“God damn it,” my father said.
“Easy,” Raleigh said.
The woman strode to my father’s window. “Where is she?”
“She’s locked in the bathroom,” said Raleigh.
“What did you do to her?”
“Nothing,” Raleigh said. “She was locked in the bathroom when we got here.”
“I wasn’t talking to you; I was speaking to Mr. Witherspoon. Tel me you were not going to just leave her out here.” The lady bent so she could look into the smal slit where my father had opened the window. “You were! You were going to just leave my child stranded out here in the middle of nowhere.” She moved her hand like she was going to slap my father, but the window wasn’t open far enough.
“Calm down,” my father said. “She told us that she had cal ed her mother, and we assumed you were on the way.”
“Did you even check to make sure she was okay?” She peered in the window. “You in on this, too, Raleigh? I would have figured that you were better than this.”
She looked, final y, into the backseat at me. This was the woman I had seen Raleigh with at the park that time. She looked different now, her face was wild and creased. But she smiled at me, and it was a cold smile, more chain-gang than the man on the chain gang’s. “My name is Gwendolyn,”
she said. “I’m Dana’s mother. Wil you please tel me what the hel happened? Wil you please tel me what you have done to my child?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said.
“Why are you wearing her top?”
“She gave this to me.”
“Gwen, stop talking to her. Leave my daughter out of this.”
“Oh, that’s funny,” Gwendolyn said. “That’s real y funny.”
My father blew the horn. “Go take care of your child, Gwen. Tel Wil ie Mae to move her car so I can get by.”
She hit the glass beside my father’s face with the heel of her hand, leaving an oily spot. Raleigh opened his car door and my father and Gwen spoke at once: “Sit down, Raleigh.”
When Gwendolyn moved down the length of the Lincoln, my father pressed the lever to make sure the doors and the windows were locked. She tapped on my window with a dainty click of fingernails. In the front seat, my father turned on the stereo, flooding the car with Beethoven, turned up so high that the symphony was like the screech of dying rabbits. Gwendolyn’s lipsticked mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear her over the music. She kicked the door before heading to the bathroom.
MY FATHER BLEW the horn at the Escort, but the lady in the driver’s seat didn’t budge. I couldn’t real y see her face, but she wore a blue bandanna tied around her head. Daddy blew and she blew back. For a little car, it had a lot of horn on it.
At the bathroom door, Gwen spoke, but we were too far away to hear what she said. The door opened a crack, and then wider. Gwen disappeared into the smal room. I could imagine how close they must be, jammed into such a cramped space. What were they saying to each other?
By now, my father was out of the car, arguing with the woman driving the Escort. Raleigh was stiff in his seat. He reached over and turned off the Beethoven.
“Uncle Raleigh,” I said, “that lady is your girlfriend, isn’t she?”
“She is dear to me, Dana. I’l say that much.”
“Stop cal ing me Dana,” I said. “I’m Chaurisse.”
“Sorry, Chaurisse,” he said. “I have a lot to keep an eye on here.”
His voice sounded thick and I wondered if he was going to cry. “This is terrible.”
The bathroom door final y opened. Dana leaned her weight on her mother like she was an earthquake victim being tugged from the wreckage.
She turned and looked at my father and said the strangest thing. She looked at his short pants and said, “I’ve never seen your legs before.”
23
TARA
ONE WEEK AFTER Dana and her mother disappeared into the Forsyth County night, my parents sent out two hundred double-enveloped invitations to the anniversary party. The guest list was essential y their combined client rosters, which had a lot of overlap. My mother gave me three cards to send to whomever I wanted, but I only wanted Dana, and she was gone. I never had her phone number, so I couldn’t cal her. I only knew that she lived somewhere in the vast Continental Colony apartment complex. Once she had mentioned her mother being “upstairs,” so at least I knew that she lived in one of the town houses, but there were so many, and they al looked alike. I knew that my mother liked Dana, cared about her even, so I asked her to drive me to Continental Colony to look for the mailbox labeled Yarboro, but she shut me down. “James and Raleigh told me that Dana was clearly strung out on something, and the mother, too. I knew something was wrong with that girl. I just hate that I didn’t see how bad it al was.”
“But Dana and her mother knew Daddy and Raleigh already. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
She sighed and spoke in the Mother Voice. “Just let it go, baby. I think Raleigh was involved with the mom, a long time ago. Maybe Dana was hoping that she could get him to be her father. So many kids, black kids especial y, are hungry in their hearts for a daddy. You don’t know how blessed you are.”
“But it was weirder than that,” I told her.
“Chaurisse, just try and put it out of your mind. I know you miss your friend, but that girl has serious emotional problems. You don’t want to get mixed up with that.”
“Emotional problems” was my mother’s catch-al term for anybody who wasn’t quite right in the head. The neighbor kid who climbed a hickory nut tree in his birthday suit — emotional problems. When Monroe Bil s shot his ex-wife when she was walking out of Mary Mack’s, my mother said,
“Why couldn’t anyone see that he had serious emotional problems?”
“Why won’t you listen to me? Dana doesn’t have emotional problems. She just has regular problems.”
“I am listening to you,” Mama said. “You are the one who is not listening to me. ”
This was not a day to fight. We were in the Honda on the way to Virginia Highlands, a historic neighborhood in northeast Atlanta. Nowadays, you can take the freeway almost the whole way from southwest, but when we went shopping for my mother’s party dress, we took the surface streets the ful fifteen miles. We drove east on MLK, passed by Alex’s Barbecue, which used to have the best ribs on the planet. A mile or so later, we passed Friendship, where we sometimes went to church. After that, we cut through downtown on a series of one-ways. The gleaming gold roof of the capitol reflected in my mother’s sunglasses. On Ponce de Leon, we traveled east, past Daddy’s IHOP and Fel ini’s, where you could get pizza one slice at a time. Final y we made the left onto North Highlands and the trees seemed to bloom al at once and the streets were clean and bright.
Virginia Highlands is one of Atlanta’s oldest neighborhoods. The homes aren’t columned like over in Druid Hil s, but they’re gorgeous Victorians and the side streets are cobblestoned. We drove al the way out here because my mother had her heart set on buying a dress from Antoinette’s, which apparently is an Atlanta institution, although I had never heard of it.
Strangely enough, it turned out that my mother and father had similar taste in dresses after al . Who knew that my mother, who was extravagant only from her hairline upward, secretly dreamed of Tara? “Your father and I went to see that movie three times. It was beautiful.”
I’d never actual y seen Gone with the Wind, because a ninth-grade trip to the Turner Center was canceled because of a complaint from some of the black parents. Stil , I found my mother’s Scarlett-dreams to be plenty weird.
After we paral el-parked on St. Charles, Mama craned to read a street sign and then pointed that we should go right. “Vivien Leigh was so gorgeous. And that accent. It was Southern but not country. Elegant. I’l remember those dresses — even the one she made out of a curtain — I’l remember that for the rest of my life. That little waist!”