My aunt looked remarkably like my mother. The gene pool had been kind to both, but if my mother always looked and seemed sad to me, Aunt June looked as if she were waiting for the slightest reason to fly off the handle and beat you to death with a shoe heel.
She lacked the silver star in her front tooth. She was a little heavier, and there was nothing hippie about her clothes. She had on a black-and-white dress that had all the style of a borrowed quilt. Her hair had a long patch of gray in it that I thought was most likely designed by the beauty parlor. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and I was to learn she seldom did. I tried to remember if my aunt was the younger or the older sister. I realized I really didn’t have anything to remember on that matter. It had never come up when my mother spoke about her, which wasn’t often.
Way she looked at me, I might as well have been a smallpox blister.
“I take it you’re Daniel,” she said, and her voice sounded as if the inside of her throat had been slightly sandpapered that morning. “It’s been a while.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Once, I think.”
She looked over my shoulder at Dudley. “And you’re Sheriff Dudley, of course.”
“Yes, ma’am. We spoke on the phone.”
“Come in, Sheriff.”
“That’s all right. I’ll check back on him for time to time. To let him know if we recover his father’s body.”
“Don’t bother,” she said.
“Do you have any idea where his mother is?” Sheriff Dudley asked.
“No.”
“So, you and your sister weren’t close?”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Mostly no. We didn’t do each other’s hair, trade dresses, and swap boy stories, if that’s what you mean.”
“I see,” Sheriff Dudley said, handing my aunt my travel bag.
Aunt June stood with one hip cocked, waiting to see if Dudley had more. He didn’t.
“Okay. Thanks, Sheriff. Daniel. Come in the house.”
I told Sheriff Dudley goodbye and marched through the open doorway with my sack of cookies held before me like a shield. Before I knew it, the door was closed and I could hear Sheriff Dudley’s car starting up and motoring away.
My aunt looked at me like I was an unidentified animal discovered in the Amazon. She had my travel bag in her hand. She lifted it up and down, said, “Not much here.”
“Didn’t have much.”
She set the bag by the door, kept eyeballing me.
“I’m trying to see your mother in you,” she said. “Trying to see me, for that matter. Did you know your mother and I were twins?”
I shook my head. I realized I knew more about the Candleses than I knew about my own family.
“I’m the older one by nine minutes,” she said.
The only response I could come up with was “Oh.”
It was warm in the house, and it was nice, but considering how I’d imagined my aunt’s taste, given the fact that her husband had been a highly successful oilman, I had expected more. Perhaps the Taj Mahal and a troop of elephants. The house was simple and well kept, and except for the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke clinging to the curtains and the padded furniture, it seemed cozy enough.
Aunt June, still studying me, seemed to know what I was thinking.
“That cigarette stink,” she said. “Comes from the previous owner. That’s their furniture too. I’m having all that stuff thrown out next week, walls painted, new furniture. You’ll get a new bed out of it.”
I nodded.
“What’s in the sack?”
“Cookies,” I said.
“I like cookies,” she said. “That colored family give you those?”
“Mrs. Candles,” I said.
“Colored women can cook. How was it staying with those kinds of folks?”
“It was fine.”
“Wasn’t too nasty, was it?”
“Wasn’t nasty at all.”
“Good to hear. I know there are some clean ones.”
I hadn’t been through the door five minutes, and already I was starting to hate her.
“Want a snack?”
I nodded as if I really knew what I wanted. Truth was, I was still stuffed to the gills from breakfast and the cookie I’d eaten.
She guided me to her kitchen. There were wooden roosters on the wall in several places. There was a framed cloth with GOD BLESS THIS HOUSE on it that hung over the doorway. There was a clock on the wall and it beat out the minutes with a sound like someone driving railroad spikes.
“That goddamn clock makes me crazy,” she said. “I been here, what now, three weeks, and I keep thinking I’ll get used to it. I won’t. I’ll be glad when all this bullshit goes and I got new stuff. People owned this house, all of their taste that wasn’t in their mouth was up their ass.”
She took the clock off the wall, beat it soundly on the counter until it quit ticking, then threw it in the trash can under the kitchen sink. “I’d rather guess the time. Sit at the table.”
She was as subtle as a drill sergeant but without the charm. I sat.
She got out a glass jug of milk, set it on the counter. She reached back inside the refrigerator. There was a sandwich already made and on a plate. The plate was nestled between some blackened bananas and something in a clear bowl with a lid on it. The contents of the bowl looked suspicious. She placed the sandwich in front of me, then poured me a glass of milk and placed it by the plate. She put the milk back, and from a pot on the stove she poured herself a cup of coffee. She took a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet shelf, leaked a little of that into her coffee, said, “Eye-opener. Eat up. I got to get more groceries with you here.”
The sandwich turned out to be pimento cheese. The bread tasted a little damp. I only ate a few bites. I was so stuffed by that time, I feared I might burp and shit myself.
“I need to go shopping. You should go with me. Listen here, Daniel. I don’t know a goddamn thing about taking care of a teenage boy.”
“Not sure I know much about being one,” I said.
That made her laugh.
“Me and your mother, we didn’t exactly have great examples for how to parent anyone. We didn’t get much in the way of examples for how to do much of anything. I married well and your mother tried to. Unfortunately, she married your dad. She expected more than she got.”
“He was all right.”
“Was he?”
“He was all right,” I said like a mantra.
“Let’s look at some facts. Your mother is missing. Your father drove you out to his old hometown, your mother’s old hometown, my old hometown, then drove his car through a bridge with you in it, and you had to be rescued from drowning by colored people and had to stay with them for a few months. How all right was your father again?”
“I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”
“Someone had to know, and I pick him. He tried to kill you, Daniel. He put you in a position where you were on your own and you had to stay with coloreds.”
“I didn’t mind staying with the Candleses,” I said. “Ronnie says they prefer to be called black.”
“Ronnie? That the little girl Dudley told me about? You don’t have a little crush on a pickaninny, do you, Danny?”
I could feel myself blush, but not because of Ronnie—because of what my aunt had called her. I didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but I knew it wasn’t good.
She looked me over as if seeing into my thoughts.
“Remember this, kid. I wasn’t supposed to raise your ass. That wasn’t my job. That was my sister’s and her no-account husband’s job.”
I really couldn’t argue with that.
My aunt sipped her coffee. She kept looking at me as if by looking long enough and hard enough, I might vanish in a puff of smoke. Perhaps then I might cling to the curtains like cigarette odor and she could throw them and me out with the spring cleaning.
Her eyes widened. A sudden thought had hit her like it was shot into her head by a bolt of lightning.
“You’re not going to want a goddamn dog, are you?”