Dade, who is about an hour ahead of me, has called a few minutes ago from a service station on Interstate 40 near Brinkley and should be home in an hour or so. I have nothing on my schedule tomorrow morning, but have to be back for Gordon Dyson’s unlawful detainer hearing in the afternoon. Lucy gives me directions to the store, which she tells me is easier to find than their house, and I ask about Lashondra’s ears.
“They’ll be all right,” she says, her voice flat and lifeless.
“At least it won’t take a year to fix them.”
“Why don’t we talk about it tomorrow?” I suggest. She sounds wrung out. I don’t want her to lock into a position I can’t change.
“That’s why you’re coming,” she says without sarcasm.
I can hear a child crying in the background. Bad ears are no fun. We had to put tubes in Sarah’s.
“Did you tell Dade?”
“No,” she says.
“We’ll wait until you get here.”
“That’s fine,” I respond. I do not push her. I tell her I’ll be at the store at eight tomorrow morning and hang up. I am hungry (I missed lunch again), but all I find in the pantry are five cans of Campbell’s soup. I pick up the phone to call Amy and see if she wants to go out to eat but realize she is visiting her mother in Pine Bluff for a couple of days. Well, soup it is. This case is good for losing some weight, at least. I call Sarah and tell her I won’t be waiting up for her. Tomorrow will be another long day.
Cunningham’s Grocery is on the right-hand side of Highway 79 on the road to Memphis outside the small town of Hughes. A small, green wooden structure (perhaps only twelve hundred square feet), it is badly in need of a paint job. With the economy in the Delta so bad and the store this tiny, I wonder how Lucy and Roy survive. I push the door open and set a bell to tinkling and become immediately claustrophobic. The shelves in the store look jam-packed with everything from razor blades to cigarette papers. It reminds me of the Chinese stores in Bear Creek when I was a boy. If you had to, you probably could live out of here for the next fifty years, but at first glance it is visually oppressive because of the cramped space, dinginess, and sheer mass of goods.
On my way to the back of the store, I nearly trip over Lashondra, whom I’ve never met. It has to be Lashondra because she is cradling her tiny ears with both hands.
Standing in the middle of the center aisle, she raises her head and says distinctly, “Hurt.”
Since she barely comes past my knees, I squat down on my heels to make conversation easier. Her dark chocolate skin would make her a mirror of her father but for her straight nose and thin lips. Without a doubt, except for her complexion she looks like Dade. Her huge black eyes and grave manner suggest that she will break some hearts before she is done.
“I’m sorry,” I say sympathetically. I point to my ears.
“Do they make you cry?
Mine hurt too, sometimes.”
Perhaps reminded that she isn’t supposed to be worrying them, Lashondra slides her hands down the sides of a white, long-sleeved cotton sweater decorated with pictures of five-flavored Life Savers and into the pockets of her bright red slacks. Her tea-party expression, so brave until now, collapses following my unexpected empathy.
Her eyes filling, miserably, she nods, “Mama said not to pick at ‘em.”
“It’s hard, isn’t it?” I commiserate. I wonder if she understands anything about what is happening to her brother. How many other brothers and sisters does she have? Two, I think. I have shielded myself from knowing anything about Lucy and her family as if ignorance would lessen my bond to them. This child is making it hard to do. I hear Roy’s voice in the back and say to Lashondra, “I hope you feel better.”
Lashondra stands on her toes and plucks a can of black-eyed peas from the shelf to her right and examines it like a smoker trying to find anything to take her mind off her habit.
“Mama says I will if I don’t pick at them.”
If only life were that easy, I think, and stand up, my knees snapping with the effort. I stand and see Roy in the back next to a refrigerated bin containing milk products.
I walk to the front on cold concrete and find a Borden’s milk salesman on his knees beside Roy, stocking his product. Roy pushes up the sleeves of a blue cotton pullover sweater and tells me to go on around the counter and through the door in the back where I will find Dade and Lucy.
“I can’t close the store because this is when a lot of the salesmen come in,” he explains, counting milk cartons.
“I’ll come back and stand at the door when I get through here” He glances past me, apparently looking for his daughter.
“Lashondra’s a doll,” I say, wondering if it is too late to reach this guy. Even if he lived next door to me for ten years, Roy wouldn’t be my best friend, but we can do better than this.
“I’ll be there in a minute,” he says, his eyes on the salesman, who is switching out milk cartons so fast I feel I’m watching one of those guys who cheats you at card games on the streets of New York.
In the back is a combination small office and store room. Dade and his mother are seated at a rickety card table, pouring themselves cups of coffee from a brown thermos, and not for the first time I am struck by the re semblance between mother and son: even their facial expressions are the same. Both look up and scowl at me at the same time, making the same crease in their broad foreheads. She has just told him, I realize. As the messenger of bad news, I should have expected their disapproval. Again, I realize I know too little about them. The chasm that separates us can’t be overcome by telling them my ears sometimes hurt, too.
“Would you like some coffee?” Lucy asks politely, her words at variance with her expression.
“I told Dade,” she says, unnecessarily. Like her son and husband she is wearing jeans; a red bandanna covers her hair, reminding me of some angry black militant from the sixties and seventies.
“I’ll take a little,” I say, needing to take a leak, but too embarrassed to ask. If there is a bathroom, it is hidden from me among the scores of boxes stacked all around us. I study Lucy’s face, looking for cues, knowing intuitively that she is the key to Dade’s decision.
She takes out a mug from a cloth bag by her chair and pours.
“Go ahead, Dade,” she says, her voice low and in tense.
“Tell him how you feel.”
Dade, who has barely looked at me, studies his cup.
“I can’t go to jail for a whole year!” he says fiercely.
“That’s twelve months of my life!”
Though they haven’t invited me to, I ease into the third folding chair and warm my lips with the coffee. It is chilly back here despite the presence of a glowing space heater four feet away from my feet. I’m afraid if I argue with him, all he’ll do is dig his heels in.
“Okay, then, what evidence do we put on in court?” I ask.
“She waited until the next morning to go to the hospital,” Dade replies.
I glance up to see Roy filling the entrance that divides the back room from the grocery. His expression is so melancholy that for a moment I think he has been crying.
I notice the gray in his hair and the beginning of a gut.
Dade is his dream, his escape from the store.
“She’ll say she couldn’t make up her mind,” I point out, “whether to report it.”
“She admits she wasn’t hurt,” Dade responds, glowering at me.
If he looks this angry in court, we won’t have a chance.
“She’ll testify you threatened her and it would have been dangerous for her to resist.”
Hands on his hips, Roy mutters, “Whose side are you on?”
To keep from launching into a sermon, I place my palms flat down on the table, and my fingers almost stick to the surface. This table must serve as the family dining table for Roy and Lucy more often than not.