We Are All Welcome Here (17 page)

“Bail set at five hundred dollars,” Peacie said. “Might as well be the moon.”

“What a coincidence, the moon came today,” my mother said. “Moon walked right up the steps and handed me a check.”

“I can’t do that,” Peacie said. “I can’t take your prize money.”

“It’s not mine,” my mother said. “It’s ours.”

I saw new clothes rising up in the sky as though they were going to heaven. I saw my beautiful canopied bed, a new washer and refrigerator, fancy shampoos, all fading away. But also I saw LaRue’s warm brown eyes. I saw him sitting in jail, erect and proud, but hurting. Waiting with his hat on; I so hoped he had his hat on.

“Diana,” my mother said. “I want you to go and ask Riley to come stay with me. Get me a pen and I’ll sign that check. Then go to the bank with Peacie and get it cashed.”

Cashed! I’d be like Scrooge McDuck; I’d need a wheelbarrow for all that money—a vault!

“Give a thousand of it to Peacie; bring me the rest.”

Peacie gasped. “No, Paige! I ain’t taking it!”

That’s right,
I thought. It was too much!

“Peacie,” my mother said. “Please come here and sit by me.” Peacie moved reluctantly to my mother’s bedside and sat down. My mother looked over at me. “You go on now, Diana. Tell Riley I’m going to need him in a few minutes for about an hour, then take a walk around the block.”

I stood still. “Go,” she said. “Once around the block.”

Still I did not move.
“Go!”
my mother said, and I went, letting the screen door slam behind me. On the porch I saw Peacie’s small suitcase, and I kicked it over.

I went back to Riley’s house and told him what my mother had said. Then I walked around our crummy neighborhood, full of crummy houses and crummy yards, crummy laundry on crummy lines, and I was angry. Why would my mother give away nearly half of what we had just gotten? Why? We needed that money! Peacie knew that! Peacie saw that it was wrong to take it! Why didn’t my mother?

By the time I got back, Peacie was waiting at the door. “Let’s go,” she said. I looked up into her face. Nothing in her expression told me anything I needed to know. Reluctantly, I set out alongside her.

Halfway to the bank, I asked Peacie, “What’s wrong with LaRue’s eye?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will he go blind?” She didn’t answer. I looked out across a field we were passing, closed one eye. “Nah,” I said, answering my own question. “He isn’t going to go blind. He’s going to be fine.”

“I just need to get there,” Peacie said. “I hope that bus run on time, I got to get there.”

“Peacie?”

She kept walking.

“Peacie?”

She turned to look at me, weariness in her eyes.

“I just want you to know you don’t have to worry at all about my mother. I’ll take care of her. I really will. I know how, and I’ll get help when I need it. It won’t be as good as you, but she’ll be all right. You just worry about you and LaRue, and don’t even think about us. We’ll be fine.”

Peacie smiled, a halfhearted thing, but exceptional under the circumstances. “Well, looky here. Look who done growed up overnight.” I reached over to hug her, but she stepped away and looked sideways at me. “Keep those grabbers to yourself. You want me cry a river like you?”

Outside the bank, I handed Peacie ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Her bottom lip trembled as she put the money in her purse; she would not look at me. Then she walked off toward the bus stop, turning around only once to say, “Tell your mama I call her.”

The rest of the money I clenched in my fist, and I stuck that fist in the waistband of my shorts as I set out toward home. Every few steps I took, I looked behind me, just in case. It wasn’t a fine feeling, having so much money, after all. It made your stomach hurt. It made you worried and suspicious. It made you feel captured.

M
y mother asked Mrs. Gruder to change her hours so that she would be with us from nine to five. Her husband, Otto, strenuously objected to this, saying it was too many hours, so she offered us eleven to four, but just for two weeks. We took it, hoping that Peacie would be back by then. I began helping my mother both in the mornings and at night, and I began making dinner.

I knew how to make a lot of things; creating easy suppers posed no particular challenge. The challenge was, my mother felt that in Peacie’s absence she needed to supervise me. She would have me unplug her and push her into the kitchen, where she watched every move I made. The way she used to do things and the way I did them were at odds, and she was constantly correcting me. My hamburger patties were too fat. I didn’t let the water boil hard enough before I put the noodles in. Greens needed to be washed more thoroughly than I did it; tomatoes for salad needed to be cut into eighths, not fourths. It got so that I dreaded this time of day more than anything. “You don’t cut onions that way,” she said one night when I was making a meat loaf.

I continued chopping.

“Diana.”

“What.” I didn’t look up.

“You don’t chop onions that way!”

“What
difference
does it make!” I shouted. “Who cares how you do it as long as they get cut into little pieces! Why don’t you just leave me alone! I know how to do this; I don’t need your help!”

She gulped down some air. “I’m trying to teach you something,” she said. “My way is better. And it’s safer. If you keep your fingers—”

“I’m
fine
!”

“Diana, put that goddamn knife down and listen to me. You listen to me. I am your mother and you will do as I tell you. The way you are doing it is wrong!”

I flung the knife down on the counter. “You do it, then. Come and get me when dinner is ready. I’ll be down the block. Just come and get me.”

I fled the house, crossed the yard, and stood still on the sidewalk, trying to remember how long she had been in the kitchen, how long she had been breathing on her own. I figured she had a good half hour left.

I walked a few doors down and sat cross-legged on someone’s lawn, breathed in, breathed out. A woman down the street pulled into her driveway and began unloading bags of groceries. She would carry the bags in. She would make dinner. She would probably clean up afterward, too. She would tuck her children in at night.

Up in the sky above me, a flock of ducks appeared, flying in formation. They passed directly over my head, and I could see their feet tucked up under them. They veered sharply right, then continued straight on. I watched them grow smaller, then disappear.

Peacie was gone—we hadn’t heard from her in days. The ducks were gone. I wanted to be gone, too, but I sat right there, my arms wrapped tightly around myself, aware of the giant pulling force that was my mother. I hung my head, closed my eyes, and for the first time in my life wished her dead. The thought came in and out of me like a needle stick, quick but painful. It terrified me. I raced back to the house and fell to my knees beside my mother’s wheelchair. I was sobbing, and I saw that she, too, had been crying. “Give me your finger,” she said, her voice bitter. She bit hard, and my finger bled. I went to the bathroom and washed the wound, rinsed it with peroxide, and put a Band-Aid on it. We had only one Band-Aid left; tomorrow I would need to buy more.

I returned to the chopping block, and I cut the onions the way my mother had suggested. She was right. It was better.

We spoke little while I prepared the rest of our meal: baked potatoes, along with stewed tomatoes from the bag that someone had left on our porch. When everything was in the oven, I hooked my mother back up to her respirator. “Let me rest now,” she said. “And then after we eat, I want to talk to you about something.”

I went to my room while the meat loaf cooked. I didn’t like turning on the oven because of how hot it made the house, but I loved the smells it created. Anyway, it was my mother’s opinion that if dinner wasn’t hot, it wasn’t dinner.

I lay for a while on my bed, imagining how happy Suralee would be when she came over tomorrow—I’d dreamed up a whole new scene for our play: The sheriff, modeled after Sheriff Turner, trips over the dead body of Debby Black and knocks himself out.

I wondered what my mother wanted to talk to me about. Whenever she made that pronouncement—and it was rare—it was because she had something important to say. It occurred to me, suddenly, that it had to do with Dell. He’d been over a few times, and she flirted with him just as she flirted with almost any man—Brooks, various meter men, her doctors, even old Riley Coombs. But something about Dell’s response made her flirting with him different. It was like he was a normal man responding to a normal woman. There was a depth to the two of them together. And there was danger. If Brooks stopped coming around, it would be one thing. A blip on the horizon. But Dell. Every time before he came, my mother would say, “How do I look?” And every time he left, my mother was silent and dreamy for a while, still with him in a way.

I understood her great attraction to Dell, of course. He was so handsome, wonderful to look at, even for Suralee and me. And he talked to her in honest ways about her condition, talked to her in ways no one else ever had. Just the other day he had been over visiting. I’d been coming up from the laundry room, and I’d heard him say, “I guess having something like this happen changes you on the inside, too.”

“I don’t know if
change
is really the word,” my mother had said. “I’ve thought about it a lot, obviously. Didn’t do much
but
think when I was in that lung! At night, you could feel
everyone
thinking. That’s when most people cried, too…. Anyway, what I believe is that what happened to me, revealed me.”

“You mean…? I’m not sure I understand,” Dell said.

“Well, it made me know how I really feel about important things. I mean, whatever the diagnosis is, isn’t the issue. The issue is the way the person who has it looks at it. Understand? I know that polio made me be my best self. It’s funny, it seems like people need obstacles to bring out their finest qualities.”

“That might be true,” Dell said. “Losing my best friend that way, in football practice? That was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But I think it made me…kinder.”

“You are kind,” my mother said. “And you’re…Well, I like you quite a bit, Dell Hansen.”

“And I like you.” He laughed. “I like being around you. You’re nothing like what I would expect. I mean, you know, a person hears about a woman can’t move anything but her head, he’s not going to think of
you.
I don’t know how you do it. I don’t see how you stay so…Well, I don’t know how you do it.”

“It’s really true that you can get used to just about anything,” my mother said. “And what helps me most is that I know I have choices. I don’t focus on the fact that I can’t move my body; I focus on the fact that I still have feeling in it.”

“You do?” Dell asked. “You have feeling?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were paralyzed. I mean, you
are
paralyzed!”

“Right,” she said. “But I can feel everything.”

There was a moment, and then he said, “So…you can feel this?”

“Yes,” she said, laughing.

“How about this?” he said, and it grew quiet.

At that point, I dropped the laundry basket and came into my mother’s room. “Hey, Dell,” I said.

“Hey, Diana!” He pulled back from my mother. He was blushing. They both were. It came to me that Peacie had been parent to both me and my mother, and that in her absence my mother was going wild.

I didn’t blame her for wanting attention from Dell, or for taking it. But I felt, too, that it was my job to intervene, to prevent something from happening that we all would regret. For one thing, Dell had said right off the bat that he wouldn’t be staying long. I hoped my mother remembered that. And here was the mean seed in my own heart that I did not understand: I hoped he remembered it, too.

After I fed my mother dinner, she asked me to get her ready for bed. When I finished, I sat on a chair beside her to hear whatever it was she wanted to talk about.

“I have good news and bad news,” she said, smiling.

“Good first,” I said. This was our way.

“Okay. I am going to order you a canopied bed tomorrow. Whatever one you want. You find it and I’ll get it. And whatever you want on it—you’re getting all new linens and a new bedspread.”

“I know exactly what I want,” I said excitedly. “I saw it in the catalogue. And I want the exact bedspread they show, too. It’s white.
Thank
you!” I couldn’t wait to lie under that canopy and look up. I wondered, as long as we were talking about spending our money, if this would be the time to lobby for a few other things. It was August; school would be starting soon. “Can I…What about the new clothes, too? For both of us?”

“Well,” my mother said. “That’s the bad news. I’m going to give most of the rest of the money to Peacie.”

I sat still, a half smile on my face.

“Yesterday, when Mrs. Gruder was here, Peacie called. I didn’t tell you about it until now because I wanted to think about what I wanted to do. But I’ve decided.

“LaRue is out of jail, but he’s in the hospital. Peacie’s going to need a lot more money for him to stay in there longer, and for him to get the kind of care he deserves.”