The Wedding Machine (41 page)

BOOK: The Wedding Machine

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Mama handed us each a towel before we took our seats in front of two heaping plates of battered shrimp topped with two lopsided balls of fried corn bread.

“Like to have fooled me,” Papa Great said as he sucked a shrimp out of its tail and slurped his toddy.

He motioned to Mama's swelling belly and said, “Let's hope this third one's a boy. Then you'll see determination, Son.”

Papa Great. Ugh. He put the “pig” in “male chauvinist pig”; he even looked like a hog with his upturned nose rooting out the weakness in everyone.

“She's been swimming all summer long,” Mae Mae said as she searched the table for the cocktail sauce.

If he was a hog, then she was a peacock, tall and here for no reason at all except to be beautiful. She had a way of looking down her beak at him, and I liked that about her.

“Somethin' for sweet in your mouth,” murmured Juliabelle under her breath as she put a Bazooka square beside my plate and patted my back.

Then Daddy, the greatest cheerleader anyone could hope for, said, “Adelaide's got determination, Papa. You watch what I tell you.”

That night, beneath the sheets of the roll-away bed that sat flush against a window opened to the porch, I watched Juliabelle smoke her pipe at the edge of the boardwalk, with a shotgun propped against the wooden rail. Spooked by the snakes and the remote possibility of a gator skulking out of the marsh and across the gravelly road, she had taken one of Daddy's old field guns and learned how to shoot it. And we all understood that no one and nothing should disrupt the pleasure of her evening smoke.

She was lanky but strong, and I loved her as much as my mama, who was going to be even farther from me now with the birth of a third child. I'd stolen a picture from Mae Mae's photo album of Juliabelle holding me as an infant and hidden it in the lining of my suitcase. How I looked forward to curling up in her bony arms on the hammock in the early mornings and smelling her sweet tobacco smell as she rocked me on the porch and hummed “Eye on the Sparrow” before anyone else was awake. Her skin was loose and darker than the coal funneled into the furnace at the Williamstown steel mill, but her palms were a chalky pink like the tip of Daddy's stump or a square of Bazooka bubble gum, and she would cup them around my cheeks in those first minutes of daylight and say, “Good morning, my Adelaide.”

I didn't want the summer to end. The guidance counselor had labeled me “learning disabled” because of the dyslexia, and I'd have to share a classroom with Averill Skaggs, the ringleader of a mean generation of mill village lowlifes, for the first years of elementary school. He'd throw spitballs at me and trip me and ask me if a bird had crapped on my forehead. My jewel.

De-ter-mi-na-tion.
I had no idea what it meant then, but over the next twelve years I came to understand that it was something I must cultivate if I had any hope of getting out of Williamstown County and the open-air asylum that we called home. I had found it that day in the gully, and I would bridle it and use it to turn the letters straight, to help Mama raise up my younger sisters, and to bodysurf in the storm tide as the hurricanes gnawed along our South Carolina coast.

On the porch I could hear Daddy singing, “Like a rhinestone cowboy . . . ,” as Mae Mae shuffled the cards and dealt out another hand of seven-card stud. He was humming the refrain to the rhythm of clinking poker chips, and I focused on his voice and the sound of the hammock creaking where its chain met the wall until my eyelids were weighted and the dull roar of the ocean nearly lulled me to sleep.

I played possum a few minutes later when Daddy popped his head through the porch window to kiss me good night.

“You're my gal,” he whispered as I pretended to sleep. He still smelled like coconut suntan lotion, but it was mixed with beer now, and the stubble from his chin tickled my cheek and nearly gave me away.

“You can do anything you set your mind to,” he added before Papa Great called him back to the game.

As he ducked out onto the porch, I turned back toward him, caught my swollen lip between my teeth, and grinned.

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