Over breakfast the day after Easter, Mama said something or another about how she’d like nothing better than some fried chicken. So when Daddy’d brought home a whole bird from the butcher’s she wasted no time in cutting it up to fry for supper. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to remember the last time I’d had Mama’s fried chicken. What I did remember was how crisp the outside got and how juicy the meat stayed.
I thought when I grew up and had a family of my own I’d need to know how to make chicken just like Mama’s. My husband, whoever he ended up being, would love me even more for the way I cooked it and my kids wouldn’t leave so much as a scrap of it on their plates.
But first I’d need to learn how. I came to the kitchen and asked Mama if she needed any help.
“I’d like that,” she said.
She let me help her sift the flour and dip the legs and wings and breasts in the buttermilk and then press it in the flour, then back to the milk, back to the flour.
“Why twice?” I asked, my fingers coated in a layer of the breading, making more of a mess than helping, I was sure.
“My mother always did it that way,” Mama said. “I never could make it just the way she did. I think she added something she never told me about. Some kind of a spice or something.”
“Why wouldn’t she have told you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe so my chicken wouldn’t be as good as hers. She was funny about some things.”
“My mother? Oh, I guess you wouldn’t remember her. She wasn’t around us much once you were with us.” Mama pushed a piece of chicken into the flour. “She passed on when you were little.”
“I wish I could remember her.”
“She was a fine woman, I guess. Tough as could be. Course, she had to be, I suppose.” Mama lowered the chicken into the bubbling oil with as much care as she could so it wouldn’t splash. “She always said she was part Cherokee but I don’t know about that.”
I looked up at Mama’s dark hair and eyes and wondered if it was true, that she was part Indian. I wished there was a way to be sure. Next day at the library, I’d get myself a book about the Cherokee and see if they had any pictures on the pages. It would’ve been a great discovery if one of the squaws in the book looked just like Mama.
“Beanie was always scared of her. She’d cry whenever my mother got close. Didn’t ever know why.” Mama shook her head. “My mother never understood why we kept Beanie.”
“What else would you have done with her?” I asked.
“My mother said we should’ve put her in some institution up in Boise City,” Mama said. “One for mongoloids.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It was just another way of saying Beanie wasn’t right.”
“Beanie was just fine.”
“She was. Yes, she was.”
Mama fished the pieces of chicken out of the grease that were cooked through and put them in her covered dish to stay warm.
“I’m glad you didn’t send Beanie away,” I said, dunking a chicken piece into the milk.
“It wouldn’t have been right.” Mama blinked a tear loose. “She belonged with us at home.”
I hoped Mama hadn’t seen me peek at the calendar hanging on the wall. She’d circled one day out of all of the dates in April. It was a tiny circle, made with a pencil, around the number fourteen. I didn’t remember the dates of everything that happened through the year. But that one I knew. That was the date of big, black dusters and lost sisters.
It would be a full year the very next day. It didn’t hardly seem possible. The stab of missing Beanie had changed over the months to an ache right in the middle of my chest whenever I thought of her. Aunt Carrie had told me once that having that kind of pain came because we still loved the person that was gone and that it never all the way left us. She’d said it was good to feel it and it was all right to still love Beanie so deep.
Mama felt it too. I could tell by the way she made her lips into a tight O and pushed out a thin ribbon of air.
We kept on making the chicken, Mama and me. Then we went on to setting the table, Mama telling me to put out an extra plate for Winston. I was glad he was coming. I hoped he’d tell us a story or two, maybe even a joke. And I hoped maybe he’d help us forget the sadness the next day would bring us.
We got changed into fresh clothes and Mama had me sit on her bed as she pulled a brush through my hair.
“It’s growing out,” she said. “It’s pretty, darlin’.”
She was more gentle with me than she usually was, careful not to tug too hard at a snarl or to push the bristles into my scalp. Soft and low, she hummed one of the songs she’d sing when I was smaller, one to keep me from being sad or scared. It was one I thought sure she’d made up herself on account I never heard it anywhere else.
“I’m glad you came home, Mama,” I said, worried she wouldn’t hear it because it’d only come as a whisper.
But she’d heard it. I knew she had by the way she paused in her brushing, just for a second, before going on. I looked at her reflection in the mirror on the other side of the room. She hadn’t smiled and hadn’t nodded. She’d closed her eyes and breathed in through her nose, pulling her lips in between her teeth.
She had to pull a hanky from her pocket to dab under her eyes.