When Erica turned, I saw that she was holding my baby picture in her hand. She must have found it under my bed. Before I could take it from her, she said, “This your baby?”
“No,” I said and swallowed hard. “That’s me.”
“This you when you was a baby?”
I nodded.
“You was so cute,” she said. India leaned over to see.
I needed to return that picture to Daddy’s office. I didn’t know why I was holding on to it. “Everybody say I’m the spitting image of my daddy,” I said.
“They say India look like our mama. I look more like Grandmama. Neither one of us got her or Daddy’s eyes though. I wish we had. I think I be pretty with them light eyes like they got.”
“Your eyes are pretty just the way they are,” I said softly.
Erica looked right at me. “Miss Civil. You staying in this job or you leaving?”
“What do you mean?”
When she didn’t answer, I spoke slowly. “I’m not going nowhere no time soon, Erica. And if I do? I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”
This answer seemed to satisfy her. She moved over to the stack of records leaning against the wall.
Later, I took them to the kitchen, where I boiled rice and warmed up leftover pot roast. The girls sat at the kitchen table and scarfed the food down. I wished I could have fed them a better dinner, but it was all we had time for. I wasn’t watching the clock, but I knew it was getting late.
“I better get y’all home.”
Mama walked in the back door, a streak of yellow paint across her cheek.
“Hello,” she said and walked through the kitchen into the hallway as if she hadn’t even noticed there were two girls sitting at her kitchen table.
“Is that your mama?” Erica whispered, as if she had seen a ghost.
“In the flesh,” I said, watching the doorway to see if she would reappear. When she didn’t, I picked up the bags of the girls’ old clothes. “Let’s go, y’all.”
India put the dishes in the sink. Then she walked over and patted me on the arm several times, hard, as if she were trying to communicate something.
“What’s she saying?” I asked Erica.
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, India. You can come back another day, okay?” I told her. From the way she reacted, I could tell I was speaking too loudly. I still did not know how to talk to her. Newly clothed, bellies filled, the girls, smelling of cocoa butter, climbed into my mama’s car.
NINE
I might have been a daddy’s girl, but it was not by choice. I had always longed for a mama who read to me at night and kissed me before school in the morning. Unfortunately, that was never June Townsend. The way the story goes is that when Mama got pregnant with me, Daddy turned the shed behind our house into an art studio after declaring that the fumes in the house were not good for a baby. He placed a metal trash can in the corner for her oil-soaked rags, installed window fans so there was adequate ventilation. On one side of the room, a wooden counter ran along the wall, ending at a metal utility sink. Daddy had run the pipe himself so Mama could have a sink with running water.
As I grew older, I began to suspect Daddy might have built out that shed for a second reason. They had not taught us about postpartum depression in nursing school, but I suspect now that having a baby had only worsened her mental state. From the time I was a child, Mama would paint for hours, sometimes forgetting to feed me. I learned early on how to get out the bread and make a bologna sandwich.
Mama would put toys on the floor for me to play with while she worked. I had my own watercolors, though I never expressed much interest in them. I preferred to cut the magnets out of the shower curtain and stick them to metal surfaces around the studio. Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Mama would be lost in her thoughts. Preoccupied was an understatement. She’d have two or three things going at once. Two canvases on easels. A square of fabric hanging from a rack on the wall.
By high school, I had learned to build the frame and pull her canvases onto stretcher bars, carefully cutting the wood with a miter and saw before fitting them together. I thought doing this might bring us closer. And for a while, it did. I enjoyed the work, and Mama even asked me to sign the backs of my frames. But after I came home from college one break and discovered Mama doing it herself, cutting the wood more precisely than I ever had, I never made another one.
It was hard for me to imagine Mama without her brushes and paints and stained clothes. Sometimes Daddy would go out there and bring her back into the house. He’d literally carry her, and if I caught the silhouette of them through the window, I imagined he was rescuing her. Head cradled in his shoulder, feet dangling to one side, Mama looked like a rag doll in his arms.
The day after I brought the girls to the house I sat in the shed watching her, a brush in one hand, that signature red lipstick carelessly applied across her mouth. Mama had a habit of putting on lipstick as soon as she brushed her teeth in the morning. Even if she had slept in the studio all night without a bath, she religiously brushed her teeth, threw water on her face, and put on lipstick. The color tended to feather around the edges of her mouth and spread onto her teeth when she ate. This vanity was the one bit of fussiness to her otherwise unkempt beauty.
She wiped a thumb down the front of her shirt. Mama always painted in the same basic clothes: a stained shirt and pair of worn overalls. Even in winter, she wore the same thing. Daddy had not installed heating, fearing a fire. Mama claimed she liked the chill, though she had cut the fingers out of a pair of old gloves to wear on colder nights.
“You alright, Civil?” She didn’t look in my direction.
“You know I started my new job.”
“Today?”
“Well, it’s been three weeks.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You saw the girls who were here yesterday? They’re my patients.”
Daddy had brought home barbecue ribs for us to celebrate my first day of work, but Mama was excellent at disconnecting. I’d learned this early on, the absentmindedness a trait of her eccentricity.
“You like it?” She stepped back from the easel.
“Is it finished?”
As soon as I uttered the words, I realized the carelessness of them. The truth was that I’d always found her work indecipherable. She used a lot of negative space, but where there was color it rioted. I’d often peer into the canvas, to see what it might teach me about this mother who revealed so little.
“Not the painting. Do you like your job?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Those girls who were here yesterday lost their mother a few years ago.”
She used the edge of her fingernail to scrape paint off a spot on the lower right side of the canvas.
“That’s sad.” She said it in such a monotone that, once again, I did not know if she was referring to the motherless girls or declaring judgment of the painting in front of her. I forged ahead.
“I think so, too. They living out in this shack on a farm with their daddy and grandmother. I’m trying to get them moved to an apartment.”
“Mmm.”
I rattled a can of miniature wooden blocks to get her attention. She turned and looked at me.