Chapter Six

EVELYN KNEW GRANNY B had buried her the moment she’d stumbled down her three concrete steps and slunk away in her car. Not six feet under the wiry Bermuda grass and a pile of sandy North Carolina soil, but deep down in the back of her mind where she cataloged and closely monitored all the hurts and wrongs done to her. When Evelyn left Headquarters, she knew she’d have to find some way to explain to her mama why Granny B definitely wouldn’t attend her birthday party this fall. Why she wouldn’t see Granny B anytime soon.

But Lis beat her to it.

“She’s dying, Evelyn. Mama is going to die.”

Evelyn stared, struck dumb. It would’ve been a picture-perfect moment—Lis, clad in the heather-green frock, perched on the edge of the wooden bench, the sun a golden halo—if not for the silent stream of tears dripping unchecked into the pot of gardenias in her lap. The tears . . . and the headstones that dotted the Hillcrest Cemetery hillside.

A chattering blue jay broke the silence. Lis swiped at her cheeks, replacing the tears with streaks of dirt. Evelyn swallowed her rising panic and tried not to choke on the news.

“Wait a minute, Mama. Back up. Start over.”

Lis took a breath. “You remember Ruby Tagle?” Her voice was deeper, the words spoken more slowly, her accent more pronounced.

“Mama, why—?”

“Girl, just answer the question.”

Memories of warm molasses cookies, butter-frosted pound cakes, collard greens and salt pork, and honey-glazed ham washed over her. “Of course I know Ruby Tagle. My friend Maxine’s grandmother. Oh, you mean, she’s dying? But you said—”

“I got a call from her this morning at the shop. Remember? Right before you left. You know, they’re pretty close—well, as close as Mama is to anybody, other than you—”

“Are you doing this on purpose?”

“Anyway, Mrs. Tagle is Mama’s emergency contact. After Dr. Hedgepeth talked to her, she immediately called me.”

“Emergency.” She rolled the word around on her tongue. “What emergency?” Crusty people don’t get sick. They just get crustier until God says, “Enough.” Right?

“Thank God he’s known our family for so long and is willing to break that hippo law thing.”

HIPAA, Evelyn thought automatically but figured this wasn’t the time to correct her. And Evelyn sure wasn’t ready to thank God for anything yet. “What’s wrong with Granny B? Is it a heart problem? You can’t just tell me she’s dying without telling me what the doctor said. Is this a second opinion? What do we need to do?” Resolve crumbled as panic snowballed and gathered momentum.

“Evelyn, I told you practically all that I know! Mama is . . . she has . . .”

“Cancer?”

“Yes! I mean . . . no. It’s . . . She has something called acute myeloid leukemia.”

Boy, that’s a mouthful. Sounds deadly. “What is that exactly? What do we do now?”

Lis jumped to her feet. The pot hit the ground and rolled against the headstone. Graham Willis. Son. Husband. Father. Child of God. “‘We? What do we do?’ And just who is ‘we,’ Evelyn?”

“You, Granny B, me—you know, we. What’s with that look? If there isn’t a ‘we,’ then why are you telling me? You know I love Granny B, that I want to do whatever I can—”

“And why do I know that, Evelyn? ‘We’ haven’t given a whit about her, not enough to go see her once the last month or so. You’ve been ‘just too busy,’ ‘so booked up,’ ‘had a full itinerary.’” As Lis elucidated all her daughter’s excuses, she stepped closer, crushing a white blossom underfoot. “You’ve been home for a week, and you have not so much as said one word about her. Where was this great love of yours for Mama that you now sit here telling me about? Hmmph, ‘What do we do now?’”

Now was not the time for Evelyn to explain the Reason she hadn’t gone to see her elderly grandmother—for all of a sudden that was what Granny B was: her elderly grandmother, an infirm person, not the strapping, healthful, ice-crunching old lady who’d turned her from her home without blinking. No, that terrible Incident had been wiped away with just the whisper of the word dying. Now she needed to add sugar cubes to the trough so her mama would drink.

“Okay, listen. No matter what happened in the past, that is exactly what and where it is: the past. You know that people say and do a lot of things . . . things that really don’t mean much in the long run or in the short run either. What will mean a lot more is what I—we—do right now. You just said yourself that I’m the closest person to her, so it makes sense for me to reach out to her, especially now.”

Lis looked away. Evelyn admired her beautiful, dirt-smudged profile before she started searching her pockets. She considered cleaning her mama’s face with a slightly crumpled, sugar-crusted napkin from Krispy Kreme, but she handed it to her so she could do it herself.

Lis retrieved a handkerchief from her own pocket. She dabbed at her cheeks and smoothed her ever-perfect coiffure. “You know what makes sense? If you had shown her these past few weeks even a tenth of the concern you’re showing now, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Mama probably would have confided in you, and we would have known how to help her. We could have saved her, Evelyn.”

She dropped to her knees and stabbed at the dirt with her spade. Lis was much like Granny B: everything had its place, and if it didn’t know where to go, she’d put it there, including Evelyn.

Much as Kevin had controlled himself and merely offered her a glass of orange juice, Evelyn silently took the spade from her mama and gently used it to lower the trampled gardenias into the hole. Lis and Evelyn spent the next hour wordlessly planting and cleaning away the dead leaves, bits of trash, and old flowers from the family plots. When they finished, Evelyn distributed a few of the new plants to the graves of Grandpa and Grandma Willis. The tension in their heartstrings gradually loosened.

When Lis moved to stand, Evelyn rose quickly and cupped her elbow. Lis pulled away and rose with little effort, but Evelyn looped her arm through her mama’s and edged closer. Together they returned to the bench under the Southern live oak tree. Its roots stretched unseen beneath the headstones.

Lis’s eyes drifted far away from Hillcrest. “You know, your grandmother’s always watering those hydrangeas.”

“She is?”

“You thought she’d let them die, what with all that work planting them? You always seem to have a way with her. At least you used to.”

“Mama—”

“When I was down there digging, I thought back to when she used to send all of us out to Booker Perkins’s garden. Well, he called it a garden, but it was really this huge plot of land he owned where he grew corn, beans, peas, all kinds of vegetables. Every summer, he’d come by our house at the crack of dawn and load us all up in the back of his truck. Over a few weeks’ time, we’d clear that whole piece of land.”

“How old were you?”

“When we started going, Sarah wasn’t as tall as a tobacco leaf. I’d have the taller ones pick from the highest rows and the rest of us gather up what was left. Little Ed pushed the wagons.” She gazed into yesteryear’s fields, seemingly unmindful of her fresh flow of tears.

Evelyn didn’t know if her mama was mourning what once was or what was to come.

“Thomas was kinda fragile, so he didn’t help much. But he’d lead us all in singing or telling stories. He could imitate Mama or Mr. Perkins. Almost anybody. He’d have us all laughing about one thing or another before long, distracting Little Ed from worrying about messing up those pretty hands of his.”

“Y’all could laugh in that heat?”

“Girl, that work kept us out of Mama’s sight. She would have had us doing something much worse, I know. Besides, we would have plenty enough time later to be around the house as we got the vegetables ready for canning and storing.”

“I can see Ruthena out there now, praying for God to help her pick that corn.”

Lis swatted a mosquito. “No, Ruthena wasn’t out there with us. At least, not after the first picking season or two. She kept her color most of the year ’cause you can’t get a whole lot of sun when it’s streaming through stained-glass windows.”

“Come again?”

“Ruthena spent most of her time in church. Personally, I think her preoccupation with the Lord began with her simple wish to beat the heat—mostly the kind Mama laid on us. Ruthena made friends with the missionary group from church, so they put her to work most days after school and during the summer. She’d be running around delivering plates of food and Bibles to the sick and shut-in. She took prayer cloths to folk, ran errands for the pastor—it was Pastor John back then—dusted off the pulpit and choir hymnals. Ruthena wouldn’t show up back at Mama’s until long after we were home.”

“How did Granny B feel about that?”

“Ruthena wasn’t quite as holy then as she is now, so she was much easier to live with. As long as Ruthena didn’t try to save everybody, Mama was fine with her work in the church. Besides, membership has its privileges, as they say. Mama got a few free plates of food in her time, and with us working in Mr. Perkins’s fields most of the summer and Ruthena doing the Lord’s work, all the bases were covered. We stayed out of trouble. Of course, Little Ed didn’t cooperate for long.”

Lis stood and gracefully stretched her back and neck. “Mama didn’t look to God to provide, at least not to provide in the way you think. She didn’t believe in letting her burdens down. They kept her warm at night in a way none of us kids could. Mama believed God saved her, but her salvation gave her something to look forward to, not something she got to enjoy here on Earth. You wouldn’t find her in church, singing His praises. She stuck to doing His work at home. For her, we were the Lord’s work.”

Without warning, Lis grasped Evelyn’s right hand with both of hers. She leaned in to her, blocking out the sun, the branches of the oak tree, the headstones around them. “Evelyn, it’s time for us to do the Lord’s work now. Mama needs us. Not you or me laying prayer cloths on her or dousing her with oil like Ruthena. But us.

“Mama never asked us for anything. I never even heard her ask God for something. We just made the best of what He gave us because it took all of us to survive. Evelyn, I want my mama to stop looking to heaven to end all her pain. I want her to find peace and joy now, on Earth, ‘in the land of the living,’ like the psalm says. And she can do it if we help her.”

Evelyn tried to tug her hand from that inexorable, painful grip.

“She needs a constant presence in her life, someone she can depend on even when she doesn’t want to depend on anybody. She’s had that in God, but He works through our hands and feet, too. What Mama doesn’t need is someone feeling sorry for her, somebody whose main purpose is to clear a guilty conscience . . .” Lis glanced down for a second before again interlocking their eyes. “However well-deserved that guilt may be.”

Evelyn didn’t curl her fingers around the ones clutching hers, but she stopped pulling away. “I know you feel this need to protect Granny B from me . . . but you need my support just as much as she does. It makes no sense for the two of us to fight like this.”

Then Evelyn finally did intertwine their fingers. This time she wouldn’t let her go. In a lowered voice she importuned, “Please. Just tell me what you need me to do. I can talk to the doctor, run errands for you—anything you need while you’re taking care of Granny B. I can pick up prescriptions—”

“I need you to see your Granny B.”

Evelyn nodded vigorously. “Oh, of course! I’ll extend my trip. I was thinking that next week, once you’ve had the chance to talk—”

“To-mor-row.” Lis peeled away her fingers. Then her two soft, sweetly scented hands gently, yet firmly, cupped her daughter’s face. “Tomorrow.” With that she stood. “Now, let’s get out of this heat and give your daddy some rest.”