Lydia says, “I’m sorry.”
Mama says, “It’s all right, darling. It’s okay.”
*
I’m nine already, because my birthday was a week ago. I’m looking for Lydia to walk to the creek with me. It’s Friday afternoon. Baybay James’s mama came and got him and Boukie Crawford, and I’m bored. If my big sister comes with me to the creek, she’ll break off pieces of the sugarcane and give that to me to suck until the juice runs out. But when I call her name, Lydia doesn’t answer.
I run to Coco on the front steps. “Come on! Let’s go to the creek! Let’s go!”
“You sure are full of energy. You need to settle down.”
Coco fusses like an old lady and looks like one, too. Her hair’s braided and wrapped into two buns. She climbs up from the steps and calls through the screen door, asking can we walk to the creek?
A voice comes back. “You taking the baby?”
“Yes, Mama, I got her.”
“All right, then. Y’all be careful.”
Coco takes a long stick from the pile by the side of the house. There’re blackberry bushes on the way to the creek, and the stick’ll protect us from snakes. Then she decides which way. We can walk north, but then we’d hit the soybeans that Uncle Norman’s planted. After that, there’s a forest with trees and shadows, like in a fairy tale. That scares me, so we take the longer way, walking east through the peach trees until we come to the dirt road.
Now we have to choose again. If we take one direction we’ll walk out to the highway, but that’s not allowed. If we walk the other direction, we’ll go past the burned-down plantation house and the old general store. That road will end at our family church, Red Mound. So we have to turn west again: that’s the way to the creek. There, we see a light-green pickup truck parked on the grass, and Lydia on a blanket on the ground. Her long hair’s out of her plaits. Her shirt and bra are off, and I see her breasts. There’s a man standing over her. A grown man. Tony Crawford, Boukie’s cousin. Tony goes to our church, and he is naked, and he’s stroking his long, long penis.
Coco slaps her hand over my mouth and drags me by my hand back to the main road. She starts running, as I try to keep up. Slow down, I beg her. My legs are tired. She doesn’t stop until the plantation house. I breathe fast, my hands on my knees.
“Coco, why was Lydia naked? And that man Tony, too?”
She sighs and stays quiet for a while.
“Okay, like, she was hot, Ailey. It’s really hot today—and—and—that’s why she had her shirt off. And—and—the man—he was trying to compete with Lydia. It was a game, okay? Just a game to see who could pee the farthest. And—and—boys urinate standing up instead of sitting down. With their penis. That’s what that thing was.”
“I know that. I’ve seen a penis before, lots of times. I saw Gandee’s in the bathtub. He made me touch it, and it stood up like Tony’s.”
She socks my shoulder.
“Ow, stop, Coco! You’re heavy-handed!”
“Don’t you ever say that again about Gandee. Do you hear me? Ever, to anybody. It would hurt Mama’s feelings real, real bad. She would cry all the time and wouldn’t stop. And you don’t want that, do you? Pinky swear?”
I think about that awhile. I like to think now. I don’t like people pushing me around.
“What about Lydia? Would her feelings be hurt, too?”
“Definitely.” Coco sticks out a short finger and I hook mine to hers and I swear I never will say a thing. On the walk back to the house, she starts talking to herself. She’s like an old lady again, only she curses under her breath. She says she’s glad that Gandee’s dead. She damned sure is. That low-down motherfucker. That nasty asshole.
Lydia’s gone at dinnertime, and Mama walks through the house, out the door, and into the field that Miss Rose says is her front yard. Mama calls my sister’s name. She asks Coco and me, do we know where our sister has gone? No, ma’am, we say, but then it’s dark. There are no streetlamps out in the country, only june bugs. She starts calling people on the phone, and Uncle Root and Uncle Norman and Aunt Pauline come to the house. Aunt Pauline sits with my mama on the plastic-covered sofa and reads out loud from her Bible about the Lord is her shepherd, and she shall not want, but my mama’s still upset.
Then she calls my name and kneels down in front of me. She asks again, had I seen Lydia?
“Tell me, baby,” Mama says. “It’ll be all right. I won’t be mad at you.”