the afternoon.

“What about Grandmother?” Tracy asked. “How is she?”

“She’s very upset.” Mother sighed. “Daddy will bring her home on Thursday, after they get things settled there.”

“Where will she sleep?” Tracy asked. “I think she better have Melinda’s room.”

“I think you’re right.” Mother’s brow furrowed. “We’ll have to put Melinda’s things upstairs, with you girls.”

She turned to Reana Mae and me.

“Will you two move your things so we can fit Melinda’s bed up there?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.

I didn’t much mind having Melinda move in with us. She hardly came home from college anyway, and she’d always been the easiest of my sisters to get along with. But I wondered how our house could absorb another person, even one as tiny as Grandmother Araminta.

Tracy, on the other hand, seemed thrilled. She helped Mother pack up Melinda’s things and move them upstairs. Then she set to work with the vacuum cleaner and dust rag, cleaning the room Grandmother would take. She didn’t even complain when Mother asked her to scrub the bathroom.

“Maybe we should get one of those toilet fresheners,” she said as she scrubbed the toilet bowl. “The blue ones that make the room smell good. I bet Grandmother would like that.”

Mother just nodded and smiled at her. She looked worried and tired.

By the end of the day, Melinda’s bed had been moved upstairs, and her old room was spotless.

“We’ll have to get a hospital bed,” Mother said, writing in her notebook.

“I’ll go with you, Mother,” Tracy said, sitting beside her on the couch. She was watching Mother make her list, volunteering items she thought Grandmother might like.

“You are grounded, young lady,” Mother reminded her.

“But I want to help,” Tracy sputtered. “She’s
my
grandmother, after all.”

In the end, Mother relented and took Tracy with her to the Hook’s Rehab store to look for a bed, then to the mall for sheets and blankets and pillows and new curtains. I thought about when I had accompanied her to the mall on a trip like that, when we knew Reana Mae was coming. That had been scary, but this was worse. I couldn’t imagine our house with that old lady in it.

“Probably, we won’t even be able to play the stereo,” I fumed at Reana as we made up Melinda’s bed. “No noise or anything fun.”

“Well, now, Bethany,” Reana Mae answered calmly, punching down the pillow. “That’s just how things are with family. She’s your granma, after all. And she ain’t got any other family.”

She sat down on Melinda’s bed and looked at me sternly. “And family is all there is, you know.”

She sounded just like Mother.

On Thursday evening, Mother and Tracy drove to the airport to meet Daddy and Araminta. Tracy had bought a bouquet of daisies at the grocery to take for Araminta.

Melinda’s room looked like a hospital room. A new bed with rails sat against the wall. Reana Mae and I had already taken turns moving the head and foot up and down, turning a knob on the side. A picture of the Last Supper hung above the bed. Mother said Araminta had always had one like that in her apartment. A wheelchair sat waiting in the living room.

Reana Mae and I started supper. I was making hamburger Stroganoff and Reana had bread rising on the counter. She hummed to herself while she worked. Reana Mae loved making bread, pounding and kneading the dough till it felt just right, then letting it swell till she pounded it again. And her breads were always good. She didn’t use a recipe, just threw in handfuls of flour and whatever else struck her fancy. Sometimes she added dried fruits or nuts, sometimes leftover mashed potatoes or applesauce. Even Tracy liked Reana Mae’s bread.

Reana was just taking two perfect golden loaves from the oven when we heard the front door open and Tracy’s voice chirp, “Here, Grandmother, let me carry that for you.”

Reana Mae carefully dumped the loaves from their pans, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and walked into the living room to meet her great-aunt, who had been Loreen’s aunt long before we were ever born.

“Araminta.” I heard Mother’s soft voice. “This is Reana Mae. She’s Arathena’s great-granddaughter.”

“Well, now,” Araminta said, smiling at Reana, “I can see that. She takes after Arathena, plain as day.”

Her voice was low.

“So you’re livin’ here now, too?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Reana sounded deferential.

“Well, that’s best, I reckon. Can’t have you down there with no one to look after you. Your mama couldn’t, I reckon. She always was a wild one, your mama. I heard all about her from Loreen.”

I stood at the stove, stirring sour cream into the Stroganoff.

“Bethany?”

Mother stood at the kitchen door.

“Come say hello to your grandmother.”

So I put aside my wooden spoon and walked to the living room.

“And here’s Bethany Marie.”

Araminta smiled up at me from the couch, her bright blue eyes unclouded and clear.

“Hello, Grandmother,” I whispered, kissing her soft, crinkly cheek.

“You’ve growed a foot,” she said, inspecting me critically. “I reckon you’ll be as tall as DarlaJean soon.”

She looked away, out the window at the bare tree in the yard.

“My DarlaJean, why, she was five feet seven inches tall. Nearly as tall as her daddy, she was.” She sighed heavily. “And now she’s with him, I reckon.”

Tracy sat down beside her and took her hand.

“First Winston, then Jimmy, and now my DarlaJean,” she said. “I reckon I lost everyone I ever loved.”

“I’m here, Mother,” Daddy said anxiously, watching her. “You haven’t lost me.”

“Why, Jimmy, I lost you when you was just a baby,” she said. “I lost you sure as I lost Winston.”

She sighed again. “And now my DarlaJean, my own little girl. I never figured on losing her. I thought I’d have her with me till the end.”

A tear slid down her cheek.

“You have me, Grandmother,” Tracy said. “You’ll always have me.”

“You favor me, child.” Araminta stroked Tracy’s cheek. “You surely favor me.”

I don’t think I ever saw Tracy that gentle with anyone before or after. Reana Mae looked at me in surprise.

“Well, Mother, let’s get you settled in.”

Daddy picked up her big suitcase and offered his hand. “Let me show you your room.”

“I’ll take her, Daddy.”

Tracy rose and helped Araminta to her feet, then walked slowly beside her down the hallway to Melinda’s room.

“See, Grandmother? We found a picture for you.”

“Well, that’s a comfort, child. That’s a real comfort.”

Reana Mae and I escaped back to the kitchen to finish supper. Then we all sat down to eat, Grandmother Araminta in Mother’s chair, Tracy perched right beside her.

“What’s this?” The old lady stared at the Stroganoff before her.

Mother grimaced, then immediately regained her composure.

“That’s beef Stroganoff, Araminta. Bethany made it.”

“Well, I never had that before.” She smiled at me, then looked back down at her plate. “I reckon I’ll have to get used to lots of new things up here.”