Tiny Dancer (29 page)

Friday morning I
took a glass of lemon water outside to cool off. Distantly, I saw Dorothea’s shadow rocking in the light of her porch candles. Not that I was prone to visions, although stranger things had happened over the summer, but each candle went out one at a time. Then a fog descended and swallowed up their house. Lightning and thunder roiled from the locus of the cloud, shaking the ground beneath me. When the cloud dissipated, the house was gone. It was as if the Millers had never lived there. The drooping cherries were all that stood behind our house. I sat up from the worst dream I had ever had.

I got up from my bed and tore down the staircase. Daddy was gone to work but Vesta sat on the back porch. My old dance costumes lay in a stack next to her. She was measuring
them.

“Vesta,” I said, out of breath.

“Good, let’s get you measured,” she said to me.

“I have to talk to you,” I said, making it clear she had to listen to me.

“Sit down, dearest,” she said, her eyes on her sewing.

I couldn’t sit. I stood in front of her.
“You have to drop the charges against Theo Miller.”

“Has he put you up to this? I’ve told you if you don’t stop your associations with him—”

“Stop acting as if I can’t decide things for myself,” I said. “I’m telling you that if you don’t drop the charges, it will be the biggest mistake of your life. You’ll regret it.”

“The only thing I regret is not doing it sooner.
Men like Miller are making havoc all over the country. You ought to watch the news. There’s a ruckus going on down in Mississippi and why? Because good people won’t put a stop to it.” 

Theo’s granddaughters ran out of the house, laughing.

“It’s their home. They were here long before us.”

“You think you know everything. I’ve heard the Miller
’s ancestors killed their landowner and stole it.”

“That’s a lie spread about them.”

“You tell me then, how they came about it. You think you know so much.”

I had heard the men talking about it one night when they were waiting for the ashes to cool
in the smoke pit. “Theo’s ancestor was owned by the man who owned this land. He even named our street.”

“Cotton? What you saying, a black man named our stree
t. What tales you telling now?”

“
Only Mr. Cotton had gotten horribly sick. Theo’s grandfather and his wife tried to nurse Mr. Cotton back to health.”

She
fell silent, for I assumed she thought, like I first did, that our street was named after the crop, cotton.

“But Mr. Cotton, who thought he had pneumonia, had consumption. Theo’s grandmother made him po
ultice after poultice, but he got worse. LeRoy would not leave his side but held his head in his lap, giving him doses of laudanum. LeRoy got so distraught he dropped to his knees and begged God to take him instead.

Finally
Mr. Cotton called his lawyer to his bedside. He said that he had never known a man as kind as LeRoy Miller. He had never married and had no heirs. He signed papers giving the Millers their freedom. Then he bequeathed his land to Theo’s grandparents who then left the land to Theo.”

“It was the Civil War gave them their freedom,” said Vesta.

“Not the Millers,” I said.

Vesta grew more incensed.
“What are you saying, that somehow the land we’re living on belonged to him too?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We live on Cotton Street and they don’t,” she said, as if I missed the whole point.

I got up and studied the matter
, pacing. “That makes sense. The row of cherry trees makes a straight row from Theo’s yard to ours.” But how the land got separated, I didn’t know.

“This is a ridiculous story. They made it all up and you believed it.”

I recalled something else. “Wait. I want to show you something.” I left her for a moment to retrieve something from my room. I got back fast as I could, handing her the photograph of Siobhan holding out the bread pan. “You should know Siobhan knew the Millers too.”

“What is this? How long have you had this?”
Her face was as pale as the petals on the cherry trees.

“See, hanging from Dorothea Miller’s bracelet is a charm in the shape of a cotton boll.
” There it hung all this time. “I never knew the meaning behind it until now.” That little charm represented their family’s legacy.

“You think this changes anything?” asked Vesta. “All thi
s says to me is that those people have been interfering in my family matters too long. Her voice was tenuous as she stared at the photo of Siobhan. She muttered, fanning herself. “What was she doing over there?” she got up, talking out loud to herself. She wandered back into the house, clutching the last photograph taken of Siobhan.

                                                                      * * * * *

The phone rang. I answered, still reeling over Vesta’s stubborn resolve to ruin the Millers.

Alice said, “You haven’t called me, so I’m calling you.”
She was chatty and in a good spirit, talking about how soon she would be leaving the club. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought she was trying to win my approval.

My mind raced with
all of my excuses for not calling her. I knew why. I could not ask her, not in person nor even over the phone, if she was Dwight Johnson’s girlfriend. For one thing, I was not feeling strong enough to handle a heavy answer.

“I need to see you,” was all she said next.

Seeing her again was a difficult maneuver. I could not ask Daddy to drive me. Claudia and Irene were in a state of mourning and I couldn’t bring myself to beg favors of them in such a condition. I told her where to meet me. In a moment of desperation, I took off on my bicycle. My feet flew as I cycled down Cotton Street and down the tree-lined roads of Bitterwood Park. I pulled under the oldest tree in town, the place where Daddy had been told that he was about to be a father for the first time. Some people might call that spot the place where he proposed to my mother. I guess, in a way, that was the long and short of it.

I waited, watching for any sign of her. Alice pulled up driving a long black Lincoln Continental. We drove away without anyone noticing us.

“I don’t think I’ve told you that I’ve been a dancer since,” I hesitated, “since you left.”

“I read about you in the paper
s. I do keep up in spite of what you believe,” she said.

“I’m supposed to join a dance troupe in September,” I s
aid, “But, I’m turning it down. I don’t know what will happen. You think Vesta will leave?” Now that I thought about it, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

“If Vesta leave
s him, it’s an excuse. I shouldn’t tell you but you’re old enough to handle the truth,” she said. “Your daddy could have kept me from leaving. He had a choice.”

“He does seem to depend on others to decide,”
I said.

“
That’s not what I mean. He had a choice.”

“Ask you to stay?”
That was what I thought she meant.

“You remember the day your daddy sent you to try and get me to stay?” she asked.

I remembered painfully well.

“Did you think it was your fault I left?”

“Yes.”

“Shame on him for letting you believe such things. It was his decision. He had met a woman, didn’t I know, at one of your dance recitals. I was working late at the diner those nights so he was the stage mom standing in for me. Happy to do it, he told me. Finally I knew why.”

“What woman?” I asked.

“She made your costumes.”

“I don’t believe you. That means that he and Vesta—“

“You don’t have to beli
eve me. Me, an exotic dancer. What kind of mother am I, really? But I beg you, don’t believe that you’ve caused your daddy a second of trouble. Each of us, we cause our own problems, and we got to work them out the same. Like you. You know what you want so you stand up for it. I should’ve been more like you. I wouldn’t be working in a dump in south Raleigh that’s for sure.” She continued talking.

As she spoke, i
t was as if the earth released all of its winds at once. The pressure in my head was intense, especially between my ears. Eleven years worth of unreleased torment rushed through me. If ever my spirit floated outside my body, it was then.

“
You keep your eyes on the prize. But promise me you won’t think you’re the cause of Vesta leaving Flynn Curry. They have enough baggage between them to sink the Queen Mary. Trust me, if they sink it’s at their own hands.”

I was quiet
, afraid to drop the question weighing on me about Claudia’s daddy because now the bomb Alice had just dropped in my lap detonated a lot of other things.

“I didn’t mean to tell you any of that.”
She pulled off the road and laid her forehead against her big leather steering wheel.

I remembered Billy acting all mysterious at the ball. “
You remember a dance student, name of Billy Thornton?”

“I can’t recall.” She lifted slowly up from the steering wheel. “Wait a sec.
Cute little guy, could dance his hard shoe dance like a storm.”

“That’s him,” I said. “Any way he would know about Vesta and Daddy? Was it a town scandal, I mean?”

“Billy Thornton was a smart little guy but he was awfully young. Now the adults around Bitterwood, they all knew. No one acted like they cared what happened to me, though. I couldn’t get a job in town to save my life. All I got was a big dish of pity and that don’t pay the bills.”

“You had to leave me then?”

“No choice. I wasn’t going to take my baby girl into starvation. And I did reach that point. One day I fell flat on my old apartment floor outside Raleigh, weak from hunger.” She smiled, strangely enough. “Don’t look so stunned. This isn’t pity I’m asking for. I moved on.”

“Why did you wa
nt to see me today? You haven’t told me,” I said quietly, no longer looking at her.

“I’ve
got to make a change, Flannery. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve made a way out of my predicament. I’m getting respectable work.”

“In California,” I said.

“I’m not going,” she told me. “I’m going to stay around, see you. Catch up on my mistakes.” Then she said she had to go, to dress for work. “My last night,” she said, making a promise she said she intended to keep. Her voice was weak. I was afraid that if I looked into her eyes I would see the fear she was tamping down for my sake.

I
imagined her gluing on false lashes the length of daggers and teasing her hair up so high she looked like a vampire from a scary movie. I imagined her looking into her makeup mirror and willing herself to change. I did not know if she had the ability to keep her promise. But I would not rob her of her quiet stand to say what she hoped would happen.

Several hours later
I lay in the quiet of the night that had fallen over Periwinkle House pondering Alice Curry’s words and her disconcerting revelation. All this time and Daddy had let me live with the guilt of my mother leaving us. He was the one who had let her go and now, in my heart, I knew why. Shame was a big old bowl of dirt. I had eaten enough to grow five sunflower forests. Daddy didn’t eat his shame though. Just passed it on down to me.

I opened my
door and saw the glow from the study light downstairs. I immediately closed and locked my door, leaving my father to sit downstairs alone. Matter of fact, I locked it with a hard snap.

I
dressed for bed and pulled out a novel to read. I relished the simplicity of owning my own time.

If Daddy and Vesta
went their own ways, Alice was right about one thing—it was because that was what the two of them decided. Truthfully though, he had mourned the loss of his first wife for years, so maybe he never really knew what he wanted. He doubted his love for my mother until she left. Now he doubted his love for Vesta. He did not possess the gift of Theo Miller’s present sight, the ability to recognize the life you have right in front of you. I could not take the blame for that either.

But the lump in my
throat would not go away, birthed of a strange idea. If Daddy could not decide what was right for the two of us, or the three of us, as it were, my only alternative was to ask Mama to take me back after all these years. Most girls would be elated but I could not peel that thought off the ceiling. It was not my thought.

                                                                                * * * * *

The next morning I got up early and ran all the way back to the big tree where I had left my bike. My plan was to return before Vesta would be up making her first pot of coffee. But I was wrong about all of that. I pushed my bike into our yard only to find another big black car was parked in our driveway. My heart leaped as I worried Alice was making a surprise appearance. I jumped the curb and rode around the big luxury sedan, dropping my bike on the grass. To my great relief, it wasn’t her Lincoln.