I took a cab to the bank and asked the driver to wait for me while I withdrew forty dollars from my personal account, leaving very little left for a move to Charlotte or anywhere else, for that matter. I slipped the envelope with the money into my red handbag, the one I ordinarily saved for dressy occasions and the only one I had now that I’d lost my everyday handbag in the accident. When I got back into the cab and told the driver to take me to Ridgeview, he asked me if I was sure that’s where I wanted to go.
“I’m sure,” I said.
He shrugged and put the cab into gear.
I had him let me off in front of Adora’s house. The day was hot and I was perspiring by the time I got out of the cab. The short sleeves of my dress stuck to my arms, and I knew that unruly black tendrils were curling over my forehead. I walked up to the door, dodging a rusting tricycle on the crumbling sidewalk. In the front window, I spotted one of the red-bordered blue star flags and guessed it was for Del.
Although only the screened door was closed, it was too dark to see inside the house. I knocked on the door frame.
Honor pushed open the screened door and there was no warmth at all in her jade-green eyes, only a look of surprise. She peered behind me, and I guessed she was looking for a car or perhaps for Ruth or Henry.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Jilly spotted me from the living room and ran onto the porch. Gripping her doll in one arm, she wrapped the other around my thighs. I felt touched by her reaction to seeing me. She acted as though we were old friends instead of two strangers who’d shared a five-minute conversation at Ruth’s house. I welcomed her innocence and trust.
“Jilly!” Honor chided her, but I rested my hand on the back of the little girl’s head.
“Hi, little one,” I bent over to say. “How’s your dolly today?”
She let go of me and hugged her doll with both arms, rocking it back and forth. “She’s happy,” she said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” I smiled at her, then looked at Honor who stood holding the screened door open with her hip, her arms now crossed at her chest. “May I come in?” I asked. “Just for a moment.”
“Who is it?” Adora asked as she hobbled up behind Honor and peered around her shoulder. “Why, Miss Tess!” She smiled and I felt relieved. “What can we do for you?”
“When Lucy and I had the accident,” I said, more to Adora than Honor, “we were on our way here.”
“Here?” Adora frowned.
“Yes.” I looked from her to Honor. “Lucy and Ruth had collected some money at church to help you get a headstone for Butchie and we were bringing it over. Or at least we planned to bring it over, but Lucy wanted to … run an errand on the other side of the river, and…” My voice trailed off as I pulled the envelope from my handbag. “Anyway, I brought you the money.” I held out the envelope. “I’m sorry it’s taken a while to get it to you.”
“We don’t want your money,” Honor said. I was taken aback by the hostility in her voice. She’d treated me politely at the house after the funeral. I supposed that, at the house, she’d had no choice. Now I was on her turf. I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my cheek and brushed it away with damp fingers.
Adora gave Honor a light swat on her arm. “Act like a good Christian for once in your life,” she said to her daughter.
“No, it’s all right,” I said hastily, not wanting to be the cause of animosity between mother and daughter. “I’ll just leave the envelope with you, Adora, and go.”
Adora looked past me toward the street. “No car?” she asked. “You took the bus?”
“A cab.”
“Oh, that’s better,” she said. “Why don’t you set down here before you go back?” She pointed to the two white rocking chairs on the porch. “Mite bit cooler in the shade.”
Honor gave her mother a look of daggers. “I need to go out,” she said, and without so much as a glance in my direction, she walked past me and down the porch steps.
“Where you going, Mama?” Jilly called after her.
Honor didn’t answer and Adora held the door open with one hand while leaning over to draw her granddaughter to her by the shoulder. “She be back soon, Jilly, don’t fret,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to stir things up,” I said softly.
Adora waved away my comment and limped heavily across the porch to one of the rockers, motioning me to follow her. Jilly sat down on the wood floor of the porch and began talking to her doll, making it dance through the air.
“Honor thought of Miss Lucy as a friend,” Adora said as she sat down. “She don’t feel too kindly toward you, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sure she’s still grieving her son too,” I said, sitting on the second rocker. “She’s had two losses in a row, plus she’s apart from her…” I searched a bit desperately for the right word. Boyfriend? Lover?
“From Del, yes.” Adora saved me. “It’s all been hard on her and you’re right. There’s an empty spot in this house with no Butchie, that’s for sure,” she said. “Like I imagine there is at your house with no Lucy.”
I nodded.
Adora leaned forward in her chair, nearly close enough to reach out and touch me. “I want to tell you somethin’,” she said. “I’m glad Mr. Hank chose you.”
I was surprised. “You are?”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “That Violet, she a real pretty thing but she ain’t no good. She don’t feel for other people,” she said. “You do, don’t you? You feel things in your bones.”
“You barely know me,” I said, though she was certainly right about me. My bones ached with all I was feeling these days.
“Oh, I know enough.” Adora brushed a droplet of perspiration from her temple. “Jilly took to you right off. Honor told me how she sat with you at the house after Miss Lucy’s funeral. She only four but she got one of them sixth senses about people, you know what I mean?”
I nodded uncertainly. I looked at Jilly who was trying to tie a little bonnet over her doll’s molded blond hair.
“You can tell a lot about a person by the way a child takes to them,” Adora said. “You don’t hold yourself above nobody, not even a little bit of a thing like Jilly. Miss Violet, though—” She shook her head. “She hold herself above everybody. Above Jesus.” She chuckled. “I hated when it looked like Mr. Hank was gonna marry her. ’Course I had no say. Miss Ruth was thrilled. Two big families comin’ together. That kind of thing be important to Miss Ruth. Not so important to Hank though. He got a better head on his shoulders, thank the Lord.”
She wasn’t going to mention that I’d given Henry little choice but to marry me when I showed up carrying his child. I was sure she knew. Everyone else did.
“Henry told me you saved his life when he cut off his fingers,” I said.
She leaned back in the rocker and set it moving with her feet on the porch floor.
“Just lucky I was there or I don’t know what would of happened to that boy,” she said, looking past me into the distance. “I’ll never forget it, long as I live. Nineteen twenty-three, it was. I was coming from the cottage to the house when Hank come running out of the shed screamin’ his fool head off, blood flyin’ everywhere. So much blood it took me a minute to realize three of his fingers was gone.”
I bit my lip at the picture taking shape in my head.
“I quick tore the rag off my head—I was younger, skinnier, and faster movin’ in those days.” She winked at me from behind her glasses. “And I made one of them tourniquets and yelled for Miss Ruth to call for help. They was one of the only families with a phone back then and old Dr. Poole—the new Dr. Poole’s daddy?—had a phone too and he come right over. Meanstime, the blood done gone everywhere. All over Hank. All over me. All over the ground.”
I tried to imagine what Adora had looked like all those years ago when she came to work for Ruth and her husband. Behind her round face and thick glasses, I could see a pretty young girl. She’d probably been slender then too, like Honor.
“I don’t know if I could have done what you did,” I said, “and I’m a nurse.”
Her eyes lit up. “You a nurse, honey?”
“Yes, though obviously I’m not working as one. Henry doesn’t want me to work.”
“That’s a fine job for a girl, but you being a Kraft, you got no cause to work now, do you?”
I sighed. “I have no cause, but I’d still like to,” I said.
She didn’t seem to hear me. She was staring into the distance. “My children was Mr. Hank’s only playmates after he hurt his hand,” she said. “Other children called him a monster and such.”
“Really?” I supposed this was why Henry didn’t like talking about the loss of his fingers.
“Oh yes. Nobody would play with him after that. He would of died from bein’ lonely if Zeke and Honor didn’t play with him. They loved him like a brother till they was old enough to know better.”
Jilly had walked over to me and dumped her doll unceremoniously on my lap. “I can’t make this hat go on,” she said in frustration, handing me the bonnet.
“Would you like me to do it?” I asked.
Her head bobbed up and down and I began to tie the bonnet beneath the doll’s chin. “I’m glad he had Zeke and Honor,” I said to Adora.
“He needed them, for sure,” Adora said. “That little Violet was the worst about Hank’s hand. One of the ringleaders really. She didn’t care nothin’ for him until her mama and daddy put the idea of all Hank’s money in her head. Then suddenly, she mad in love with him.”
I thought of that picture in Lucy’s room, the one of her and Violet standing with Henry. He hadn’t looked all that miserable at finding himself with his arm around the pretty blond. I handed the doll back to Jilly.
“What you say?” Adora asked her.
“Thank you,” Jilly muttered. Then with her eyes on my face, she added, “You’re pretty.”
I laughed. “So are you, sweetheart.” I watched as she flopped down on the floor again with the nameless doll. I hoped Gina could find the colored doll for her. I wondered if she’d give that one a name.
“She’s a pip, ain’t she.” Adora nodded in her granddaughter’s direction.
“She’s darling,” I said.
“Hank give Zeke that job at the furniture company when he got sent home from the Marines,” Adora said, continuing our earlier conversation. “Nobody wanted to hire a colored man with a gimp leg, but Mr. Hank never forgot who his true and honest friends was.”
I thought of Zeke’s surprisingly lovely room at the factory. Lovely, but lonely, perhaps, living in that huge factory day and night. “Does Zeke have a family?” I asked.
“No, that boy ain’t never met a girl he liked well enough.” Adora sounded a bit annoyed by that fact. “He a good man, but tough to please.”
“How about you, Adora?” I asked. “You lived in that little cottage for twenty years, right? What about your husband?”
“When I started working for Mr. and Mrs. Kraft, I was twenty-four with two little ones and my husband worked for a farmer over to Newton,” she said. “We lived with his parents not far from here.” She pointed south of where we sat. “He got pneumonia one winter and…” She shook her head. “He went right quick.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I did the math in my head and was shocked to realize Adora was not even fifty. Arthritis and hard work had really taken their toll.
“That’s when Hank’s daddy built that little house for me and the children. They was good to us, the Kraft family.”
“I think they were lucky to have you.” I motioned toward her current house. “This little house is darling,” I said. “Prettiest house on the street.”
She smiled. “Zeke and Hank keep it up for us,” she said. “They paint it. Fix the roof. Hank got us these rocking chairs.”
“I’m glad they look after you,” I said. For a moment, I loved my husband. “Well, I’d better get going.” With a sigh, I got slowly to my feet, smoothing my skirt.
Adora suddenly looked worried. “How you gonna get home?” she asked. “We ain’t got no phone to call the cab.”
“Oh, I’ll take the bus,” I said. “It’s not a problem.” I hoped she didn’t watch me as I left, since I’d be walking in the wrong direction for the bus as I headed toward Reverend Sam’s house. “Thank you for the shade and conversation,” I added. “I enjoyed it.”
She winced as she stood up, then shuffled with me across the porch.
“Everybody always ’spected Hank’d marry Violet and that would of been a terrible thing,” she said. “Maybe you saved him from something terrible, Miss Tess. You think of it that way, all right?”