The House You Pass on the Way (5 page)

Staggerlee ran her tongue over her harmonica and wondered for maybe the thousandth time what it would be like to have Tyler staying with them.

It was sunny and warm now. All around her, sugar maples and silver birches were beginning to bloom. She blew a note, soft and clear. Was Tyler up in Baltimore, packing slowly and thinking about coming?

IT RAINED THE MORNING THEY LEFT FOR TUDOR. Red mud trails flowed down away from the house on the Breakabone River side. Staggerlee sat in the truck staring out the window while her father gave last-minute instructions to Dotti.

“How come Staggerlee can’t stay home with Battle?”

“I’ll stay,” Staggerlee lied. “You can go with Daddy to Tudor.”

“I don’t want to go to nobody’s Tudor.” Dotti glared at Staggerlee. All morning she had complained about not being the one who wanted Tyler to visit, that it wasn’t fair that she was stuck with Battle now that Charlie Horse was gone.

“If Battle wakes up,” Daddy said, “give him the juice bottle. There should be some crackers he can chew on in the cabinet.”

Dotti stood on the porch looking evil. She was wearing a pair of short-shorts and a near-transparent shirt over a black bra.

“Don’t wake Adeen either. No company. No loud music. You hear me?”

“I heard you,” Dotti said, rolling her eyes. “I’m going to Jen’s when y’all get back.”

“Maybe,” Daddy said, climbing into the truck. “Maybe when we get back you can change your clothes and go on over to Jen’s.”

Dotti turned on her heel and slammed inside the house.

“Don’t know what we’re going to do about her,” Daddy said, starting the car and moving slowly down the long driveway. “Girl’s becoming hard to live with.”

“Ma says it’s just her taking being a teenager too seriously. A phase.”

“Well, it would be nice if you remembered how troubling this phase is for us and not make us go through it again.”

“I’m not Dotti.”

“I know.” But he looked worried anyway.

Staggerlee stared out the window. Would there ever come a time when her parents weren’t comparing her to Dotti or using Dotti’s bad behavior to teach her a lesson? Her mother had said that she and Dotti were both women now.
But still,
Staggerlee thought,
I’ll never be her.
That was the thing her parents would never understand.

AS THEY NEARED TOWN, Staggerlee’s stomach tightened. Town made her nervous. There was always someone somewhere ready to point them out, ready to whisper, “You remember that bombing back in sixty-nine? Well, that’s the family of those people.” Some days she felt like a sideshow act—being gawked at by people she didn’t know.

People were walking fast underneath brightly colored umbrellas. A couple waved, and her father waved back. A group of men sitting underneath a gas station awning grinned and waved—some of them were Daddy’s hired hands.

“What y’all know good?” her father said, rolling down his window and slowing the truck as they neared the men.

“Devil beating his wife today, ain’t he?” one of the men said. He grinned. A wide, nearly toothless grin.

Staggerlee smiled, looking out to where the sun had peeked out a bit between two clouds. It was an old expression, one she had heard her father use a couple of times—sun showers meant the devil was beating his wife. It didn’t make any sense but it was always funny to hear.

Her father laughed and pulled over.

“We’re going to be late,” Staggerlee said, getting nervous. “Tyler’ll be waiting.”

He looked at his watch. “We’ll make it, sugar. Let me just say a quick hello.”

Another man came up to the truck—a dark, gray-haired man in work pants and a shirt so washed out, Staggerlee couldn’t guess what its original color had been.

“Your south field’s gonna need plowing before the sun gets too hot, Canan. I got some time next week I could get to it, if you’d like.”

“That’d be as good a time as any, Trev. Just come on by and do it and let me know how much you got coming to you.”

Trev smiled. “That your baby girl there?”

Daddy nodded.

“How you doing, brown sugar child?”

“Fine, sir.”

“She getting big, ain’t she?” He turned back to the men. “Y’all see Canan’s baby girl—she just about grown, ain’t she?”

Staggerlee’s face grew hot.

“Look just like he spit her out,” another man said.

“Be beating boys off with a stick soon, Canan. My big-headed boy Derrick’s in your class, ain’t he?” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the rain dripping from his forehead.

“Yes, sir.” His son was loud and gangly. Once, a few years back, he had put an apple on her desk, with a tiny red heart taped to it. Staggerlee had eaten the apple and returned the red heart. She had no idea what he had intended for her to do with it. After that, he had seemed cold toward her.

“Adeen got another one coming.” Her father grinned.

Derrick’s father whistled, low and steady, then turned to the group again. “Y’all hear that? Another one coming.”

They all hooted.

“Can’t keep the rooster in the barn, can you?” Trev grinned.

Daddy smiled, and Trev tapped the truck once and stepped away.

“You give my best to your family,” he said as Daddy started the engine. “I’ll see y’all sometime next week.”

They drove off slowly, Daddy grinning and giving one last wave before he turned at the corner. When he got around his men friends, he seemed to step into a different person—someone relaxed and easygoing and ready to laugh. He had known some of those men all his life. Staggerlee leaned out the window and squinted against the wind. Her mother didn’t have this—a group of people to laugh with. She spent most of her time alone or with the family or knitting or reading.

“You think Mama’s lonely?” Staggerlee asked, poking her head back in.

Her father glanced at her. “Where’d that come from?”

Staggerlee shrugged. “It’s just that you have your men-folk friends in town and Sweet Gum’s mostly all black people. Mama doesn’t have anyone.”

“You think she doesn’t have anyone because Sweet Gum is mostly black folk?” Daddy asked, raising an eyebrow.

Staggerlee shrugged again. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, she just doesn’t have anyone. I don’t know if it’s about black or white.”

Daddy frowned. “Good—’cause it’s not. Your mother’s always been on solo. And I wouldn’t have brought her back to Sweet Gum if she hadn’t wanted to come here.” He looked over at her.

“She seems so alone, though.”

“She is alone. Some people go crazy if they feel like they don’t have any type of community or close friends and whatnot. Your mama’s not like that. She never did like a big social kind of lifestyle, always preferred to be by herself. Or now, with me and you kids.”

“Well, I figure I’d like to have me a good friend in my lifetime.”

Daddy patted her leg. “Then you will, Miss Staggerlee. You will.”

But she wasn’t sure she believed him.

THE RAIN STOPPED HALFWAY TO TUDOR. BY THE TIME they arrived, the roads were hot and dusty again.

Tudor Station was small—not much more than a store-front with a ticket counter and a dusty red dirt road where Trailways pulled in once a day. Staggerlee climbed down from the truck and looked around at the station. Today it seemed shabby, dusty and bare. She swallowed. What would Tyler think of it?

“I guess she’s on her way,” she said, brushing off the knees of her overalls and smoothing her ponytail back. Her feet were sweating inside her hiking boots, and she couldn’t tell whether it was nervousness or heat.

When the bus pulled in, it took the driver a moment to get the door open. Staggerlee bit her cuticle. She moved a step closer to her father and waited.

Tyler stepped down carrying a duffel bag. The sun was hot and bright now, and she shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at them—a half smile working one side of her face. Staggerlee felt her mouth go dry. Tyler was beautiful, like nobody she had ever seen before.

Daddy rushed over, smiling and taking her duffel. “Tyler, I’m your uncle Elijah. Good to see you. Real good!” He gave her a quick hug. “Come meet your cousin, girl.”

Staggerlee shoved her hands in her pockets and stared down at her boots. It was the kind of beautiful you couldn’t put a finger on. Separately, all the parts of Tyler’s face didn’t add up to anything. But together they were beautiful. She tried to keep her eyes on her boots, but something kept pulling her gaze back.

“I’m Stag . . . Staggerlee,” she said when they walked over.

Tyler gave her a strange look and shifted her knapsack higher onto her shoulder. She was wearing a dungaree jacket with TROUT stitched across one of the pockets. Underneath the jacket, she was all in black.

Staggerlee took a deep breath. “Guess you’re Tyler.”

Tyler shook her head and raised an eyebrow.

“My name is Trout.” Her voice was soft and even. She looked Staggerlee over, and her eyes seemed to click into place as though she had just decided something. She pulled her lips to one side of her face. It made her look older than fourteen. “I thought your name was Evangeline Ian.”

Staggerlee hadn’t expected her not to have an accent. It sounded strange, how clear her words came out.

“I thought yours was Tyler.”

She smiled, and Staggerlee smiled back, kicking one of her hiking boots against a rock.

“Yeah,” she said. “Well, Ida and Jonathan tried that name out on me.”

They stared at each other, smiling. One of Trout’s eyebrows curved into an arch, which made her look skeptical even when she was smiling. Staggerlee remembered all those love-at-first-sight stories she used to read—how she had never believed them. But standing there, in the Tudor bus station, she felt something weird happening inside her stomach and all around her—like something pounding, trying to get out of her. Her mind kept running back to Hazel in those cornflowers.

“Seems neither of you were happy with the names your mamas gave you,” Daddy said.

Staggerlee jumped. She had forgotten he was standing there.

He lifted Trout’s duffel into the back of the truck.

“My mother named me Danielle, sir. Ida and Jonathan named me Tyler.”

“And you don’t consider Ida and Jonathan your people?” Daddy asked. “Because if they’re not your people, then what does that make me and this fine daughter of mine, who just drove a good long way to pick up a city-slick niece and cousin we heard was coming in from Baltimore?”

Staggerlee glared at him. He seemed out of place—like a wall between her and Trout.

“Yes, sir,” Trout said quietly, glancing away from him. “They’re my people. They raised me.”

“Well then, Miss Trout Danielle Tyler,” Daddy said, “welcome to Calmuth County. My mama, your grandma, named me Elijah and I think I’ll hold on to that name awhile.”

Trout smiled and followed behind Daddy, taking high steps to keep her shoes from getting covered in red dust.

“It’s a losing battle, Trout,” Staggerlee said, pointing down at her own hiking boots.

“You always wear those boots?”

“Most of the time.”

“They look like it. I brought stuff with me to keep my shoes shined. You can use it if you want. Can we ride in back, Uncle Elijah?” She hoisted her knapsack into the truck.

Staggerlee frowned. Who’d ever heard of shiny hiking boots?

“Probably get a bit windy back there,” Daddy said.

“I don’t mind.” She looked at Staggerlee. “You mind, Staggerlee?”

“No.” Maybe Staggerlee would have followed Trout to the end of the world.

“Okay then,” Daddy said, climbing into the cab.

Trout climbed into the back easily and scooted to one corner. Staggerlee climbed up after her and settled against a bag of fertilizer her father had picked up in town. Red dust kicked up around the truck as he slowly maneuvered it back onto the main road. Staggerlee tried not to look at Trout, but Trout was looking hard at her, so that every time Staggerlee’s eyes slid in Trout’s direction, they bumped smack against hers.

Staggerlee started braiding her hair—hoping to keep the wind from whipping it into snarls.

“Don’t do that,” Trout said. “I like it.”

Staggerlee let it drop back into a ponytail.

“Ida said she was sending me here to spend time with some ladies and gentlemen,” Trout said above the noise of the truck. “You sure don’t look like a lady.”

“How’s a lady supposed to look?”

Trout shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I guess liking lipstick and dresses and stuff. Wearing bras. Ida says one day I’m going to be too big for T-shirts. I hope that day isn’t planning on coming soon.”

“I still wear T-shirts too.”

Trout smiled. “Good. Otherwise, I’d be embarrassed.”