Too pretty, the men said, and what man could resist such a female? Skin so smooth and a body tight in all the right places. An ass you could set a drink on, and it would never fall. Big old pretty brown eyes with shiny whites. But the women said, Lonny was a pervert who couldn’t keep his hands off underage girls. Nasty bastard, and him with a wife at home, though soon, the wife packed up her children and left town. Lonny started drinking, and the rest of the story tumbled out, along with his teeth each passing year.
Crack was different from liquor, though. It was irresistible, and those who smoked it quickly became shameless in their need. At first, it was in the northern cities, like at that house with boarded windows around the corner from where Lydia had attended Jean Toomer High School. The people who walked in and out of that house looked awful. Their lips chapped and eternally ashy. Their eyes bugged and staring at something that they could only reach once they had smoked another rock or two. When crack traveled from the urban Sodom to the country, it began holding its own with liquor. Folks who’d kept to themselves, avoiding the fast life, couldn’t get enough of it. The pull was legendary: once you smoked it, you couldn’t turn it down. But the danger only made it more seductive.
You could smell it on the skin, that metallic odor. That’s what Miss Rose had remembered, the day a stranger came by the farm. She shouldn’t have opened the door for him, but the man looked awful. Skinny, clothes not clean. She took pity on him, offering him a meal, but made the mistake of leaving him in the kitchen while she visited the bathroom. It didn’t take that long for Miss Rose to do her business, and she had sense enough to take her purse with her. When she returned, that man had run off with the plate she fixed him, and he’d stolen two hens out her deep freezer, too. Miss Rose wasn’t angry at the man. She prayed for him that evening, because she could see that he’d had some pain in his life. Something pushing him to the edge.
Yet Lydia’s fall was a mystery to her family. A girl like her, provided with every necessity, a mother and father, plenty love. Educated at college and on her way to becoming a social worker. A good girl like that. What had gone wrong? And when Lydia reflected on her life, meditated on it, the way Elder Beasley at Red Mound told his flock that they should meditate on Jesus, think about His suffering, how He toted the troubles of the world so the rest of human beings didn’t have to, Lydia couldn’t have told you how she had ended up in the thrall of a white rock that looked harmless. The pellets like cheap jewelry, cloudy diamonds that somebody tried to pass off as priceless. They didn’t look like something that could ruin Lydia’s life. That could make her family ashamed to call her name out loud in polite company, make her mother feel as if her heart had been stolen and carried off to Hell.
It had been frightening for Lydia, phoning her mother. Ringing the house at nine thirty, so there would be no harmless chitchat. A call that time of night could only mean a death or an emergency. Lydia took it as a sign when her baby sister answered the phone, though there were only seconds of hearing Ailey’s voice before Mama snatched the phone away. Lydia told her she was in trouble. She’d gotten in with a bad crowd. And when Mama pressed her, she admitted, yes, it was drugs. By that time, Lydia was shaking. She only wanted her need to stop. Her grief to stop. Only her granny’s hand on her shoulder was keeping her from screaming.
But it was a relief, knowing Ailey was still there, waiting. Loving her. Lydia closed her eyes and kept Ailey’s face in front of her, as she lay in the bed that she had shared with her baby sister only the summer before. Tried to remember that when her mother arrived at Miss Rose’s house the next evening. Her uncle collected her mother from the airport in Atlanta, and at dinner, Lydia knew there would be no respite.
“I knew something was wrong with that nigger,” Mama said. “I had a dream.”
“This ain’t the time to be bringing all that up,” Miss Rose said. “Let the child be. She already upset.”
“Don’t you think I see that? She’s my daughter, not yours!”
Lydia sat at the kitchen table. Her plate untouched. An old quilt of her great-grandmother wrapped around her shoulders. When her mother asked, where was that boy, now that he’d gotten her hooked on drugs? Lydia trembled in her misery. She lied that Dante had broken up with her. She lied, because if Mama kept low-rating Dante even after she found out he was dead, Lydia definitely would hate her.
For the next few days, Lydia walked over the wood floors of her granny’s house. Her mother would call her name, a noise Lydia didn’t truly hear, because she was focused on getting from one minute to the next. She couldn’t stop shaking, and her heart raced, like she had drunk too much coffee. She wanted to scream: she bit her lips to keep the sound in, until she tasted blood. Then she told herself, lie down. Maybe some rest would do her good, but when she closed her eyes, a strange dream—