Each year after that first one, her mother drove them south in her station wagon, and Lydia looked forward to those summers, to the playing in the heat that didn’t seem to tire her. To the laziness of the time. At the height of the day, when the sun was too hurtful, Lydia would sit on the living room floor. She cut out dresses for her dolls as her great-grandmother gave her instructions. Dear Pearl sat on the couch because her knees were bad. They wouldn’t let her get up again if she got down that low.
As summers passed, Dear Pearl showed Lydia how to make clothes for real people. She took an old dress, plucking at the thread. She mixed up the pieces and told Lydia to close her eyes. Could she see how to fit the pieces back together? And somehow, yes, Lydia could. The old lady was grouchy with everyone else, but she told Lydia that she was a real smart girl. Dear Pearl’s own mama had taught her the trick of taking a dress and pulling it inside out. To look at the seams and how each piece joined together and figure out how to make another one. Dear Pearl’s own daughter and granddaughter couldn’t master that trick, but see how Lydia could do that? And soon, she learned how to cut out her own dress patterns from brown paper bags, because her great-grandmother insisted a woman who knew how to sew could always make her own money, selling to another woman who didn’t know. And that meant Lydia would never go hungry, not one day in her life.
There was dinner in the evenings, and Mama had to take Coco into another room and whisper to her that it was not nice to make faces at the pinto beans and corn bread and greens someone had kindly prepared for us. It was polite to eat whatever was placed before us, so eat it, damnit, and don’t say another word about it. And now that Mama thought about it, don’t be looking around at the wallpaper while somebody asked the blessing, like Coco didn’t know any better. Bow her head instead. After the meal, the peeling of peaches and tomatoes, then helping the older women piece together quilts in the evenings. Or there was a long walk. Dear Pearl stayed back at the house while Miss Rose and Mama and Lydia and her two sisters headed off, until Ailey got tired and wanted to be carried. Lydia let her mother tote her baby sister, though, because she liked to run in the open spaces. She was unaccustomed to not having to look both ways and watching out for cars and having Mama tell them, come back here right now.
“I sure wish you would move into town with Uncle Root,” her mother said one night. “It’s too quiet out here.”
“I like it out here,” Miss Rose said. “This my home.”
“There’s too many ghosts on this place for me. Dead Indians. Dead slaves. And what if somebody comes out here to mess with you and Dear Pearl? Norman don’t even live in yelling distance.”
“Then I got something for them. They gone get a chest full of what’s in my rifle. I ain’t scared of nobody. I’m grown. And I like my ghosts. I like looking up and seeing the same sky my people seen all them years before me. It kinda make me want to pray. Don’t you laugh at me.”
“How you mean? I’m not laughing at you.”
“I love this place, even if my own child had to run away.”
“I didn’t run. I went to college, and I married Geoff. You make me sound like a fugitive from justice.”
“You went to college right down the road. You coulda came back here and married somebody else.”
Mama snorted. “You mean, if I hadn’t gotten pregnant?”
Miss Rose laughed. “You know what I mean! You had plenty boys you coulda married. Like that Wilt Monroe. Remember him? He sure was sweet on you.”
“That’s who you wanted me to marry?”
“He came from a decent Christian home.”
“Mm-hmm. Christian enough to try to get me to go in the bushes with him, behind school. You didn’t know that, did you? And he was ugly and had that funny-shaped head, too.”
Miss Rose tapped her daughter’s arm, but playfully. “You the Devil, Maybelle Lee Driskell!”
“No, I ain’t, neither!”
They laughed and nudged shoulders, and in the darkness, Lydia had looked up at the sky. She thought she could see every star there was. Was this the same sky her daddy could see, up in the City? Somehow, her granny’s sky seemed bigger. If she stayed here, if she hid in the woods, she could sleep under this sky. It would keep her safe, but then her mother was calling.
“Y’all girls come on. It’s time to go inside and go to bed,” and the little girls made sounds of protest. They weren’t sleepy. Then Miss Rose was saying they should mind they mama. But take her hands and walk with her. She didn’t want them to get lost out here.