What's Mine and Yours(86)

“Mama, I came to see him,” pleaded Noelle. “He’s my friend.”

“You don’t need friends who will only bring you trouble. You don’t need friends who will derail your life.”

Jade was stunned at how frankly this white woman was talking in front of her, how unafraid she seemed to offend. It was as if she thought her words were unimpeachable truth, and it was a service to say them. She was an ignorant woman, dangerous. Another woman’s child was laid up in the hospital, and all she could see was the imagined threat to her own.

“Noelle, I think you better leave. Take your mother with you.”

“This is a free country, and I’ll go wherever I like.”

“Don’t you have any decency?” Jade said. “My son was just assaulted, and you’re out here calling him names. Some example you’re setting for your daughter.”

Lacey May looked stunned. She hitched a hand onto one hip and went to snap back, but Noelle seized her hand and yelled, “Leave it, Mama.” She started dragging her down the hall, and Lacey May followed reluctantly. She turned around more than once to glare at Jade, but she said nothing. Noelle was sobbing again.

Fury surged through Jade. She wondered whether she should have done more to put that woman in her place, to defend her son. She heard Gee calling her, and she came back to her senses. He was the one who needed her. Chances were, they’d never see that awful woman and her daughter again.



Noelle announced she was moving out that night. She wasted no time packing up a bag with her clothes, a cardboard box with her shoes and schoolbooks. Then she called Ruth and asked her to come and get her.

“Now, you know I can’t do that,” Ruth said.

“Either you come and get me and I’m staying with you, or I’m leaving this house and looking for somewhere else to stay, starting with the bus station.”

“All right. Bailey and I are coming.”

Lacey May didn’t stop screaming the whole time Noelle was putting her things together. Hank shut himself in the bedroom so he wouldn’t have to watch. Margarita sat impassively at the TV, mostly watching her show but occasionally interjecting to point out how both Lacey May and Noelle were wrong, that they were two peas in a pod and they deserved each other. Diane followed her eldest sister around, tugging at her knees and weeping.

Jenkins, perhaps, was the most distraught. The dog, who mostly lay on the floor by the couch these days, was alert and whining sharply now. He followed Noelle around, barking at her, as if he knew what was going on. He bit at the hem of her shirt to get her to stay, but she swatted him away. After that, he kept close, shadowing her, until there was a honk from the street, and Noelle left, carrying her suitcase and cardboard box down the lawn. Lacey May had given up by then, slammed the door behind her. Jenkins stayed at the door, sniffing and whimpering, until Lacey May told him to shut up and kicked him good in the ribs. Diane picked the dog up into her arms and carried him down to the basement; he couldn’t handle the stairs on his own anymore.

It wasn’t until Lacey May was alone in the bedroom with Hank that she finally let herself wonder aloud. “Am I wrong? Am I crazy?”

Hank was in his pajamas, cross-legged on the bed, reading a motorcycle magazine. He looked tired, his graying hair long around his ears.

“He isn’t Robbie,” he said.

“He’s black.”

“Jesus Christ, Lacey May. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing on its own. But you’ve got to look at things in the big picture, think about how he’s been raised, where he’s from. And his mother—”

“You don’t even know the boy.”

“Please tell me I can still speak my own mind in my own home. Goddamn it, Hank.”

She had come to him for consolation, and he had let her down. She pulled on her nightgown with a vengeance, as if she wanted it to rip, and Hank sighed, called her to him.

“You speak your mind all you want. Meanwhile, your daughter’s run off to another house.”

“Are you saying I’m wrong?”

“What’s it matter if you are? You’ve got to decide whether you’d rather be right, or you’d rather have your daughter.”

It felt like no kind of choice to Lacey May.

*

The first few days at Ruth’s were peaceable. Noelle stayed in a spare room with a daybed, an exercise bicycle, boxes full of Bailey’s old clothes and toys. She had plenty of company. They ate breakfast and dinner together, the three of them, every day. And Ruth drove Noelle in the mornings to the mouth of the freeway, where she waited on a little patch of grass for the bus to arrive in the early dark. She did her homework in the room, and sometimes Ruth came up and rode the bicycle while Noelle worked. Still, she was lonely, lonelier than she had ever been. It surprised her, since she was sure she didn’t miss Lacey May.

Gee hadn’t been to school for days, and the boys who had gone after him had been suspended. Noelle waited until lunchtime to tell Duke it was over, so she could make sure it was in front of all his friends, the kids of his parents’ friends from church. Even in public, he had tried to plead with her, and it had felt good to yell at him, to say, I am through with your bullshit, as if they were getting divorced, as if it had been years, as if they were on reality TV.

Mr. Riley asked Alex, who normally played Lucio, to read Gee’s lines at rehearsal. He said he had a hunch that Gee wasn’t coming back. “I tried to help him,” Mr. Riley said. “But you can’t help anyone until they’re ready.” Noelle had wanted to say to him, You have no idea.