Take My Hand(15)

I sat on the side of the tub. No doubt, I was overstepping my boundaries on this case. I decided I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Alicia. I didn’t want to lose my job, and Mrs. Seager would lose her mind if she found out what I was doing. When the water was ready, I brought out fresh towels from the hallway closet and hung them on the back of the door. I found the shampoo and hair grease under the bathroom sink. It was going to be a serious undertaking getting their hair untangled. The best I could do was try to comb it out. Maybe I would cornrow it. We could sit outside on the porch, and I would braid until it was too dark to see, parting their hair with a rattail comb or with the tip of my pinky nail.

“If y’all want to, you can get in the tub at the same time,” I said as I cut tags off underwear and clothes. “I think you can both fit.”

India jumped up first. Ever since the horse ride at Kmart, she had been warming up to me. At one point she had even grabbed my hand and held it.

It turned out that the hair was too matted to detangle. As much as I hated to do it, I had to cut the tangles out. Erica convinced India that it had to be done, but the younger sister started to cry when she saw her hair falling onto the bathroom floor. In the end, I picked it out into an Afro. I took India’s hand and put it on her head so she could feel the curly softness. “I didn’t cut that much,” I said.

“Our grandmama going to go crazy when she see our hair.”

I wanted to cuss myself. She was right. Her grandmama was going to kill me. Cutting their hair without asking permission had been tomfoolery. And not everybody was into Afros. My daddy sure wasn’t. My hands shook as I put the scissors back in the drawer. All I can say is that their hair seemed a serious thing to me that evening. Life or death. If I could clean them up, I could clean their lives up, too.

In my room, India settled on the floor in front of me and I divided her hair into sections. Parting the hair, line after line, this shared geography of scalp like an ancestral road map, bound us Black girls. I scraped my nail along the pale of her scalp. The hair hung in tight coils. I ran my fingertips along the bumps at her nape.

“Does it itch back here?” I asked. She nodded, and I thought of a medicated shampoo I could buy that might clear up the fungus.

“What’s that?’ Erica sat on my bed and pointed to the floor beside her.

“Records. You ever played a record before?”

Erica shook her head. She and her sister were aliens and I was their guide on Earth. Here to teach our food, our music, our movie stars. I flipped through my records and picked out a new one by Gladys Knight & the Pips. The first song I played was “Neither One of Us.” The music changed the mood, and Erica talked to me about her mother. Her speech was slow, but there was an intelligence to the girl.

“We used to have a radio. My mama liked to listen to music on it.”

“You remember your mama?”

“We used to live in a different house. A real house. Things ain’t the same after she dead. Even Daddy ain’t the same.”

She said the word dead so matter-of-factly. These girls were dulled by the world.

“Speaking of your daddy, he doesn’t seem to like me too much.”

“Why you say that?” Erica propped her chin up on her palm. She was stretched long across my bed in her new clothes. A yellow butterfly spread its wings across the back of her shirt. As soon as she’d seen it in the store, she’d clutched it to her as if she would not allow me to say no.

“He just . . . I don’t know.”

“Daddy ain’t got a mean bone in his body. He just don’t like government people.”

When Erica turned, I saw that she was holding my baby picture in her hand. She must have found it under my bed. Before I could take it from her, she said, “This your baby?”

“No,” I said and swallowed hard. “That’s me.”

“This you when you was a baby?”

I nodded.

“You was so cute,” she said. India leaned over to see.

I needed to return that picture to Daddy’s office. I didn’t know why I was holding on to it. “Everybody say I’m the spitting image of my daddy,” I said.

“They say India look like our mama. I look more like Grandmama. Neither one of us got her or Daddy’s eyes though. I wish we had. I think I be pretty with them light eyes like they got.”

“Your eyes are pretty just the way they are,” I said softly.

Erica looked right at me. “Miss Civil. You staying in this job or you leaving?”

“What do you mean?”

When she didn’t answer, I spoke slowly. “I’m not going nowhere no time soon, Erica. And if I do? I’ll make sure you’re the first to know.”

This answer seemed to satisfy her. She moved over to the stack of records leaning against the wall.

Later, I took them to the kitchen, where I boiled rice and warmed up leftover pot roast. The girls sat at the kitchen table and scarfed the food down. I wished I could have fed them a better dinner, but it was all we had time for. I wasn’t watching the clock, but I knew it was getting late.

“I better get y’all home.”

Mama walked in the back door, a streak of yellow paint across her cheek.

“Hello,” she said and walked through the kitchen into the hallway as if she hadn’t even noticed there were two girls sitting at her kitchen table.