“Esau, I swear I won’t be but an hour. That’s if I go now. But if I have to drive you back home first—”
“You think Miss Dyson is going to want me sitting out here for an hour, Tory-boy?”
“No. No, Esau. I didn’t even ask her. I mean, she knew where I was going, and she asked if you wouldn’t like to take some tea with her. I said I’d ask you. So I am.”
I was about to tell Tory-boy I’d have to check for myself when Miss Jayne Dyson came to the screen door.
“That is exactly what I asked Tory,” she said, like she was reading my thoughts. “I could use some company. That’s why I always like seeing Tory. He’s a real gentleman, and I know who taught him that.”
“I …” That was as far as I got—I guess I ran out of words. Miss Dyson held the screen door open, and Tory- boy wheeled me right inside. I swear our van was moving before Miss Dyson even got a chance to sit herself down.
n the fall, darkness drops down quick. But I couldn’t really tell what time it was by the light—Miss Dyson had her parlor fixed so that it was always in some kind of soft shadow.
I probably pay more attention to couches and chairs and such because I don’t know what it would be like to sit in them. Hers were old-style: built of a heavy, dark wood; the cushions covered with a kind of a velvety material as dark as dried blood.
Every other time I’d been there, Miss Dyson would always seat herself on the divan, so there could be a long, low table between us. For putting cups and saucers on without making it awkward for me. But this time, she put herself in a high-backed straight chair near the corner. When she beckoned with her hand, I rolled my chair over to her. Fussing a little to myself about the wheels making marks on her carpet, but I could see she wasn’t paying attention. Or didn’t care about such things.
“You just wait here a minute,” she told me.
I don’t know how long she was gone. I was—I don’t know how to say it, exactly—maybe
“You take honey?”
I had to come back from wherever I’d gone to, and I wasn’t sure I heard her last word right, so I just nodded.
“Lemon?”
“Yes, I do,” I answered, feeling better now that I was back all the way.
“Not sugar, though?”
“With that honey? No, ma’am.”
“I thought I told you—”
“I didn’t mean it like it came out,” I told her. “I was just trying to be … emphatic.”
“Clear.”
“Clear,” I agreed.
e sipped our tea, polite as a church social. Then she put her cup and saucer down on the little table and leaned toward me, dropping her voice just a little. Miss Dyson never spoke loudly, but this was … not so much quieter as it was softer.
“I know what you do, Esau,” she half-whispered. It didn’t feel like an accusation. More like it was something I should be proud of.
I wouldn’t disrespect her by making a joke. And I couldn’t well deny what hadn’t been said. So I just put down my own cup and saucer and folded my hands, like I was expecting her to go on.
“I don’t judge you for it,” she said. “I’ve been judged, and I know how that kind of meanness feels when you’re on the receiving end of it.”
“Miss Dyson, I would never—”
“Lord, did you think I was talking about you when I said that, Esau?”
“Well … no, I suppose you wouldn’t do that. But I just wanted to make certain you knew—”
“Esau Till, you can stop all that. Right this minute. It was me telling you, not the other way around.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. Not exactly. So I was grateful when she broke the silence. “Does cigarette smoke bother you?”
“Not at all,” I lied, but it felt right to do it then.
She jumped up and ran off. Back almost before I knew it. But she wasn’t in her chair; she was on her knees, next to me.
“It’s easier this way,” she said, handing me a lighter.
I knew what to do with that—just part of good manners. I fired up the lighter, and held the flame until she got her cigarette going. Then I watched as she put the ashtray on the table with the cups and saucers.
I couldn’t help looking down her dress when she did that. When I realized what that would make me look like, I straightened up quick.
She took a short little puff on her cigarette. Ladylike, I guess it was. Then she said, “I was close to twelve. I remember because my twelfth birthday was coming, and I was hoping for … Well, it doesn’t matter. That’s how old I was when a terrible thing happened to me.”
“What was—?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she shushed me. “Not anymore, it doesn’t. By the ninth grade, people were talking about me. Behind their hands, but I could see it in their eyes. And the boys, they made it impossible for me to stay here.”
“You went away?”
“For a time I did, yes. But I came back. Maybe ten years later it was, but it might as well have been the day I left. Only, by then, I knew how to turn their meanness into money.”
I didn’t say anything. Just watched her puff on her cigarette a couple more times.
“Some of us, we get marked,” Miss Dyson said. “Me, not even twelve. And you, from the moment you were born. But those kind of marks aren’t any stupid 666 brand, like some wish they were. What they really are is trail markers. And we, all of us with those kind of marks, we’re bound to follow them.”
“You didn’t have to come home.”
“Home?” She kind of laughed. “No, Esau. I didn’t have to come back here. Any more than you didn’t have to stay.”
I opened my mouth to tell her about Tory-boy, but then I snapped it shut when it came to me that she knew all about that. Wasn’t I the one who’d brought him to her in the first place?
“Are you familiar with what they call the Bernoulli effect?” I asked her instead.
“No. No, I surely never heard of anything like that. Why do you ask?”
“If you force smoke through a pipe, the more narrow the pipe, the faster the smoke will move. Think of it as if you blew your cigarette smoke through a soda straw.”
“Ah! So, if you only have one road to go down, a real narrow one …”
“You’ll move faster than the others. Be ahead of the field by the first lap. That’s a scientific truth. And that’s how I always saw you, myself.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Esau. Not one damn thing.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t see how she could say such things to a man in a wheelchair.
“If you’ll trust me, I can give you something,” she said, so soft I could feel the words brush against my cheek. “I can give you something you thought you could never have.”
“What could you—?”
“Do you trust me, Esau?”
Her eyes only left me but one answer. “Yes” is all I said.
efore Tory-boy came back, Miss Dyson had healed me. I don’t mean like a doctor. Or a preacher, either. Only a person marked like we both were could ever really do what she’d done, and then only for another of our own kind.
