“Got any food in the fridge?” Mama asked.
August opened the door wider, taking in the spectacle before her. “Is the pope Catholic?”
Mama shrugged.
I could hear Wolf growl again over the hum and buzz of the bees and the hummingbirds.
“My word,” August said in a whisper then. “Did it get that bad?”
“I’ll take my old room if I can have it,” Mama said.
Auntie August fumbled into the deep silk folds of her kimono, her face momentarily scrunched in mild annoyance. Like she had an itch she couldn’t quite reach. From out of her robe’s pocket came the unmistakable green-and-white packaging of a pack of Kools, and the relief was visible in Auntie August’s face. That pack of smokes. I felt a pang, sharp in my ribs, like one of them was missing. Daddy had smoked Kools. Would religiously pull out the green-and-white carton and smack it against his knee a few times before removing and lighting a cigarette and asking if Mya and I wanted to hear another ghost story.
In a series of deft movements, August removed a cigarette and positioned a lighter in her other hand, ready to strike. She motioned with her cigarette, first at Mya, then at me. “And them girls?” Her glance seemed to rest longer on me than on Mya.
“Together. In the quilting room,” Mama said, with a sharpness to her voice that almost sounded defensive, but with something else there I couldn’t place.
August, with the quickness of a serpent, reached out her hand and grasped Mama’s chin in her palm, turned her face this way and that.
“The foundation don’t match,” she said.
Auntie August lost her swagger then. A flash of rage quickly turned to tears, and her face broke down like Mya’s when she was told not to open her graham crackers directly in the grocery store. August reached for Mama, and all near six feet of August collapsed, leaned like a weary palm tree into her sister’s arms.
“What hell you been through, Meer?” August asked, sobbing into Mama’s hair.
“Mama, who them?”
The voice was male. Not adult, but on the crisp cusp of it, burgeoning with masculinity. It shocked us. We hadn’t heard a male voice in days except for Al Green’s over the radio and that white man at the gas station a half day’s drive back. It was like a predator had suddenly announced its presence in our new safe haven.
A boy, almost as tall as August but with a body slender and young, stepped into the doorframe, blocking the entry.
He didn’t look like us. He didn’t have the high cheekbones, the slightly upturned top lip, the massive forehead everyone else related to me had. He had a copper hue to his skin that seemed slightly foreign to me, like meeting someone from an entirely different tribe.
But I recognized him. My cousin Derek. And in that split second, I also remembered what he had done to me—a memory I’d forgotten after all these years suddenly coming for me with a force I was powerless to stop.
“Derek,” Auntie August said, exhaling her cigarette, “these here your cousins. That’s Mya,” she said, pointing with her cigarette. “Mya was a newborn last y’all was here. And that there is Joan.”
“Derek, you as tall as your mama. How old are you now?” Mama asked.
“Fifteen,” he said and puffed out his chest.
“A man almost,” Mama said, quiet.
On the drive to Memphis, I had noticed deer grazing in the woods, right alongside the highway. While we were eating tuna sandwiches atop a park bench at a rest stop west of Knoxville, high in the Smoky Mountains, a family of deer had walked right up to our table. Mama placed a pointed finger over her mouth to signal silence. We said nothing, but I sat open-mouthed as Mya fearlessly, gracefully, extended an apple slice. A young doe had plucked it like Eve must have that apple. Without much thought at all. Simple desire. Later, in the car, Mama had explained that deer will walk right up to you if you’re silent, or on horseback. They really only fear us when we’re hunting them. But if you’re silent among them, it’s almost like you’re invisible. You blend in with the nature around the deer.
Seeing Derek now, I wanted to disappear into the flora and the fauna of the front porch and yard. The cats hunting the birds, the hummingbirds competing with the bees for honeysuckle—that all made sense to me. There was a logical order to the chaos. But no one, not even God, could sit there and explain to me why that boy had held me down on the floor of his bedroom seven years before.
August leaned back from Mama, taking shaky breaths. “Well, come on in, y’all,” she said, with a new warmth in her voice that their embrace had seemed to kindle in her. “We standing out here like y’all some salesmen, like we ain’t kin. Come on, I’ll warm something up. Made lamb chops last night. Y’all welcome to it,” August said, drying her eyes on the sleeves of her kimono. Her hands trembled slightly with emotion as she finally lit her waiting cigarette.
“It’s Friday,” Mama said. Her voice sounded small, exhausted.
“So?” Derek asked.
August smacked Derek hard on the back of the head. “Watch who you talk to. And how. Meer, y’all going to eat meat, eat your fill today, so help me God.” Derek slipped past her, into the dark room beyond the door.
I would not, could not, move.
“Joanie?” Mama asked. “You all right?”
Suddenly, I felt Mama’s hands on my shoulders, and I jumped almost a foot in the air.
Auntie August paused on the threshold, one foot inside.
I couldn’t seem to move my eyes from the darkness of the hallway behind her, not even to look at Mama. The blackness started to overtake my vision; I realized, vaguely, that I was holding my breath. He was in there, somewhere. From the inside, I heard a grandfather clock strike a half hour.
“The girl don’t speak?” Auntie August asked.
My heart was pounding in my ears. Then—
“My God,” August said, clasping one hand to her mouth. She pointed her lit cigarette at my pant leg.
The lion’s snout on the door appeared to sneer at me. I felt paralyzed, as if I’d live the rest of my life standing in this spot on the front porch until I grew ivy myself and became just another vine for the bees to explore. The bees—the buzzing came from far away now. I realized, as if from a distance, that the volume of the whole world seemed to have been turned down. Except for the warning sound of my heart pounding.
“Joanie?” Mama spun me around so hard I nearly stumbled. Her big eyes had flecks of yellow in them that caught the sun streaking in between the vines, the sudden brightness assaulting my eyes. I felt warmth all down my left leg, a wet heat that was quickly going cold. It was pee, I realized, feeling vaguely surprised, as if I were observing someone else’s body, someone else’s life. I didn’t even feel embarrassed. Mama shook me hard.
“She’s just exhausted,” she said, now looking into my eyes. “We had a long trip.” I felt Mya’s eyes on me, watchful.
“Well, y’all home now,” Auntie August said, her voice slightly higher than before. It sounded almost like a question, or maybe a prayer.
“Come on now, Joanie,” Mama said softly, in the same voice I remembered her using to soothe Mya when she was only a baby. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” In a louder voice now, as if answering a question, she said, “Mya, you go on ahead.”