The Mighty Miss Malone (27 page)

I stopped breathing and had to read each sentence twice before I could understand it.

It was from Father!

I read it again.

And again.

The fourth time through I had to stop, tears were clouding my eyes so much I couldn’t see.

Mrs. James said, “Oh, please tell me it’s good news, Deza.”

“Oh, Mrs. James, Father’s OK! He got a job! He’s working as a carpenter.”

We fell into each other’s arms.

“Child, I am so happy for you.”

She handed me something that had fallen out of the envelope when I ripped it apart. It was a piece of paper that had been folded and taped shut.

Out fluttered two of the greenest, brightest, cleanest-looking dollar bills I had ever seen! I picked up the money. They weren’t dollar bills. They were five-dollar bills!

I had never seen this much money in my life!

“Oh, my, Deza. In the future you must treat the mail with more care. Look at this!”

“Are these real?”

She took the bills. “I went into the wrong profession, I should have become a carpenter!”

I hugged her again, put Father’s letter in my book and flew home. I couldn’t wait to see how flabbergasted Mother was going to be!

As soon as I got home I started arguing with myself about how to give Mother the good news.

It isn’t the way of the Malones to come right out and tell anybody anything, so I had to think up a way to surprise her.

Should I pretend I was so sad about something that she’d pull me into her lap and say, “Kisses … kisses … kisses make you stronger”? And then give her the letter?

Should I put the letter under her pillow so the next morning she’d find it like the tooth fairy had visited? The more I thought about it the more confused I felt.

I put on my Hotel Durant blouse and blue gingham jumper. When I climbed on the bed and read the letter for the fifth time, I started crying, I don’t know why.

I remembered how my tears messed up Clarice’s goodbye note, so to be safe, I got up and put the letter in our new file cabinet under the mattress.

I curled back up on the bed. I wished Mother would hurry home.

I didn’t want to, but I bawled and bawled and bawled.

And that’s how Mother found me a hour later. I pulled the letter out and handed it to her.

She didn’t act near as excited as I thought she would. She kept looking from the letter to the two five-dollar bills. She flashed her 1-1-1 lines before she said, “Oh, Deza, isn’t this wonderful?”

Her heart wasn’t in those words. Maybe it was just relief, maybe you can hold on to something bad for so long that when you put it down you don’t trust the feeling.

That had to be why both of us weren’t bouncing around the room.

“I’m still going to check at the post office every day,” I said.

“Deza, it says he’ll write again in two weeks, why don’t you start checking closer to then?”

“I’d just die if Father’s next letter sat at the post office one day longer than it had to.”

She smiled. “Fine, but leave the library fifteen minutes early and come right home afterwards.”

That night, I thought I’d have trouble sleeping, but when Mother kissed me and said, “Good night, my darling,” the last thing I remember thinking was, Two weeks. Two long, slow weeks, then I
know
something good is going to happen.

I had just left the library when a man called out, “Miss Jones?”

I kept walking.

He yelled again, “Miss Jones!”

There was no one around but me. I could hear him coming nearer.

I closed my book and started walking faster. The man started running at me!

I looked for help, but I was on a block of vacant lots and empty homes.

“Wait! Miss Jones, hold on for a minute.”

I turned around and did what Mother and Father always told me to do if something like this happens, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “
My name is not Jones
!
Leave me alone
!
Someone help me
!
This man is bothering me
!” I took in a breath to keep yelling but the man stopped and put both of his hands up.

“Whoa! Whoa! It’s me, Saw-Bone Zee! Don’t you remember? From the camp, the harmonica man? I’m sorry, missy, I mistook you for Jimmie’s sister.”

“Mr. Zee! You scared me to death!”

He laughed. “I
thought
that was you. How are you and your ma?”

“Do you know where Jimmie is? Is he here with you?”

“Y’all ain’t heard?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Zee, if it’s bad news just tell me.”

“Bad news? Your brother is doing real good. I thought for sure he was writing to y’all. Must’ve got lost in the mail.”

“Please, Mr. Zee, what happened to Jimmie?”

“He’s doing just grand, he’s singing in nightclubs.”

“
What
?”

“It’s like I told y’all, if there was anybody who could squeeze a penny or two outta folks in these hard times it would be him and that voice.”

“You aren’t traveling with him, he’s all alone?”

“Well now, that’s sort of a sore subject with me. Jimmie’s fell in with a shady manager calls hisself Maxwell. I got cut loose.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“He travels a lot on the chitlin’ circuit, but I’m pretty sure that right now he’s singing mostly outta Maxwell’s nightclub in Dee-troit, joint called the New Turned Leaf.”

“What’s a nightclub?”

“That’s just a fancy name for a blind pig or a speakeasy.”

I’d heard lots of horrible things about speakeasies, they were where people went to drink alcohol and fight with each other. “Mr. Zee, can you wait so I can write this down? I’m so excited I know I’ll forget.” I got my pencil and opened my notebook. “Sir, Jimmie and my last name is Malone, not Jones.”

He snapped his fingers. “I forgot! That Maxwell clown had Jimmie change his name to Jones.”

“What? Why?”

“Who knows, but ask near anyone in Dee-troit ’bout Little Jimmie Jones and they’ll know who you mean.”

Mr. Sawbuck Zee gave me the address of the nightclub in Detroit. Then he said, “When you see him tell him I ain’t mad, he done what he had to. I been in this business long enough to know what’s what.”

“Thank you again, sir, and I’ll tell him.” I started running home to give Mother the news!

Three things stopped me.

First, my heart was pounding so hard and fast and my legs were so wobbly and weak that it felt like I’d already run a mile. I bent over to catch my breath.

The second thing was I could almost hear Mother say, “Deza, that’s just a rumor, if Jimmie was making money you know he’d write to us,” or, “If Jimmie was as near as Detroit he would’ve come to see us.”

But he hadn’t.

And the third thing was when I heard my second brain, “OK, kiddo, you know doggone well Mother isn’t going to run to Detroit to try to find Jimmie. In a speakeasy?”

My second brain laughed at me, then added, “And you know you don’t have half the nerve it would take to even
ask
her if you could go by yourself!”

I squeezed down on my back teeth.

That second brain was right, I’d never be brave enough to do it on my own.

Unless …

Mother’s favorite saying is “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and my will was strong enough to find a way to write her a note, borrow money out of the filing cabinet, buy a Greyhound bus ticket and come to Detroit. All by myself.

It was ten o’clock at night and for the first time in my life I wasn’t in bed asleep. Instead I was squeezing my pocketbook to my chest, standing behind a tree in Detroit, Michigan. Across the street was the address that Mr. Zee said was the New Turned Leaf, a speakeasy! A nightclub!

I kept peeking at the house trying to figure it out. I know you can’t read what someone’s like by the way they look. The person who seems to be kind and understanding may be using that look to hide something horrible, while the person who at first sight scares you might turn out to be the gentlest soul
you’ll ever meet. And things like houses hide their secrets even better than people do. Things don’t even have to try.

My heart sank. Nothing seemed to match up with the horrible rumors I’ve always heard about speakeasies.

The minute I decided I was going to come to Detroit by myself I’d been scared to death about what I’d see once I got to the New Turned Leaf. I thought there’d be all sorts of loose grown-ups half-undressed shouting and fighting. I thought there’d be drunken men laying in the mud next to a pile of people who’d been stabbed or shot or had drunk themselves to death that night.

I imagined having to cover my ears to block out the gut-wretching wails of children who were crying to their mothers or fathers not to spend all the grocery money on whisky and beer or dice.

But if those things were going on in this place you could have fooled me. This New Turned Leaf was about the most unexciting thing I could think of. It looked the same as any other very nice house that rich people lived in.

The curtains on both floors were drawn and were so thick that if there
were
lamps on inside you’d never know. The front yard was tidy, with a strip of geraniums growing along the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a sign that let you know what this was, only the number 3121 lit up under a porch light.

The only thing that made me think this was more than just a regular rich person’s home was that in the few minutes I stood behind the tree, four couples and three or four men by themselves walked through the gate and followed the sidewalk to disappear around the back of the house.

The men were all wearing very fancy suits and hats and ties. Mr. Marvelous Marvin would have fit right in here. The women were in some of the most beautiful dresses and shoes I’d ever seen! A lot of Sunday-going-to-church hats had escaped from their boxes a couple of days early!

I was so glad I was wearing my blue gingham jumper. I’d stick out like a roach floating in buttermilk in my other dress.

One or two of the men were walking in that rooster-strutting way that Jimmie and his hoodlum friends did back home in Gary. Everybody nodded or shook hands with the short, thick man half hidden in shadows leaning against the side of the house.

I got the feeling he wasn’t about to let just any-old-body go past him without some kind of trouble, even a scared-looking girl dressed in very nice blue gingham.

The curtains in one of the windows came apart and a triangle of light shone through the darkness. A tiny head, it looked like a five- or six-year-old girl’s, was at the base of the triangle of light and a pair of eyes locked right on me. She must’ve been watching me as long as I’d been watching the house. She raised her hand to wave, then jerked her head around to look back into the room. The curtains fell and smothered the light.