Free Verse (6 page)

For two days, I'm too sick to realize I'm sick. I try to lie perfectly still, and I wonder why the room is spinning. Sometimes Phyllis is there with oatmeal or soup or tea I can't drink. Sometimes I'm alone in the room and I keep thinking I'm seeing things move in the dark corners.

By the time I wake on Monday, there's news I don't want to hear coming in from the mines, so I'm sick in another way. I stay under the covers.

The blankets and sheets don't smell like laundry detergent anymore. They smell like sweat and sickness and me. On Wednesday, the first of May, I feel well enough to escape them. I make my shaky way out to the porch. The world looks wet, like it's been raining, but it's much warmer than it was when I was last out. Weak evening
sun turns the porch boards orange, even though I know they're chipped-paint gray.

I'm not expecting to see Hubert. He should be in for supper about now. But his screen door creaks open almost as soon as I sit down.

He doesn't look like himself in his suit. His hair is slicked back with visible comb streaks, and he keeps tugging at his necktie. Although his outfit matches the ones the news anchors have been wearing on TV, Hubert doesn't in any way look like those men. He looks uncomfortable and sweaty.

“Hi,” I call, raising a hand.

He raises one back. “Feeling better, little lady?”

I smile a little. Ben used to call me that, too. “Yep.” I study him. He looks so different today. Behind him, Shirley comes out of the house in a black dress. She's got Marla in her arms, and Sara toddles beside them. Both little girls are in dark dresses, Sara's green and Marla's blue. Marla is fussing and bending over her mother's arm. She wants down to play. But Shirley must know as well as I do that if she puts Marla down, the baby will go immediately to the muddiest place she can find and the dress will be ruined.

Sara opens and closes her hands in a baby wave, and I wave back. I watch the door behind her. When Mikey comes out, he's wearing a suit like his father's. His hair is
so gelled it looks like a solid thing. His face is red and tear-streaked, and I feel a pang of sympathy for him.

“It's a prayer vigil,” Hubert's saying as Mikey follows him down the steps. “You can't wear sneakers to a prayer vigil, son. I'm sorry.”

“We're taking the car,” Shirley says when Mikey darts past her to his father's pickup.

“I will rot in hell before I ride in that car!” These are the first words I have ever heard Mikey say.

“Mikey,” his father warns. It's been a long time since I've had a father, but I had a big brother recently enough that I recognize that tone of voice. I figure Mikey ought to listen.

But he doesn't. “If you try to make me go in Shirley's car, I'll die and I'll rot in hell and then you'll have to get dressed up and go to
my
funeral!”

“William Michael Harless!” I'm relieved to learn that Mikey is his middle name. I want
my
Michael to be the
only
Michael. When Hubert speaks again, his voice has already lowered. “Please get in the car.”

Mikey backs away, shaking his head. His chin is high. I sit up straighter. Something about how stiffly he's holding his shoulders, something about the way he keeps shaking his head, is familiar. I can feel it in my own chin, in my own bones. All at once, I have an opinion on the situation next door.

“He can stay with me,” I call.

Mikey's head whips around so fast his gelled hair moves an inch. “I don't know you,” he says. But he doesn't sound quite as fierce as before.

“I'm Sasha,” I explain, although I'm sure he knows at least that. “Your father's father and my father's father were brothers. That makes us . . . something. Some sort of cousins. First cousins twice removed.”

“Second cousins,” Hubert corrects. “You and I are first cousins once removed. You and Mikey are second cousins.”

“See? I'm your cousin. Hubert says.”

Mikey studies me for a long moment. Then he nods.

“Guess I'll stay, then.” Like he's doing me a favor.

•   •   •

Phyllis is trying to teach us to cook.

“You could stand to eat something more solid than egg salad and oatmeal,” she tells me.

“But why can't you just cook it?”

“Because.” She points to the sink. I wash my hands, with a lot of soap because I know she's watching. Mikey shuffles in behind me. He's taken off the tie and the jacket. Now he's only wearing an undershirt. It looks weird with his black slacks and bare feet. Mikey has black road dirt tattooed on his feet the way Hubert's hands wear permanent coal dust. I wonder how long it took Hubert to get shoes on him.

“
Because
is not an answer,” I say, echoing my English teacher. Phyllis flips the dish towel at me. The first time
she did this, I wasn't sure what she meant by it. Ben and Judy weren't the dish-towel-flipping type. I wasn't sure if having a dish towel flipped at me was a good thing or a bad thing. Since then, I've figured out that it's one of the ways Phyllis teases me, like when she tugs my braid or when she calls me “Sasha Serious.” Phyllis doesn't tease the way Anthony does. With Phyllis, it's all right.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I ask when it looks like Phyllis is getting down to business about this cooking thing. When I was little, my parents worked so much that we mostly ate dinners Judy brought home from the Burger Bargain. Then when I got older, and it was just me and Ben and Michael, Michael did all the cooking, and he didn't always have the patience to teach me. Later, when me and Michael were alone in the first little house we shared, we didn't have a good working kitchen. And by the time we moved to the apartment, I'd done enough stupid things just with the microwave and hot plate that Michael didn't really want me anywhere near an actual stove. Not with him seeing the things he saw from the fire truck on a weekly basis.

Phyllis says we're going to cook muffins with anything we want in them. “Not
anything
,” she stops herself. “Y'all two, who knows what you'd throw in there. You can have walnuts, chocolate chips, or strawberries. That's all I've got that would make sense in muffins.”

“Yes, please,” I say. Mikey nods his approval.

“All three, then.” She sets them one by one on the counter, then begins whipping around the kitchen so quickly I'm sure I'm going to be knocked on the head by a cabinet door.

“Where's the recipe?” I ask, retreating to safety near the sink. I pull Mikey with me so he won't be killed. He is mostly bone and empty space and he pulls easily. He looks taller today than usual with his dark hair standing stiff. His face is all cheekbone and freckle. He actually looks a lot like me.

“Pffsh,” Phyllis says. She whips out a mixing bowl and a measuring cup. “Preheat the oven to three fifty.”

“I don't know how to do that.”

With a twitch of her eyebrow, Phyllis shows me how to spin the dial. At the last minute, she remembers to pull the pizza pans out of the oven, where they've been stored.

“Wash your hands again,” Phyllis instructs. “You've been playing with your hair.” My hair is on day two of a braid. It's nearly all frizz at this point, the core of the braid hidden by loose tangles. The rubber band at the bottom is barely hanging on.

I wash my hands again. Phyllis isn't watching as closely, so I don't use as much soap.

“When you're finished, you can grease the tin,” she tells me.

“I don't know how to do that.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake.” Phyllis puts down the bowl
she's been drying and crosses to me. “How you have made it this far in life is beyond me, girl . . .” Her voice fades out, but she's still muttering under her breath. I catch something about “kids today” and I tune out.

Mikey steps in before Phyllis can take over my job. “
I
know,” he says. He shows me how to smear butter all over the muffin tin. “My mom taught me all about cooking. Now your muffins won't stick,” he explains. “If you don't do this part, everything sticks to the tin, and when you pick up a muffin, you only get the top. Shirley uses cooking spray, but it doesn't taste as good. She and Dad got in a fight about it once.”

“That's a weird thing to get in a fight over,” I say.

“Shirley and my dad get in fights over a lot of weird stuff.”

“I need a measurer and a mixer,” Phyllis says. “Any takers?”

I eye the mixing bowl with concern. “This is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon,” I tell her. I'm thinking of the time I tried to make dinner for Michael and the kitchen ended up splattered in raw eggs.

“You didn't know how to preheat the oven or grease a muffin tin, and
this
is the part where the wheels tend to come off the wagon?”

“Well, there are a lot of wheels on a wagon,” I tell her. “More than one can come off.”

Mikey cracks up laughing and drops the measuring cup.

•   •   •

We sing while we wait for the muffins. Mikey has cheered up a lot. I've heard him described as a handful, and half the reason I invited him over was morbid curiosity, to find out how much of a handful he is. But so far he's measured ingredients and helped wash the dishes. He has, without being told, wiped down the table with a dishrag, which never would have occurred to me. He already knows the words to half of Phyllis's songs. Sure, he's got a colorful vocabulary. But overall, Mikey seems a lot less of a handful than me.

We eat muffins and watch a scary movie on cable. Phyllis gasps every time a fake zombie jumps out, and I have to explain how you can tell they're fake, not just because I don't think zombies really exist, but also because you can see the makeup lines.

“That's not true!” Mikey says. He's got melted chocolate chips smeared all over his face, and strawberries down the front of his shirt. “Real zombies have makeup lines just to fool you into thinking they're fake zombies! Then when you lean in to ask, ‘Is this CoverGirl or Maybelline?'—that's the two kinds of makeup Shirley uses to chase
her
zombie face away—that's when they pounce and rip your face off and . . . and bake it into muffins!”

“Don't tell her that; now she'll never eat one!” Phyllis
swats him lightly. “And don't talk about your stepmom that way!” Then she asks me, “Why don't you try a bite? It won't bite you back!” She's eaten half a muffin already. Mikey's on his third. I've been picking the walnuts out of mine, because I changed my mind about them.

“The walnuts look a little grosser than I thought they would,” I explain. “I can sort of picture these being zombie muffins. The walnuts could be . . . gnarled finger bones.”

Mikey nods seriously. “That's true. My mom said you never know where something scary will turn up. That's why you have to keep your eye out. Even with muffins.”

“Bite,” Phyllis repeats. She has this look on her face that lets us know she's listening to Mikey, even though she doesn't answer.

I try a bite. The muffins are warm from the oven, and the chocolate chips are melty. It's a little like biting into . . . I can't think of any way to say it, because I've never bit into anything that tasted this good.

“So what's the verdict?” Phyllis asks.

“The most delicious gnarled finger bones I've ever tasted,” I admit.

•   •   •

By the time the zombies and their gnarled fingers have gone off the TV, I've eaten four muffins and I'm almost asleep. I've leaned so far sideways on Phyllis's couch that Stella is using my stomach as a bed. She purrs on and
off between catnaps. I don't really care for cats, but the warmth is nice.

Mikey is passed out on the rug with an arm looped over Chip, like he's a teddy bear. We let the animals in a while ago because the road outside will be clogged with cars again once the prayer vigil is over. It's not a funeral. Those will be later, and private. It's just a gathering, a chance for people to be together and to say good-bye. I've been to them before. They're better than funerals—there are still flowers, but no shiny boxes—but still, I'm grateful to be here instead.

Phyllis gets up and takes our leftover muffins to the kitchen. I hear her moving around in there, creaking the linoleum and closing the refrigerator. She comes back with her last cup of coffee and sits. I think she thinks I'm asleep, because she doesn't speak. She pats my knee.

She changes the channel to the news, which she always has to watch before bed in case anybody she knows is on it. Phyllis is a worrier. I figure it's all the coffee.

I let my eyes close. The TV newsman is talking about a car accident in Rathbone. Then there's a drug bust in Jane. Then he says
Caboose
. I open my eyes again.

There it is, on TV. The vigil. The flowers. The newsman's voice is sugar-sweet sad. He talks about the two miners from Caboose. He says the other one lived over in Bent Tree. He was only nineteen. He was a Red Hat in training. He was only six years older than me.

The newsman talks about the lives of the miners, and that's what he calls them the whole time:
miners
. As though that were the main thing about them.

Five years ago, I stood at Ben's service. I remember them calling Ben a miner. I remember them saying it over and over:
God bless these lost miners. Jesus is waiting to welcome them to Heaven.
I remember thinking how Ben was a dad and a husband and a cardplayer and he liked to eat pizza toppings but not the crust and he liked to watch the second ten minutes of the news but not the first, because he didn't want us kids to see the worst parts. I remember wondering why they had to pick that one thing, the mining, to talk about at his funeral. Sure, he ran a machine that dug coal out of the ground. He climbed deep into tunnels with low ceilings, and he made more money for his company than anybody, some days. But then he came home. He called me his “Sasha Love” and said I was his bright spot. He looked tired all the time. He read two books before bed, one to me and one to himself. He was made out of other stuff besides the coal mine.