Mama B - A Time to Mend (Book 4) (7 page)

“What about the stuff in this
hall closet, B?” Libby asked, holding a heap of neatly-folded towels. Some of
them was threadbare, but I could remember wrapping my grandkids up in them and
drying them off after baths. “Naw, I think I’ll keep those.”

“Where will you put ‘em?
Frank’s house got room?”

The answer to that question
was most definitely ‘no.’ I took a deep breath and looked around my house. “You
know what, Libby, I think I’m going to need a storage unit.”

“B, that’s silly. This stuff
will sit in there for the next fifteen years doin’ nothin’ for nobody.”

“What if I need some more
towels one day?” I fussed. “I don’t want to have to spend more money on ‘em.”

“So you gon’ spend money on
storage to save money on towels? Really, B, we got too many people comin’ to
the food pantry in need of basics like towels. Remember those refugees we met
last week?”

Boy, did I ever. Look like
they ran straight off the battlefield, leapt into a plane and came straight to
America. They was tired. Hungry. They didn’t need towels only to dry off after
a bath. They needed towels to give a smidgen of cushion for sleepin’ on the
floor.

“You right, Libby. Somebody
needs these things way more than I do.” I slumped my shoulders. “But it sure
hurts to give it away. So many memories, all these decades with the kids and
Albert and the grands. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday parties.”

Libby come down and sat on
the couch with me. She put her arm on my shoulder and rested her cheek on my
shoulder. “It’s gonna be alright, B. I’ll be in the same boat in a few months.”

I shrugged her off, made her
look me in the eye. “What’s going on?”

“Me and Peter are moving to a
senior retirement village.”

I was tryin’ my best to put
on a smile for Libby so she wouldn’t feel as bad as her droopy face showed, but
it wasn’t no use. She was right. We was both in the same boat, saying good-bye
to our homes, our things…a lifetime of memories. I put my arm around her this
time, and we sat there sniffin’ and talkin’. “Libby, everything’s changin’,
ain’t it?”

“It sure is. I’m grateful to
be my age and all,” she cried, “but I thought once we got into these golden
years, everything would settle down and be…boring!”

We both managed a laugh.

“I mean, look at you. You got
married, moved away, now you got somebody moving into your house. Me and Peter are
moving, downsizing to a one bedroom apartment. Nobody warned me getting old would
make me feel like I was starting all over again.”

We sat there slobberin’ for a
minute. A private pity party, until I reminded us both, “Well, at least we
ain’t got money problems.”

“Or health problems,” Libby
added. “I mean, Peter’s got a memory problem, but it ain’t life-threatening.
All our kids and grandkids are fine.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “We got
food, clothes, and shelter.”

Libby wiped her eyes. “So
what are we complaining about?”

“I don’t know,” I laughed at
us. “I bet them refugees would sacrifice an arm and a leg to be sittin’ pretty
like us. We ain’t got nothin’ to shake our fist at God about.”

“Amen, B!”

“Libby, I’m gon’ take those
towels down to the shelter and give ‘em away. Everything I got came from the
Lord. If I need some more towels down the line, He’ll give me some more. He got
more where that came from.”

So Libby turned the music on
her cell phone to
Great Is Thy Faithfulness
. Chile, we barely got
through sorting through the stuff in that house for praising God! We made a
stack for throwin’ away, a stack for giving away, a stack for my keeping, and
stack for stuff my children might want to keep.

We dropped off the donations
to the shelter, dumped the trash in a bin, and took the rest by mine and
Frank’s house.

“When do you want to start on
your house, Libby?”

“As soon as possible. I can
move on now, I think. I’m ready.”

Chapter 9

All my butterin’ up Julia had
paid off. Probably helped that I had started sending Jeffrey home with a plate
of breakfast for her, too.

She invited me in one day
about a week after I started praying for her. We sat at a corner of her kitchen
table—and I
do
mean only a corner of clear space was
available—and chatted for a bit over cookies. I brought the cookies, of
course, because I didn’t trust nothin’ comin’ out of her kitchen. Thank the
Lord she had some little individual bottled milks because I don’t know if I
would have drank it otherwise.

I suppose if you gon’ be
nasty, it’s best to eat and drink from throw-away containers.
Lord knows, I was trying my
best to not get so caught up with all the clutter. One good thing I saw was her
kitchen sink. She only had a few unwashed items in there. And there wasn’t no
stinky smell to the house, overall. Look to me like it was all paper and clothes
and boxes and pens and old computer printers—stuff she just never put
away.

“Julia, honey, I don’t mean
to pry. But I got a question to ask you,” I approached one of my points with
her carefully.

“Don’t ask, Miss B.”

She still hadn’t took to
calling me Mama B no matter how many times I told her she could.

“I already know what’s on
your mind. You want to know why this place is such a mess, right?”

“Not really,” I said. “The
why
ain’t all that important to me. My question is, do you mind if I help you get
some organization around here? Me and some of the ladies at my church, we done
cleaned up plenty houses. Sometimes, when a church member pass away…well, let’s
just say they didn't know they was gon’ be dyin’ that day. Somebody got to go
in and clean up so when peoples drop by, they can feel comfortable ‘cause most
the time, the family be too busy grievin’ and plannin’ the funeral to really
get in there and clean up.”

I scanned her kitchen again.
“Now, your house is a special case, I won’t lie to you.”

She raised an eyebrow and
nodded in agreement. “And I can’t promise you no miracle. But we can get rid of
a lot of stuff and at least make the pathway wider. Safer for you with these
crutches.”

She exhaled loudly. “This
place is so…ridiculous! I mean…” she couldn’t even finish her thought for
looking around and shaking her head. “I can’t believe we live like this. Like
freakin’
pigs
!”

“Watch out there now, Julia.”
She was too close to cussin’ for my comfort.

“I’m sorry. It’s just…I can’t
understand how this is my life.”

That makes two of us.
“Will you let us try to help
you get a handle on things?” Of course, my whole goal was to eventually
introduce her to Jesus. But this was like Jesus and all those people He healed.
First, we got to deal with her immediate issue, then we can get to the “go and
sin no more” part. And to tell the whole truth, I’d have a hard time seein’
Jesus in there myself for all the chaos.

She shut her eyes real tight,
like a little kid about to take a bite of somethin’ he don’t want to eat. “Okay.
If they’re willing to help, I can stomach the embarrassment.”

One down. The women at my
church to go.

The Mother’s Board meeting
came to order with four from our group present, plus two younger ones from the
Titus 2 women’s fellowship who could make it to the church during workday
hours.

Ophelia was in charge of
treasury for the Mothers Board. She real good at raisin’ money for our efforts
and keeping a report. She and I always got there early to pray and set the room
in order. The fellowship hall consisted of several tables with folding chairs,
which could be covered in real nice cloth sleeves for special occasions. Our
meetings only took up one table, though.

Henrietta was supposedly our
Vice President. Mother Ruby was the honorary Vice President ‘cause be she
fallin’ asleep right in the meeting, bless her heart. This left me the
President, in charge of basically everything else, which was fine with me. I
conducted the meetings and put all our service opportunities on the table.

My other reason for inviting the
Titus 2 team was because I knew Julia’s house was gon’ take as many hands on
deck as possible.

Once the business part of the
meeting was over with the reading of the minutes, Mother Ruby woke back up
again. Ophelia gave me the floor.

“Ladies, I have a pretty big
project I’d like for you all to consider.” I had to start out with the
sympathy. “One of my neighbors was in a car accident, broke her right leg. Her
name is Julia. She and her husband have a special needs child, Jeffrey. Anyhow,
I had occasion to visit Julia at her home and…all I can say it, she don’t have
no kind of organizational skills whatsoever. And bein’ on crutches and all, she
could really use some help cleaning.”

Ophelia said. “I can’t do no
bendin’ and scrubbin’ like I used to, but I’ll help any way I can.” See,
Ophelia used to clean houses back in her day, so I knew she would feel like
this was something we could handle.

“Well,” I turned to the
younger ladies, LaTonya and Myesha, at the table, “that’s why I’ve asked the younger
ones to help us out. Make it a community service project.”

“What color is she?”
Henrietta blurted out.

“What color is
who
?”

“Your neighbor. Is she
white?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“I ain’t goin’,” Henrietta
huffed, crossing her arms.

“What difference does it make
what color someone is? When somebody need help, they need help,” Mother Ruby
said.

Henrietta insisted, “My Momma
used to clean for white folk. Said they was the nastiest people on earth. How
nasty
is
her house?”

Though I knew Henrietta’s
point about the race had nothing to do with the issue, suddenly their eyes were
cast on me like they believed what just came out of Henrietta’s mouth.

Call me naïve, but I really
hadn’t thought anything about color in this whole thing. Now, Henrietta had
done took it there and all I could do was tell the truth. “The house is pretty
bad.”

“
How
bad?” LaTonya
wanted to know.

I sighed. “Bad enough to
where it’s gonna take all of us a whole day to make the walkway more clear.
That may be all we get to do, but it’ll be better than nothing.”

“Worse than Brother Wallace’s
house when his wife died?”

Henrietta’s memory returned
at some of the worst times. Brother Wallace was nearly a hundred years old,
blind as a bat, and his wife had been bedridden for almost six months before
she passed away. He had good excuse for his house to be filthy.

“Well, is it worse?” Ophelia
wanted to know.

“Yes.”

Ophelia gasped, “My Lord.”

“We don’t have to clean up
everything,” I reminded them. “Just what we can in the time we’re there.”

Ophelia smacked her lips. “It
ain’t gonna be much if it’s worse than Brother Wallace.”

“Do we need to bring masks
and gloves?” LaTonya asked.

I shrugged. “Might be a good
idea.”

“I ain’t goin’,” Mother Ruby
said.

We wasn’t plannin’ on her
goin no way, so I just acknowledged with a tilt of my head.

Myesha said, “I guess we’re
in.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll go,” Ophelia
volunteered.

All eyes was on Henrietta
now.

“If y’all go, I’ll go. But I
want it on the record that we is
not
in the business of cleanin’ white
folk houses.”

“Duly noted,” I assured her.

Suddenly, everybody’s eyes
looked past me toward the room entrance. I turned just as I heard,
“Yoooo-hooooo!”

Lawd, say it ain’t so.

But it was so. There was my
sister-in-law, Ida Mae Jackson, intruding on my Mother’s Board meeting with Son
at her side.

She wasn’t really walking.
More like a rocking from side to side like a heavy-built lady, though she
probably wasn’t much bigger than me. Her gray hair was pulled back into a black
bun she tacked on for some reason. I suppose that’s one thing me and her had in
common.

Ophelia whispered, “We got a
visitor?”

My gut clamped up tight at
the sight of my new tenant. I answered under my breath, “Albert’s sister. She
movin’ into my house.”

I don’t think Henrietta meant
to say this out loud, but it slipped out of her mouth anyway, “This the last
thing we need. Another uppity Jackson.”

For once, I agreed with her.

Ida Mae wore a white, velour
pantsuit, quite fashionable. She had always been one to dress in stylish
clothes, which I believe in, too, so long as you got the money. As she
approached the meeting table, she made eye contact with everyone except me.
“Hello, ladies! Helllooooo!”