“Where’s Tricia?” Evie said to Mamaw.
Mamaw said, “Not here.”
Evie said, “She’s sposed to be here.”
Mamaw pushed a spraypaint can into a pile of clothes with her toe and shrugged.
Evie said, “You gonna let us in your college class, June? I aint going to lie to you. I need the money.”
June was teaching a summer art class at the community college. She’d got a grant to pay the students who took it.
June said, “Yes, Evie. Of course.”
Evie said “Starts Wednesday, right?”
“Yes,” June said. “No. It starts this coming Tuesday.”
Evie said, “I’ll be there Wednesday.”
Talking to Evie was like somebody emptying a nail gun into the side of your head. I said, “You don’t need to take that class, Evie. That class is for people who give a shit.”
Evie said, “Why do you care then?”
I headed to the kitchen.
Evie said, “Tricia’s taking it.”
June said, “Taking what?”
Evie said, “Your class.”
That summer Momma and Evie’s shame was so gone you couldn’t have found it with a pack of prison movie dogs. Momma and Evie could have cared less how it would make June feel for them to fart around in her summer class, how it might knock out somebody who might actually want to be in there.
I went upstairs.
GENE
That banty-rooster girl Evie said, “Who are you?” and I said, “Nobody,” cause she come at me like a wad of yellowjackets, and caught me blank.
She said, “I can’t say you aint.” Then she was gone, quick as she come, and that old woman, Cora, looked at me and said, “Now, whose are you?” I told her who my daddy was and she said, “Why you here?” and when I pointed at That Woman, Cora said, “Yeah, I seen you get out of her car, but why have you come here?”
I said, “To mow the yard.”
Cora said, “Well, that aint nothing to be ashamed of, is it?” She looked at Nicolette when she said it.
Nicolette said, “I don’t reckon.”
I’ll just say it—the whole bunch made me nervous. I come from some ruckus-making people, so I try to avoid stir in strangers, and if it was most people, I’d of just cut the grass and not said nothing to none of them, just gone to That Woman for my pay when I was done. But That Woman was a bug zapper and I was the bug. I couldn’t stay away from her nor nothing swirling in the area around her.
Cora said, “What are you looking at June for?”
I pulled my mouth shut and said I didn’t know.
Cora said, “Come with me.” We went through the kitchen to the back door. She took me out in the yard, said, “Is that all you do is mow?”
I said,
She said, “Come here.”
She climbed up the rock steps wedged into the hillside past a flat spot held in place by a low stone wall, could have been a garden spot was it not all growed up. She took me to another stone wall on the far side of the flat spot. The second wall was higher than the first, made of creek rock. The old woman stopped short and I about run into her. She clamped down on my shirtsleeve, made me feel like a field mouse a bird had snatched up out of a field, said, “You see them hydrangeas?”
I said I did.
She said, “Anything happen to them hydrangeas I’ll murder you.”
I said, “Did you plant them or something?”
She looked at me flat as pavement, said, “Look at them.”
They was four hydrangea bushes stretched out towards the kudzu that had took over the hillside behind That Woman’s house. Cora said again, “Look at them.”
I reckon what she was wanting me to look at was the wads of flowers, blue and purple at once. The shade of a big oak made the flowers look like something you’d see under the ocean on one of them coral reefs like I saw on TV in this motel one time in Newport when Sister and her husband took us to see the Cincinnati Reds play baseball. I’d never seen a TV that bright and clear. I’d never seen a coral reef neither and I couldn’t believe how all them bright colors was waving in the blue water, and how bright and striped and spotted the fish were, and how all that bright actually helped them hide amongst that coral. I wanted to understand it more, but Sister’s husband flipped the channel to try and find the UK football game.
That old woman said, “You got it?” I said I did and she said, “Well then, come over here.” She darted off behind a snowball bush on the other side of the yard where there wadn’t hardly no room to go.
I followed in after her. We come to the far side of the house. The air condition perched in an upstairs window dripped like a ice cream cone. That old woman had a walking stick painted with spots and stripes like a coral reef fish. She tapped me with it on my shins, said, “All that vine has got to go,” and waved her stick from the back end of the house to the front. They was vine all over a trellis by the front porch and they was vine running up the electric meter and they was vine running up on the satellite cables and they was vine running up the power line feeding the air condition. At the base of the house, they was junk bushes, all thick and tangly with vine, out of which all the rest of that vine was spewing like some vine volcano.
I said to that old woman, “That’s a mess of vine.”
She said, “We need rid of it. Can you handle it?”
I looked back over the whole thing, believing I could, and when I threw back my head, they was a woman standing at the very peak of the roof. I couldn’t make out much about her because the sun was behind her head, but I could hear a bird chirping and it was like a morning bird, a bird that had forgotten to wake up, which couldn’t be cause birds don’t forget to wake up.
That old woman hollered, “Patricia!” and it startled the woman against the sky and she threw her arms out to balance herself. The roof woman seemed thin and light, nothing but the center nub to her, which could have been a trick of the sunshine. She wobbled, one foot on either side of the peak, faced right straight out over us. She fell down on her knees, hanging on with both hands to the lip of the roof, looked down at us, said, “Smile, Momma. Don’t be so sour.”
DAWN
The upstairs of Momma’s house wadn’t no better than the down below. The air conditioner in the stair window roared like people on Fox News. All the other windows swung open on their hinges, waved in the wind like pothead beauty queens. A bird flapped through Momma’s bedroom, bashed his head against the wall, pooped her bed, flung himself out into the glare. One wall was half-painted green. Another half-painted gray. There was a mattress on the floor, ashtrays on either side, a knocked-over lamp, scattered clothes—some sparkly, some tie-dyed—little clothes, way littler than mine.
Out the window, Canard rolled out to a pointy-headed mountain at the other end of town. The town looked pretty laid out there in the valley. Things had been too jacked up in Canard for too long for anybody to have enough money to ruin its old-timey look. I wondered about the man who built this house, back in the 1920s. I wondered did he think Canard would go on forever. I wondered did he care.
There was a clatter on the roof. Momma come around the