“We could.” Brother stepped on the gas. I said, “But I’d just as soon go work.”
Brother looked at me, then at the road. He had his vehicle wound up to where I thought it would fly apart. Brother said, “You’re a sight.”
Brother took me back over to That Woman’s. I started in on the ivy work and yard trimming. That Woman sat at a fold-up table on the porch, wearing a peach-pop tanktop and a flouncy flowerdy skirt, drinking a beer lit up by the sunshine, beer yellow as a caution light, out of a girl-shaped glass. She wrote in the book she was reading. I’d set a load of brush at the bottom of the steps and was heading back up the hill to the backyard. I wadn’t going to say nothing, just walk on, get on with my business.
“Say, Gene,” she said.
“Say,” I said, squinting up at her.
She said, “Be careful,” and I thought, shoo, I’d be careful with her, whatever she wanted me to take care with. I went on in the backyard, fired up the weedeater, let myself get lost in that.
Before long, Hubert Jewell come up the steps, Albert trailing behind, looking down at the muscles in his arms. I kept on weedeating. A while later, I seen them go back down. When I got done edging, I cut down ivy a while, hauled it off. I got the work going good enough I could give my mind over to think about things. Spent some time trying to think like a fish, so it’d be easier to catch fish. Thinking about having eyes on either side of my head give me a headache, and I had to stop thinking like a fish, least for a while.
Sun got close to the ridgeline. Bugs started to stir. I went to see if That Woman might still be on her porch. She wadn’t, but when I come up the steps, she come out, stood in the empty doorframe, said, “Gene, what are we going to do about a door?”
I said I didn’t know. She smiled and blinked real slow. She might have had another beer. I couldn’t see it mattered much. She wadn’t no drunk. You could see that.
She said, “How much I owe you?” I named a figure and she said, “OK.”
She was easy to work with. Always was.
She said, “Do you want a glass of water?” I told her I could drink some water. She wasn’t gone a second before she come back with a glass full.
I said, “You want, I could get Brother to hang a new door for you.”
She said, “You reckon we could get it done tomorrow?”
I said, “I’m sure we could.”
We stood there saying nothing. There’s days I go without talking to nobody. I hadn’t talked much at all, really, since Easter. Not since Sister died.
That Woman’s eyes darted like dragonflies. I felt she had something on her mind, something she wanted to talk about. I figured it had to do with Hubert Jewell coming up there. Figured it had to do with what Brother said about her sister telling on people. That Woman’s eyes settled off over my shoulder.
“I start teaching my class Tuesday,” she said. “I reckon Monday’s the holiday.”
I said, “I reckon that’s right.”
She squeezed hard on the door hinge. I asked her did it bother her to stay there without no door.
“I don’t reckon,” she said. “Should it?”
I sipped on my water. “I’d keep an eye on you if you like.”
She said she didn’t need that.
I said, “Let me know. There aint nobody else there at Sister’s.”
She said, “They gone for the holidays?”
I said, “Something like that.”
That Woman set on an old rocking chair with a fake leather seat.
I said, “I seen Hubert Jewell come up here.”
The sun went behind the ridge and everything got darker in a way made my head light. In the dim, That Woman’s face turned up at me, cool as the air from a coal mine.
She said, “You know him?”
I said, “Not really.”
That Woman rocked in her rocking chair. She looked at me awhile and then she looked out over the town, said “Did you ever get in over your head, Gene?”
“Several times,” I said. “Mostly out at the lake.”
She smiled.
I said,
“Is that right?” That Woman said.
“Like a cinderblock with hair, she said.”
That Woman said, “Mine too.”
I was getting my talking ability back. I was about to sit down in the other rocking chair next to That Woman when she said, “Well, thank you, Gene,” in a goodbye way. She gave me forty dollars. I told her when I’d be back with Brother to get her a door and I went up the hill and back over to where I lived, in the little house out behind Sister’s.
DAWN
Friday night, I was going back to Tennessee, to be with my husband Willett Bilson and his parents for 4th of July. Aunt June took me up to Mamaw’s, to get the Escort she said I could drive. June had to stay in Canard. Get ready for her college class. She said, “They might have me a job. If I do right.” Before we left we went to see my grandfather, Houston Redding.
Houston didn’t live up on the mountain no more. He lived in one big room in town. Houston was June and Momma’s daddy. Since he’d settled down, they’d let him live in the High-Rise Apartments with all them other old people.
When me, June, and Nicolette got off the elevator in Houston’s apartment building, there was a wall covered by a photograph of some Rocky Mountain scene—sharp mountains covered with snow, flowers in the meadow in the foreground. Nicolette took off down the sticky carpet through the bleach stink to Houston’s door with its ribbons and toilet paper roll firecracker 4th of July decoration done by somebody feeling good about theirselves for all they’d done to cheer up old people.
Houston’s room was twenty foot square. His bed was in the far corner, in the shadows beside the window. It was a twin bed had an old quilt on it from the little house around the bend from my grandmother’s, the place she’d chased him when his loafing and trifling got too constant.
There was a bookcase beside his bed. On top of it set a big boombox. On the shelves beneath it set plastic boxes each holding ten cassette tapes. There was twelve of those boxes on the shelves beside Houston’s bed. There were another twelve cassette boxes on the shelf to my right as we come in the room. There were old dime store frames filled with oranged-out seventies-looking pictures of my mother and grandmother and Aunt June. They hung next to black-and-white copies of pictures of musicians in suits and fedoras from the twenties and thirties, blurred pictures of pictures hanging in the same dime store frames as the pictures of my mother and aunt and grandmother. A sorry-looking meals-on-wheels
