Mama slept and slept the next morning, all the way through breakfast and then even later. “Just let your mama keep on sleeping,” Daddy told me, pulling Mylie’s blue church dress over her head. “Think maybe she’s coming down with something. You and I can handle church today.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything, just smooshed my lips together until they burned.
Daddy had just brushed out Mylie’s hair and tried to put a little barrette into it to keep the curls out of her face when he realized he didn’t have the keys to his truck.
“Della, you seen my key ring?” he asked, his words clipped little syllables wrapped up in stress. He glanced at the wall clock, ticking its way ever closer to church time.
“No,” I said, pausing in the doorway where I was getting ready to take Mylie out and put her into her car seat.
“Darn it all,” Daddy muttered, running a hand through his hair so it stuck up all funny. He looked square at Mylie. “Did you take those keys, little monkey?”
It took us nearly ten minutes of combing through the house before we found them, stuck between the couch cushions along with a handful of Cheerios and Mylie’s favorite toy, a little plastic phone.
“That dang baby.” Daddy grabbed his sunglasses and herded us toward the door and out to the truck.
My best friend, Arden, was the oldest of five kids, but the babies in her family had barely done more than toddle around and giggle when they were sixteen months old. Not Mylie, though. Anybody who knew Mylie knew that she had been born with mischief in her hands and big ideas in her head. Once, Daddy’s cell phone had gone missing for most of a day, until I went out to get the eggs and found it in the chicken coop. Another time, she’d stolen Mama’s shiny silver credit card, and when a week had gone by without it ever turning up, Mama had had to spend a whole day on the phone convincing the credit card people to give her another.
“Silly goosey,” I whispered as I snapped the car-seat buckles together. She just grinned back. Mylie didn’t like a lot of stuff, but she sure liked riding in the car, especially when it was hot summertime and Daddy put the windows down. He put them down today, letting the wind roar over our faces as we bumped down the road toward town.
I sat in the backseat of the pickup and watched the back of Daddy’s head. My mouth felt full of words I wasn’t saying: Words like Is Mama really coming down with something, or is it the other thing? and Aren’t you gonna say something about how she was acting crazy last night, crazy like she used to be? But all those words stayed right inside my mouth, trapped, through the whole drive to the Maryville Methodist Church. Daddy never liked if I used the word crazy, anyway. Said it was unkind and untrue both.
“You’re quiet today, Della,” he said now, talking loud so I could hear him over the roar of the wind through the open windows. “Come on. Answer me this. Would you rather work seven days at twenty dollars per day, or be paid two dollars for the first day and have your salary double every day for a week?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled.
“Well, figure it out.”
“It’s illegal for a twelve-year-old to have a job anyway.”
Daddy’s shoulders hunched up just a little. “You’re not worrying about your mama, are you? She’s gonna be fine, honey. She was just tired last night. Okay, how about this one: Do they have a fourth of July in England?”
“Duh. Of course they do.”
“Don’t sass,” Daddy said, but I could tell he felt bad.
I turned toward the window, resting my chin on my arm and watching the town rush by. Maryville isn’t a real town—just a highway that runs through the center, with a bank, a church, a school, and a gas station/convenience store that is the only place to buy food, pump gas, or post mail. Most of Maryville is farms as far as the eye can see, all the way down to the bank of Hummingbird Bay on the Albemarle Sound.
We turned into the church parking lot just before it was time for the service to start. It was hot in the church today, just about as hot as I imagined the devil’s place must be. The air-conditioning couldn’t keep up with the July heat; all around me, church ladies fanned themselves with programs and wiped limp, sticky hair off their foreheads.
“You wanna take Mylie to the nursery class, Della? I got a car question for Anton,” Daddy said when we got there. Anton Jones owned the gas station, and since we didn’t have a mechanic, he was the closest thing you could get outside of going to Alberta. I picked Mylie up and hitched her onto my hip, heading off in the direction of the nursery. Her legs and arms were tacky with sweat, like they might stick right to me.
“No!” Mylie started yelling as soon as she saw the door to the nursery class. She kicked her legs back and forth hard, hitting my thighs with her Mary Janes. “No! No! No!”
“It’s just your class, Mylie,” I said, trying to talk to her like I was her mama and not just her big sister who would really rather be out of this hot church, too. “You love your class. There’s Miss Marvella, see?”
“Come on, Mylie honey,” Miss Marvella said. “We got lots of fun things to do today.”
Mylie’s teacher was young and pretty, with light brown skin and long hair braided into cornrows that swayed a little as she waved to us. I’d gone to church a couple times with Grandma and Grandpa Kelly up in Alberta, and most Sundays their service was filled with row after row of sunburned white faces. Maryville was so small—according to the newspaper, the last census had recorded only a couple hundred people—that Maryville Methodist Church was the only church for a half hour’s drive, which meant that pretty much anybody Christian ended up there come Sunday morning. I was glad, too; if we’d had white-person churches and black-person churches, like lots of cities did, then Mylie wouldn’t have had Miss Marvella for a teacher, which would’ve been a straight-up disaster. Miss Marvella was just about the only grown-up Mylie liked, aside from my parents and Arden’s. During the week she taught kindergarten at the elementary school, and you could tell, because little kids went to her like bees went to the Bee Lady.
But not today. Mylie wasn’t having any of it. She arched her back so hard I thought I might drop her, and screamed even louder. “No, NO!”
I put her down before she could fly out of my arms, and she started stamping her feet on the floor like it was covered in ants. Big fat tears were running down her flushed pink cheeks now, splashing onto the collar of her dress and leaving round wet spots. “Wan’ Mama,” she sobbed, wrapping her arms around my leg so I couldn’t move an inch. “Mama, Mama!”
Miss Marvella bent down, trying to pry Mylie’s arms off me. “Your mama not feeling well, sugar?” she asked, her voice quiet, like she was talking to a skittish horse. “You wanna come play with me and the others now? You gone be just fine, sweet baby.”
Mylie just cried harder, pressing her face into my leg until I could feel the tears seeping through my own dress.
I sighed. “She can just come with us today,” I said, reaching down to pull Mylie’s head away from my skirt. “You hear that, silly baby? You can come with Della and Daddy, okay? But you gotta stop crying and you gotta stay quiet the whole time.”
Mylie stopped crying so fast she choked, gagging on her own tears.
“You sure?” Miss Marvella asked.
“We’ll be all right,” I said to Miss Marvella, and then looked down at Mylie. “You come on, little monster. And be quiet.”
After the service was over we got stopped by church lady after church lady, all of them waving their fans and asking about Mama. “She doin’ all right?” “Can I bring you a meal tonight?” “Suzanne be needing help with the kids this week? I know that baby is a handful and a half.” Daddy and I just shook our heads and smiled real big, saying, “No, thank you” over and over.
“Suzie’s just feeling a little under the weather,” Daddy said, keeping a firm hold on Mylie’s hand so she couldn’t dash off through the open church doors and into the parking lot. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “She’ll be back to her usual self by tomorrow, I’m sure of it. We’ll be just fine, but thanks for the offer.”
“You just call me anytime y’all need anything at all,” they all said, one after another, their husbands nodding agreement. Each one of them church ladies looked hard into my eyes, like they were checking to see if Daddy was telling the truth or not. I did my best to smile big and normal, trying not to think about the night before.
The image of Mama with a watermelon seed stuck above her eyebrow was burned right into me.
I wished Arden were there. She was the kind of person who wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone and knew just how to make other people smile. That was one of the reasons that I was pretty sure even if we hadn’t grown up seeing each other nearly every day, I’d still have wanted to be her best friend. Being with Arden made it okay that I was quiet, okay that sometimes I blushed around new people and stumbled over my words.
If Arden had been there, she would’ve given me the courage to go back home and see how Mama was doing this morning. But the Hawthornes were one of the few families in town that didn’t go to church on Sundays; it was just one more thing that made people raise their eyebrows when they thought Arden’s parents weren’t looking. Everybody in Maryville loved the Hawthornes, but most everybody also agreed they were just a little different.
I always figured that Maryville could use all the different it could get.
We were almost out the door and into the bright-white summer sunlight when one last church lady caught us, her pale light-blond hair shining in the sun. She was only medium-old for an adult, not much older than my daddy, but she was the kind of grown-up who spoke so confidently and knew so much that she might have been alive a hundred years.
It was Miss Tabitha Quigley. The Bee Lady.
She had a backyard full of white beehives, the bees buzzing around them till the whole place hummed with it, and her honey wasn’t just the kind you could get from any grocery store. It was pretty well accepted that the Bee Lady’s honey could cheer you up if you were feeling down, or fix your broken heart, or help you see things clearer when you had big decisions to make. Some people even mixed her honey into water and poured it on their gardens and farms, swearing it made their plants grow twice as strong.
“Noticed y’all all alone in your pew today,” Miss Tabitha said. Her eyes were the same bright blue as the silky turquoise scarf she wore, so blue it looked like they couldn’t possibly be real. Mama said the Quigleys had always had those eyes, as far back as anyone in town could remember. Even here inside the church building, a black-and-gold bee darted back and forth above her, its wings like lace in the light from the glass doors. Miss Tabitha didn’t seem to notice it.
“Hi there, Tabitha. Suzanne’s just feeling a little under the weather,” said Daddy, looking out the doorway to where his truck sat parked, invisible in the haze from the heat and the sun. “Just got a little one of them summer colds.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Miss Tabitha, putting a pale hand down on my shoulder in that absentminded way grown-ups sometimes did. Her skin smelled like honey and lavender.
“Thanks,” said Daddy, with a grimace that was probably meant to look like a smile.
“You tell me if you ever need anything, Della, you hear?” Her voice was as warm and soft as her skin, as sweet as the honey she sold.
I looked up at her, my tongue all tied up in knots. I’d always felt a little shy around the Bee Lady—even more shy than I felt around most folks. Seeing her was like seeing somebody step right out of the stories that Mama used to tell to me, the stories I loved to tell Mylie. Plenty of people had a little bit of magic to them, but the Quigleys and their bees had more than most.
Standing there in that light-and-shadow entryway, I wanted to open my mouth so bad and tell her everything that had happened the night before, wanted to beg her to give me some of her magic honey to fix Mama up like Miss Tabitha’s grandma had once fixed Grandpa Kelly’s leg.
But Daddy was standing right there beside me, his hand in Mylie’s, impatience written all over his face, and I knew if I said anything it would only frustrate him more. I knew without even asking that he didn’t want anyone to know about Mama right now, didn’t want anyone hearing about how she’d been with the watermelon seeds last night, didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.
“It’s important for your mama to have dignity, Della,” he’d told me more than once, his eyes sad. “And lots of people, they don’t understand an illness like your mama’s, like schizophrenia. They hear that name and start to use hurtful words, like ‘crazy’ and ‘psychotic,’ and start seeing a person as just a disease, not a human being. Your mama’s always going to have good days and bad days, and we’ll get through them the way we always have. Together, as a family.”
Daddy figured that since schizophrenia had been part of our family exactly as long as I had, nobody knew as well as we did how to handle it. And maybe I’d felt that way, too, sometimes.
But not right now. Not after last night. Those watermelon seeds had been something worse, something more than all Mama’s symptoms since the bad time.
I could see just the way Daddy’s mouth would pull together into a thin line if he heard me beg magic honey off Miss Tabitha.
Don’t go bothering Miss Quigley, he’d say, holding on to Mylie’s hand while she tried to tug him toward the car. You know just as well as I do, Della, that your mama’s medication is the best treatment available.
But what Daddy didn’t understand was that after last night, treatment didn’t feel like enough. Treatment meant “good days and bad days.”
What I wanted was a cure—not something that would work for just a year or two at a time, like Mama’s medicines. Something that would heal forever, so we never had to worry again.