My father entered the room while Mama was fumbling with the brooch. She stuck herself with the pin and left a faint streak of red on Miss Bunny’s col ar. “D-d-don’t worry about it,” he said, slipping the brooch into his pocket. I turned away, staring into the hot plate, where the straightening comb steamed. Behind me, I heard the hiss of film advancing as Uncle Raleigh snapped our picture. As I was blinking from the flash he took three or four more.
“Don’t worry, Raleigh,” Mama told him. “We got Miss Bunny looking real nice. It was the least I could do.”
Uncle Raleigh said, “I miss her already.”
“Me, too,” Mama said. “When my son was born, with the cord around his neck, just as dead as anybody, as stil as Miss Bunny here on this table, she took care of me. She washed me, put me in bed, changed my linens.”
By the time she delivered, Mama had gotten used to being married, used to living with Daddy and Raleigh. It was too late to go back to school; she wouldn’t be al owed. After they buried that baby boy in the churchyard, she had said to Grandma Bunny, “You going to send me back?”
“Not unless you want to go,” said Grandma Bunny.
“SHE DID RIGHT by me, righter than rain, and righter than my own mama,” my mother said.
“I miss her,” Uncle Raleigh said again. He turned away from where she lay on that metal table. My mama took the straightening comb from the hot plate and set it on a wet towel. While it sizzled, she turned toward Uncle Raleigh and laid her hands on his back and pressed her wet face to his clean shirt.
My father and I stood there, left out of their embrace. Miss Bunny was our blood relative; we weren’t her took- ins, but we loved her, too. “C-c-come here,” he said to me, spreading his arms. I sank into his hug, which smel ed strong with tobacco, and maybe a trace of gin. He clapped me on the back like I was a baby with colic. I believe he kissed my hair. Against my cheek, I felt Grandma Bunny’s brooch stashed in his lapel pocket. I pushed against it harder, hoping to emboss my face with the jeweled star pattern.
13
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT DRIVEN SNOW
“YOU NEVER KNOW,” my mother said to me. “You never know what means what.”
“True,” I said. I was just nine years old, give or take, but I had learned not to interrupt my mother when she was on a rol , especial y not when she was talking to me in the deep voice she used with the women in the beauty shop. She didn’t talk this way to al of them, of course; different people got different treatment, just as some people had to pay for every clip of the shears and other people got their bangs straightened for free. On that day, in the car, she talked the way she did with the longtime customers, the ones who got their lips waxed on the house, the ones who cal ed me
“Miss Lady” and cal ed my mother “Girl.”
“George Burns cheated on Gracie,” Mama said. “Can you believe that?”
I didn’t believe or not believe it, as I wasn’t absolutely sure who George Burns was. “The man who plays God in that movie?”
“Yes,” she said. “Him. He hasn’t always been old, you know. He was young and handsome and he was married to Gracie.”
“Oh,” I said. “I remember.” This was the key. If I talked too much, asking her to clarify, she would remember I was a kid and then she wouldn’t talk to me like this.
This was a long time ago, way back when Jimmy Carter made a fool of himself by tel ing
“I don’t know,” my mama said. “I like the last part of what he said, about people not judging each other.”
When she said this, Daddy scooted closer to her on the couch, touching her cheek with his glass of gin-and- tonic. “You got something you don’t want to be judged for, girl?”
Mama laughed and pushed the glass away. “James, you are so crazy.”
“I’m just getting started,” he said.
MAYBE IT WAS because I spent half my life in my mother’s beauty shop, but it seemed that I knew quite a bit about marriage, even when I was just a little girl. It was probably a bad sign when I touched my kindergarten teacher on the knee when she looked unhappy and said, “Marriage is complicated.”
This was my mother’s favorite refrain. She said it at least daily to some woman dripping wet in the shampoo bowl. A shift in pitch flipped the meaning entirely, but the words were always the same. In the car that day on the way to the beautysupply store, talking about George and Gracie, she didn’t say “Marriage is complicated” in a between-the-lines way, like she did when she tried to talk over my head. This time she said it like she needed a word from another language, but she just had to settle for “complicated.”
I nodded, enjoying the sound of her voice. It was like I was her best friend. And maybe I was. For sure, she was mine. Even before puberty changed the stakes, I never had much truck with girls. Spending so much time with grown women had ruined my timing and dated my speech, making me poor company for my peers. As much as I tried, I never could get any traction. Not that I was an outcast. I got invited to slumber parties and I went, as eager as anyone, but I was no one’s best friend, and the best friend is the only friend that matters.
“So where was I?” Mama said.
“You were talking about God.”
“No I wasn’t,” she said. “I was talking about how irritated I am to be spending my Saturday driving way out here to return this dryer. When I bought it, I asked her, ‘Is it quiet?’ She said it was quiet as rain, and then I turn it on and it sounds worse than a lawn mower.” She lowered her voice and winked. “One of the customers said it sounds like a cheap vibrator.”
I nodded, although I didn’t know what she meant.
