Mavis stared out the window of the bus at the sights of Landry, Alabama, beyond the gates of Magnolia Estates. The trailer parks with dirt-stained trailers sitting every which way among the white oak trees. The cotton fields stretched out between farmhouses with sheets on the clotheslines and pickup trucks filled with bales of hay in the gravel driveways. Sometimes children waved to the bus from their front porches.
The sickly sweet smell of her mother’s cologne drifted toward Mavis, making her eyes water. She waved her hand in front of her nose and opened the window of the bus, letting the hot summer air blow in.
“Tell me again why I had to come with you,” Mavis said.
“I want you to see more of Landry, May May.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I think you’ll like it. There’s a lot more to Landry than that snooty Magnolia Estates, you know.”
But Mavis knew there was some other reason for this bus trip. That tightness in her stomach told her this wasn’t a sightseeing trip. She was almost eleven years old. Did her mother think she was still that little six-year-old Mavis who believed everything her mother told her? The Mavis who went along on every new adventure with her mother, thinking everything was going to turn out great, like her mother promised it would?
Well, she wasn’t that little Mavis anymore. This Mavis could smell something fishy a mile away. And in addition to that sickly sweet smell of her mother’s cologne, there was most definitely a fishy smell wafting around Mavis as she sat on that bus.
Before long, the view outside the window began to change. The farms and cotton fields disappeared, and in their place were neighborhoods with tree-lined streets and kids playing in the yards. As they got closer to town, they passed JBJ’s Used Car Lot, Bucky’s Diner, Oak Grove Baptist Church, Ruth Ann’s Cut ’n’ Curl.
“Check it out!” Her mother leaned over and pointed out the window. “That’s your school.”
Landry Elementary School was a two-story brick building beside a dusty playground and a tiny square of blacktop with a basketball hoop. Scattered in the dirt and gravel were remnants of long-ago recesses. Half of a frayed jump rope. A deflated soccer ball.
Finally the bus came to a stop, brakes screeching.
“This is it!” her mother said. “Come on!”
Mavis followed her mother up the aisle and down the steps to the sidewalk. The doors of the bus closed with a whoosh, and the bus drove off, leaving a puff of black smoke behind it.
“Ta-da!” Her mother threw her arms out and grinned at Mavis.
There in front of them were four small apartment buildings. Two on each side of a wide strip of dry, yellowing grass. In the grass strip were a couple of picnic tables and a swing set. Kids played on the swings while grown-ups sat at the picnic tables, playing cards and bouncing babies on their laps.
Some of the apartments on the ground floor had pots of flowers by their doors or bicycles lying beside the walkway. The second-floor apartments had tiny balconies where laundry dried on the railings and old people sat in aluminum lawn chairs.
A sun-bleached, peeling sign out by the road read GARDEN VIEW APARTMENTS.
“Where’s the garden?” Mavis asked.
Her mother frowned. “What?”
“The garden.” Mavis nodded toward the sign, making a clump of curls flop over her forehead.
“Aw, come on, May May,” her mother said. “Can’t you look on the bright side of things for once?”
“Which side is the bright one?” Mavis was trying very hard to act nonchalant, but her insides were stirring around like a swarm of angry bees, and that fishy smell was getting stinkier by the minute.
“They’ve got a couple of empty apartments and I’m telling you, May, they’re really nice inside.” Her mother gave her a little poke on the arm. “Dishwashers and everything,” she added.
Mavis didn’t want her mother to beat around the bush. She wanted her to go straight to the cold, hard facts.
“Why are we here?” she asked.
Her mother shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other. “Okay. I’m thinking of getting me a new job in Landry. A better job. A job where some highfalutin woman doesn’t make me feel like a dumb, worthless piece of nothing.”
“And what job is that?”
Her mother flopped down on the bus stop bench.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “But I’ve made some calls, and I’ve got a couple of prospects. I got a good feeling about this, May May.”
Mavis’s swarming-bee insides turned into one big ball of dread.
Her mother had had a good feeling about a lot of things before. But most of the time, those things had turned out to be a long way from good.