Ain't She Sweet? (11 page)

Unless she’d been too ill by then.

Lincoln Ash had arrived in Parrish during the spring of 1954. Until then, he’d been living in a cold-water flat in Manhattan and hanging out with the equally impoverished Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village. The established art community had sneered at the work of “the dribblers,” as they tagged them, but the public had begun to take notice, including Sugar Beth’s grandmother, who considered herself a patron of the avant-garde. She’d agreed to provide him with room and board for three months, a studio where he could work, and a small stipend. In return, she’d have bragging rights as the first woman in northern Mississippi with her own artist in residence. Griffin had been sixteen at the time, and he loved telling people that he’d learned to smoke cigars and drink good whiskey from Lincoln Ash.

The water had nearly reached the rim of the tub, and Sugar Beth turned off the faucet with her foot. She thought of Frenchman’s Bride with its deep closets and odd-shaped cubbyholes. More enticing, the secret cupboard in its attic . . . Her grandfather had ordered it built “in case those fools in Washington ever decide to bring back Prohibition.”

Did Byrne know about that cupboard? Tallulah certainly had.

She wouldn’t consider his theory that Tallulah had destroyed the painting, but as she sank deeper into the tub, an equally alarming thought hit her. Byrne had bought the house. Did that include its contents? What if he owned the painting now? She knew nothing about property rights, and she couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer. If she found the painting, she’d simply have to get it out of the house without tipping him off, which wasn’t an enticing proposition. But she’d risk that and a lot more because selling the Ash painting would finally give her the money she needed to keep Delilah at Brookdale. As for supporting herself, she’d go back to Houston and wait tables until she could get a real estate license.

She didn’t fall asleep until well after midnight, and then a nightmare awakened her. She lay there for a moment, skin damp, heart thumping, the dream still with her. Usually she found Gordon’s snores irritating, but now the raspy sounds coming from the bottom of the bed were a comforting reminder that she wasn’t entirely alone in the world.

She’d dreamed about Winnie again. Not the sophisticated woman she’d seen in the antique store last week, but the insecure girl who’d hidden behind her hair and stolen what Sugar Beth wanted the most.

Daddy, you were a real jerk, you know that?

She could never recall exactly how she’d come by the knowledge of her father’s other family—bits and pieces absorbed here and there, snippets of conversations, glimpses of her father in places he shouldn’t have been. Eventually she’d come to understand some of the subtler dynamics of his relationships with the two women in his life. Diddie was Griffin’s mercurial unobtainable Scarlett O’Hara, Sabrina his nurturing, loving Melanie Wilkes; but her earliest memories were merely of her father walking away.

“Watch me do a cartwheel, Daddy.”

“Not now, Sugar Beth. I’m busy.”

“You’re coming to my dance recital, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have time. I have to work so I can pay for those shoes you’re scuffing in the
dirt.”

She’d approach him with a book to read, only to have him stand up before she could crawl in his lap. He’d walk off to make a phone call just as she brought him a painting she’d done to please him. She suspected flirting came so easily to her because of the arsenal of little-girl tricks she’d used to get her father’s attention. None of them worked.

She’d been in third grade when she’d discovered she wasn’t her father’s only daughter, and it had all happened because of his disapproval over her schoolwork.

“You got a C in arithmetic? You have the brain of a flea, Sugar Beth. One more thing
you inherited from your mother.”

He didn’t understand how torturous school was for her. All that sitting when she wanted to giggle and dance, to jump rope with Leeann and play Barbies with Heidi. To decorate cupcakes with Amy and lip-synch Bee Gee songs with Merilynn. One day after he’d made her cry with another lecture about how stupid she was, she came to the conclusion that her bad grades were the reason he didn’t love her.

For six whole weeks she’d tried her hardest to change that. She sat still in class and finished every bit of her boring, boring homework. She listened to the teacher instead of talking, stopped drawing happy faces all over her workbooks, and, in the end, she’d gotten straight A’s.

By the time she brought her report card home that April afternoon, she was nearly sick with excitement. Diddie fussed over her, but it wasn’t Diddie’s approval she craved, and as she waited for her father to come home, she imagined how he’d smile at her when he saw what she’d done, how he’d swing her up in his arms and laugh.

“What a smart daughter I have. I’m so proud of you, my Sugar Baby. Give your daddy a
big kiss.”

She was too excited to eat dinner. Instead, she sat on the veranda and waited for his car.

When it grew dark, and he still hadn’t appeared, Diddie told her it didn’t matter and made her go to bed.

But it did matter. On Saturday morning when she awakened to discover he’d already left the house, she grabbed her precious report card—that magic passport to her father’s love

—and sneaked out of the house. She could still see herself flying across the yard to her pink banana-seat bicycle and tossing her report card in the basket. She jumped on her bike and took off down Mockingbird Lane, sneakers pumping, her lucky horseshoe barrettes warm against her scalp, her heart singing.

Finally, my daddy’s going to love me!

She no longer remembered how she’d known where to find the house he sometimes stayed in with the other lady, or why she’d thought he’d be there that morning, but she remembered the tidiness of the brick bungalow, the way it sat back from the street with the curtains drawn over the front windows. She’d left her bike in the driveway behind his car, taken her report card from the basket, and raced for the front steps.

The faint sound of his voice coming from the back of the house stopped her. She turned toward the stockade fence that surrounded the tree-shaded yard and approached the partially opened gate, the report card clenched in her sweaty hands, a giddy smile taking over her face.

As she peeked through the gate, she saw him sitting in a big lawn chair in the middle of a flagstone patio. His yellow shirt was open at the collar, revealing the shiny tuft of dark hair there that she was never, ever allowed to pull. Her smile faded, and a creepy feeling came over her, like she had big spiders crawling up her legs, because he wasn’t alone. A second grader named Winnie Davis lay curled in his lap, her head against his shoulder, legs dangling, looking like she sat that way every day. He was reading a book to her, using funny voices, just like Diddie did when she read to Sugar Beth.

Spiders were crawling all over her now, even in her stomach, and she felt like she was going to throw up. Winnie laughed at one of his silly voices, and he kissed the top of her head. Without being asked.

The magic report card slipped from her fingers. She must have made some sort of sound because his head shot up and he saw her. He set Winnie aside and leaped to his feet. His heavy black eyebrows collided as he glowered at Sugar Beth. “What are you doing here?”

The words stuck in her throat. She couldn’t explain about the magic report card, about how proud he was supposed to be.

He stalked toward her, a short-legged, barrel-chested banty rooster of a man. “What do you think you’re doing? Go home right now.” He stepped on the report card, lying unseen on the ground. “You aren’t ever to come here, do you understand me?” He grabbed her arm and dragged her back toward the driveway.

Winnie followed, stopping just outside the fence. Sugar Beth started to cry. “W-why was she sitting in your lap?”

“Because she’s a good girl, that’s why. Because she doesn’t go places where she’s not invited. Now get on your bike and go home.”

“Daddy?” Winnie said from the fence.

“It’s all right, punkin’.”

Sugar Beth’s stomach hurt so much she couldn’t bear it, and she gazed up at him through an ocean of tears. “Why’s she calling you that?”

He didn’t bother looking at her as he pulled her farther away from the house. “Don’t you worry about it.”

Sobbing, she turned back toward Winnie. “He’s—he’s not your daddy! Don’t call him that!”

A swift, silencing shake. “That’s enough, Sugar Beth.”

“Tell her not to call you that ever again!”

“Settle down right now, or you’ll get a spanking.”

She’d pulled away from him then and hurled her small body down the drive, running past her pink banana-seat bicycle, out onto the sidewalk, sneakers thudding, her little girl’s heart exploding in her chest.

He didn’t come after her.

The years passed. Sometimes Sugar Beth caught glimpses of Griffin in town with Winnie, doing all the things he never had time to do with her. Bit by bit, she began to understand how he could favor one daughter over the other. Winnie was quiet. She got good grades and loved history the same way he did. Winnie didn’t throw temper tantrums because he wouldn’t take her to Dairy Queen, or get dragged to the front door by the chief of police for underage drinking. And Winnie had certainly never given him heart failure her senior year because she’d skipped her period and thought she was pregnant with Ryan’s baby. No, perfect Winnie had waited until after Griffin died to do that. Most important of all, Winnie wasn’t Diddie’s daughter.

Sugar Beth hadn’t been able to punish Griffin for not loving her, so she’d punished Winnie instead.

Gordon stirred at the foot of the bed. Sugar Beth rolled to her side and tried to will herself back to sleep before the memories took her any farther down that dark path, but her mind refused to cooperate.

Senior year. The after-school poetry showcase Mr. Byrne had required his classes to attend . . .

At the end of the performance, the stage had fallen into darkness, and two figures smeared with yellow fluorescent paint stepped into a dim puddle of black light. Stuart Sherman and Winnie Davis. Sugar Beth no longer remembered anything about the poem they’d dramatized. She only remembered that something made her turn toward the back of the auditorium, and there she saw Griffin standing under the exit sign. The father who’d been too busy last October to spend five minutes waiting on the courthouse steps so he could watch her ride through town on the back of Jimmie Caldwell’s vintage Mustang convertible with the homecoming crown on her head hadn’t been too busy to come see his other daughter recite poetry. She knew what she was going to do.

She lingered after the showcase with Ryan and some of his friends in the parking lot until enough time had passed, then she announced that she needed to get the eyelash curler she’d left in her gym locker. The sound of the shower greeted her as she’d made her way inside the almost empty locker room. Winnie, with her yellow fluorescent face and neck, her painted arms and feet, was the only girl in the showcase who’d needed to clean up before she could go home. Sugar Beth worked quickly, and as she left the locker room, she envisioned the yellow paint washing down the drain and taking her father’s illegitimate daughter right along with it.

“Guess what,” she’d announced to the boys as she returned to the parking lot. “The girls’

locker room’s empty. Y’all’ve been threatening since sophomore year to go in there.

This’ll be your last chance before we graduate.”

It hadn’t taken any persuading to get them to follow her: Deke Jasper, Bobby Jarrow, Woody Newhouse, and Ryan, of course, the most important person in her plan. Woody and Deke started scrambling for paper so they could slip notes through the vents in their girlfriends’ gym lockers. They were making too much noise, and she shushed them.

“Some of the teachers might still be around.”

It happened just as she’d imagined it. Winnie stood naked by the lockers as they came in, hair plastered to her head, water still glistening on her skin, a bewildered expression on her face as she looked for the clothes and towel she’d left on the bench. But they were gone, hidden in Sugar Beth’s locker. Even the stack of towels that normally sat in the corner had disappeared, stuffed behind the equipment bin.

The boys froze. All the blood drained from Winnie’s face.

“Holy shit,” Woody whispered.

Winnie could have laughed and run back into the shower room—the whole thing would have been over. But she didn’t. Instead, she stood there, paralyzed by the poisoned arrow she hadn’t seen coming.

She wasn’t long-boned like Sugar Beth. She had short arms and legs. Her hips and thighs were a little plump for her narrow shoulders. Not fat, just fleshy enough to make her ever so slightly bottom heavy. A dab of white caught Sugar Beth’s attention, and something unpleasant quivered in the bottom of her stomach. A string poked through the damp patch of pubic hair between Winnie’s thighs. She was having her period.

Winnie’s eyes went to Ryan. Only Ryan. All the boys saw the string, but Ryan was the only one who mattered. This was exactly what Sugar Beth had anticipated, but now she felt sick, as if she were the one standing there, naked and humiliated.

Winnie let out a low, keening wail and stood in front of them, arms at her sides, the white cotton string poking through her pubic hair.

The door of the shower room burst open, and Mr. Byrne came in. “What’s going on in—”

He uttered a low curse as he saw Winnie. His hands flew to the buttons of his old black shirt. Within seconds, he’d peeled it off and wrapped it around her.

He shot the rest of them a furious look. “Get out of here! Wait for me in the hall.”

The expression in those green eyes chilled Sugar Beth. He knew this was no accident, and he also knew who was responsible.

She fled from the locker room, from the building, feeling as naked as Winnie. Her stomach cramped, just as if she were the one having her period.