Between, Georgia (21 page)

“I don’t know,” I said.

Henry’s shoulders were set and tense as he stared at me from behind his glasses. “Ona cried. She’s the toughest old bitch. But she cried when she saw them. I never saw her cry before. When she’s drunk, she’ll bray like a donkey over country songs, but her eyes stay dry. It doesn’t mean anything. This was different. She was silent. She was trying to suck it up, but fat tears kept falling out of her eyes. She wouldn’t look at me.”

I let my hand drop from his shoulder. “You love her,” I said. It came out wrong: I didn’t sound surprised so much as accusatory.

His brows came down. “Of course I love her. What do you think?” he said.

“How?” I said. He looked incredulous and angry, and I held up one hand, rushing to speak before he could. “No, I meant it sin-cerely. How? She wants me to love her. She’s wanted it so badly since I was little. But I was scared to death of her. Her house was dark and filthy, and who knew what lived under the sofa. She sat around in all this squalor watching me, so hungry. I thought she would eat me. So, yeah, I am asking how you can love her, because I couldn’t. I still can’t. And now I can see why. She’s this horrible old racist drunk. She’s as mean as a bag of snakes. She’ll say awful things out loud, anything that comes into her head.

She’s had seven or eight common-law husbands since I’ve been alive, and none of them treated her children any good. She let them stay around anyway, being crappy to her kids, having more kids with them, so yes, how? How on earth?”

“You love Bernese,” Henry said.

“Not today I don’t.”

Henry went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Bernese and Ona are practically the same person.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Fretts and Crabtrees are like two entirely different species. I don’t think they even share a genus.”

Henry snorted. “Bernese is nothing but a dead-sober Ona with an outsize scoop of ambition and some money. She keeps her nasty parts yard in a black-lit terrarium and calls it a hobby, but squalor is squalor, Nonny. They both shoot before they think, and they’ll both do anything that needs doing for their families, no matter who or what is in the way.”

I stared at him with my mouth hanging open, and then I shook my head. “Are you on crack? Bernese has been known to take a moral shortcut, but that’s not the same as not having any morals to cut across. I admit that Bernese is not the easiest person to love some days, but she isn’t like Ona. Anyway it’s not like I have a choice. She’s family.”

Henry regarded me blandly. “What’s my name?” he asked me.

“Yes, but . . .” I said, floundering. “But you’re not really like them. You aren’t a crazy, awful redneck racist with less self-awareness than a pill bug. You read for pleasure, and I’m not sure more than half of them can even read the want ads. You have things they don’t even know exist, like ethics and table manners.

You’re kind to them, of course you are, but you aren’t really one of them. You never have been. You don’t even look like them, and I seriously doubt you actually are—” I stopped abruptly, horrified by what I was in the middle of saying. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

“Yes, you did. And you aren’t the first.” His eyes were cool now, unfathomable. “I get this shit all the time from my relatives.

Sideways comments about my mother’s habits, my dark skin. All the time. Never from you before, though. And never, by the way, from Ona Crabtree.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said.

“Who do you think of as your mother, Nonny? Hazel Crabtree or Stacia Frett?”

“You know who my mother is,” I said in a low tone.

“Yeah. Because Stacia did the job. That’s all that counts. I know what I look like, and I know what people say. But Reau Crabtree did the job. He was my father. And that means Ona Crabtree is part of my family.”

It had never occurred to me that Henry might be fighting to feel like one of them just as hard as I was fighting to distance myself. I’d never thought that anyone could want that. “I’m so sorry, Henry. I was out of line.”

I felt as if I had killed something, the small green thing that had been growing imperceptibly between us. I must have looked as miserable as I felt, because his expression softened, and he said,

“Ah, screw it. You didn’t mean anything. We’re both under some pressure right now. Let’s forget it, okay? We have bigger problems.” He stared down at the animals’ bodies, stuffing both his hands in his pockets. “No one but Bernese makes any sense.”

“I know,” I said, relieved to be back on ground where we could stand together. “But Henry, she would never. I can’t imagine Bernese being clandestine.”

“Maybe you’re underestimating her,” Henry said.

“All I can think is, it must have been an accident. Did Lobe or Tucker put down any rat poison recently? Or maybe some old engine is leaking antifreeze.”

“That would be quite a coincidence, wouldn’t it? If it wasn’t Bernese—” I started to speak, and he quickly said, “I see your points, but who else could it be?”

All at once it came to me. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself from speaking. Bernese would not have done this. It wasn’t her way, but there was someone else.

Henry took one look at my face and knew I’d figured it out.

He stared at me intensely, and then he leaned back, understanding dawning. “I’m an idiot. Of course not Bernese. It was her lawyer, wasn’t it.” It wasn’t said like a question, so I didn’t answer.

He took my silence as confirmation, adding, “I should have seen that. She either sent Isaac Davids or he did it for her on his own.”

I kept my hand over my mouth, my eyes wide. I wanted to answer him, but this was a war, and I was beginning to understand that Henry Crabtree and I were on different sides. He was part and parcel of everything I was fighting, and half a kiss didn’t make me his family. It didn’t make me his anything. I wanted to hurl myself at him and weep and put the answer in his lap to get his help. But I couldn’t. He’d made it clear where he stood, and anything I told Henry could be used as ammunition against my family.

I couldn’t even tell him about Lori-Anne and the tires, because he might relay it to Ona. And wouldn’t Ona love that? Wouldn’t Ona love to be able to say to Bernese, “No, it wasn’t me or mine.

It was your own child, your own child attacking you, and who could blame her?”

“You need to talk to Isaac,” he said. “I’m going to keep working on Ona. I’ll try to make sure she calls the police instead of her psychopath nephews.”

I nodded, grateful. Ona would have to do something. She didn’t take things lying down. But the police were a cakewalk compared to the Alabama Crabtrees.

“Good,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Nonny, wait,” he called after me.

But I didn’t wait. I turned and ran, leaving him in the jungle of old cars and junk stacks, sprinting full out as if running away from Henry Crabtree were a competitive event and I was training for the Olympics.

Once outside the gate, I ran up Grace toward the square, heading across Philbert and into the butterfly gardens. I dropped to my knees beside the cobblestone walkway, searching, thrusting my fingers deep into the grass. I crawled, backtracking all the way across the square to the fountain, heading toward Bernese’s store.

I found only two Percocets, melting in the morning dew.

Isaac, my ass. If Bernese had sicced Isaac Davids on Ona, he would have put on a tasteful navy suit and a power tie and knocked on the gas station’s front door. He would have brought a court order and some folks from Animal Control, not poison.

It wasn’t Isaac. And it wasn’t Bernese.

It was Mama. And worse, I had helped her. I’d brought her the big plate of Trude’s meatloaf, extra gravy, and while I was downstairs in the store, she must have been loading pain pills into the meat. She’d probably wrapped it in her napkins and shoved it down into her giant handbag.

Walking home, she’d dropped a trail of a few pills and the empty bottle, giving me something to do so she could make me leave her by the fence surrounding the parts yard. Once I was gone, she’d reached out and put her fingers through the fence, fearless, and dropped her bombs. The dogs, trained haphazardly at home by Lobe—who didn’t have enough personal discipline to hope to teach it to an animal—would have been happy to eat up the meat. Every bit.

Half of me wanted to run home and ask her, “Why, Mama?

Why would you make it worse? You knew I was working to get those dogs moved, working to keep Bernese from doing anything violent and permanent. Why would you?”

But I knew why. I didn’t have to ask. She had been certain my methods wouldn’t get the dogs out of there before Genny got released from the hospital, and Mama couldn’t have that. She wouldn’t be able to bear Genny coming home, so hurt, to spend days or weeks picking herself bald, chewing holes in her skin, banging her head into the wall.

Genny in one of her bad phases could find the slim thread of the Frett willfulness that lay mostly dormant beneath her pretty face and fluffy heart. When fear was driving her, she could refuse to sleep, could fight off Xanax and soothing music. She would stretch rigid in her bed with all the blinds drawn, refusing food, refusing water, until she was so tired and dehydrated she was hallucinating.

But Mama didn’t have to search so hard for that thread; she was Bernese’s sister, after all, and a world-class pragmatist in her own right. She’d quietly found her own way to make the world tell lies, and say that it was safe.

CHAPTER 14

DRIVING MAMA TOsee Genny was an exercise in not plummeting off the highway to our doom. She liked to chat in the car, which meant I was steering with my knee half the time. But we didn’t talk about the dogs.

I waited until we were safely parked in the visitors’ lot at Loganville General before I signed,
Do you need me to ask Dr. Crow
to write you another prescription for Percocet?

She shook her hand no, signing,
They make me fuzzy.

I sat beside her for a moment longer, not sure what to do. I knew what I knew, and what could she possibly say? The ugliest bits inside me were glad the dogs were gone, whatever the method, however much the cost. Arguing with her or even asking her about it was pointless, but even so, I couldn’t help but sign to her,
I guess the pills already served their purpose.
Mama stilled, a beat with a total absence of movement, and I added,
They let you sleep last night. Right?

Mama eased her shoulder forward, stretching her hurt back, and then she signed very tersely,
I never think that you are cute
when you are being coy.
She opened the door of the car and unfurled her white cane, feeling her way out and then shutting the door behind her with a little more force than was strictly needed.

When we got to Genny’s room, we found her sitting up in bed, pleating and unpleating her sheet. She had distressed eyebrows and a trembling soft mouth. I could see she’d been picking. Her good arm was dotted with reddened patches where she’d ripped the hairs out by the roots. The bed itself was a wasteland of crumpled tissues that were spotted red with her blood, so I knew she’d already moved on to chewing the inside of her mouth. The blood made her nauseated if she swallowed it, so she blotted her small wounds incessantly with the tissues. When she saw Mama and me coming through the doorway, she smiled and then burst into a quick flurry of tears.

She was already reaching toward Mama with her good arm, and to me she said, “Dr. Crow came by and told me they’ll send me home tomorrow!”

I walked with Mama to the chair by the bed and guided her hand to the back of it. “I’m going to go talk to the doctor right now, widget,” I said. I tried to keep my voice calm and even. I could see Genny was already more than halfway into the mael-strom of a bad phase, perhaps too far in to be drawn back. I wondered why on earth no one had given her a Xanax or some Ativan, but Genny could spiral down so fast. I walked toward the door, saying, “Maybe I can get them to let you go home today.”

Genny shook her head. “No! You can’t! I can’t come home!”

She shuddered with another burst of short, racking sobs. Mama worked her way around the chair and sat, then reached out to find the edge of the bed and Genny. As soon as Genny’s hands met Mama’s, Genny began signing frantically to her, talking to me at the same time.

“Those dogs are right by home. They are waiting for me, those awful dogs, and what will happen? I hate it here. I’m so lonely, and I hurt, and those dogs will kill me if I go home. They know I am coming, and they’ll—”

Mama closed her hands around Genny’s, stilling her, then began signing, soothing her. Mama said nothing to me, did not turn even a millimeter toward me, but her posture radiated with

“I told you so,” even though she had told me nothing.

Standing in the doorway, I couldn’t see her face, and her hands were mostly hidden by her body, so I wasn’t sure what explana-tion she gave Genny, but after a few moments Genny was fairly glowing with relief. To me she said, “Nonny, find out if they will let me go now. I hate it here. This room smells like beets.” She was simultaneously signing into Mama’s hands.

“Beets?” I said.

Genny nodded vigorously, and then her mouth scrunched up as the movement hurt her torn shoulder. She went on, “Can’t you smell it? Like overcooked beets that got scrubbed down with an-tiseptic, and Nonny, they are threatening me with a new room-mate. It will be someone I don’t even know! Who can sleep like that? I’ll get hives. What if it’s a man? Would they put a man in here?”

I said, “Let me go see when they’ll release you.” I turned to go, but Mama squawked, stopping me. I walked back over toward the bed until I could see Mama’s hands.

Mama was signing to me,
But even if they release Genny today,
you’re still going to Athens tomorrow, right?

Of course she is,
Genny signed.
I won’t need Nonny if you’ll be
 
home with me.
To me she said, “You wouldn’t miss your court date just because of me.” Her mouth was trembling again. “Because I could stay here if you even think for one second you would have to miss it because of me. It’s not so very awful here.” She stiffened up her rounded shoulders, wincing.