Jilo (Witching Savannah #4)(60)

SEVEN


April 1954



Jilo leaned across the table, her breasts exposed and hanging down over it. They had filled out some since Guy first started the portrait, but he hadn’t seemed to notice.

She wore a tatty shawl tied around her waist. It wasn’t hers, just one Guy had borrowed for the painting. From whom, she didn’t know. Guy was real good at talking women into—and out of—things. She didn’t look at him; he’d told her not to. It was easier not to. She kept her gaze fixed on the dark bands in the grain of the tabletop. In her peripheral vision, she could see the bottom of a vase Guy had filled with flowers. Not a gift, just part of the scenery.

She was tired—he wanted her tired, said the painting needed it. Her feet cramped, but he insisted that she balance on the balls of her feet for reasons of light and composition. Again, the painting needed it.

“Jilo,” he said, her name a rebuke on his lips. “Stop fidgeting.”

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. She’d just come off of a twelve-hour shift at the hospital, where she worked in the colored wing. The Greelie Hospital was really a single building, but still most folk referred to it in the plural, as “the Greelies,” since the white and colored wings were separated by a corridor. She’d walked that corridor at least a hundred times in her shift, so her feet already felt like they’d been beaten with a board.

Mary had found Jilo the job at the Greelies, but Mary herself had been forced to return home to Missouri not more than a week after graduation. Her mother had suffered a heart attack that had rendered her incapable of seeing to herself and Mary’s younger brother. Jilo had been left on her own to catch up on the procedures and practices the hospital’s hiring manager already thought she knew. On parting, Mary and she had promised to stay in touch, but no more than a handful of letters had passed between them through the post. Mary, Jilo knew, had her hands full. Jilo, well, she didn’t have much she felt she could share without shame.

“I’m worn out, Guy. I just need to rest a bit,” she said. “Can’t we do this another time?”

He sighed. “I’m not sure you appreciate what I’m attempting here. I’m not sure you appreciate my work.”

Jilo bit her tongue, but she felt her expression harden, a layer of anger varnishing the exhaustion.

“There,” he said, “that’s better. Concentrate.”

He thought she didn’t appreciate his work. Hell, it was Guy who didn’t give a lick about all the work she did. She spent six days a week emptying bedpans, cleaning bedsores, and lifting patients who couldn’t manage to shift themselves. This man didn’t even understand the concept of real work. And he didn’t know what it meant to pay a bill either. It was her work that paid their rent for this rat-ridden hovel. It was her work that fed them. It was her work that paid for the damned paints and canvas he was using now.

There was a quick rap on the door, and it opened before either of them could respond. “It came. The letter came,” Guy’s friend Charles said, storming into the room, waving a white envelope around.

“Please,” Jilo said, straightening up and turning her back to the men.

“Come on, girl,” Guy said, “you don’t have anything Charles hasn’t seen before.”

“Maybe not, but he hasn’t seen it on me.” She unknotted the shawl and whipped it around her body. After grabbing her nurse’s uniform off the bed, she slipped behind the changing screen she had insisted on procuring, even though Guy had made fun of her modesty. Lately he found a lot of things about her worthy of contempt. “You still got too much girl in you,” he’d taken to saying, “not enough woman.” It was true that she wasn’t as experienced or worldly as he was. She hadn’t realized it at first, but Guy was a good decade older than her, and though that didn’t matter to her, lately it seemed to matter to him. Every time she spoke up—about anything, from the weather to where he’d spent the night—he would remind her of her immaturity.

Guy and Charles had been friends since the war. They’d met in the army, and it was Charles’s presence in Atlanta that had prompted Guy to come for an extended visit. A visit that had culminated in her leaving the Joneses’ boarding home going on a year ago and moving into this tenement with Guy. The building was filled with musicians and artists. And whores. Nobody cared that she and Guy weren’t married. The building’s owner didn’t ask too many questions as long as you didn’t get too far behind on the rent.

She had thought their love would be enough. In those first few months, she would press her body closer to his whenever she heard the rodents moving in the walls. Then came the nights when she’d come home from the hospital to find their room dark, when she would flip on the overhead light and stand in the doorway as the last of the cockroaches scurried for cover. Until then, she had never thought she could miss the Joneses’ house. But it wasn’t only the boarding house she missed. She missed the pastor and his wife as well. Yes, she missed them. She would like to go pay them a visit, but shame held her back. They’d ask too many questions that would require too many lies.

She flung the shawl up over the top of the screen.

“What does it say?” Guy asked. She had no idea who this letter was from, but she could hear the tension in his voice. This was something that mattered to him. Really mattered to him.