Before We Were Yours(87)

Fern shrinks in her seat and gives our new mommy’s frown a worried look. We all know where Mr. Sevier is. We can hear the music drifting up the hall. He’s not supposed to go in his music room before breakfast. We’ve heard them fighting about it.

“Dar-ren!” she hollers, clicking her fingernails on the table.

Fern slaps her hands over her ears, and Zuma rushes in with a covered china bowl rattling in her hands. The lid almost slides off before she catches it. The white shows all around her eyes, and then she sees that Mrs. Sevier isn’t mad at her. “I’ll go for ’im, Missus.” She sets the bowl on the table and hollers over her shoulder toward the kitchen, “Hootsie, you bring them platters in befo’ they go cold!”

She sweeps past the table, stiff as a whisk broom, and shoots a mad look my way when our new mommy isn’t looking. Back before we came, Zuma didn’t have to dirty up all these dishes for breakfast. She only had to make a tray and take it to Mrs. Sevier’s bedroom. Hootsie told me. Before we came, sometimes Hootsie’d stay upstairs all morning with the missus, just looking at Life magazines and picture books and trying to keep her happy so the mister could work.

Now Hootsie’s gotta help in the kitchen, and that’s our fault.

She sticks a foot under the table and stomps on my toes when she sets down the eggs.

In a minute, Zuma comes up the hall with Mr. Sevier. She’s the only one who can get him out of his music room when the door’s closed. She raised Mr. Sevier since he was a little boy, and she still takes care of him like he is one. He listens to her when he won’t even listen to his missus.

“You gotsa eat!” she says as she follows him up the hall, her hands waving in and out of the morning shadows. “Here I been, cookin’ up all this food, and it done gone half-cold a’ready.”

“Woke with a melody in mind earlier. Had to work it out before it left me.” He stops at the end of the hall, puts one hand to his stomach, and holds the other one in the air. He dances a little jig like he’s an actor onstage. Then he takes a bow for us. “Good morning, ladies.”

Mrs. Sevier’s frown tugs upward. “You know what we agreed, Darren. Not before breakfast, and meals at the table together. How will the girls ever learn to be a family if you’re locked away by yourself all hours?”

He doesn’t stop at his chair but rounds the table and kisses her square on the lips. “How’s my muse this morning?”

“Oh, stop that,” she complains. “You’re only trying to shake me off.”

“Am I succeeding at it?” He winks at Fern and me. Fern giggles, and I just pretend I didn’t notice.

Something tugs in my chest, and I stare down at my plate, and I see Briny kissing Queenie just that same way when he passed through the shanty heading to the afterdeck.

The food doesn’t smell good all of a sudden, even though my stomach growls for it. I don’t want to eat these people’s breakfast or laugh at their jokes or call them Mommy and Papa. I have a mama and a daddy, and I want to go home to them.

Fern shouldn’t giggle and carry on with these people either. It ain’t right.

I reach under the table and pinch her leg, and she yelps a little.

Our new mommy and papa bend their foreheads at us, trying to figure out what happened. Fern doesn’t tell.

Zuma and Hootsie bring out the rest of the dishes, and we eat breakfast while Mr. Sevier talks about his new music and how just the right tune came to him in the middle of the night. He talks about scores and rests and notes and all kinds of things. Mrs. Sevier sighs and looks out the window, but I can’t help listening. I’ve never heard anything about how people write music down on paper. All the tunes I know come from listening when Briny plays his guitar or harmonica or maybe even the piano in a pool hall. The music always goes deep down inside me and makes me feel a certain way.

Now I wonder if Briny ever knew that people write tunes on paper like a storybook and it gets put in the movies, the way Mr. Sevier talks about. His new music is for a movie. At the end of the table, he moves his hands around in the air and talks wild and excited about a scene where Quantrill’s Raiders ride through Kansas and burn a whole town.

He hums the tune and uses the table for a drum, and the dishes rattle, and I can feel the horses running and hear the guns blasting.

“What do you think, dear?” he says to Mrs. Sevier when he finishes.

She claps and Fern claps too. “A masterpiece,” Mrs. Sevier says. “Of course it’s a masterpiece. Don’t you think so, Bethie?”

I can’t get used to them calling Fern Beth, which they think is her real name, of course.

“Madderpees.” Fern tries to say the word masterpiece with her mouth full of grits.

The three of them laugh, and I just look down at my plate.

“It’s so good to see her happy.” Our new mommy leans around the table to tuck Fern’s hair out of the way so she won’t get grits in it.

“Yes, it is.” Mr. Sevier is looking at his wife, but she doesn’t know it. She’s busy petting Fern.

Mrs. Sevier twirls Fern’s hair around her finger, blending tiny spirals into bigger curls, like Shirley Temple’s. Mrs. Sevier likes it that way best. Most days, I put mine in a braid behind my back, so she won’t get any ideas about doing that to me. “I was worried we’d never get to this point,” she tells her mister.