Tending to Grace (8 page)

65

Hide? I'm not hiding. I'm waiting for my mother to come back and take me away. I sink my arms deeply into a basket of wet clothes. I grab towel after towel, shirt after shirt, hanging my madness out with wooden clothespins.

“When you goin' to talk about it?” Agatha has walked up behind me. I stiffen but don't turn. Two clothespins jam into my mouth, and I reach down for a pair of my socks.

“You don't talk about your mother, your stutterin', you keep all that inside you, you're goin' to rot like an apple.”

I pick up a pair of my socks and add those to the line as she walks away.

She wants me to talk? How? I stuff my feelings and they layer themselves like a parfait dessert in the innermost part of my being.

Inside, where nobody can see, I am glorious with the colors of the girl I wish I could be.

66

One day a postcard comes with a mother walking hand in hand with a child, and I know, even without flipping the card, that there's been a shift in the barren landscape between my mother and me.

67

Something itches at me. It's itched for weeks now, ever since Bo started coming around for reading lessons.

I stand at the counter peeling potatoes and Bo practices her
u
sounds. “ ‘Muck, luck, truck, stuck,' ” she reads, her index finger a magnet that pulls her through each word.

But it's not Bo that's making me itch; it's Agatha. She waits at the table every afternoon for Bo. She looks up from whatever bean she's snapping or tomato she's chopping and watches Bo read.

“Corney, I don't know this word,” Bo says, looking up from her book. I put my knife down, ready to walk over to her, then pick it up again. The itch runs deep. “Ask Agatha,” I say, looking over at my aunt. “I got to get this done.”

Agatha looks down to the dried beans she's picking through, hunting for bits of pebble and dirt.

“I'd need glasses for words that small,” Agatha says quickly.

68

I know it's him as soon as the car turns up the driveway. We don't move as he crunches along the gravel to the back door. Even Agatha sits without breathing.

He looks in at us through the screen, his eyes traveling from Agatha to me and then stopping on Bo. “What are you doing here?”

“Pa!” Bo covers the reading book with her hands. Her father unlatches the door without anyone asking him in. Agatha stands. “Pete,” she says. I grab hold of Bo's hand.

He ignores us and glares at Bo. “No one said you could come here.”

“St-st-stop yelling.”

He turns slowly and stares at me.

“This is my niece, Pete,” says Agatha. “Now you be calmin' down.”

“Calm down? What are you talking about? No one said she could come here. What's going on, anyway?”

His eyes jump from the reading book to Bo's paper and pen to Agatha's beans.

“She's l-l-learning to read,” I blurt out, grabbing Bo even tighter.

That fact catches his attention. “Reading? She reads just fine.”

When I don't say anything more, he turns to Agatha.

“What is this, you think we need some kind of charity? We don't need it, that's for damn sure.” He turns to Bo. “Get out to the car.
Now.
”

I take a deep breath. “She can't r-r-r-read hardly at all. She c-c-c-c-could never go to college reading like that.”

He laughs, sneers. “College? You think I got money to send a
girl
to college?” He grabs Bo's arm and marches her out of my grasp and out the door.

I look at my empty hand, unbelieving. I look up at Agatha, but she is sitting back down at the table, slumping into her arms. I take a deep breath.
What now? What now? What now?
I breathe again and run outside as he crunches toward the driveway. “J-j-just wait,” I scream. “She'll go to college. J-just wait.”

69

“You could hide a book in these potatoes,” Agatha says a few nights later, walking up from the cellar.

“How are we g-g-g-going to do that?” I use a towel to wipe whole wheat dough from my hands and walk over to the table.

“Like this.” Agatha pulls a dozen potatoes off the top of a bushel basket and lays them on the table. “Put a couple of books in here like this and we'll pile these potatoes back on top.” She looks up at me.

“Do you think it could work?”

“Best I can think, it will. Now go get some books.”

I pull two books off the counter and hand them to Agatha. “He'll shoot us if he finds out.”

“He won't find out. We'll go when he's at work.”

When the basket is filled, I carry it out to the back of the truck. “I forgot
Leo the Late Bloomer,
” I yell to Agatha over my shoulder. “It's her f-f-f-favorite. Can you get it?”

“You get it.”

I heave the basket on the truck. “It's on the shelf in my r-r-room.”

She opens the door to the truck and climbs in. “Damn, I forgot the keys.”

“Get the book while you're in there,” I say, taking the top layer of potatoes off the basket so I can add another book.

When Agatha gets back, she carries
The Cat in the Hat.

I look at it, confused. “She's already read this one. I said
Leo the
Late Bloomer
.”

“I don't have time to fiddle around, Cornelia. I've got to get back before it gets too dark so I can get the rest of the cucumbers in from the garden. We've got to hurry.”

I put
The Cat in the Hat
in the basket and cover it with potatoes.

70

The dogs howl as soon as we start up the driveway. The father meets us on the porch.

“What do you want?” he yells to us as soon as Agatha turns off the truck.

“You said he w-w-w-wouldn't be home.”

Agatha shrugs and opens her door and climbs out. “Just had too many of these potatoes, Pete, and I was wonderin' if you could use some. We'll never use all these.”

He doesn't say anything; he's looking at the back of the truck. I can tell he's trying to decide.

“Plus,”Agatha hurries on, “I wanted to tell you I was sorry about your little girl. Had no business invitin' her over and all.”

I can't believe she's saying that. He grumbles to himself. He finally walks off the porch and around to the back of the truck and looks at the basket of potatoes.

“All right. We'll take them.” He unloads them from the truck. “Just you both stay away from my little girl, you hear?”

71

Everything clicks as we bounce along the road back to the house.

“You w-w-w-wouldn't have made that mistake about
Leo the
Late Bloomer
if you could read.”

“What you talkin' about?” Agatha looks over at me quickly. “I can read just fine.” Then she laughs.

“You don't need glasses; that's not the problem,” I continue, sorting out the last few loose threads. “You plant carrot seeds smaller than the head on a pin.”

It all adds up. The terrible amount of work she puts into paying her bills every month, the fact that there isn't a book in the house, the way she seems more interested in Bo's reading lessons than Bo does.

“You've been on my back for w-w-w-weeks now about being scared to go back to school. Boy, you just won't give me a break. And all this time you've been hiding what a f-f-farce you are.”

She doesn't say anything for a few moments as we bounce along.

“Cornelia, I don't give a rat's ass what you think. I can read just fine. I need glasses, same as I've been tellin' you since you got here.”

I turn and face her. “Oh yeah? Prove it.”

“The hell I will.”

72

I know I'm a candle when I'm with Agatha now because sometimes the flame inside of me burns higher and the wax that covers me starts to melt and drip and I'm softer and lighter and I want to dance through the fields and feel the grass rub against my bare ankles.

But on other days, the days when we slam doors and scream and build fences, the flame dies out and the wax hardens, and I close up, covered by wax again, like chocolate crackle on an ice cream cone.

73

Another postcard arrives in early August. This one shows a girl and her mother, arm in arm, watching a sunrise over an early-morning ocean.

74

I lay the postcard on top of all the others in my dresser drawer. Six of them form a silent chain to my mother.

I rub my thumb over the newest one. I wish it had been that way: oceans and sunrises and us. Instead I am cooking by the time I turn ten. My mother has stopped working, stopped caring about anything but her newest boyfriend. I start packing my own lunches because I'm not taking free lunches from anyone. I bring egg sandwiches with ketchup, apples when we have them, and Yodels when we don't. I buy carrots and cut them into slivers and pretend they spear me like little swords, pricking at my heart as I eat them. But I am always stronger.

75

Agatha avoids me for the next two weeks. I leave the phonics books I used for Bo on the table. When the time comes for her to write her checks, she asks me to go to the bank with her, but I say no.

When she gets back, she writes her name in the same wobbly handwriting as usual, slowly, like a child writing, and then she angrily pushes all the bills to the floor and storms out and I hear her start the truck and drive off.

She comes back an hour later, carrying a white paper bag. She pulls out a large cup of coffee and hands it to me. “I remember you used to like this.”

My heart thumps.

76

In the end it is so simple.

“I'll go to school,” I tell her as I peel a potful of turnips, “if you let me teach you to read.”

77

We sit at Agatha's table night after night. I open
Teach Your Child to Read.

“The letter
u
s-s-s-sounds like the
u
in
umbrella,
” I say, taking another sip of sassafras. I've been drinking it for so long now that I'd almost rather have it than coffee, even though the coffee she bought me the other night was pretty good. “Now make the
u
sound.
Uh,
uh, uh.
”

Agatha pushes the book on the floor. “I'm not reading this ridiculous book again.” She stomps off into her room.

“B-b-b-but you have to start at the beginning,” I say, picking up the book and putting it back on the table.

“I'm too old for this baby crap, Cornelia,” she says, walking back into the room. “Come on, we're going to the library.” She is wearing the purple hat.

78

Warm Milk looks at me as I walk in and smiles when she sees Agatha's hat. “Ever been in here before?” I whisper over my shoulder.

“Course not,” Agatha says, stomping away from me. “Now, show me where to find a book on butterflies.”

I look around for a while until I find the nature books. Agatha pulls
Butterfly Handbook
from the shelf and flips through the pages
.

“Th-th-this will never work,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Look at all those L-l-latin words. There's no way.”

“Cornelia, if I'm going to learn to read, I'm going to do it with something I'm interested in.” She grabs it back and marches over to Warm Milk's desk.

Warm Milk smiles at us. “Do you have a library card, Mrs. Thornhill?”

Agatha shakes her head.

Warm Milk pulls a couple of cards out of her drawer. “You need to sign here.”

While Agatha signs her name, Warm Milk looks over at me. “If you'd like a card, I'll need your name.”

I look over at the shelf where
To Kill a Mockingbird
waits for me. Agatha hands her card back to Warm Milk. But I shake my head.

Agatha looks at me and raises an eyebrow, but she doesn't say anything.