“Don’t matter why,” Sylvia said crisply. “The only thing that matters is Kali and making sure she’s happy. If she likes Faye, you can make coffee for Faye every day of the week and you can be happy about it. I’ll bring the Milk Duds.”
Pretending that she didn’t see the silent Kali as she slipped through a barely open door, Sylvia reached deep into her apron pocket and pulled out a yellow box. Laying a napkin on the table, she dumped out the contents of the box. Hard brown balls hit the napkin-cushioned table with a clatter. “Dig in!”
“Lots of people are doing nice things for you, sweetheart,” Sylvia said, patting the seat of the chair next to her and setting Kali’s coffee cup in front of it. “Your Uncle Laneer gave you permission to go to The Peabody Hotel to have tea with Miss Faye, and he made you a nice cup of coffee. Take a good long drink. And Mr. Walker here brought you a backpack full of food like you usually have to walk a long way to get. These people are real nice to you, don’t you think?”
Kali didn’t respond, but a little hand shot out and grabbed a handful of candy. Faye could see that Laneer had already told her about Faye and her invitation to afternoon tea, because she was wearing a dress. It was orange knit, printed with gray elephants, and the juvenile fabric was subtly wrong on her. Kali was still a little girl, but she was standing at the edge of the gulf between child and woman. Already, the childish elephants on this dress, which would have been adorable just a few months before, made her look awkward and unsure.
“Would ya look at that?” Laneer said, squinting at the candy going into her mouth. “She ain’t opened her mouth for nothing, not for talking and not for food, since her mama….not since yesterday. But she’s eating now.”
Kali chewed her Milk Duds, but she didn’t look up from Laneer’s bright red tablecloth, not even when Walt started to speak.
“It’s me, Kali. Mr. Walker. Your teacher. You talked to me every day, all school year long. Won’t you even look at me?”
“Neither one of you is asking the child what she wants. This ain’t about you,” said Sylvia. “Do you want to talk to us, honey?”
There was no answer. To be fair, Faye noticed that the girl’s jaws were glued together by firm, sticky caramel.
“You do what you’re gonna to do, Kali. You don’t have to do any talking,” Sylvia said, catching the other adults’ eyes in a signal that they should ignore the girl. Without looking at the Milk Duds or at Kali, she used her left hand to shove a few duds in the child’s direction. “Us grown-ups can talk to each other. Faye, why don’t you tell us about what kind of stuff you’re digging for?”
So Faye did.
Kali avoided Faye’s eyes as she spoke, focusing instead on unloading the backpack Walt had handed her. Faye was under no illusion that the man had gone to the playground on a Saturday and loaded up a backpack. Unless he had a key to the food storage closet and the refrigerator, it would have been impossible. He’d bought that backpack and packed it himself, no small gift for a man living on a teacher’s salary.
Kali was unloading a lot of things from the stuffed backpack, and it didn’t all look like food people gave away for free to keep children healthy and alive. There was yogurt and granola in there, it was true, but there were little toys and cupcakes, too, even a set of colorful plastic barrettes.
Everybody but Kali seemed interested in hearing about the archaeology Faye was doing in their very own neighborhood. Since she knew Kali was listening, she ramped up the drama in her monologue, doing her best to make the long-ago discovery of a mammoth’s skeleton in a Memphis creek the most exciting story she’d ever told. She got no response, other than the sounds of smacking lips and small teeth gnawing on hard caramel.
As Faye came to the dramatic conclusion—“And now the skeleton is on display at the museum, where anybody can see it!”—Kali was ready to speak. She must not have been remotely interested in Faye’s exciting but nerdy stories, because she interrupted, speaking right on top of the fascinating mammoth skeleton story.
“I’m going outside. Wanna come?”
Kali walked out the back door and let it slam behind her. Faye took advantage of the absence of little ears to say, “I’ll be at the funeral tomorrow. I’m giving my crew time off, because I know Jeremiah and Richard will want to come.”
Then she checked her watch. She and Kali had time to take a short walk before leaving for the Peabody. Her instincts told her to do whatever the girl wanted her to do, even if it meant missing tea. According to Sylvia and Laneer, the handful of words Kali had just used—“I’m going outside. Wanna come?” were the only words she’d spoken since she last saw Faye, and a full day had passed since then.
Why did Kali respond so well to a stranger? Maybe it was simply because Sylvia was old enough to be her grandmother and Laneer could have been her great-grandfather. Kali had lost her mother, and Faye had experience in that area—having lost her own mother—but Faye suspected that her bond with Kali went beyond being bereaved daughters. Faye was a mother, and she supposed it showed.
Kali led Faye out Laneer’s back door and to the back of his deep, narrow yard. The back gate opened onto the bank of the creek.
Land on the opposite side of the creek belonged to the state park, as far as the eye could see, and Faye knew that a well-marked trail wound in and out of
