Prayers and Lies (6 page)

Reana spent the whole day with us. We listened to the radio, threw sticks in the river, ate bologna and cheese sandwiches, and cut out paper dolls. Tracy showed up late morning, silently dressed herself, and went to bed, where she stayed till lunchtime. After lunch, Mother took her and Reana and me to the laundromat in St. Albans and bought us Snickers bars while she washed a load of permanent press shirts and Essie in the big washing machine. Reana Mae and I pushed each other in the rolling laundry baskets. Tracy sat quietly on a metal folding chair beside Mother, clenching and unclenching her hands, watching us play.

When Essie came out of the washer, she was sodden and heavy, but clean as ever. Mother wrung out her cloth body and handed her to Reana Mae to hug.

“I’m afraid to put her in the dryer,” she said, “but I think she’ll dry out by tomorrow.”

She put Essie’s yellow-flowered dress in the dryer with the shirts, then sat back down with her
Ladies’ Home Journal
. Reana Mae and I took turns pushing Essie around in the laundry basket, and still Tracy sat silently, watching us.

When the drying was finished, we all helped to fold. Then we climbed back into Uncle Hobie’s Chevy, which Mother had borrowed for the day. Reana and I sat in the back, with Essie on the seat between us. Tracy sat in front with Mother. I saw her lean over and whisper to Mother, then saw Mother smile and nod. Tracy turned to the backseat.

“That old doll needs a new dress,” she said. “We’re gonna stop at Woolworth’s and get one for her.”

Reana Mae smiled at Tracy hopefully.

“Will you choose one, Tracy?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Tracy shrugged her shoulders. “I’ll find her a good one.”

Mother smiled at her. I wanted to scream, “It’s her fault! It’s all her!” But I sat still, holding Essie’s little plastic hand, and wondered at my sister.

When we got home, I had even more cause to wonder when I saw Tracy take a dollar from her dresser drawer and hand it to my mother, in payment for the doll’s new pink dress. Mother smiled down at her and kissed her soft auburn hair.

Would wonders never cease? Tracy Janelle Wylie buying a dress for Reana Mae’s doll. Not only that, she actually sat and played dolls with Reana that afternoon.

I lay on the couch, watching them in wonder. I was stunned that Reana Mae would even want to play with Tracy. I couldn’t understand why she would, since Tracy was nothing but mean to her most of the time. I wished mightily that I could tell Reana—and Mother, too—that it was Tracy who had nearly ruined Essie. But of course, I couldn’t. I’d sworn on Daddy’s life.

I wondered, not for the first time, why Tracy was so mean. Nancy and Melinda were sometimes thoughtless, but they weren’t mean. Daddy and Mother certainly weren’t mean. No one else I knew was that mean. Well, maybe Jolene was mean sometimes … but not like Tracy. Tracy was mean for no reason. Sometimes she was downright vicious.

And then, just when I thought she couldn’t possibly get any meaner, she would go and do something kind … like buy a dress for Essie.

I shook my head as I watched my sister playing dolls with Reana Mae. Tracy was, indeed, a mystery.

After supper, just as it began to get dark, Jolene knocked at our door. Without a word, Reana Mae picked up the pink-frocked Essie and her old, yellow-flowered dress and followed her mother home.

Tracy and Mother and I stood on the porch and watched them go. Jolene’s arm draped lightly across Reana Mae’s shoulders.

We didn’t know where Bobby Lee had been that day. Jolene never said. And we didn’t know then just how often Reana Mae took treatment like that from her mama.

Later, we learned it all. But that day, we thought the storm had passed.

5
A Harsh Mistress

J
olene loved Bobby Lee, that’s for certain. No one could say she didn’t love her husband. But it was a grasping, sucking kind of love that didn’t leave room in her life, or in his, for anyone else.

I suppose she loved like that because she didn’t get a whole lot of love herself when she was a little girl.

EmmaJane—Jolene’s mama—had run away from home a week after her seventeenth birthday, leaving her own parents, her job, and her steady beau behind. She’d been working downriver for the summer at the boardinghouse where my mother worked. And then, just like that, she was gone. No one in the valley knew why, though a lot of people weren’t so very surprised at her sudden disappearance.

“Always trouble,” Aunt Belle said of EmmaJane. “Too pretty for her own good, and raised by a damned fool.”

Folks speculated that EmmaJane had run off with a man from the city, but no one knew for sure. And because they didn’t know for years where EmmaJane had gone to or what she’d done, the stories that circulated ranged from the exotic to the ludicrous. Her mama was convinced she’d been kidnapped by white slavers. Some people said she’d gone off to Hollywood. Others whispered that she’d drowned herself over a failed love affair. Her forlorn beau waited almost two years for her return, before finally marrying a girl from St. Albans and moving away.

The truth was that EmmaJane had got herself pregnant and gone off to hide her shame. She took the bus up to Huntington, rented a cheap apartment, and found a job in a hair salon, setting herself up as a single mother in a time and place where that wasn’t so fashionable as it is nowadays.

Jolene was left pretty much to raise herself, coming home from school to an empty apartment in an old brick duplex by the train yards. She learned early to rely on herself. And she learned how to get what she needed from men. She learned that skill at the knees of a harsh mistress, indeed. Even all those years after EmmaJane died, Jolene remembered how cold her mother had been. “A mean bitch” is what she called EmmaJane, a term that made my mother blush.

One day, EmmaJane came home from work in the middle of the day, fired from her job for sassing the boss.

She gave Jolene a dollar and told her to go to the movies. As she left, Jolene heard her mother opening a beer.

When Jolene came home, she found her mother’s body sprawled dead on the couch, four beer cans and a bottle of bourbon empty on the floor alongside a smaller but equally empty pill bottle.

It nearly broke Loreen’s heart for her only daughter to die like that—by her own hand and alone in a cheap city apartment. Of course, Loreen never would believe that EmmaJane did it on purpose. No, Loreen insisted to her dying day, EmmaJane had died by accident, or maybe even been murdered.

When EmmaJane’s landlady had called to tell them their daughter was dead, and would they come get their granddaughter, Ray and Loreen drove right up to Huntington, even though it meant borrowing Brother Harley’s Buick and closing the store for a whole day. And even if it was the first time they even knew they had a granddaughter. Jolene was twelve when she came to the valley to live with Loreen and Ray. And by then, folks said, it was too late. She’d been city-spoiled. She cried for missing the radio, and a telephone in the house, and the bus to go shopping. But no one ever saw her cry for her mama—not even at the funeral. Oh, she’d been a handful, all right. She smoked and she swore and she stole from Ray’s store. She skipped school, she got into fights, and twice she ran away—one time getting all the way up to Huntington before Ray found her and brought her back home. She was hard and smart-mouthed and sullen. Just like EmmaJane. Nearly drove her poor grandma to distraction, even after she married Bobby Lee.

The only person Jolene ever really listened to was my mother. Probably that was because Mother really listened to her, too. It was a puzzle why Mother was so patient with her. She was almost old enough to be Jolene’s mother, but she acted more like a sister to her. Even when we were in Indianapolis, Mother worried over Jo-lene. She sent her letters and coupons and gifts, and she tried to show Jolene how to be a mama.

One thing was certain, though—Jolene never learned to be a mama. But Reana Mae did have some family who loved her. Loreen fussed over her. Ray was quietly fond of her, letting Reana Mae spend her days at his store, reading to her from the
National Geographic
magazines he collected, and teaching her to read and write before she was even five.

And then, of course, I loved her. Between the two of us, we made a sisterhood of misfits that sustained us both for a long time.

6
A Time to Give Thanks

W
e tumbled out of the wood-paneled station wagon, cramped and tired from the eight-hour drive, and stared at the scene before us. The valley looked like a picture postcard—a soft-focus watercolor of rural Appalachia. The hills and trees and bushes, the cabins and outhouses, the pumps and split-rail fences were frosted white. I had never been to the river in winter before, and the landscape I knew as well as I knew my own name looked foreign, the familiar markers blanketed in snow. Even our cabin looked strange under a foot of snow. But someone had shoveled a path to the front door for us.

“Okay, girls, stop gaping and start carrying,” Daddy hollered, opening the tailgate. “No one uses the bathroom till the car’s unloaded!”

“Now, that’s some incentive you got goin’ there!”

We turned to see Bobby Lee in the open door of the cabin, laughing.

“I got you a fire goin’.” He grinned. “Figured you’d need it after the drive.”

Daddy strode onto the porch and shook Bobby Lee’s hand. Mother hugged him. “Thank you, Bobby Lee. How thoughtful of you. Is Jolene with you?”

“I’m here, Helen.” Jolene was just inside the door, a blue apron tied around her waist. The smell of fresh cinnamon rolls wafted from the cabin. Mother’s eyes widened in surprise—Jolene was not known for her domestic skills. But she smiled and hugged Jolene tight, then reached for Reana Mae, standing just behind her mother, clutching a wooden spoon. The front of her gray sweatshirt was dusted with flour, and she was smiling shyly.

“Come on, girls. Let’s get moving!” Daddy returned to the business of unloading the car. Bobby Lee and Reana Mae joined us, carrying the suitcases, boxes, and bags into the cabin. Mother and Jolene stayed inside, unpacking groceries in the kitchen. Bobby Lee and Jolene always opened the cabin for us when we came down, but never had they been such a welcome sight. The kerosene lamps and fire in the wood-burning stove made a small oasis of light and warmth in the frosty late afternoon, and as soon as we had brought in our luggage and made our hurried visits—clutching a roll of toilet paper—to the outhouse, we unwrapped ourselves from layers of coats and mufflers and hats, and gathered around the stove.

Mother made coffee for the grown-ups and cocoa for us. Jolene passed around cinnamon rolls warm from the oven. We were home for the holidays, spending Thanksgiving at the river. Best of all, Daddy was with us to stay for the whole week. I thought I would split my face open from grinning so wide.

Reana Mae was showing me the new dress and coat, with matching hat and muff, that Loreen had sewn for Essie, when we heard the tramp of boots on the back porch. The door swung open and the frame was filled with a bearlike shape, bundled head to toe in dark wool. The creature was carrying a huge armful of firewood. I shrank back into the couch behind Mother.

“Here’s more wood, Bobby,” said the bear, dropping the wood onto the pile by the stove. Now I could see it was a man—a big man pulling a dark brown ski mask off his head. Then, as he noted the crowd of people in the room, the man’s cheeks turned a dark red, and I realized it wasn’t even a man at all—it was a great big boy.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Didn’t know you all was here.”

Bobby Lee had risen and was standing beside the big boy. “Jim, Helen, you remember my little brother, Caleb?”

Daddy rose to shake the bear-boy’s hand. With his ski mask off, I could see that Caleb looked a bit like Bobby Lee—younger and not so handsome, but with the same dark brown eyes, the same straight nose, the same shock of black curly hair falling across his forehead. But where Bobby Lee carried the features with a confident, slightly macho grace, Caleb looked like a hulking bear—his eyes glancing kind of sideways at you, dark with suspicion.

“Caleb’s stayin’ with us for a piece, till Mama gets herself settled somewhere. He’s been a big help around the house, what with my schedule pickin’ up so. I don’t know what Jolene would do without him these days.” Bobby Lee flopped back down onto the picnic bench beside Jolene. “Ain’t that right, sugar?”

“Oh yeah.” Jolene smiled back at him. “He’s a great helper all right.”

Then she glanced at my mother, just for an instant, and I could see in that look she was lying. Her green cat-eyes were narrowed slightly, her mouth drawn into a tight line. Funny, when she looked that way, she seemed suddenly old—lines creasing her forehead, small crow’s feet around her eyes. Then she turned back to Bobby Lee, and she was herself again—pretty, plump Jolene. “I just wish your schedule would let up some, that’s all.”

Bobby Lee laughed, looking away from her. “If I’m gonna build you that loft you keep naggin’ about, I gotta be doin’ more long hauls to pay for it, now, don’t I?” He grinned at my father and shook his head. “Jolene says she’s gotta have a upstairs loft like you all got here, so Reana Mae can have her some privacy. With an extra body about, it’s gettin’ a might crowded at home.”

“Especially when the body’s so dang big,” Jolene added, glancing at Caleb, who was standing awkwardly by the cabin door, still wearing his coat.

Mother rose, offering her hand to Caleb. “Why don’t you sit down here, Caleb, and I’ll get you some cocoa.”

“No, thank ye, ma’am,” he mumbled. “I gotta get on back home. Got things to do, you know.”

With that, he fumbled for the handle of the door.

“We’ll be home shortly, Caleb,” Bobby Lee called after him. “Don’t be gettin’ yourself into any nonsense, you hear?”

Daddy turned inquiring eyes to him, and Bobby Lee grinned sheepishly. “He’s a handful, that one. Always into something or other, especially since Mama left. But he’s a good kid, Jimmy. He’s okay.”