Someone was coming through the front door of the building. We heard keys jingle and then drop onto the marble floor. “Shit,” a man’s voice mumbled. Delia knocked again, this time more urgently. She shifted Malcolm so that his head could rest on her left shoulder and then leaned in close to the door, pressing her mouth into the space where the door and doorjamb met. “Gwenyth.Gwenyth,” she whispered.
The man turned the corner and my mother froze. We stood stock still and held our breaths. His back was to us and he stared down at some mail he had retrieved on his way in. It seemed as though he stood there forever before he started up the stairs whistling to himself.
After the man entered his own apartment on the third floor, Delia began knocking again. “Gwenyth.”
The door was at least a good half an inch off the ground. I peered down and saw a shadow there. My heart began banging in my chest and I looked up at the silver square with the clear eye that sat in the middle of the door. The peephole. She was there watching us shiver.
The shadow moved away and the volume on the television increased. Delia stumbled backward as if slapped. “C’mon,” she said and took me by my shoulder, leading me back up the stairs. “He’s probably asleep by now.” She glanced over her shoulder once more in pure disbelief. I’ll never forget the look of abandonment that came across my mother’s face.
She never sought help from Gwenyth again.
“So what are you going to do?” Mable was asking Delia for the fifth time, and Delia still did not respond.
“I guess that means you’re going back.”
There was a long silence and then the sound of chairs being moved. I stood up and crawled into the bedroom, easing myself back into the bed I shared with Malcolm.
“We going back?” His breath was hot on the back of my neck.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said and curled my knees into my stomach.
“Just like always.” He shifted his body into a comfortable position, taking a breath, and then the sucking sounds came.
“Yeah, just like always,” I said and didn’t bother to reprimand him about sucking his thumb.
It was barely eight when I heard my father’s voice sailing up from Mable’s living room. The sun was beaming in through the window sending red rockets across the inside of my eyelids. I pulled the covers up over my head and prayed it was all a dream. I had begged God to kill him while he slept. I wanted the whole building to collapse on top of him. But God had ignored me and there he was in my grandparents’ living room, alive and well.
I removed the covers and opened my eyes. I surveyed the room. It had been my mother’s bedroom before she got married. The walls were a soft pink. It was practically bare except for the twin bed and white dresser. A picture of my mother sat in a silver frame on the top of the dresser. That was my favorite picture of her. She was on the back of a truck, surrounded by watermelons, her legs crossed beneath her, her bare feet covered in dirt. She was smiling and waving at the cameraman. Her hair was piled high atop her head in wild loose tresses and watermelon juice shone wet on her chin.
She was seventeen in that picture and it was the last time she ever smiled that way. Hy-Lo was the cameraman and married her six months later, five days after her eighteenth birthday. He took her hand in marriage and took away, forever, that easy joy of her youth.
I turned over on my side and hugged myself. I felt safe there at my grandmother’s house. There was never any yelling, screaming, or fighting. When Sam, my grandmother’s second husband, laid his hands on Mable, it was always an affectionate caress, not a punch or slap. Their disagreements were settled quietly behind closed doors and they always went to bed friends.
I wanted to stay there forever.
The smell of pancakes and bacon pulled me from my bed. As much as I didn’t want to go downstairs and look into the sorry eyes of my father, I had to quell the hunger pains in my stomach. I tippy-toed to the bathroom, quietly closing the door behind me. I quickly washed my face and brushed my teeth. I smoothed my hair down and adjusted the large T-shirt my grandfather gave me to sleep in. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that I looked so much like my mother in the picture, minus the joy. I guess I looked exactly how she looked now. Worn, tired, and miserable.
I opened the door, took a deep breath, and started down the stairs.
They were already at the table: Delia, Mable, Sam, and Malcolm.
“Good morning,” I said as my eyes searched every corner of the dining room for Hy-Lo.
“Good morning, baby.” My grandmother smiled and began to fill my plate with Sam’s down-home blueberry pancakes.
“Grandma, can I have soda?” Malcolm asked, his mouth filled with food.
“No,” Delia said sternly.
“Oh, Delia, please. Of course you can, baby.” Mable patted him on the head and Malcolm jumped up from the table and ran to the refrigerator to retrieve a can of Coke. Delia rolled her eyes and shook her head, but said nothing. It was Mable’s house and she had the final word.
Sam smiled, but said nothing. He paid the mortgage, but knew that didn’t mean a thing in this house. What Mable says goes.
I avoided my mother’s eyes and focused on my food. I was tense; I didn’t know where Hy-Lo was.
“Sleep okay, Kenzie?” Delia was trying to make breakfast conversation. Trying to fix her voice to sound like June Cleaver. I nodded at my food.
“Look at your mother when she’s talking to you, Kenzie.” Mable’s voice was pleasant but stern.
I glanced at Delia and saw the blue half moon beneath her eye. “Yes,” I mumbled my reply.
The back door opened and my heart jumped in my chest. I looked up and Hy-Lo looked back at me. His face was expressionless. He took one long last drag on his Camel and then flicked it outside. My mouth went dry and the blueberries began to back up in my throat.
He wiped his feet on the brown rug and walked over to the table. All the time his eyes never left mine. He stood over Malcolm and pulled the can of Coke from his hand just as he was about to drink from it. Delia’s mouth twisted but she said nothing.
“Hey, man, don’t you think it’s a little early in the morning to start a commotion?” Mable’s voice rang out.
Sam grunted and sat back in his chair, folding his arms across his massive chest. He licked at his lips and grunted again.
“Mable, it’s too early in the morning for this boy to be having soda. And to make it worse, with pancakes,” Hy-Lo said as he walked over to the sink and emptied the bubbling, caramel-colored liquid into the sink.
“Well, I said he could have it,” Mable replied and shoved a piece of bacon in her mouth. Sam grunted again and scratched at his chin.
Hy-Lo didn’t say anything for a long time. He’d released my eyes, but I couldn’t stop staring at him. Him in his white T-shirt and clean blue Levi’s that held a crease so sharp it could cut steak. That’s when I noticed the butter knife, the dark blue handle resting against the cream-colored lace of the tablecloth and the shiny silver tip resting on the edge of my plate.
I could do it, I thought to myself. I could jump up, run across the table, and stick the butter knife right in his heart. I could. I could.
My body began to shake at the thought and my hands trembled in my lap as I ran the image over and over in my mind.
“The boy is already hyper, Mable.” Hy-Lo was done talking. He threw Delia a look that promised her a beating for not supporting him. He pulled out a pack of Camels from his back pocket and started walking toward the door again. He whistled “Stand by Your Man” as he went. I looked at Delia and she was trembling.
M
y heart stopped as I walked into the room. The chair was not against the wall but pulled close to the bed, past Hy-Lo’s toes, closer to his knees. The thought of coming that near to him sent shivers up and down my spine.
“Uh-unh,” I said and shook my head back and forth like a disagreeable two-year-old. “Uh-unh,” I said again as I moved forward. “That is too close,” I voiced to no one in particular.
I stood a few inches away from the foot of the bed and looked from the chair to Hy-Lo. Had he done this? Was it a cruel joke he was playing on me? Maybe. He was an expert at being cruel. Jokes weren’t his thing though.
I glanced toward the open door. Visitors, doctors, nurses, and patients dressed in green pajamas with
Property of Kings
County
stamped across their chests moved up and down the hallway. Perhaps one of them had done it. Perhaps Nurse D. Green had done it.
I snatched at the raised back of the chair and dragged it noisily across the floor back to the spot by the wall. I would have to start all over again, from the beginning, from the wall, where the temperature was the warmest. No one would force me ahead. My whole life had been an acceleration. No more. I sat down.
The morning news came across the television and a wide-eyed blond woman with braces smiled through the dusty glass. She seemed glad to advise her viewing audience that a cold front was coming down from Canada and would be here by early Thursday.
I snuffed at her and tugged at the hem of my gloves. Thursday. That was tomorrow. I looked at Hy-Lo and then back at the wide-eyed weather reporter. “That makes today Wednesday then, I guess?” I said to the television.
“Uh-huh,” someone replied from behind his green curtain.
I’d hated Wednesdays for a long time. From age ten to thirteen to be exact. Those were the years I attended Catholic school, and during those years every Wednesday we had half a day of school. Most children chalked that up as a plus, as if it made up for the ugly plaid skirts and clunky black shoes. Malcolm and I hated it.
Our schoolmates hurried past us, leaving a knotty stream of laughter behind them as they giggled their way through plans for their afternoon. Malcolm and I turned the normal ten-block walk into fifteen or twenty, going out of our way to stretch the time between the 11:45 bell and the moment we stepped over the threshold of apartment A5.
Glenna was always with us. Her wide bright ribbons bounced against her cheeks as she slapped at the back of Malcolm’s head and teased his ears. “Stop,” he’d yell at her, but she would keep harassing him; she knew he had a crush on her.
Glenna was a latchkey child and spent every afternoon, Wednesday or not, stationed in front of the television, a bag of candy in her lap, waiting for her mother to walk through the door at six. She was lucky if Pinky walked through the door before midnight.
“You gotta go to the bank today?” she asked as she nibbled on a Twizzler.
“Yep,” I said. That was Wednesday protocol. The bank and the A&P. I hated both places. But I think the A&P was worse. Hy-Lo did all of the shopping for the family. He bought what he liked, Delia cooked it, and we ate it.
He always used two shopping carts, one for food and the other for household supplies. Malcolm and I would trail along behind him, up and down the wide, white aisles with shelves that dwarfed us. We would struggle with our cart of toilet paper, detergent, and cleaning supplies, often rolling into a display or jamming into Hy-Lo’s heels.
“Meatheads,” he’d sneer at us and maybe pop us upside our heads or pinch us on the underside of our arms.
After we came home and unpacked the brown paper bags and put the food and supplies away, we had to fold the bags. Not just any old way; there was, according to Hy-Lo, an art to folding a paper bag.
Bag after bag, crease after crease—we folded until our fingers ached, and if we didn’t do it right Hy-Lo would throw all the bags to the floor and make us fold them again.
Yes, I hated Wednesdays.
“You want me to go with you?” Glenna always asked.
“He might see,” I said as I kicked over a bottle someone left standing in the middle of the sidewalk. It fell on its side and rolled into the street.
Hy-Lo made it clear every week that I was to go straight to the bank and then come directly home. No stopping, no socializing. I was to do this alone. And if he found out otherwise, my behind would be his.
“Oh, that’s right,” Glenna would say as if she’d forgotten that it had always been that way.
No matter how many blocks out of our way we went, we always seemed to make it home by twelve-thirty. My stomach turned as we rounded the corner and started toward the apartment building.
Maybe he wouldn’t be there. Maybe today would be the day his truck jackknifed on I-80 and he was lying dead on the highway somewhere. Maybe today would be the day I would walk through the door and there would be two nice policemen comforting my mother. She would look up at me with her red eyes and tell me, “Your daddy is dead.” I would hold my smile back, for her, so she could have her grief.
I would hug her and tell her it was going to be all right, offer the policemen something to drink, and then show them to the door. “Thank you,” I’d say. “We’ll be fine.”
I’d tuck Delia into bed, make her some tea, and close the drapes. Maybe call Gwenyth and his brothers, Charles and Randy, with the news, and then I would go to my bedroom, close the door, and scream with joy into my pillow.
The car was there.
“Well, he’s home,” Glenna said and gave me an apologetic look.
My stomach turned over and I grabbed Malcolm’s hand.
I rang the bell and waited. I didn’t have keys like the rest of my friends; Hy-Lo wouldn’t allow it. Wednesdays were the only days we didn’t have problems trying to get into the house. He would still be wide awake and only a quarter of the way into his vodka. All of the other days we stood in the hallway ringing the bell for such long periods of time that the round black dot left its impression on the tips of our index fingers.
Many times, Delia would come home to find us sitting on the floor in the hallway, our books spread out around us as we struggled to do our homework amidst the traffic of our neighbors and the squeals of playing children that sailed in from the backyard.
We dared not move from the hallway. We never knew when he would wake up from his drunken slumber and open the door, and if we were not there, it would be the belt for sure.