“Watch your mouth,” Roosevelt says.
“Willa Mae’s getting paved over don’t bother me none,” Billy says.
“If you was my own child I’d slap your mouth for talking like that,” I says.
“I ain’t yr child,” Billy says.
“I thank God you ain’t,” I says.
“Why you got to be so ugly?” Teddy asks her.
“I ain’t being ugly,” Billy says, “I’m just saying, if they gonna put a supermarket on top of her, I ain’t wasting my honeymoon running out there trying to stop them.”
Dill opens her mouth, running her tongue over the teeth she got left. “I guess that settles it,” she says.
Me and Teddy thought, if we loved Billy the way our mothers and fathers had loved us, if we put food on the table for her and clothes on her back and took care of her when she was sick and told her to go to school and helped her as we could with her homework, that she would be ours. All ours. But she wasn’t never ours no matter what we said or did. I was the first one who noticed she was pregnant. I looked at her one day. It was May. I asked her if her monthly was regular and she told me her monthly weren’t none of my business. She had quit her job in March and had quit school the year before and then had the nerve to say her monthly weren’t my business. Just as well she ain’t my child, I guess.
Billy straightens both her legs out in front of her and points her feet, then she turns and looks me straight in the eye. “You sitting here talking about the body, but you only really interested in the treasure,” she says.
“I’m talking about your own mother,” I says.
Billy keeps on, not even listening to me. “I always said there weren’t never no real treasure buried there nohow. It was all just a story she made up. I told you the truth of it but you stuck on believing the story,” she says.
“Dill buried your mother with her jewels. The pearl necklace and the diamond ring,” Roosevelt says.
“That stuff weren’t no real jewels. They was fakes, wasn’t they, Dill?” Billy asks.
“I ain’t no expert on the subject,” Dill says. “I just put it in the ground like she asked me to, I ain’t no expert on its value.”
“Hell, they was fakes, I’m telling you,” Billy says.
“I said watch your mouth,” Teddy says.
Billy closes her mouth and shuts her eyes. If she weren’t pregnant she’d let loose of that porch rail she’s balancing on and cover her ears with her hands. I seen her do it plenty of times. Like all Billy’s got to say is cusses and she got to close up every place so the cusses won’t come out. Me and Roosevelt and Dill look away. We hear Billy take a breath, but none of us look at her.
“This is Willa Mae Beede we talking about,” Billy says. Then she gets down from the railing and goes inside. After a minute I can hear her rattling that tin money box she got.
“You two don’t like the body getting paved over but Billy’s made her peace with it,” Dill says.
Billy comes to stand in the doorway. She’s got a single pearl earring in her hand. It was Willa Mae’s. “This is a jewel she had and it’s a fake. She tolt me so when she gived it to me.” She goes back inside. When she comes back out, the earring’s put away and she has some money in her hand. Not much. “I could use help with my bus fare to Texhoma,” she says.
Dill opens her billfold. It’s made of pig leather. She made it herself. There ain’t much money in it, but there’s some. “I can only spare a single,” Dill says. Billy takes it, but I can see by her face that she had hopes for more.
“A dollar’s better than nothing,” she says.
“Show yr manners,” Roosevelt prompts.
Billy says thanks and Miss He-She-It tips her hat.
There was a time when Dill woulda gived Willa Mae and Billy the world. I guess that time’s done passed.
If I had more money I’d take the time to hide it, but I don’t.
“I got three quarters in my spot. They’re yours if you want em,” I tell Billy and she goes inside to get them. Through the filling station office, out the back door, over the two wood planks and underneath the yellow plastic tarping that makes a sort of covered bridge between the office and the house, a trailer, truth be told, going in there and squeezing past the fold-down sink to my bed. Shaking the pillow slip for a pouch. My spot.
We all see someone coming down the road.
“What’s Laz doing walking down here?” Dill says.
“Maybe he wants some gas,” June says.
“He better go back home and get his hearse,” I says. And we all fall out laughing.
“It’s good Billy’s getting married,” Dill says. “People were starting to talk.”
“I ain’t heard no one talking,” June says.
Dill puts her hand in her pocket, fiddling with something. She’s been fiddling in her pocket like that for years. Like a fella would touch hisself from time to time. Dill sees me watching her fiddle and stops, taking out her hand. I want to tell her that she can go head and fiddle all she wants to, it’s her pocket and her privates.
“They was talking, believe me,” Dill says.
Billy comes out on the porch jangling my money in her hand. It don’t sound like three quarters, though.
“I found a silver dollar too,” she says.
I look over at June who is looking at me. The dollar is the first and the last of June’s leg money. “Let yr Uncle keep his old silver dollar for a little while longer,” I tell Billy.
A smile passes over June’s face before a new thought comes to her and she looks down at the floor. “We’ll need that dollar for our own bus fare when we head up after you tomorrow,” she says. And she’s right.
Billy gives me the dollar. “I’ma pack,” she says going inside. June clumps after her to help out.
Dill walks down the steps slow-like, taking one step at a time, placing one foot on the step then the other, standing still, then moving down the next step until she is standing flat on the ground.
“Guess you all won’t be going to LaJunta then,” Dill says.
“Don’t look like it,” I says.
“I shoulda brought Willa back here and buried her in the first place,” Dill says, “then we wouldn’t be worrying about her getting paved over.”
“Water under the bridge,” I says.
“Them diamonds and pearls woulda been nice.”
“Whoever said you can’t take it witchu didn’t know my sister,” I says.
“Willa Mae sure was something,” Dill says, her voice going funny, sad or mad, I can’t tell which.
I had plans that depended on someday getting the treasure my sister had left us. A new church maybe. But maybe not. Maybe just something easier, like a regular house instead of a trailer and land that we owned outright. I feel those plans move away from me, out of my reach. But there’s something I wanted more than a house, something I didn’t know I wanted more until now. My parents are buried in the colored section of the Butler County cemetery and my mind had planned, secretly, without me actually thinking about it, to lay Willa Mae alongside them. It woulda been nice, visiting them all at once.