WHERE MAMA WENT
Mamaw stammered a mite afore she said, “Pick showed up here last summer wanting a place to stay.” She turned to me. “You understand, don’t ya, Adabel?” Her voice held a sickening sweetness I couldn’t abide.
“Ya know where he is now?” Daddy asked.
The thumping from my heart was so loud, I nearly couldn’t hear Mamaw’s answer as she changed her voice back to a screechy one. “It don’t matter where he is, Ray. He don’t never want to see your sorry face ever again. Ever in his whole life, he said.”
Daddy’s face was tight. He had’a know she was telling the truth. Was he remembering the last time he seen Pick? When he’d beat him black and blue and bloody?
“Ya best be on your way afore he comes home,” said Mamaw.
I jumped to my feet. “How could ya not let us know Pick was here? Ya had to know we was worried sick.”
“Pick jist showed up at my door,” Mamaw said. “I never asked him to come. But what else was he to do?”
Norris spoke up. “You mean you didn’t send Mr. Grayson to Smoke Ridge to tell him he could make money working in the insurance office?”
“Royce is a growed man,” Mamaw said. “I don’t tell him what to do.”
“But you was the one who always tried to set my loved ones against me, Leona,” Daddy accused. “Ya tried to keep Ada from marrying me. Wanted her to marry Royce instead.”
Mamaw’s voice come back with a screech. “And if she’d married Royce, might be she’d still be alive!”
Was my face as shocked as Daddy’s? He’d gone plumb ashen and looked like he was fixing to keel over. I forced myself to speak, trying to keep the quiver out’a my words. “Ya know for a fact that Mama’s … dead?”
Mamaw didn’t answer right off. She let out a couple breaths afore she spoke. “Ada sent word all them years ago that she was afeared she was sick. I had Royce tell her to come stay with me a spell. I wasn’t scairt of catching nothing. She didn’t want to slip off like she done, but she was bad sick and Royce convinced her it was for the best.”
Daddy clutched at a pile of boxes, and I was afeared he’d pass out. “She told me she was sick on account’a the baby.”
“Set down, Daddy,” I said, giving him a gentle push to the chair I’d been in. “Mama come here, did she, ma’am?”
Another big breath from Mamaw. “Yes. Royce fetched her. In the dead of night. She was sick as the trash man’s dog. I didn’t think she was goin’ git over it.”
My heart leapt clean into my throat. “Did she? Git over it?” I squeaked out the words.
Mamaw’s voice turned sad. “She did, for a spell. But her labor come on, and the childbirth waren’t easy. In the end, it kilt her.” Mamaw pulled a hankie out’a her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes.
I’d thunk Mama was dead, but now I reckoned it was certain, and I was fixing to choke on a tight feeling in my throat.
“She didn’t want’a keep it a secret, Ray,” Mamaw went on, “but she reckoned if she told ya she was leaving, ya’da begged her to stay.”
“I would’a,” Daddy said in a voice that sounded like he had the same choked feeling I did. “No doubt. I would’a.”
“And that would’a put you and your young’uns at risk of catching what she had. She thunk it was consumption, and she didn’t want no one else to die from it.” Mamaw raised her chin and puffed out her ample chest a bit. “But I was her mama, and mamas don’t mind the risk.”
Daddy looked down at his hands. “I wouldn’ta minded for myself neither, but the young’uns would’a been a worry.” His face looked up slow. “Where’d ya bury her, Leona?”
“Down the road a piece.”
“Tell me exact.”
“I’ll take ya there if’n ya want me to.”
Daddy nodded.
Mamaw grabbed her hat and locked up the office afore she led us along the side of the road the opposite way from how we drove there.
We walked single-file. I watched the slump of Daddy’s shoulders as I follered him and heard the sound of Norris’s feet behind me. Daddy and I had already grieved Mama, and now we was fixing to go through it again.
And Daddy knew that Pick had run to Mamaw after the beating. And didn’t want to see him. Could he face all this news without a nip?