Calling Me Home (11 page)

Miss Pearce wrinkled her nose and harrumphed. “Always a first time for everything.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I called, slamming back out the door, imagining her pressing a finger to her pursed lips at the noise, though I was already gone and it was too late to mind her warning.

I gazed in the direction I’d last seen Robert, spotting only a few businessmen smoking in doorways. I picked up my pace, nearly breaking into a run. Eventually, I slowed. I’d lost him.

Only then, he emerged from the hardware store. He pushed a small paper bag into his pocket once he cleared the storefront and continued toward the edge of town. I fell into step again, twenty yards or so behind, though I needed to take three steps to match his every two.

His destination wasn’t foremost in my mind. All I knew for certain was I wanted to speak to him again, to be lulled again by his flannel voice, to be amused by his wry humor.

Beyond that, I had no plan.

Robert crossed the city limit, me sneaking behind like a poor imitation of a private investigator. After a half mile or so, he turned into a dirt lane leading to the steps of an old building. Faded lettering on the whitewashed sign posted out front identified it as Mount Zion Baptist Church. Below the name, the sign read
ALL WELCOME HERE.

Yet I hung back, sheltered behind a huge yellow buckeye tree, watching until Robert climbed the sagging steps and entered the church.

I pressed my forehead against the knotted tree trunk, then plucked a piece of fruit from a low branch. I rolled the husk, flexible and green and unlikely to split open in the middle of summer, between my palms. I yearned to discover what business Robert had in a lonely church on a sweltering July afternoon. But in spite of the sign’s promise, I knew following Robert inside would be a blunt invasion of privacy. I stepped back and tossed the buckeye fruit against the tree trunk, the earlier nerve I’d felt so keenly now lost, and started back toward the road. But then I heard a creaking and glanced back over my shoulder. Robert emerged from a side door, carrying ungainly wooden and metal tools. His back was already to me; he’d obviously not seen me on the path, and he headed around the building. I plucked up all the courage I’d believed gone and followed. Behind the faded clapboard structure stood a brush arbor, its original frame hidden within the twisted and gnarled fingers of overgrown vines. Robert ducked under them to enter the arbor. Presently, I heard vigorous clicks and snaps, and the vines quivered.

I gathered a breath and went the last few yards toward the arbor, ducking under at the same spot he’d entered. He startled when he saw me, his arms frozen high in the process of hacking away a particularly thick branch that had wormed its way through the arbor roof and hung so low in the space, it scraped the dirt floor.

“My God, Miss … Isabelle!” He released the stubborn branch from the clippers and dropped the tool at his feet, then clutched his chest and backed away from me. “You about gave me a heart attack. I thought maybe I saw a ghost.”

I covered my mouth, trying not to giggle at the shock on Robert’s face. “I’m sorry. I should have … made noise?”

“Or something.” He mopped sweat away from his forehead and reached for a jar of water resting on the rustic wooden pulpit. A jar that could have held preserves put up by his mother at my house. He turned his chin to the side and studied me. “You follow me from town? Oh, Lordy, why am I asking dumb questions? Course you followed me. How else would you end up in the middle of nowhere, trying to kill me off early?”

I raised a palm in the air. “Guilty. As charged.”

“And why? What on earth were you thinking? Oh, yeah, I remember now. You don’t think ahead much, do you, Isabelle?” It was the first time he’d managed my name without the infernal “Miss” in front of it, or even the slightest hesitation, but I wasn’t flattered.

“Guilty on count two also.” I dropped onto one of the weatherworn benches that lined the arbor.

“Watch for splinters, now.”

I smoothed my skirt under my legs. “I’m not scared of splinters. And I followed you because I wanted to talk to you. I like talking to you. I like watching you do things.”

Robert shook his head and took another swig from his water jar, then retrieved the clippers and resumed hacking at the branch. “Don’t know what you want with me. Your folks would be hysterical if they knew you followed me out here. Well, your momma. Your daddy, he’d be concerned, wondering what you’re thinking, talking to a colored boy, even if that colored boy is me. Not the wisest proposition.”

“Daddy talks to you all the time. Why can’t I?” We hadn’t been tutored together in years—my mother had put an abrupt end to those joint sessions long before Robert entered high school—but I still saw my father and Robert together frequently. Daddy quizzed him while they worked side by side, to be sure Robert knew all the basic math and science he’d need to declare a major in biology at college. While they painted house trim together, laid a walkway to our backyard gazebo, dug limestone from the earth to create a retaining wall in the soft, steep slope to our front porch, Daddy groomed Robert, too. He had hopes Robert would follow in his footsteps. Northern Kentucky needed Negro doctors. The few in practice—added to the small number of white doctors who would consent to treat colored folks—were never enough.

Robert twisted his head to gaze at me as if I were too dense to walk the earth. “You know that’s different.”

“I mean it. Why can’t we talk? Be friends?”

“You know why. Don’t play dumb on me, now.”

“I’m tired of people saying what I can or can’t do, Robert.” I puffed air out of my mouth and dropped my chin against my hand, drawing circles in the sand under the arbor with the toe of my shoe. Then I plucked the shoe off my foot and threw it against the vines over my head, hard. Its impact released a shower of dead plant matter onto my head, which would have been fine had it not been laced with a few living creatures. When a spider plopped into my lap I screamed and jumped up from the bench. I brushed wildly at my skirt and backed away from the spot.

Robert threw his head back and belly-laughed, deep waves rolling from inside him. I hadn’t seen him so expressive in years. It was as if in my town and on our property, Cora and Robert and Nell filtered their emotions through a fine sieve. If I hadn’t been so startled by the spider, I would have marveled simply at Robert’s laughter. As it was, I narrowed my eyes at him while stamping my feet and shaking my shirt, still worrying that the spider roamed in its folds.

“Oh, you got him, Isabelle. That spider ran as fast as all his legs could carry him away. But, my, that was funny,” he said, mirth still wrinkling the corners of his eyes. He leaned on his knees until his laughter subsided. Then he reached for my shoe where it had fallen. He carried it to me and held it out. I took it from him, and his fingers brushed mine, barely, but enough to make a shiver run from my finger all the way up my arm to the back of my neck.

He felt it, too. I knew he did. He dropped his hand, then froze in place. I’d heard the other girls whisper about boys they liked, heard them describe how they felt when they first really and truly knew the boy liked them back, but I had never experienced it for myself. Now? I knew what I knew.

It flowed between us—even if we couldn’t say so aloud. It was no longer one-sided, no longer just a daydream, however treacherous, in my own mind.

I broke the awkward silence. “Here’s a question—what are
you
doing here?” I motioned to the arbor and his tools. “Well, mostly, why?”

“This is my church. And this is my church job.”

“Your church job? How many jobs do you have?”

“Well, not my paid job. Every member pitches in to get things done. It’s coming up on time for revival, and my job is getting the arbor trimmed and looking good and not so full of
live
things before the meetings start.” He grinned, and my cheeks heated up as I recalled my hysterics.

“Everyone?” I asked Robert. At my church, everyone was pulled into service on scheduled work days, of course, and the women and girls cooked and served and cleaned up for special dinners or events, but the rest of the time, it seemed the place ran itself—with old Mr. Miller’s help. Mr. Miller slept on a cot in an alcove in the basement. He cleaned and maintained the building in exchange for his keep, and the ladies of the congregation rotated carrying him meals, cooking extra when they cooked for their own families, or, as in our case, having their housekeepers prepare simple meals to deliver. Every couple of weeks, Cora sent Nell or Robert over to the church with a pail filled with sandwiches and fruit for Mr. Miller’s dinner, along with fresh milk and coffee. He’d been there as long as I could remember, though I’d heard whispers about a wife and family and a paying job lost in the early years of the Depression. He kept to himself, mainly, and we kids avoided him, frightened of his long, dour face. But the older I grew, the more I wondered if his expression was not meanness, but grief. After all, I never saw him truly angry, not even when he huffed and grumbled at the boys for leaving shoe-polish streaks on his freshly waxed floors from running and sliding along them in their Sunday shoes.

“From the time they’re old enough to walk,” Robert said, “even the littlest ones have some chore or another. Straightening the singing books or the pencils, pulling weeds, whatever the mothers and Brother James divvy up between them. I’ve been making this arbor ready for meetings since I was thirteen.” He gestured to the branches over him, then pulled at a button on his shirt, his face an awkward version of proud.

“Well, now, it’s a fine-looking arbor, if I do say.” I strutted around the edges, studying his handiwork. “But it looks as though you’ve missed a spot. Here.”

Robert rolled his eyes and went back to work. “Oh, now you’re the expert on arbor tending, I see.”

“The expert of many things, master of none.” I sighed. It was true. Sure, I was smart, a good student, but I had no special talent, no burning passion to even present to my mother as an option to her plan. I envied my classmates who were already learning trades and the few who would attend college, pursue careers they’d dreamed of for years—mostly the boys, but a few of the girls, too, whose mothers were more modern than mine. And though I did want a family one day and dared to dream of romance and true love, I feared it wouldn’t be enough. I longed for something more, but I had no idea what more looked like.

“Why the sigh?”

“I’m envious of you. Of your opportunity to go to college and
be
something.”

His regard balanced between amazement and amusement. “You? Jealous of me? Oh, you don’t want to be me.” He shook his head and grabbed a rake and started scraping together the branches he’d lopped from the underside of the arbor, dragging them toward one edge. “Trust me there on that. You have no idea.”

My cheeks felt flushed as I pondered this truth. I couldn’t imagine being a boy, much less a Negro—a second-class citizen in every way, or so my upbringing had taught me, though I questioned this more every day. “Well, no, maybe not. But I want the chance to do something important. Something truly important.”

Robert chuckled. I followed as he pushed the trimmings toward an indention in the dirt across the yard. From the bundle he’d carried away from the hardware store, he pulled and lit a matchstick, then tossed it onto the brush pile. Eventually, leaves and branches smoldered in the afternoon sun. “You’ll do something important,” he said. “Too stubborn to do otherwise. May not be what you’re dreaming of, may not be important in the way you think, but still.”

“See? You don’t laugh at me when I say things. Well, yes, you do laugh at me—you’re in big trouble for that. But you take me seriously nonetheless. That
never
happens.”

He seemed to withdraw a fraction, though he never moved from the stance he’d adopted, his hands on his hips, watching the fire and watching me. “What if I didn’t take you seriously, Isabelle? Am I allowed that? Not taking you seriously?”

My heart seemed to shrink inside my chest like a punctured balloon. Of course he wouldn’t disagree with me or poke fun at my dreams. Given who each of us was, it wouldn’t be acceptable. Yet I wanted him to be honest with me, more than anything. And it seemed he was honest, no matter what he claimed. “You decide,” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. “It’s not mine to allow.”

My words crossed an invisible line, one that could change things between us. One that invited trust.

8

Dorrie, Present Day

W
E PULLED INTO
Memphis earlier than expected that evening, having made good time in spite of our stops. Still, I was surprised when Miss Isabelle asked me to drive past all the tourist spots before we found our hotel, just to look. Elvis’s house was smaller than I’d pictured—considering all the fuss. His songs weren’t generally my style, but some of them could move even me. (Seven down, five letters: “unaffected by joy, grief, pleasure, or pain.”
Stoic.
That was me.)

I yearned to slip away later to one of the blues clubs we eyed along Beale Street. I listened now and then to the stuff my kids liked. The verdict? I liked the beat, but most of the lyrics offended my delicate sensibilities. The blues, now, that was some genuine grit. But I didn’t think it would be wise to leave Miss Isabelle alone, and the vision of us together in a place like that only made me laugh. We needed to get some shut-eye anyway.

I’d helped Miss Isabelle set up a computer and an Internet connection around the time I started doing her hair at home, and she’d more than mastered it. Her online skills left me coughing in her dusty wake. She’d been all over the Web, planning our journey. I’d volunteered to find us places to stay, but she’d already taken care of it, reserved our hotel rooms and everything.

Miss Isabelle waited in the idling car in the pull-through of our first hotel. I gave the guy at the sign-in desk the reservation name and Miss Isabelle’s credit card. He eyed it and asked me for ID. I handed over Miss Isabelle’s. He checked it out, then gawked at me. Like he thought I was trying to
pass
for her or something. And let me tell you, passing wasn’t something I’d ever be able to do. My color was plainly there for the world to see.