When we passed the sign to get on the interstate highway, he didn’t put on his turn signal and instead kept driving along the two-lane road. He slowed a bit at every intersection, giving my mother the chance to ask him to change course.
11
THE PRIZEWINNER
AS MY JUNIOR YEAR came to a close, and I started thinking about col ege applications, James assured me many times that Chaurisse was going to Spelman Col ege, right here in Atlanta. “She’s a stay-at-home girl,” he said. “Takes after her mama, just like you take after yours.” He spoke with conviction, without even a flutter of a stammer, but how could I trust his report? I, better than anyone, understood the limits of my father’s ability to predict the desires, actions, and motivations of a teenage girl. Besides, James had not been right since his mother died.
After Miss Bunny’s funeral, James spoke softly, ate less. He lost track of himself, leaving his hat on after he’d entered the house, cal ing my mother and me by the names of our rivals. How could we bring ourselves to be angry with him, pitiful as he was? The stubble growing on his chin was stiff and spiked with white. When he took off his jacket, I could see that he ironed only the col ar of his white shirt, leaving the rest rough-dried.
He had repaired his glasses with an unfolded paper clip.
My worried mother asked me to catch the school bus, so I would be at home within an hour of the final bel , so that someone would be at the apartment if my father were to drop by. She had beat me home one May afternoon and found him waiting on the back porch, cracking his knuckles until they were swol en and sore. When he stood up, the grime from the rusty chair left a butterfly across the seat of his good wool trousers.
“James needs us right now,” my mother said.
He didn’t show up very often, so I spent many afternoons alone in the apartment, reordering the keepsakes atop my chest of drawers, leafing through col ege brochures, and longing for Ronalda’s basement hideaway. When we passed each other between classes one Thursday, she pressed a skinny joint into my hand, folded over in a discarded sandwich bag. At home, I turned on the bathroom fan and pul ed open the thin paper, touching my tongue to the crease, but getting high without Ronalda only made me paranoid and depressed.
When my father did come over on those early afternoons, he quizzed me about my only conversation with Miss Bunny.
“What did she say to you?”
“I already told you.”
“You didn’t tel me word for word.”
“I don’t remember word for word. Do you want me to get you an ashtray? Do you need a gin-and-tonic?”
“Would you get one for me?”
I set his gin-and-tonic on a coaster in front of him while he tamped his cigarette pack against his knee.
“How’s school?”
“Good.”
“Are you working on your col ege applications?”
“I’m just sending off to Mount Holyoke. That’s the only place I want to go. Okay?”
“I told you that you don’t have to worry about it. Mount Holyoke is expensive, but I am going to pay for it. Did you tel that to Miss Bunny?”
“How do you know Chaurisse isn’t applying to Mount Holyoke?”
“She’s not applying.”
“But how do you know?”
He took a swig of his drink. “She doesn’t like cold weather. Now answer my question about your grandmother. Did you tel her that I was going to pay for you to go to col ege?”
“She didn’t ask me.”
“You should have found a way to work it into conversation. What al did you say to her? I know I asked you before, but just run it al by me one last time.”
He worried so much about it that my mother started worrying, too, although I had given her the details as soon as I came home that evening. I had told her everything, after describing the shiny blue brooch that was to be my only inheritance. When I reported that James had told Miss Bunny that my mother was dead, she gasped as though she had been poked in a delicate place, and then she let go only a couple of tears before gathering herself together. It was not the first time that I had seen my mother cry, but the experience troubled me in the pit of myself.
“I ask for so little,” she said.
“I know, Mother.”
When she came to me three months later, inquiring again about the details of my conversation with Miss Bunny, I said, “I told you everything that there is to tel . You don’t want to go through it al again?”
She said, “When you told me before, I was distracted by the shock of it. I just want to know, now, for the sake of information. You father is tied up in knots and I am just trying to understand why.”
“I don’t know what he wants me to say. He asks me every time, and I don’t know what I am supposed to say.”
Mother sat down and took off her nursing shoes. “This is so peculiar.” In the kitchen, she fil ed a basin with warm water, adding a scoop of Epsom salts and a squirt of soap before putting it down in front of the couch, letting the sudsy water slosh onto the carpet. She slid her feet into the basin.
