Prayers and Lies (12 page)

Finally, Mother climbed into the bed, kissed my forehead, and pulled the quilt snug under our chins. Then we both finally slept. It had been a long day.

9
News and Prattle

T
he next day, Reana Mae went back to school. I stood on the porch and waved at her and Ruthann and Harley Boy as the dirty yellow bus rumbled down the rutted road. Mother put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed gently.

“All right, then,” she said, cheerfully. “Are you ready to do some chores?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I sighed. I hadn’t counted on Reana Mae going to school while I was here. But of course she’d been out of school for nearly three weeks. It was time for her to go back.

I followed Mother into the cabin and helped her take down the blue curtains in the front room and kitchen. We were going to clean Jolene’s house from top to bottom, and I knew better than to argue about it. Mother was in spring-cleaning mode. It happened every April at home, and we all dreaded it. She got a kind of half-crazed gleam in her eyes when the south wind started blowing warm and the first daffodils poked up through the late snow. All of us scrubbed and scoured and dusted and waxed every surface in the house until the whole place sparkled clean and smelled of bleach. Today, Mother’s eyes had that gleam, and she’d come armed with buckets, scrub brushes, scouring powder, and a big mop she’d borrowed from Donna Jo. I knew it would be another long day.

Jolene was still asleep when we started working. By the time she staggered out of her room at ten, we had scrubbed down the whole kitchen, walls and all, and were starting on the front room.

“Hey, Jolene!” I called out when I saw her.

Mother looked up from the spot she was scrubbing on the wooden floor and smiled. “Good morning, Jolene. How are you feeling today?”

“What the hell are you doing?” Jolene scowled. She swayed slightly, then clutched the table to support herself. She looked as bad this morning as she had the night before—worse, maybe, because the morning sun streaming through the newly washed windows showed every line on her face, every sag in her neck. She looked like a rag doll that had been wrung out wet and hung to dry—like Essie after her ordeal in the mud, I realized with a start.

Mother rose from her knees and walked into the kitchen, reemerging with a mug of steaming, black coffee. “Why don’t you sit down, honey? Sit down, drink some coffee, and just relax.”

Jolene stood still, clutching the table, ignoring the mug Mother held out to her.

“I said, what the hell are you doing, Helen?”

“Why, we’re just cleaning up a bit. I thought it might cheer you up if the place was a little … brighter, that’s all.” Mother set the mug down on the table before Jolene and pulled out a chair. “Here, you just sit down and relax. Bethany and I will take care of it all. We’ll have this place bright and shiny in no time.”

Jolene stared at her in silence. I could see her jaw clench tightly, and I wondered if she was going to yell. I looked down at the floor and scrubbed furiously.

“I don’t need you to clean my house, Helen,” she said finally, in a sad, weary voice. “I don’t need you or no one else taking care of me and my family.”

“I know you don’t, Jolene. It’s just that, after all you’ve been through … well, I want so much to help, and this is the only way I know how.” Mother’s voice was soft, cajoling. She smiled at Jolene and gestured at the chair again. “Please, honey, sit down and relax. Bethany and I came all the way down here to be helpful. Let us do
something
for you.”

Jolene sighed and sank onto the chrome and red vinyl chair. She sipped at her coffee, pulled a pack of Marlboros from her robe pocket, lit one, dragged heavily, and finally sighed again. “Whatever,” she said flatly. “Lord knows them windows ain’t been that clean in a generation.”

Mother found an ashtray in the kitchen cabinet and placed it on the table. “When did you start smoking again? I thought you gave that up years ago.”

Jolene just shrugged her shoulders and dragged on her cigarette. Mother’s lips pressed together in a tight line. She walked briskly out the back door. I kept scrubbing the floor in silence, wondering where she’d gone, when I saw her at the kitchen window, tearing at the plastic that had been nailed over it. When she had the whole sheet down, she came back into the house, leaned across Jolene, and shoved the window open.

“If you’re going to smoke in the house with Bethany here—or Reana Mae, either—you ought to at least open a window.”

Jolene shrugged again. She stared out the window, ignoring my mother and me. She sat silently in her short pink robe, smoking her cigarette and drinking her coffee. I found myself staring at her again and again when I thought she wasn’t looking. I couldn’t believe how different she looked. She had been plumpish at Thanks-giving—prettily so—but she had gained a lot of weight during the pregnancy. Her stomach still bulged under the robe, her ankles looked thick, and her neck rolled slightly under her drooping chin. Was this the same Jolene I’d seen just last fall sporting a black leather miniskirt and white go-go boots? Slumped in the chair before me, she looked like a balloon that had been overstretched and then partly deflated.

She stubbed out her cigarette and stretched, yawning hugely. Looking down at me, she smiled tightly. “Well, I reckon you’re glad to be out of school in the middle of the week, anyway.”

I smiled back and nodded. I wasn’t sure what to say. Abruptly she rose and her robe fell open to show her distended belly and sagging breasts beneath her sheer nightgown. I dropped my head and pretended not to notice.

When I looked up again, Jolene was gone. She’d gone back to bed, and we didn’t see her again until lunch, when she staggered into the kitchen to tuck away two platefuls of scrambled eggs, hash browns, biscuits, and bacon. When she’d finished eating, Jolene sat back in her chair, lit another cigarette, and sighed.

“You know,” she said, “my whole damned life I been starvin’ myself, just so some man or another would look at me.” She plucked another strip of bacon from the plate.

“And what’s it got me?” she demanded, staring straight at Mother. “What in God’s own name has it got me? A goddamned shack in a goddamned hick valley with an ugly kid that don’t much like me and a husband who ain’t never at home.”

Mother and I sat quietly watching her while she chewed the bacon noisily. “A goddamned shack,” she repeated, wiping her fingers on her robe. “Well.” She smiled at Mother—it was not a pretty smile. “The hell with that!”

She took the last strip of bacon from the plate and held it up like a trophy.

“From now on, Jolene Darling Colvin is lookin’ out for herself first. Startin’ with food, goddamn it! From now on, if I want to eat bacon, I’ll goddamn well eat bacon—and plenty of it! And if some goddamned man don’t like the way I look, that’s just too goddamned bad for him!”

Mother’s lips formed a thin line as she looked at me and said quietly, “Bethany, will you please go to the store and pick up some dish soap? Ask Uncle Ray to put it on my account.”

I nodded and scampered for the front door, grabbing my jacket on the way out. I didn’t want to hang around and hear what Mother might have to say to Jolene just now.

I stopped in briefly at Aunt Belle’s, to ask Donna Jo if she needed anything from the store. She said no, she surely didn’t—but since I was such a thoughtful little thing, why didn’t I take a dime from the change jar and get myself a little treat? I smiled as I continued down the road. Some grown-ups, at least, were predictable.

“Bethany Marie!” Loreen hollered gladly when I entered the store. “You surely are a sight for these old, tired eyes. Ray told me you was in here with Reana Mae yesterday. God bless you and your precious mama for coming down here to help my little girl.”

With that she pulled me into a suffocating embrace. Squirming slightly, I pulled back as soon as she loosened her grip.

“Hi, Aunt Loreen.” I smiled at her.

I hadn’t counted on Loreen being here. Usually, Ray minded the store. But here she was, her short, squat body nearly bursting the seams of her cotton housedress, her nearsighted green eyes watering behind her eyeglasses.

“You sweet thing,” she said, still holding tight on to my hand. “You sweet, sweet thing. Ain’t you just the sweetest thing, coming down here with your mama to help. The good Lord will have a rich reward waiting for you both someday,” she gushed. “And don’t we all deserve a rich reward, with all the troubles of this world?”

She shook her head sadly as she continued. “How are you, Bethany? And how’s your dear mama? Ya’ll have a good trip? Roads okay? You stayin’ at Belle’s? She’s got plenty of room, of course. But ya’ll know you’re more than welcome to stay with me and Ray any time. Especially since you’re down here to help my little girl.

“The good Lord,” she continued, removing her glasses and wiping the back of her hand across her eyes, “He knows she surely does need some help right about now. God Hisself knows we have tried, me and Ray. We tried awful hard to raise her up right after her mama died. We done all we could for her. But she’s a wild one, Jolene is, and now she’s got herself in a whole mess of trouble. Lord knows how she’s gonna get herself out of this mess. But we’ll do everything we can, me and Ray, ’cause we love her just like we loved her mama.

“You remember EmmaJane? No, of course you don’t. My poor EmmaJane, she’s with Jesus up in Heaven. Wasn’t any older than Jolene is now when she died. Course, it was a accident, her dying. Or maybe even murder, I think sometimes. She was so pretty, my sweet EmmaJane. I think someone maybe just got so jealous of her beauty they killed her. But she died, rightly enough. And poor little Jolene, hardly older than you are now and left all alone up there in Huntington, without her mama or any daddy either. But me and Ray, we tried. We surely tried. We gave her a home and took as good a care of her as we knew how to. But now”—she sighed, shaking her head—“I don’t know what she’s gonna do now.”

She paused to take a breath, so I blurted out, “Mother wants some dish soap, and she says just put it on our account.”

Loreen waddled to the back of the store. “Is she over there washing Jolene’s dishes? She shouldn’t be doing that! I told Jolene over and over again, she’s got to keep her house up better. If she spent as much time makin’ a comfortable home as she did makin’ up her face, maybe Bobby Lee would want to be at home. The good Lord knows, we all of us start out pretty, just like Miss Jolene. But sooner or later, time catches up with us all.

“That’s what I always say. Time catches up. Then it’s the home, not the woman that brings ’em back. That’s what I kept tellin’ Jo-lene, but she wouldn’t listen to me. She thinks she’s different than everyone else … that the Lord’s gonna keep her beautiful till the day she lays herself down and dies. Well, I got news for her. We all start out beautiful, but it don’t last. That girl’s gotta start makin’ a good home for her husband. That’s what’ll bring Bobby Lee home. That’s what he wants. It’s what they all want in the end.

“Oh, they might take up with some fancy girl on the road now and then, but it’s a home they mostly want. Someplace nice and clean to come home to, someplace they can be king of the castle. Course, she tried to give him a son, I’ll say that for her. She tried. But I’m sore afraid her childbearing years are done with now. Lord knows, she took this pregnancy hard. She better not try again. She better just start trying to make a nice home for Bobby Lee. That’ll keep him home.”

During this last barrage, Loreen had located a bottle of Palm-olive and put it into a small sack.

“Mother says put it on our account,” I repeated as soon as she paused again for breath.

“Oh, Lord, no, honey! This here is on me and Ray. Does your mama think we’re gonna charge her cash money to clean our granddaughter’s kitchen? That ain’t the kind of folks we are. We’d be over there ourselves helpin’ out, if only Jolene would let us.

“I told Ray to keep his big trap shut. It wasn’t none of his business talking to Bobby Lee about his own wife. What goes on between married folks is their own business, not no one else’s. I told Ray, but he wouldn’t listen to me. Had to go flappin’ his jaw to Bobby Lee. Got him all riled up. Not but what he said ain’t true. Ray don’t tell lies. But he shouldn’t ought to have told Bobby Lee, that’s all.

“Do you want a little piece of candy, sugar? You pick yourself out a little treat. No, darlin’! Don’t you try to pay me for that. You just tuck that dime right back into your pocket. You think I’d charge you for a Snickers bar? After you come all the way down here to help my girls? No sirree, it’s on me and Ray. You take that on home and you enjoy it, darlin’. And you give your mama a kiss from me, you hear? You tell her poor old Loreen blesses her every night in prayer. She’s a saint, your mama, you hear?”

I could hear Loreen still calling after me as I escaped with my dish soap and candy bar out the screen door. I was down the steps, congratulating myself on a clean getaway, when she burst through the door behind me.

“Oh, sweet Lord, I nearly forgot!” she called. “You tell your mama and Jolene, too, that Bobby Lee is on his way home!”

I stopped dead and swung around, staring at her. “What?”

“He called last night on the telephone here at the store. Ray talked to him. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him. I told Ray to give me the phone, but he wouldn’t. Said it was a long-distance call and I didn’t need to waste poor Bobby Lee’s money. As if I would! I know how to keep a conversation short. I told Ray …”

“Aunt Loreen,” I blurted out. “When is he coming home?”

“What? Oh, he’ll be back tomorrow morning. He’s found Caleb! Found him at the YMCA in Cincinnati, Ohio. Can you believe it? That boy got hisself all the way up to Cincinnati, Ohio. That takes some gumption, don’t you think? I never would have reckoned on it myself. But he’s got hisself some smarts in that thick head of his, after all. And Bobby Lee, now, how he tracked that boy down, I’ll never reckon on. Ray said he asked lots of people at the bus station in St. Albans, and one of them ticket agents looked at Caleb’s picture and said he remembered him buyin’ a ticket to Cincinnati. So Bobby Lee, he rode up to Cincinnati and he went right down to the YMCA, ’cause he remembered that’s where his daddy stayed the first time he left Cleda Rae—Lord, that was all the way back in 1963, the first time Noah left. Course, he didn’t stay gone that time. He came on home again after a while, with his tail tucked, outta money. And Cleda Rae took him back, too. I don’t know why she took him back. I said to Ray …”