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Fourteen
The rest of the morning passes the same way: walk, pause, slice, turn, and check. I picture the ukulele’s frets and practice fingering the chords to “Rainbow Connection” in my head. Before long, I am covered in a film of dirt, sweat dripping down my back. I wish I’d worn a bikini top like Aggie and Beth.
I had no idea there were so many kinds of weeds. I like volunteer corn the best. It’s just corn from the next field over that’s growing in the wrong place, and it’s very satisfying to cut. Just when I think I might lose my mind, Blake tells us we are on our last down-and-back of the day. Me and the other girls have walked at least twice as many rows as Jimmy and Clark, and ours are way cleaner.
“Nice work,” Blake says to me.
“You’re welcome to take over,” I say, pointing to a bushy plant.
“Oh, no. I’d never take a weed that wasn’t meant for me.” He looks at me a long minute, and I feel like I should just stay there, explain everything, keep talking about the weeds and the beans, let the sun go down while we stand in the middle of this field that stretches all the way from here to the edge of the earth in every direction.
I bend down and slice the last weed. He picks it up and studies it, so close I could bump elbows with him. The tiniest breeze dances by, and I lift my braids to catch it on the back of my neck.
Blake looks up like he just realized where he is. “Oh, hey,” he says. “It really is a grave.” He looks like a little boy, earnestly explaining some LEGO airplane or something.
I look around, confused. “Here in the beans?”
“No, no. I looked up that elephant, Kay? It’s her grave. She’s really there.” He says it like a peace offering, like I already explained about River, and Mama, and Patsy, and like, yeah, maybe we kissed that one time, but that’s in the past and he’s okay with leaving it there.
“She’s buried there,” I say, like I agree with him and we are just two friends talking about the random elephant grave we saw, or like a boss and his worker just shooting the shit.
“Right there.”
“Huh.” I smile at him.
He smiles back and says, “It’s a cool story. Thousands and thousands of kids gave their pennies until they raised enough money to bring her to America from India where she was captured.”
“Wow,” I say, slicing a smaller weed. I think of the elephant Mama and me rode, its big dark eye with the long lashes, and how the elephant seemed to take up the whole sky. “She must have been so scared, being captured like that, taken away from her family.”
“Yeah. She never had a chance to live the life she was supposed to live,” Blake says, looking off to where the last clouds are finally leaving. “They decided it all for her.” He stands for a minute, then cuts two weeds real fast before walking on.
If Kay’s mama had been with her, would she have been scared to leave the only home she’d ever known? Maybe having her mama would’ve made up for everything else she left behind.
Jimmy and Clark are using their bean hooks like swords, jumping rows while they battle.
Blake whips his head around. “Hey, knock it off!” He jumps across the rows to stop them, as close to running as he can get while carrying the bean hook.
Idiots.
Alone again, I get back to work. My shoes are still damp from the morning, but the leaves brush my dry legs now, all the dew burned off by the sun. Aggie and Beth are singing up ahead, and Patsy joins in.
How old was I when we rode that elephant? It was in the good years of Mama’s job, so maybe I was eight or nine. I don’t remember anything about the first little apartment in Chicago, but Mama sure did.
“I swore after we got out of that shithole that we were gonna live like queens, and that’s what we’re doing. I put in too many nights of hell to turn down free room service just because your chicken nuggets are spicy. Your crib was in the bathroom, Bliss. The bathroom. Stretch out on that queen-size bed over there and eat your goddamn room-service nuggets.”
I was about seven when Mama’s jobs got hotter. Her agent would call, and we’d head out wherever she told us to go, sometimes leaving in the middle of the night to make it on time. A few times, she hooked us up with a charter bus that had its own bathroom for her and the other girls, and Mama loved that.
It was almost more than she could stand when she got picked to be the celebrity guest at the circus. At the last minute, she decided I could come, too—“Mother-daughter celebrities! Won’t they just love that?”—and it took me all day to believe I was really there. I remember the thrill of being plunked down in front of Mama like a hundred feet off the ground on top of the elephant. Mama’s arms were around me, holding me tight up there, protecting me, making me feel brave. The thick gray skin of the elephant was soft, except for the little fuzzy hairs on the top of its head, and the giant ears brushed my knees like a leathery blanket. The smell of elephant poop mixed with Mama’s perfume as she pulled me close to her, squeezing me tight.
Riding on the elephant, feeling Mama’s arms around me, was the first moment that felt real that whole day at the circus. Maybe the first time in years.
I remember that I felt real, too.
“Everything hurts,” Patsy says as we drive home, the first words she has said to me since lunch. “And my shoulders are burned. But it’ll be worth it when I save enough for beauty school.”
“You know she’ll never let you go,” I say, real low.
“Watch me.”
I can barely hold my head up enough to nod. If she asks me about Blake right now, I won’t be able to tell her anything—truth, lies, or anywhere in between. She plugs in her dead phone and it beeps when it has a charge again, then buzzes with like forty texts, and I go to read them to her, like always when she’s driving.
“Leave it”—she pulls the phone away from me—“it’s nothing.” She stuffs it on her lap, but not before I see that the texts are all from Nathan.
I raise my eyebrows up at her. “Nothing?”
Her face gets red. “I call first shower.”
River’s busy with poker night out at Granny’s, so I grab the ukulele from Patsy’s room and take it out back to practice some, but just as I finally get a chord right, everybody in the whole house decides to come sit on the patio. Someone’s mowing their lawn nearby, and a far-off dog barks and barks. Patsy drags the sprinkler to the back of the lawn, then twists the faucet until a plume of water bursts out of it. Mama and Aunt Trish come out of the house bickering about the crystal bowl like they have every day since Mama came.
“I’m telling you, that’s my bowl,” Mama says. She struggles to pull apart two stacked chairs, shrugging Clyde off, and almost tips herself over when they fly apart. She recovers quickly and sets the chairs up for her and Clyde.
“Maybe it was yours once, but Mother gave it to me.” Aunt Trish offers Mama and Clyde beers from the flamingo-decorated plastic tray. She sets matching flamingo glasses of lemonade in front of me and Patsy, then sags into her own plastic chair. “She really, really wanted me to have it.”
“But it’s not yours.” The tink-tink of Mama’s fingernails as she drums them on her beer bottle competes with the sprinkler as the water drops move across the lawn, and her voice cuts through them both.
I’m only half listening to their same argument as I fiddle with the uke, going between two chords and getting the second one wrong every single time. I try once more, then I lay the uke aside and roll my neck to shake off the frustration.
“Where did it come from, if you know so much?” Mama asks, and I perk up at her new line of questioning. “Where did Mother get the bowl?” Mama crosses her arms in front of her chest like she scored a point, her many bracelets jangling together.
Aunt Trish shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. She gave it to me.”
Mama goes to take a drink of her beer, then stops with it halfway to her mouth. She closes her eyes for a long moment, then sets down the beer, like she’s caving in to a demand.
Her blue eyes go hazy, like she’s stepped out of time for a minute, and she starts talking in a dreamy voice. “I was dying here, you understand? With Mother’s rules and her lectures. ‘Don’t feed that to the baby,’ and ‘You’re going to spoil her,’ every time I tried to help dress her or put her to bed. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get it right. So I had to go. Mother wouldn’t let me take Bliss, but she was mad that I left her behind. I couldn’t win.”
Clyde pats her knee, and Mama gives him a gentle smile. “Mother used to call every Sunday night. ‘To update you on the baby,’ she’d say, but mostly she freshened up the guilt trip and complained about money. One week, right after I hung up, I passed that bowl in the window of a jewelry shop, and it came to me like a miracle—I needed to give it to Mother, to thank her for taking care of Bliss, to show her I cared. I walked right in and asked to buy it. But it was over a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred dollars?” Patsy whistles. “For a bowl?”
Mama smiles at her. “Saving up for that bowl was the first time I’d ever really managed money, even though I’d been on my own for a long time. I was so excited when I had enough to make them wrap it up for me, I could have flown back to Lakeville that instant!”
Mama’s eyes light up, and she looks around at all of us, and I know I’m not the only one who is picturing her handing the bowl to Gramma with her face all shining and proud.
“I don’t remember—” Aunt Trish starts, but Mama holds up her pointer finger, her face shifting, darkening.
“Oh, you wouldn’t. Three months I saved up for that bowl. Mother took one look, shut the box, and told me I was wasteful, selfish, irresponsible, and a bad mother. Then she stuck it in a corner, set a basket of dirty laundry on top, and went to change the baby’s diaper.”
Even Uncle Leo is shaking his head, and Clyde sucks a breath in through his teeth. Mama looks carved out of glass, like she might shatter into a million pieces if the wind blows the wrong direction. The only sound is the patter of the sprinkler as it works its way across the grass.
I wish we were the kind of family that hugged people when they were sad, but all I know how to do for Mama is see the tears in her eyes through my own watery view. “Mama—” I start, but Aunt Trish talks over me.
“Well,” Aunt Trish says all businesslike, “maybe that’s what she said to you.” She stands up and begins gathering empty cups and bottles back onto her tray. “All’s I know is years later, when she was in that hospital bed weak as a kitten, she grabbed my arm and wouldn’t turn loose of it until I told her I’d look out for that bowl. She made me promise twice.”
Mama puts her hand on Aunt Trish’s arm. “Really?”
“Really.” Aunt Trish pauses. “Now can someone help me get these things inside?” All of us except Mama jump up to help Aunt Trish load everything back to the kitchen. I’m about to open the screen door to go back out, but the sound of the ukulele freezes me in my tracks. Through the shadow of the screen door, I see Mama with her head bent over the ukulele, and she’s doing way more than learning a chord.
The first notes drift in like little drops of sunlight, bright and happy, but searching for something, too. She plucks through the intro, then slides right into the chords, and she whisper-sings along: “Why are there so many songs about rainbows?”
I can’t hardly breathe, it...
