WHEN TEDDY TELLS ME I’m leaving, I assume I’m going to another house, probably the first in a series of houses, until the day I turn eighteen, when I’ll be thrust out into the world, friendless and penniless, like all the girls here talk about. “You’re just shit out of luck at that point,” Marisela had said once. “Out on your ass.”
Cake and Thaddeus will be just a dream. My sister and dad will fade into the background.
I don’t even say anything, just nod. I’m a blank slate at this point, bereft and lonely. I’ll go wherever they tell me to go.
She points to my clothes. “You can keep those. That dress you came in with? My God, that dress oozed pain. I could barely hold it, Tiger. Whatever the story is behind that dress? You are ready to write ‘the end,’ my girl.”
She looks at the wrecked dress in her hands. “How long did you wear this tattered thing?”
“I can’t remember now,” I mumble.
“What on earth would make you do that, Grace?”
I don’t know how to say it. It all seems far away now, why I didn’t take the dress off. “She wanted me to,” I manage.
“Who?” Teddy’s voice is gentle, but insistent.
“My mom. She bought it for me…before she died. And I hated it.”
Teddy frowns. “It’s okay not to like the clothes your mama picks out for you. That’s a story as old as time.”
As long as I live, I’ll always think that I must finally be cried out, and as long as I live, I’ll always be surprised that somewhere inside me, more tears are being manufactured, because here they come, splashing on the lap of my jeans.
“I fought with her. I said I wanted her to just leave me alone. And then she did. The very last thing she heard from me was horrible. Can you imagine?”
My voice cracks.
“And the last thing she wanted me to do was to wear this dress. So I did.”
Teddy is quiet for a long time. I can hear sounds from the television down in the next room. The show Shayna liked. Chung, chung.
Teddy’s voice is soft. “Tiger, the last thing your mama probably wished for you was to be happy. Not to wear a dress until it’s falling off you. Not to hurt yourself in her memory, and to lash out at others. No mother wants that.”
She holds the dress to her chest.
“You don’t honor your mother by wearing a dress, honey. You honor your mother by remembering her, and holding her dear, right here.” She taps her heart.
I ask her if I can have it, though, and she wraps it in a bag and gives it to me.
I don’t think I am going to wear it again, but I don’t want to treat it like it’s nothing, either. I don’t want it to end up in a box on the side of the road, a pink-stained curiosity for a stranger.
The phone on her desk rings. She picks it up. “Yes,” she says, her eyes grazing over me. “Yes, she’s coming right out.” She hangs up.
“It’s time,” she tells me.
I walk slowly behind her, not looking forward to another long car ride with Karen, who will deliver me to yet another house. Maybe I will end up with Brownie and Blondie again, way out in the middle of nowhere with Georgia and her late-night prayers and boiled meat.
When Teddy opens the door, the sunshine catches my eyes, and I close them briefly against the brightness.
When I open them, Shayna is standing at the curb, next to a black car I don’t recognize.
“Come on, you,” she calls out. “I’m starving. I’d let you drive, but that’s not allowed for the next year, you stinking criminal.”
She grins.
“Thank you,” I say softly to Teddy.
I start to cry.
Teddy nudges my back. “You be a good girl, all right? Remember what I said.”
I step over the feather carefully on my way down the steps.
My sister hugs me long and hard. “You didn’t think I was just gonna up and leave you, did you? Nah,” she says. “I’m in it to win it, Tiger.”
Just before I get in the car, I turn back to Teddy. “I forgot to ask, what’s the feather for?”
She smiles at me. “Blessings. All who come and go from this house receive blessings on their life. This feather can change things.”
She puts her hand on the doorknob of the house.
“Really?” I ask.
Teddy shrugs. “Sometimes you need to open yourself to the possibility of the miraculous, Tiger Tolliver. Sometimes you just do.”