“Please tell that to your daughter. You’re here for her.”
Mama put down her pocketbook. She slid closer to Lydia, pulling her hands away from the pillow. She told Lydia she was sure it was that boy’s fault. That Lydia was a good girl.
Lydia wanted to take up for her husband, to say, he’d done the best he could. Like anybody. Like Lydia’s parents. He’d been planning to drive her back to the City when he’d been killed. But since Lydia had called her mother to say she needed help, there’d been nothing but hostility whenever Dante’s name had been spoken. There was no use trying to defend him. He was dead now, and she didn’t have the energy to debate her mother. Nobody ever could win with her.
“Mama, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”
“Don’t you worry about that, baby,” her mother said. “I’m here now.”
After a few more days, Belle came to retrieve her. They spent a month in Chicasetta. Then, Mama drove them in Lydia’s car, and on the way to the interstate, she stopped at a fruit stand, buying peaches and watermelons from a fat white man in bib overalls. As Mama busied herself with slapping the side of the melon, he watched her, spitting brown tobacco juice into a tin can. He was dour, until Mama exclaimed, “Oh! Brunswick stew! My mother never makes this anymore.” The man smiled a stained grin as she bought all five jars in the display.
When her sisters had ridden with them in summers past, the trip had seemed shorter to Lydia. Even with stopping every two hours so she could take Ailey to a bathroom at a fast-food restaurant. On this journey, both the women in the car had stronger, larger bladders, and there was only one stop. After they used the facilities, they sat in the parking lot outside the restaurant and ate their fried chicken and cold biscuits. There was a quart of sweet tea for each of them, taken from the cooler in the back of the car.
Lydia was apprehensive, thinking about her father. Would he be disappointed in her? Would he, too, disparage Dante? But at the house, after she hugged Ailey in the foyer—how tall her baby sister had grown—and laid her cheek against the wild curls that smelled like blue grease and a peaceful yesterday, Daddy had nothing but kindness for Lydia. His face relaxed, though he had put on so much weight. He hugged her closely, telling her she’d scared him. But she was home now. His girl was home.
A few days later, Mama accompanied Lydia to the registrar’s office at Mecca University, standing beside her as she filled out the forms for the summer classes. Mama whispered, did she need to take that class over? Be honest, and Lydia whispered back, yes, she’d failed the entire fall semester. She had to take those over, and her mother told her, take only two classes. She didn’t want Lydia to overwhelm herself. The classes were half-full, the professors easygoing. They dressed casually and flipped past pages in the textbooks, declaring, six weeks wasn’t enough time to cover some of this material properly. So there’d be a multiple-choice test instead of a paper on those pages.
Lydia received As in both classes and spent her free month sleeping in and making preserves with Mama in the kitchen, though there wasn’t the same pleasure in peeling fruit and vegetables as down in Chicasetta. After the jars were boiled and cooled, it was Lydia’s job to carry them down to the basement. She’d take a few moments to rest on the stairs, enjoying her brief solitude. Then she’d remember those mornings and early afternoon hours in the apartment that she shared with Dante. When she’d been free and a woman, not a child again in her parents’ house, though Mr. Rogers still had been her good friend. Lydia smiled, recalling how he talked to those puppets as if they were real people. Then Mama would call down to the basement. Was everything all right? She hadn’t fallen down the stairs, had she? And Lydia would climb back up.
In August, she returned to classes at Mecca, taking up her same major, social work. In her classes, everyone talked about the readings, but they were too distant from the people they needed to help. They looked upon poor folks as if they were experiments. Lydia didn’t care about the case studies in her textbooks. She’d had real family living in the inner city of Atlanta: Dante’s mother and aunt. She’d lived with Dante on Campbellton Road. That hadn’t been in the projects, but it had been rough. The roaches bold until they’d swallowed enough boric acid. The people who’d lived in her apartment complex had real blood moving through their bodies. Not statistics. They drove old cars that always needed fixing, and they would knock on her apartment door, asking, was Dante in? Could they get a battery jump? Or, how much did he charge to look underneath the hood?