My playmates don’t come around anymore, either. Last summer I started my period, and Mama told me I was getting to be a young lady. I couldn’t be running around with musty roughnecks smelling themselves. Mama said Baybay James and Boukie Crawford are a year older than me and boys that age want to get into mischief, but they weren’t doing that with her daughter.
Come day, go day, as the old folks say, and the hours are so quiet. I wear a beat-up hat while we pick weeds in the garden. My sisters are quiet. Coco is fascinated by the dirt, rubbing it between her fingers, and Lydia can’t focus on her weeds. She straightens and puts her hand to her forehead, shading her eyes. Like she’s looking for something in the distance.
My mother’s so happy, though. Happier than I’ve ever seen her, and every day, she climbs in the station wagon and goes visiting. The news she brings back isn’t that exciting. Somebody had a baby. Someone else is putting in a den in their garage. Or maybe, flowers have been planted in the front yard around those cement blocks propping up another family’s trailer. One evening, her eyes shine as if she’d been on an adventure. Like she’s been sipping a glass full of magic.
I’m sitting on the porch with useless hands: I don’t know how to sew quilt pieces. My stitches are too large, my granny says, so I should sit a spell. Enjoy the company, but I’m pouting. My sisters have gone to the American Legion, and I’m forbidden to go. I’m too young, they said. I wouldn’t even be let inside the Legion, let alone able to buy a drink.
Mama’s an expert sewer, but she only keeps the pieces of cloth in her lap. She rocks in her chair, smiling, and Miss Rose asks, what’s gotten into her? Had somebody took and gave her some money?
“No, ma’am, I’m just happy! I got three daughters and all of them doing well! I’ve done my worrying over them. They gave me a few gray hairs, but it looks like things will be all right. Only four more years and my baby will be done with high school.” She pats my leg, as if I need reminding that I’m her last child.
“Don’t shout till you get happy,” Aunt Pauline says. “Remember, the Devil always working.” She’s the pastor of her own church.
“That’s fine,” my mother says. “But I’m the one who raised these girls. Not Satan.”
My granny tells them, don’t fight. It ain’t nice to do that, and Aunt Pauline says she was just saying. She reaches and squeezes my granny’s hand. She says she’s sorry, but days later my great-grandmother passes away.
Dear Pearl dies way before her time. She had been eighty-seven, but that’s a very young age in our family. She should have had ten more years, though it was true that Dear Pearl had let herself go after she became a widow. She got fat, stopped wearing her bottom partials, and her daughters had to harass her to get in the bathtub twice a week. She didn’t have the sugar diabetes, though, even though she loved cola and peppermint candy. Her doctor had told her it was a miracle she was reasonably healthy.
Nobody knew when it had happened. Dear Pearl went to bed early, skipping supper and saying she was gone lie down. Her cane tapped slowly as she walked back to her bedroom. The next morning, we heard Miss Rose calling her mother. When Dear Pearl didn’t rise, my granny said she was getting in more sleep, which Dear Pearl surely deserved. Hadn’t she worked hard all her life? Let her settle under that chenille spread. My sisters and I sat in the kitchen, while Miss Rose puttered around, cutting slices of streak-o-lean. Cracking eggs and pouring in heavy cream she’d bought from the farm down the road. My granny doesn’t believe in store-bought anything. During the summers, she cooks two sets of breakfasts: one for herself, my mother, and Dear Pearl, and another for my sisters and me. After breakfast, Miss Rose put the cooked meat and the biscuits in the oven but threw out the scrambled eggs. She went out to the garden with my sisters and me and plucked some weeds. When she came back it was lunchtime, but my great-grandmother hadn’t yet risen. When Miss Rose went into the room, it only took a moment for her to know something was wrong, and her cries climbed into full-blown screams.
My granny’s a cheerful, smiling woman who offers perky words whenever you need them, but after she finds Dear Pearl, her tears are steady. I worry that she might not have any more water to give. I offer her full glasses, along with shoulder pats.
“Thank you, baby,” she says, but she keeps right on crying.
In a few hours after Dear Pearl is found, Mr. Cruddup, the Black mortician in town, pulls his funeral hearse up to the house. He solemnly greets my family and whispers his condolences. Only after he leaves with Dear Pearl in the hearse does Uncle Root arrive. He told my mother he didn’t want to see his sister carried out with her face covered. Uncle Root’s in his baby-blue seersucker suit, his red-and-blue-striped bow tie neatly centered, but he seems very sad. He sits in one of the plastic-covered chairs in the living room, his chin on his fist, and stares at the wall. Every hour, Mama sends me over with a full plate. Doesn’t he want to eat something? It might make him feel better. But the old man only shakes his head.