“Mama,” she said, and then started over because her voice was too low to hear. “Mama, when Daddy was alive…” She was not sure what she meant to ask. Did you talk to each other? Was he the person you saved things up to say to, or was it like now? A houseful of women for everything, for company. Ivy was not looking at her daughter but her hands were still, for once. “Did Granny Logan always live with you, from the beginning?”
Ivy peered into the brown bag and then rolled the top down tightly. “Not her with us. We lived with her.”
“Is that how you wanted it?” Lou Ann felt embarrassed.
“I guess I always thought it would have been something to go off on our own, like you done. But there was so much work in them days, no time for fun, and besides I’d of been scared to death out someplace all by myself.”
“It wouldn’t be all by yourself. You would have been with Daddy.”
“I s’pose,” Ivy said. “But we didn’t think about it that way.” She turned back to the sink to wash her hands, then pulled the dish towel down from the wooden ring over the sink, refolded it, and hung it back up. “I want you to run on in there now and tell Mother Logan we’ve got to get ready to go.”
Ivy and her mother-in-law were not speaking, on account of one thing or another. Lou Ann could never keep track. She wondered what the trip would be like for them, all those days and nights on the Greyhound. But they were sure to find some way of having a conversation. In the past, in times of necessity, she had seen her mother and grandmother address one another through perfect strangers.
“Granny Logan.” Lou Ann put her hand gently on the old woman’s shoulder, feeling the shoulder bones through the dark, slick cloth of her dress. At the same time she opened her eyes the baby started to cry. “You have a nice catnap, Granny?” she asked, hurrying to pick up the baby and bounce him on her hip. She always thought he sounded like he was choking.
“It was just my eyes, needed a rest. I weren’t sleeping.” She held tightly to the arms of the chair until she knew where she was. “I told you, the heat’s done put that baby into a colic. He needs a mustard plaster to draw out the heat.”
“Mama says tell you it’s time to get your grip packed. She says you all are fixing to leave tonight.”
“My grip’s done packed.”
“All right then. You want a bite of supper before you go?”
“Why don’t you come on home with us, honey? You and the baby.”
“Me and Angel and the baby, Granny. I’ve been married now for practically five years, remember?” She felt like such a sneak, letting on as though her marriage was just fine. It was like presenting her mother and grandmother with a pretty Christmas package to take back with them, with nothing but tissue paper inside. She had never lied to them before, that she could remember, but something in her would not let them be right about Angel.
“Angel’s got good work at the bottling plant,” she told Granny Logan. This, at least, was true. “We like it here.”
“I don’t see how a body could like no place where it don’t rain. Law, I’m parched. Get me a glass of water.”
“I’ll get it for you in a minute,” she said, switching the baby to her other hip, knowing that in a minute Granny Logan would have forgotten her request. “You get used to it. When we first moved out I had sore throats all the time. I was scared to death I’d caught throat cancer like that what’s her name on TV. You know, that had to stop singing?” Lou Ann realized Granny Logan wouldn’t know NBC from pinto beans. “But I turned out to be fine, of course. And it don’t bother him one bit, does it?” She crooked a finger under the baby’s chin and looked into the foggy blue eyes. “Dwayne Ray’s a Tucson boy, aren’t you?”
Lou Ann’s baby had not been born on Christmas, or even the day after. He had come early on the morning of January 1, just missing First Baby of the Year at St. Joseph’s Hospital by about forty-five minutes. Lou Ann later thought that if she had just pushed a little harder she might have gotten the year of free diapers from Bottom Dollar Diaper Service. That was the prize. It would have come in handy now that her washing-machine fund, which was meager enough to begin with, had been parceled out to all the neighborhood kids.
“I don’t see how a body can grow no tobaccy if it don’t rain,” Granny Logan said.
“They don’t grow tobacco here. No crops hardly at all, just factories and stuff, and tourists that come down here for the winter. It’s real pretty out in the mountains. We could have showed you, if you hadn’t had to go back so soon.” The baby coughed again and she jiggled him up and down. “And it’s not usually this hot in January, either. You heard it yourself, Granny, the man on the radio saying it was the
