those shoes.
“Mo Wren! There is no music in the nightingale. Why do you look so upset?”
“I’m not!” Mo shot Mercedes a look that said, No need to worry Da, right?
“We feared a lethal gas attack,” Mercedes replied, cool as can be. “But it was only dear sweet Mrs. Steinbott.”
Three heads swiveled to look across the street, where Mrs. Steinbott was spraying her roses from a yellow canister that was nearly as big as she was.
“Those poor bugs.” Da gave her head a small shake. “They don’t stand a chance.”
“Me either,” Mercedes said. “Every time I pass her house, I feel her watching me. It creeps me out. I feel like she’s counting the hairs on my head. I mean, if there were any hairs.”
“Don’t be silly.” But Da, who’d always taught them how rude it was to stare, in turn regarded Mrs. Steinbott for a long time.
“When Mr. Walcott and I first moved here,” she said at last, “Gertrude and I used to sweep our sidewalks every evening. Now, being the first people of color, we Walcotts weren’t particularly welcomed. That, my children, is what you call an understatement.”
Under normal circumstances, there was nothing Mo loved better than sitting on this porch listening to Da’s tales about the old days on Fox Street. Da was big on history. “If you don’t know where you’re going,” she liked to lecture, “you’d best know where you’re coming from.” Not that Mo planned on going anywhere. Da’s Fox Street tales were her tales, too. Sitting on this cool, creaky porch, she loved slipping back to the time when Fox Street was paved with bricks, and the neighborhood was so young, someone else lived in the Wren house. The thought of that made her brain cartwheel.
Now a completely new and previously unthought thought gripped Mo. A thought that was terrible and yet so obvious, so undeniable, it yanked her upright in her chair.
If someone had lived in the Wren house before them, someone else could live there after them.
“Gertrude and I would be out there wielding our brooms, and she wouldn’t so much as look at me. Mr. Walcott and I were going to be the ruination of the neighborhood, after all! A month went by, and then another, and by then Mr. Walcott and his green thumb had transformed this front yard into the neighborhood Garden of Eden.” She raised her eyes to heaven. “Forgive me, James, for the sorry condition it’s in now.” Taking the fan from Mercedes, she waved it slowly, wafting memories around.
“By then, all the other neighbors were dropping by to borrow a rake, or investigate that good smell coming from my kitchen, or ask how in the world had I taught Monette to read when she was only three. But not Gertrude. Tidy as she was, with all her life arranged in nice, orderly columns, it seems she couldn’t figure out where to classify us Walcotts. So there the two of us were, night after night, keeping to our own sides of Fox Street, for all the world as if we lived on the banks of a crocodile-infested river. Well. One night, didn’t she up and nod. And the next, go so far as to call out good evening. Finally Gertrude actually crossed Fox Street to inform me boiling water poured in the sidewalk cracks would kill the ants. It was the first and last complete sentence I ever heard the woman speak.”
Da rearranged her toe coffins. Her look grew faintly puzzled, as if a student had written her a good essay but left off the last lines.
“Neither one of us is the warm fuzzy kind,” Da said. “There was never a chance we’d be best friends.”
Across the street, Mrs. Steinbott thumped her big yellow canister down on the porch.
“I’ll never forget the night I went upstairs and found that devil Monette luxuriating in a rose-petal bath, like a princess in one of those fairy tales she loved. The perfume about knocked me over! She’d snipped off an armload of Gertrude’s American Beautys and carried them home. I chased her, naked as a jaybird, all around the house.” Da’s fan paddled the air. “When she told me Gertrude’s son, Walter, egged her on and told her to take as many flowers as she wanted, I had to scold her all over again. I knew Gertrude didn’t like those two playing together.”
All at once, she’d commanded Mo’s attention.
“Mrs. Steinbott had a son?”
Da raised her eyebrows. “Why, I’m disappointed in you, Mo Wren. I thought you were the historian of Fox Street!”
“I know she had a husband. Who got killed in some kind of terrible accident at some kind of factory.” Fell into a vat of boiling sauce at the Chef Boyardee tomato sauce plant. Or doused in molten ore at Republic Steel. Or, if you asked the Baggott boys, it was no accident at all-he was poisoned at his own dinner table, a pinch of arsenic in his mashed potatoes every night, till he keeled over onto the floor and she collected his million-dollar life insurance policy.
“In fact,” said Da, “it was a car accident.”
Mo sank back in her chair.
“Overnight she became a widow alone with a baby boy. Walter Henry Junior. His eyes were like little chips of sky. Next to Monette, he was the smartest child on the street.”
Da chuckled, but then her fanning slowed. Across the street, Starchbutt had sat down in one of her porch chairs and folded her hands in her lap. She couldn’t possibly hear what Da was saying, yet she stared as if mesmerized. As if she couldn’t wait to hear the end of the story, either.
“After her husband died, Gertrude started getting seriously peculiar. People stayed away from her.” Da raised her fan like she wished she had something to swat. “Walter Junior was such a good son! I can’t tell you how many black eyes and bloody noses that boy endured, sticking up for his mother when other kids made fun of her.”
“But…how come her son never visits Starch…Mrs. Steinbott?”
“He joined the military directly out of high school.” Da pressed O GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY? to her heart. “He wasn’t there but two months before he was killed in a training exercise. Lord give me strength.”
Mo collapsed back in her chair. Unpleasant revelations were coming at her one right after another, like a nest of yellow jackets run over by a lawn mower.
“Gertrude’s hair turned pure white overnight. She took to that house and barely came out for a year.” Da rested the fan in her lap. “That was the year you were born, Mercedes Jasmine. I remember-this is how selfish your Da is. I remember being relieved not to have to see her. I was so happy while she was sunk in grief.”
The side door of the Wren house banged, and out zoomed Dottie, clutching a beer bottle in either hand.
“That child’s wild as my Monette!” Da clapped a hand over her mouth, but her smile crept out around the edges as Dottie dashed across Mrs. Steinbott’s grass (strictly forbidden) and buried her face in a fat yellow rose (penalty of death). “I’ll never forget it. The very day after Monette’s rose-petal bath, Mr. Walcott planted Gertrude three new bushes. A Martha Washington, a Dinah Shore, and a Purple Contessa.” Da nodded. “If I’m not mistaken, we’re looking at them right now.”
Dottie zigzagged across the street to pick up a cookie at Mrs. Petrone’s, then shot out between the parked cars to cross the street again and disappear up the driveway of the A.O.L. House.
“She knows that house is Absolutely Off Limits!” Mo jumped up. “I gotta go.”
“Yes, you may be excused, Mo Wren. But first, answer me this simple question.” Attach Da’s eyeballs to a drill and Mo would have a hole in her forehead, pronto. “When do you plan to teach that child to look both ways before she crosses?”
“I…I…” Mo swallowed. “I tried.”
“Tried’s not good enough!” Da thundered. “You know how those drunk drivers come roaring down this street. Dead end or no. It’s not safe!”
“You don’t need to tell me that, Da!” The words exploded out of Mo. “I already know!”
You didn’t talk to Da that way. Not if you had the sense a goose did. But Mercedes’s grandmother didn’t scold. Instead she let silence pool there on the porch. She gazed at her toe coffins propped up on the stool. At last she spoke.
“You do your best and then some, Mo. Lord knows what would have become of that handsome, foolish father of yours without your help!” Her hands fumbled with the fan. With a sorry little shock, Mo realized it was true: Da still wasn’t strong, and maybe never would be again.
“But I worry about that sister of yours!” Her voice was too small. “Every last one of us does. If anything ever happened to her, well, I can’t even think.” She touched her throat.
“Nothing’s going to happen to her.” Mo cupped Da’s shoulder. “I give you my pledge. I swear it on a mountain of Bibles. Don’t even
