“Daughter, call your father.”
I was the only one in the kitchen with Ma Charles but I couldn’t believe she meant me. That I had to be the one to make the phone call. Even though Big Ma said she couldn’t rest, she was lying down in the other room. It was just as well. Her face was covered in sweat and she didn’t look good.
I still asked, “Shouldn’t Big Ma call Papa?”
“Don’t question me, daughter. Pick up this phone and dial that number. Your father needs to know.”
What do I tell him? What do I say?
“Come on, daughter. That’s your father. Your sister. Make the call.”
I didn’t want to do it. I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have to. But the phone was in my hand and my great-grandmother stared into me with no intention of repeating herself.
I knew Pa’s number in the dark. My finger hooked into the first circle on the dial and my fingers pulled around, dialing for a long-distance line, the area code, followed by “AT7” and the last four digits. I thought I would be unsteady, shaky, and sobbing. Unable to speak. I thought all the tears and nausea pooling in me would come up and I’d choke when he picked up the receiver and I had to speak. But when the phone rang, and the line clicked when he picked up the phone, and his voice said, “Hello,” my mouth opened and I spoke calmly. “Papa. Papa.”
Pa’s voice didn’t leap toward mine, asking me how my sisters and I were making out and such. Instead, he waited. Waited for me to speak. He knew. He knew. My stomach knotted something awful. He knew I didn’t call with good news. Then he said, “Yes, Delphine.” His voice was so calm. So steady. Full of stillness and waiting.
“Vonetta is lost. Vonetta got lost in the tornado.”
No sound. Then a terrible sound. A bear caught in a trap. His growl and moan went through me and made me queasy. In the background I heard Mrs. saying, “Honey, honey,” over and over.
Her voice came through the receiver. Warm. Steady. “Delphine.” She said it again, “Delphine,” because I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. “Tell me, Delphine. Tell me what’s going on.” Papa was crying in the background, loud, like I never heard before. He couldn’t tell her.
I finally spoke into the phone. “Vonetta got lost in the tornado. Vonetta’s gone.”
I didn’t say the other thing although I thought it. I didn’t say what I knew Papa heard although I didn’t use that word. I couldn’t use that word.
“Delphine . . .” She didn’t say how horrible it was or start saying, “No! No!” so I’d have to say it again. Mrs. said, “Oh, Delphine, Delphine,” gently. I could hear my father, wounded in the background. “Delphine, Delphine,” she said. “Are you all right?”
I said, “Yes,” but that wasn’t true.
“Okay. Let me speak to your grandmother.”
“I can’t. I mean, she can’t. She’s . . . she’s . . .”
“It’s all right, Delphine. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
And she said love words to me and I took them knowing I didn’t deserve them. Then we said good-bye.
Ma Charles didn’t ask me what Papa said. Instead she said, “Now call your mother.”
I couldn’t tell her my mother was out of reach. That she didn’t have a phone. I didn’t know how to get my mother to a telephone. Or know if she would come to a telephone just because I called. I didn’t know how to explain Cecile to my great-grandmother and that she wasn’t the type to stop her work or disturb her peace of mind and come because I asked her to.
“Well?” Ma Charles said. “That’s her blood. Her child. She has to know. Go on, daughter. Call her.”
I made a plan in my head. I dialed “0.” I stretched my voice from twelve to twenty-one and said, “Operator, I need the number for Ming’s in Oakland on Magnolia.” The operator still asked for my mama and I said, “I’m trying to reach my mama,” although that was the last thing I’d call Cecile to her face. “It’s an emergency.”
The operator said, “Little girl, the telephone isn’t a plaything,” and hung up.
The dial tone was loud. Ma Charles said, “Try it again, daughter.” My great-grandmother didn’t want any of my excuses. Even if it was out of my hands. I dialed “0” and waited.
“It’s an emergency, operator,” I said. “It’s about the tornado and I have to reach my mother.”
“What city?” the voice said. A different operator.
“Oakland.” I tried to sound grown and sure. I didn’t want her to call me a little girl. “My mother’s at Ming’s Chinese Takeout on Magnolia Street.” My mother wasn’t really there, but Mean Lady Ming would remember me from last summer and she’d know how to get word to my mother. I spoke firmly and hoped my stretching the truth would get the call put through, but the operator was saying something about prank phone calls so loud that Ma Charles could hear her questioning the call.
“Gimme that telephone,” Ma Charles said, and I handed the receiver to her. She cleared her throat. “Put the call through for my great-granddaughter” was all she said and handed the phone back to me as if that was enough.
It was. The operator read off the numbers for Ming’s Chinese Takeout on Magnolia and said, “Please hold while I connect you.”
“Takeout. What you want?”
“Miss Ming?” I spoke timidly, as if I was standing at her counter for the first time.
“Hello?”
“Miss Ming,” I said.
She fussed at me to stop playing on the phone. She had a business to run.
“No, Miss Ming. It’s Delphine. Cecile’s daughter.”
“Delphine, Delphine.” It took repeating my name for her to remember me from last summer.
“My mother. It’s an emergency. I need her to call me.”
She fussed that she couldn’t leave the store, and I said, “Please, Miss Ming. It’s bad. It’s bad and I need her.” I begged and begged her to write down the number. Then I heard Big Ma say, “Who you calling?” But I said to Miss Ming, “Please, Miss Ming. Please. Emergency.” Then she said, “Okay, okay, Delphine,” and hung up.
“Who you calling?”
Ma Charles stood up. “I told her to call her mother.”
I was grateful to have my great-grandmother next to me, looking clear-eyed and ready for a fight.
“Far’s I’m concerned, those girls don’t have a mother.”
“Whether you think so or not, she and the other two have a mother, and their mother should know.” She drummed her finger against the tabletop hard with every point she made.
“Hmp.”
“We don’t teach a child to dishonor her mother or father. Not in this house.” Then Ma Charles told me to go and get her shawl from her room. What next she had to tell Big Ma was not for my ears and I scooted out of there.
Over the next few hours, my tears hadn’t dried, nor had my stomach settled. But I kept my ears open, waiting. Hoping the phone would ring soon. And also not wanting it to ring. Not wanting to tell Cecile.
Then one ring. One shrill ring was all it took to get me into the kitchen. I grabbed the receiver on the second ring.
“Cecile,” I said. I knew it was her.
“I don’t like people knocking on my door,” she told me.
My mouth went dry.
“Cecile,” I said.
“You got the Woods boy knocking on my door, dragging me out of my house. Delphine, you know better. There’s nothing you have to tell me that calls for all of that.”
If I didn’t say it fast, plain, and clear, she’d hang up on me and write me a letter-poem telling me about myself. So I said it. “Vonetta left the house this morning. She’s lost in the tornado. We can’t find her.”
I waited. And waited. And waited. Next came a click. Then the moan of the dial tone.
I felt breathing. Fast, heavy breathing. Big Ma.
“What she say?” Ma Charles asked.
I could barely look at them. “She didn’t say anything. She . . .” I didn’t want to tell them but there was no hiding it. “She hung up.”
Big Ma clapped her hands hard. One hard clap. “What did I say? What did I tell you?” She was angry with me and pleased with herself for having Cecile pegged right.
“Now—”
Big Ma cut her mother off. “Mama. You don’t know what that woman did to them. Ripped herself out from under them and ran off to parts unknown. You don’t know how she tore my son’s heart clean out of his chest. She didn’t mother them then, can’t mother them now. Too busy writing words on the wall or whatever she calls herself doing.”
After my grandmother pointed her finger and hollered at her own mother, she turned to me. “I told you and told you about Cecile, but you wouldn’t take the truth from my mouth. You wouldn’t take the gospel truth from the one who raised you. And now you’ve seen and heard it for yourself. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have a mother. And don’t you speak her name or about her in this lifetime. Ever!”
I felt like I was being knocked down again and again and again, but when I turned, I fell into my uncle’s arms. “Go ’head, cry, Delphine,” he whispered, rocking me like I was a little girl. “We’re all crying.”