“What about you, Chaurisse?” Uncle Raleigh said. “Can you find it in your heart to talk to ole Raleigh?”
I wasn’t sure what was in my heart. I went to school every day as usual. I scored C’s on my tests, performed passable arpeggios on my flute, as average and as invisible as before Dana Yarboro bul ed our china shop. For the first time in years, I was grateful that my father encouraged me to attend Northside, so far from my neighborhood — the ride to school was about twenty-five minutes by car and forty-five if I took MARTA. Dana was over at Mays High, just down the street. The word had no doubt trickled down a generation from Mrs. Grant to Ruth Nicole Elizabeth and outward from there. Even if she never heard the whispers, Dana was likely on edge like Mama and me as we kept on working in relaxers, scrunching in finger waves, and sewing in weaves. There was no way to know for sure who had heard what, so al you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything.
During the seventeen days and eighteen nights of my father’s absence, my mother slept beside me in my canopy bed. It wasn’t my idea, but on the second night she tapped on the door frame, boozy-peachy and pleading. I rol ed over until my backside bumped the wal . The bed sank a little under her weight. “You awake, Chaurisse? I can’t sleep.” She rol ed over on her side, arranging herself around me. My mother’s body was soft and warm, smel ing of schnapps and the oily silk wrap wound around her head. “You’re al I have now,” she said.
“No,” I said. “That can’t be right. You stil have the Pink Fox.”
“Maybe. If I divorce your father, al of our stuff wil be split up. He could buy me out. Him and Raleigh could together, and then they could move that lady and her daughter right in here.”
“Daddy and Raleigh wouldn’t do that.”
“There’s no tel ing what they might do, Chaurisse. Don’t you get it? Anybody could be doing anything at any time.”
I couldn’t picture Daddy and Raleigh kicking my mama out of her own home, closing the Pink Fox and sending her back to renting a chair in another woman’s shop. But then again, two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have pictured them enjoying a whole second family, eating dinner twice on Wednesdays. When I didn’t work hard to keep my mind on its chain, I could picture my daddy, naked but for his glasses, draped in a chenil e bedspread, a churning mound over Dana’s pretty mother, her hair spread over a satin pil owcase.
I GAVE MY MOTHER ten days for her hard mourning. My thinking was that people general y got a week off of work when someone actual y died.
During this set-aside time, I comforted her as she mooned over old photo albums. I knelt beside her as she turned out my father’s top dresser drawer, sending change, matchbooks, prophylactics, and even a tiny jar containing my baby teeth crashing to the carpet. When her nervous stomach stole her appetite, I didn’t force her to eat the meals I prepared. When her appetite returned, I didn’t stop her from eating cans of cake icing, one buttery spoonful at a time. I figured it was her right. On the tenth night, I started what they used to cal “tough love.” At the first sound of her sniffling, I hardened myself and said, “Don’t be so sad. You need to be angry, pissed off. If I was you, I’d be in the kitchen boiling up a pan of grits.”
Mama tightened her arm around me under the sheet. “Don’t play like that.”
I was kidding, but then again, I wasn’t. It seemed that there should be some sort of consequences for what my father had done.
“Even if he threw me out of this house,” Mama said, “I wouldn’t do what Mary done.”
“At least Mary’s famous. Everybody in the whole world knows what she did. And besides, we are not going to get thrown out of this house,” I said.
“Let’s say I file for divorce and we get a good judge that says I can stay in this house. You know James is going to just move in with them. When I was coming up, people used to say ‘It’s a mighty poor rat ain’t got but one hole.’”
Crowding me in my own bed, my mother talked her greatest fears aloud. Did I think that Miss Bunny knew al along? I said that Daddy was probably the one who gave Gwendolyn the brooch, not Miss Bunny herself. Mama said then she was glad that Miss Bunny was gone to glory before she could see al of us shamed like this. I said that yes, that was probably a blessing. In a drowsy voice, Mama pointed out that ful -time students could finish beauty school in a year. Dana and her mama could get certified and take over the Pink Fox. I said, “Dana doesn’t want to do hair; she’s going to Mount Holyoke. She is going to be a doctor.” My mother turned herself over and caught me again in a tight spoon. “Your father’s going to pay for that. There won’t be anything left.”
She gave her little sigh that signaled that the schnapps and Tylenol had final y gotten the best of her and she was drifting to sleep. The clock on my bed table glowed 2:13 a.m. “Good night, Mama.”
“Chaurisse?” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Do you think he did it because I’m not pretty? You know, I wasn’t yet fifteen when we got married. Gwen, she probably knows how to do things that I never heard of. She probably reads
While my mother was competing for the title of Most Brokenhearted Person Ever, I kept retracing my steps, trying to figure when I came to a crossroads and took the wrong turn. When it came to parents, I was a mighty poor rat. It’s not like I could have chosen a spare set in case my folks went crazy on me. Mama and Raleigh got lucky. When their biological situation didn’t work out, they ran over to Grandma Bunny. I didn’t have anyone except James and Laverne.
My mother’s body was heavy as a sandbag; my arm pinned under her was starting to hurt. I twisted free of her. It had been ten long days.
“Mama,” I snapped, flexing my tingling arm. “Stop whining. Stand up for yourself. Grab a broom. Put sugar in his gas tank. Something.”
My mother sat up, turned on the bedside lamp, kicked off the covers, and climbed out of my bed. The skin on the undersides of her arms shook as she jabbed her finger in my direction.
“Don’t you turn against me, Bunny Chaurisse.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. “I just want you to be more . . .” The word that came to mind was
