Boy, Snow, Bird(65)

Mom said: “Charlie? Charlie?” as if the phone line wasn’t working properly, but the line was clear. He said he had to go and hung up. Then I had to wait for Mom to hang up—obviously I couldn’t hang up before she did. She didn’t put the phone down for at least a minute. I stood there listening to the dial tone and began to wonder if this was a trick and she’d left the receiver off the hook in the parlor so she could appear in the hallway and tell me I’d been busted. Then I thought she might be crying into the phone, but her breathing was regular. After she hung up I dashed across the hallway and into bed with my heart going like gangbusters.

Mom: Charlie . . . I love you.

Charlie: Why?

Mom wore sunshades for the next few days. She wore them indoors and at night, and she smiled when Dad teased her. He thought she was acting that way because Snow was coming home.

Dad: I love you, honey.

Mom: And I love you.

She slept all the way through the weekend. She didn’t even get up to eat.

I tried to tell Aunt Mia that she should maybe come over or take Mom out somewhere. I’d want someone to tell Louis I was feeling down if for some reason I couldn’t tell him myself. But Aunt Mia was avoiding me. When I called her apartment, she said, “Hello?” and then dropped the phone when she heard my voice, and then I had to call back six times before she finally answered. If that isn’t avoiding somebody then I don’t know what is.

“What’s new?” she asked, once she was done denying that she was avoiding me.

“I met my grandfather.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, on Mom’s side.”

“I figured. Well?”

“Well, we sort of hated each other.”

(I’d cried about that. The tears came all of a sudden, when I was jumping rope with Ruth and Paula. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t leave the ground and my face and neck felt raw, as if they’d been scraped with rocks. It was the look he’d given me when he understood that I was his granddaughter. It was like a burn. And now that I was safe from it, the syringe scared me even more.)

“It’s okay, cara. I didn’t get along too well with one of my grandfathers, either.”

“Yeah, but . . . this was . . . anyway, he said something weird.”

Aunt Mia dropped something—a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”

“Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”

Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”

“He said that Mom’s evil.”

I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”

“I thought you’d never ask. She’s sleeping, though. Do I try to wake her up?”

“No. No, let her rest. Just . . . tell her to call me.”

“But you’re okay, right?”

She called me a sweetheart for asking. It was hard to tell whether or not Mom and Aunt Mia had fallen out. Mom didn’t seem to think so, but maybe she’d done something that Aunt Mia was holding a grudge over. I know she went to Aunt Mia’s place twice, but both times Aunt Mia wasn’t home.

Dad asked if we should be worried about Mia, and Mom got irritated. “Why should we be worried about Mia, Arturo? Because she’s not married? Because she works hard at a job she likes?”

Dad let a few seconds go by and then said: “The Mia we know makes a little time for her friends no matter what, that’s all.”

“‘The Mia we know,’ eh? So what are you saying . . . that there’s this whole other Mia we don’t know?”

There was quite a long discussion about it and Mom didn’t realize she’d been tricked out of being irritated until Dad had made some rough sketches to show us which one of Aunt Mia’s bookcases could be a door that revolved into a hidden room.

I did what I could to smoke Aunt Mia out . . . I mailed her a copy of the notes I’d taken at the diner. She’d have called if she’d read them, no doubt about it. They must have gotten lost in the mail.





6

i came home from school on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and Snow was there, playing Julia’s piano. Not a whole piece of music, just tumbling little passages. I peeped around the parlor door and watched her working the piano pedals with her bare feet. The bare feet seemed proof that she was out of the ordinary; it was already so cold that I was wearing socks over two layers of pantyhose. Dad came up behind me and pushed me into the room with her, saying: “C’mon, that’s your sister in there.”

She looked more colored in person. Maybe it was the way she’d chosen to wear her hair, combed and pinned up on one side of her head so that it all rained down on one shoulder and left the other exposed to the dusty sunlight. She smiled at me and the words I’d been about to say went into hiding.

“Have mercy, Bird Whitman. I may need you to dial it back a notch with the cuteness,” she said, and slid off the piano stool. She was three days early. Her voice was a lot more girlish than I’d imagined it, considering the things she’d written to me, but her hugging technique was like Dad’s, maybe even a little more intense. She’d brought me a bouquet. Some of them looked like squashed gray-blue poppies. Others were almost roses, their color a stormy purple. Their petals and stamen were all twisted together, but they smelled good. Snow said they were the kind of flowers that only opened up at night; you picked them at night and then they stayed open.