My stomach tumbled. I only hoped Vera would step in between us if Martha tried to slap me or snatch me by my hair. The screen door slowly creaked, announcing my arrival inside the house. The room smelled like stale beer, probably spilled on a rug somewhere. I hadn’t been at the house for the past few days. That meant no one was around to clean it up.
I didn’t move beyond the door entry. “Ma’am?” I never called Martha “Mama” or any other iteration of Mother. It was always “Martha” or “Ma’am.”
“Get over here,” Martha said.
I looked at Vera. She nodded her consent before I eased toward the sofa.
Martha scanned me from head to toe before she met my eyes. “You my child.” Martha’s words slid one into the other, the Thunderbird wine fully in control of her tongue. “My child. You understand me? You do what I say do.” She pounded a finger into her chest to emphasize her authority.
I fought back tears as I spied Vera again. Vera offered a fragile smile. “Tell her about the school, Ellie, go on, honey.”
Vera and Martha waited for me to talk. Any other time I discussed the scholarship with breathless abandon. But this time, I opened my mouth to tell Martha about it and the words wouldn’t come out. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Like I’ve told you before, it’s a school up north like Miss Vee said. They only take you if you can pass a test and I passed the test. The school will pay for every—”
“I told you, you ain’t going nowhere. Why you spend so much time at Vera’s anyway? She ain’t even your kin. You need to come back home and stay with me,” Martha said. She spotted half a cigarette on the floor beside the coffee table and grabbed it like she was afraid Vera or I might steal it first. She scooped up the matches nearby and lit it. She then took a long drag, tilted her head back, and blew smoke toward the ceiling as if it were an offering to the gods. The room quickly filled with the pungent burnt smell of tobacco. “You and Sammy need to be with me. I know we had that little hiccup a few weeks back but Vera fixed things. Right, Vera? Everything will be better now.” She reached for my hand and I flinched. With Martha, I could never be sure whether her touch would hurt or heal, whether her words would cut or console.
Martha sank back into the sofa and took another long drag before she blew the smoke out the side of her mouth. I stood frozen, suffocating in the small hot space. And then, Martha did what she always did on nights like this. She started to cry, openly weeping. I didn’t know whether to move or stay put. Vera didn’t move, so I didn’t either.
“That’s enough, Martha Littlejohn. I’m sending this girl on to Virginia. I tried to do right by you, but we are done with this. You hear me? Ellie is gonna get outta this dead-ass town and make something of herself whether you want her to or not. She’s leaving on the 7:15 bus tomorrow morning. It’s up to you if you wanna say good-bye proper when she leaves. Your choice.”
Martha stopped crying and wiped her face with the back of her hand. I hoped she would say something nice, but instead she stared down at the coffee table, scattered with an overflowing ashtray full of Newport cigarette butts, an empty Thunderbird wine bottle, and the Tolliver County Register newspaper.
Martha never took her eyes off the table as she started to speak, so soft I almost didn’t hear her at first. “You know my momma died when I was little? I told you that before. Everybody I ever loved has left me.”
Martha was born in Rome, Georgia, a “little town full of nothing” she used to say. Her mother had died when she was seven years old and she was passed around among a host of relatives and charitable neighbors who took her in until she was fifteen and finally ran away with a twenty-seven-year-old man who brought her to Chillicothe, then left her six months pregnant with me. She’d told me the story so often I could recite it as if it were my own.
Martha continued, “All I ever wanted to do was give you and Sammy a home. Someplace that was yours. Now you leaving me, too.”
I sat down on the arm of the sofa next to her. “I’m not leaving you,” I said. “I’m just going off to school. I can come home on holidays and summers.”
Martha stared at me. Time dragged, as if on hands and knees. She took another slow dramatic pull on her cigarette and blew a long cloud of smoke in my face and finally spoke: “You have caused me nothing but heartache since you came into this world.”
It wasn’t my first time hearing this from her, but still I had to fight back the sting of tears. I had never figured out how to make Martha happy. Maybe leaving Chillicothe would make her happy and she just didn’t know it yet. Maybe she would finally be happy when I was gone.