Cecilia stood up, arms spread, “Why didn’t anybody tell me I don’t have eight kids? I thought I had at least six. There’s only two of you? Nobody tells me jack anymore.” She patted her huge stomach. “Maybe there’s one in there?” She eyeballed her stomach. “Yooo-hooo! Anyone in there? Hello? Another baby? Maybe two?”
Kayla picked up a ravioli with her fork and aimed it at her mother.
“Don’t you dare,” Cecilia told her. “Don’t you dare.”
She put the ravioli down, scowling.
I threw one of my ravioli at Kayla.
Cecilia tossed a ravioli at Kayla, too. It landed on her face. She said, “Bless you, bad mother.”
I threw one at Janie. She jumped in surprise, and tossed one at Riley. Appropriately, it landed on her hair. Riley took it off her head and started squishing it through her fingers.
Henry laughed. He picked up a handful of ravioli and put them on his head. “Look me! Look me! I have ravioli nest on my head! Ravioli nest. I need a bird!”
Grandma stood up straight, pulled her goggles over her head, and straightened her flight jacket. “I am ready to take off now.” She grabbed a handful of ravioli and threw them into the air, then climbed on top of the table and sat in the middle of it. “There’s weather ahead! Weather ahead!” she screamed. “Prepare for a crash landing! SOS! SOS!”
We knew what to do or Grandma would get all upset. We pretended to pull on our own flight goggles, dropped napkins on our heads, and held on to our seats while we rocked back and forth.
“Hang on! We’re going down! We’re going down!” She shouted into her glass, “SOS! SOS!”
We all threw some more ravioli squares, then we crashed.
Grandma stopped abruptly, sighed heavily. “We’re lost.”
Grandma was so, so right.
We were lost. I tossed a slice of garlic bread at Cecilia.
She caught it in midair and rolled her eyes.
Velvet helped get Grandma to bed after dinner while we girls did the dishes.
Velvet Eddow was the skinniest person I’d ever seen and reminded me of Mrs. Ichabod Crane without the horse. She was six feet tall with white curling hair she piled on top of her head and strong bones in her face. She was not younger than seventy-five and had a thick, gentle, rolling southern drawl she’d acquired after living for fifty years in Alabama. Those words left her mouth like honey, with the honey winding its way around each syllable, smooth and gold and yummy.
Sometimes she used ol’ southern sayings and sometimes I knew she was making them up on the fly.
I’d watched her with Henry and Amelia Earhart. She was brilliant and, most important, kind. It did not take us more than a day to beg her to move into the spare bedroom in the house until further notice.
She gave us a hug and said, “Well ain’t that the berries! Sure, sugar, I’ll come help y’all. This takes the cake!”
In college the woman with the honey drawl studied engineering when it was an all-male domain. “The men didn’t even know what to do with me. I wasn’t their mother or their sister or their girlfriend. But I was smarter than them. They didn’t get that part. It baffled the heck out of all of ’em.
“Men are easily baffled, though, darlin’, don’t ever forget that. Their brains think like porn. That’s the only way I can describe it, darlin’, like porn. ” She dragged that word out real long. “One part of their brain thinks, the other part is holding a breast in his hand, at all times. I’m givin’ that to you as free advice, darlin’.”
“I’ll remember that, thank you.”
“Men are for amusement only. They are treats. Like candy. Like ice cream on an Alabama afternoon. A dessert. They are not the main course. As soon as you have a man in your life who becomes the main course, that is the time, my sweet, when you should go on a diet. Right that second. Men are for dessert only.” Envision: Honey.
“Yum, yum,” I told her.
“They are yummy.” She winked at me. “But never take them seriously. A bite here and there is puh-lenty. All three of my husbands died, bless their pea-brained souls, but I never thought of them as the chicken and potatoes. They were always the flamin’ cherries jubilee at the end of dinner.” She stared off into space. “And there was many a time, darlin’, that I wanted to set them on fire.”
Okay dokay.
As long as she didn’t set any men on fire in the house with her cherries jubilee, we’d be good.
Later that night, about one o’clock, I headed for the middle of the grass near a huge weeping willow tree in the yard. The moon was almost smack over my head and the stars were bright white holes in the deep soft black.
I closed my eyes against my life. I thought about my loft in Portland, the view of the river, my cameras I could hide behind, and my darkroom I could work in for hours. Dark on dark.
I wanted the aloneness of my life, even though it came with the familiar thick blackness, the blackness I struggled to contain and felt lost in. I didn’t want this mess here.
All the emotion.
The fighting and the stress. The total lack of control. The incessant responsibility, the small town, the Momma element.
I wanted my loft.
The wind meandered over my face.
What the hell was I doing here in Trillium River, I asked myself. What the hell?
One sole star twinkled at me. I rubbed my hands over my face, then breathed in a touch of wind.
I knew why I was here.
I knew.
About a year after Dad and his jungle nightmares took off, Momma told us she was a dancer. We thought that was pretty cool. She had been working as a waitress during the day but she kept getting fired because of Henry.
Henry cried when he had a sitter and if he wasn’t crying he was ill with one of his many health problems—asthma, chronic colds, sleeping problems that produced colds, continual stomachaches, pneumonia, and ear infections—and she had to be home to take care of him.
So Momma would soon be fired for taking too much time off, we’d rapidly be broke, she’d get that empty no-one’s-home blankness in her eyes, then go to bed for a few days or a few weeks, and the hard-core struggling would begin.
When Momma told us she had a job as a dancer the first time, we were living in Massachusetts. We envisioned her with one of those Las Vegas showgirl type costumes doing the cancan. Why we thought that, I don’t know.
All I knew was that Momma started working nights and left us notes on pink paper on what to do and not do when she was gone. Janie, Cecilia, and I watched Henry when she left about two hours after we got home from school. What we liked about that job is that Momma always brought food home after her shift so we’d have it the next night for dinner.
Plus, we finally had cash in the cookie jar so we could buy milk and eggs. There is nothing like the taste of cow milk when you’re a kid and you’ve been drinking powdered milk or water for weeks. Our water and electricity were no longer turned off and our phone worked on a consistent basis.
We threw out our old shoes, held together with duct tape, and Momma bought us new tennis shoes. Mine were pink, I remember that.
We still got free lunch at school, but Momma told us we could go down the street to get ice cream on Friday. We were stunned, beyond delighted.
It wasn’t too long before we got the truth.
A