Sweet Tea: A Novel (5 page)

“I
want big hair, big as Dolly Parton, but a cooler version.” I told Jonzie’s aunt, who owned a hairdressing shop she operated out of her garage. “I’m going to a concert and I need to look drop-dead gorgeous.”

“You need a wig to get hair as big as Dolly’s, Honey,” her aunt replied. “Besides, you’re much too tiny for hair like that. It’ll knock you off balance. How ’bout something in between and more . . . contemporary?”

“But Dolly’s small,” I argued, and people everywhere still loved her.

She placed her hands on her hips. “Dolly’s a famous country singer, and even though you’ve got a pretty good package for someone your size, Dolly has a whole post office.”

“O . . . kay, but make it wild,” I said, and sat back in the chair and let her do her thing.

When she finished, I had big hair. I had big, hard, shiny hair. I had big, hard, shiny,
ugly
hair. I couldn’t complain; I’d gotten exactly what I’d asked for. Thank goodness Jonzie’s aunt didn’t charge me. I would have died if I paid for a hairdo like that. I must have grabbed a bunch of antique magazines when I came up with the crazy idea to ask for big hair. And everyone on Main Street in Landon must have thought so too.

Cars beeped their horns at me while I walked back home. Old ladies whispered. Little kids pointed and laughed. I pulled my sunglasses from my purse and slapped them on so no one could see the tears in my eyes. I wanted so badly for everything to be perfect for Matt. No worries, no burdens, no Mama. I just wanted to be sixteen and have fun.

Wide-eyed, CeCe took one look at the sight of me and said, “What the heck happened to you?”

“I got big hair.”

She wrapped her hands around her stomach, bent over, and started cracking up.

If the upcoming night wasn’t so important to me, I would have probably been laughing along with CeCe. Instead, I wanted to cry. But I didn’t need puffy eyes to go along with my puffy head, which resembled a dirty beige lampshade de-threading at the edges.

After CeCe finished her laugh-fest, she said, “Wash it out. I just saw one of those makeover shows. I’ll redo it for you.”

CeCe transformed me from a garage sale bargain to a hot babe. Like Jonzie’s aunt said, big hair wasn’t meant for my head.

Matt was picking me up at 6:30, which gave me just enough time to run back to the bathtub and shave my legs. I still hadn’t decided whether to go forth with his plan, but I wanted to be ready just in case.

“Have fun,” CeCe said, and took off in her car mysteriously like usual.

At 6:45, Matt pulled up in his black mustang and honked the horn. Like always, Miss Ruth scoped the neighborhood from her patio. If I hadn’t seen her wrinkly claw pop up every so often holding the new hand mirror she used to view the sights behind her, I might have thought she was dead.

I opened the back door and held my finger up to Matt. “Just one more minute!”

His dimples sunk into his cheeks as he shot me a smile.

I checked the mirror one last time. My black jeans looked great with CeCe’s hot pink blouse. She would have killed me if she caught me wearing it. But she got new clothes all the time since she had a job. I was sick of the same old outfits.
If I lose five pounds, I’ll be able to borrow her pants too
, I thought while I turned and glanced at my bubble-butt. Then I grabbed a bottle of her perfume and sprayed my neck.

“Bye, Mama. I’ll be home later,” I said.

She was staring at the TV so hard, she didn’t notice me. With Luke and CeCe gone, I felt nervous about leaving her alone. The television had become her best friend. She talked to it more than she ever had before. It seemed like the TV characters had a direct line to her brain. They were her family and we were the commercials.

I left the house and got into Matt’s car. He leaned over and kissed me. His sweet smell filled the air. I breathed him in and put Mama out of my mind.

“Hey, Babe,” he said. His black velvet eyes lusted after me; his tongue grazed his bottom lip. I realized the pockets on CeCe’s pink blouse brought attention to my chest. Not my intention. My gut told me it would
not
be easy to say
no
to Matt Santoro.

* * *

Scantily dressed girls and rock ‘n roll wannabies wrapped around the building leading up to the entrance of the concert hall. From time to time I caught Matt’s eyes scanning the flow of females. I tried to hide my insecurity. Stares from girls wearing scads of makeup and cool clothes made me wonder if they were checking out Matt or me. Maybe they were wondering what someone like him was doing with someone like me. Even with the hair makeover, I didn’t feel I could compete with them.

Matt had hidden a bottle of vodka mixed with lemonade inside his leather jacket. I’d never drank more than two beers before and this would be a first, but since the girls at Jonzie’s sleepover who’d done
it
said they were drunk at the time, I figured that’s what I would be.

Once we got inside, Matt offered me some of his concoction. I wasn’t fond of the taste, but I enjoyed the warm, tingly sensation that enveloped me a short while later. My blood ran hot through every one of my veins. Right then I understood why sex took place so often when a person drank liquor. I suddenly wanted Matt’s hands all over me.

The warm-up band played, and people shouted for the main act. The guys in the crowd shook their fists in the air to the drummer’s beat, and the girls shook their butts. The lead singer of the main act strutted on stage doing both. The crowd roared. After many sips from Matt’s bottle, I danced too in the smoke-filled, sweat-smelling arena.

After the concert, we arrived at Matt’s front door and tripped up the steps. I gazed around and realized Matt’s house was bigger than ten trailers put together. Most boys from this part of town stopped asking me out after I moved to Woodlane, but Matt was different. Coming from the great melting pot of New York City, he grew up among people from all backgrounds. He didn’t care where I lived.

He fiddled with the house key while I stroked his curly hair. I giggled, but noticed his breathing was a lot heavier than before. He opened the door and we fell inside, landing on the couch, Matt on top of me. His warm and wet tongue darted back and forth inside my mouth.

We kissed for a while, then his hands began roaming . . . stopping . . . roaming, and then hurried. I felt hot, dizzy, hesitant. I sat up. Matt began kissing my neck and unbuttoning my blouse. I think I wanted to stop him but my hands wouldn’t move. I thought about what Jonzie said.
“The first time is not fun, but it’s got to be done.”

Then Bessa’s words flew into my mind.
“No! No! No!”

After Matt removed my blouse, he pulled his t-shirt off and began kissing me again. Our skin melted together. I held him tight and kissed him until the room began to spin. I couldn’t speak. He stood up and dropped his pants to the floor. The room spun faster, and the contents of my stomach projected onto the carpet and all over his pants. I don’t know whether it was the liquor or the sight of Matt standing naked in front of me, but I did know I wanted to die.

A
fter apologizing to Matt and helping him clean up the mess, he drove me home. Half disappointed we hadn’t done it, and half relieved, I said goodbye without giving him a goodnight kiss for fear he’d smell my sickly breath. I tiptoed up the steps to the back door of the trailer so Mama wouldn’t hear me. Not that it would’ve really mattered, unless she felt like talking, then I’d be trapped. Trapped again. I opened the door slowly, crept into the darkness . . . and tripped over CeCe, who was asleep on the floor.

“What the heck are you doing?” I asked.

“Mama’s taken off twice around the neighborhood in her nightgown. Luke is sleeping on the floor by the
front
door. We’ve got to keep her inside. She’ll end up on the highway. It’s like she’s sleepwalking or something.” CeCe pulled the blanket up to her chin. “You stink. Were you drinking?”

“Yeah,” I said and covered my mouth, feeling another wave of nausea.

“Go brush your teeth,” she whispered. “And take my blouse off this instant and go to sleep. You might have floor duty tomorrow night.”

It was too much to take. First Matt, now Mama. I wanted to wake up tomorrow and find it had all been a dream. I hated the trailer, I hated what Mama had become, and I hated feeling so alone. While I lay in bed picking off my mascara, a million thoughts ran through my head. The television show about mental illness was one of them. Now that we had Mama’s car back, and the concert was over, we had to get her to the doctor in Atlanta.

The next morning my head throbbed even harder and my mouth was incredibly dry. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and downed a glass of water. Thinking maybe a few crackers would make me feel better, I made my way to the kitchen and found CeCe still asleep in front of the back door. But Luke had left his position and I didn’t see him anywhere. 

Mama neither.

“CeCe! She’s gone,” I shouted. “Mama’s gone! Luke’s gone too!”

She jumped up, bleary-eyed and confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Luke isn’t by the front door, or anywhere in the house. I don’t know if they’re together or if Luke just left the house and Mama took off.”

CeCe opened the front door to see if Mama’s car was there; it was. This frightened me even more.

“Get dressed,” she said.

While CeCe quickly put on her shoes, I pulled on a pair of jeans and slipped on my sneakers and we bolted out the front door. We scoured the trailer park by foot. We realized she could be in someone’s house, trailing the highway, or even worse.

Just as we were about to jump in CeCe’s car, Luke showed up on his bicycle.

“Where’ve you been?” CeCe barked.

He flicked his kickstand down and stood for a moment, then ran his fingers through his scraggly shoulder length hair. “I was starving, so I went to get a doughnut.” He held out a bag. “I got some for you too.”

My stomach clenched. “Mama’s gone!”

“Sorry,” he said, voice crackling. “She was sleeping when I left. I tried to hurry.”

He began blinking his eyes uncontrollably, refusing to cry. CeCe’s eyes darted back and forth, the way they did when she was thinking hard. I felt too hung-over to think at all.

“Come on,” she said after a moment. “We’ve gotta find her.”

We drove up and down the highway. I searched the left side of the road and Luke scanned the right.

“There’s no way she would’ve made it this far,” CeCe said after a while. “Let’s go back.”

My stomach rumbled, and I thought I would be sick again. Not so much because of the hangover, but because of my fear. Guilt began attacking me as well. If I had not gone to the concert, we might have been able to get Mama to the doctor sooner and she would not have disappeared. 

“I’m gonna call Grandma,” CeCe said. “It probably won’t make a difference, but I don’t know what else to do. We can’t call the police. They wouldn’t understand. She hasn’t been gone long enough for them to consider her missing.”

She grabbed the phone, dialed Grandma, and handed me the receiver. “Here, you talk to her. She likes you better.”

“Why do you think she likes me better?”

CeCe shrugged. “Just talk to her.”

Grandma picked up on the first ring.

“Hi, Grandma. It’s, uh . . . Olivia. . . . No, things aren’t too good. Mama hasn’t been acting right lately, and now we can’t find her. We don’t know what to do. We’ve checked everywhere! No, Grandma, I think it’s more serious. Okay, I will. Bye.”

“What the heck did she say?” CeCe asked.

I slammed the phone down. She said, “Oh, don’t worry, child. Your mama loves to take long walks. I remember one time she was gone an entire night. We got a little worried, but she came home and told us she fell asleep beneath a beautiful weeping willow tree.”

A weeping willow tree—no wonder Daddy never liked Grandma.

I kicked the kitchen chair and shouted, “Grandma said she was on her way to the Senior Center and we should call back when Mama comes home. Yeah, if she does come home.”

I closed my eyes and massaged my temples. “She doesn’t care. She doesn’t get it,” I said, and my head throbbed even harder.

CeCe finally let her tears fall, and that scared me almost worse than Mama being gone. My sister didn’t cry often. If she had no idea what we should do, who would? Luke just sat zoned out on the TV. I sat down in Mama’s chair and rocked back and forth; and we waited.

* * *

The one thing you can count on in Georgia, winter or summer, is a thunderstorm when that’s the last thing you want. By 2:00 p.m., the sky darkened and it began to rain. Thinking of Mama lost out in the rain caused my heart to ache even more. I stepped onto the patio, and felt the temperature had dropped. A lot. I didn’t know if she even had her sweater. 

Finally, CeCe called the police.

I couldn’t tell what the officer was saying to her, but the lump in my throat grew each second she stayed on the phone. When she hung up, she said, “The police told me they’d received a call earlier about a woman wandering down the highway.”

“Mama?” Luke blurted, keeping his eyes on the TV.

“I don’t know. But they said the caller told them the woman seemed . . . disoriented. When they checked, she had vanished. They said they’d keep an eye out for her and call us if they find her.”

She turned to Luke and said, “Stay here, just in case Mama comes back. We’re gonna take another look around.”

He nodded without turning his head to her.

When we got back, Luke had fallen asleep on the couch. CeCe threw a blanket over him then lay down on the other couch. I found some pillows and a blanket and put them on the floor. We all slept in the too-small living room that night. That’s where Mama spent most of her time. When she came back, this is where she would come first.
If
she came back. Even so, sleeping there made me, and probably all three of us, feel closer to her, and closer to each other.

* * *

That was Sunday. Monday arrived and Luke and I didn’t go to school, and CeCe didn’t go to work or school.

“I better call Mama’s boss,” CeCe said.

“What are you gonna say to him?” I asked, wondering if she’d tell him the truth.

“I’ll say she’s got the flu and that she’ll be out for a few days . . . just in case she needs some extra time to rest after we find her.” She grabbed the telephone and punched in Mama’s work number. After she finished, she looked at Luke and me. “Maybe I should call your school, too Luke.” She picked the phone back up.

I glanced out the window every so often, willing Mama to come walking down the street. She didn’t.

While CeCe dialed Luke’s school she said, “I’m not gonna call yours, Olivia. The school nurse will probably think I’m you, and that’ll only cause problems. But you had better make sure you make up the work you miss. I don’t want you falling behind.”

As soon as she hung up with Luke’s school, CeCe called her boss and said she’d be out for a few days as well.

CeCe and I barely ate anything. Wracking our brains trying to figure out where Mama could be, made it difficult to have an appetite, anyway. Luke, who could probably eat while in a coma, didn’t have much food to choose from. Mama hadn’t gone shopping in a while, and most of the food was rotted. She had left her purse at home, which made us more nervous. She never left the house without it. CeCe opened it, checking for money. A twenty-dollar bill stuck out of her wallet, and a few dollars in change lay at the bottom of the purse.

CeCe pulled out the twenty and handed it to Luke. “Go get something to eat,” she said. “Don’t spend it all. We need to conserve.”

Luke shoved the money into his pocket and took off on his bike. Mama had been gone for two nights and two days. By now, I was picturing her lying in a creek at the bottom of the hill across the highway, a place we had checked, but she wasn’t there. Sometimes, I pictured her held hostage inside someone’s home, gagged and bound to a chair. Other times, I’d envision her lost in the woods, pinching leaves off trees and dropping them like breadcrumbs, leaving a trail for us to follow. Only she didn’t realize her leaves fell among thousands already on the forest floor.

Each time one of these scenarios ran through my head, anger squeezed my insides ‘til they hurt. Why couldn’t we have grandparents who would rush to our side to help their widowed daughter? Or an aunt who did more than send a Christmas check once a year? Why couldn’t just
one
member of our family live in Georgia? Why couldn’t just one member of our family care?

“It’s my fault.”

I looked over at CeCe, who was holding Mama’s purse like it was a baby. “What are you talking about?” I said.

She hung her head and shook it back and forth. “While you were out getting your hair done yesterday, I told her I thought she should go to the doctor. She said, ‘What on the earth for?’ I told her why, and she practically breathed fire at me. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night.”

“That explains why she looked so out of it when I left after you did. But that’s not
your
fault. I’m the one who brought up the idea about her going to the doctor after watching that TV program.”

“Yeah, but I should have been more gentle with her.”

The front door swung open and Luke entered holding a bag filled with burgers and fries. We sat down at the kitchen table. I took a few bites, but it felt as if I were trying to eat live bugs. CeCe just pushed her food around the plate, picking apart the burger without much of it disappearing. Luke ate our leftovers.

We had to find Mama. We had to help her. I wanted it all to stop. No doubt, CeCe did too, but she must have decided to distract us for a while. Or maybe she needed to distract herself. After Luke finished eating, she sat down on the living room chair and swung her legs over the arm.

“Remember our first winter here?” she asked. “When Mama sold her new car and bought that old Chevy because we needed the money to heat the trailer, and we missed the bus and Mama had to drive us to school?”

How could I forget that day? The car door wouldn’t shut, so Mama handed us her scarf and told us to attach it to the door. We yanked on it every time the car turned a corner so no one would fall out.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that.” I smiled. “I remember Mama yelling, ‘Hold on tight, I don’t wanna lose none of ya!’”

We all had a good chuckle about that, then I said, “And oh, don’t forget the holes in the floor under the carpet mats.”

“Yeah, yeah, the holes,” CeCe said. “Mama always feared we’d drop Luke through one of ‘em.”

Luke wrinkled his nose and scrunched his eyebrows. “Y’all wouldn’t have thrown me out, would ya?”

CeCe and I laughed harder. “Heck, we tried to
keep
you from falling out. Every time we stopped for a red light, you tried your darnedest to escape.”

“That’s ’cause I wanted to be a stuntman.” Luke smiled, showing all his teeth.

The three of us laughed like we hadn’t a worry in the world. Life stood still, happily for a few moments, until the telephone rang. Still laughing, I grabbed it first.

“Hello?”

“This is the Henry County Police Department,” said the voice on the other end.