As she climbed the steps to the porch, she felt the boards sag beneath her. A yellow brightness seeped under the back door, and she could hear the prattling domestic buzz of the voices inside. They sounded happy. She stood outside for a long time, listening, somehow hearing how her aunt and cousins had always sounded from the room next to hers, voices that had always become just whispers if she’d approached.
The door swung open before she could reach it. The glare from the kitchen caught her eavesdropping, and she flushed.
“You’re home early!” Pamela sounded breathless and guilty, her plump face dark with concern. “Matty’s not in bed yet.”
“That’s all right.” A small object lay in a cloth lump on the porch, and Athena stooped to pick it up, examining it curiously as she entered, keeping her eyes averted as she pushed past her sister-in-law. She blinked at the brightness of the kitchen, at the peeling walls and fractured chairs. “You’re letting mosquitoes in, Pamela,” she said, neither turning to her nor moving any farther into the room. “Do you want me to drive you home?” She stared at the mottled yellow walls, at the pebbled mold where they met the low ceiling. She looked down. Tongue lolling, the dog sprawled on the floor planks.
“Now, you know the road to my place is all overgrowed, ’Thena.” Giggling, Pam closed the door. “You can’t get a car through there.”
“I could drive you partway.”
“Why? I mean, don’t be silly. I’ll tell you, first thing I’m gonna make that man do when he gets back is clear out them damn little pines. Well,” she sniggered, “maybe the second thing.”
Athena looked away in embarrassment.
“Least it’s a little cooler,” Pam went on. “Did you have your dinner? I never expected to see you this early. Soon as I heard the car, I said to Matty, ‘That can’t be your mother,’ I said.” She paused. “Where’d he get to, anyways? He was just here a second ago. He was sitting right at…”
“It’s all right.” She stepped over the unflinching dog.
Pam blushed. “I don’t know how that dog got in here. I know he’s s’posed to stay in the yard. I’ll put him out now.” She took a few steps forward. “Come on, Dooley, you big ugly thing.” The dog barely rolled an eye in her direction. “Come on now.” She stood there, not knowing what to do with her hands. “I guess I’ll just go on home now.”
“No.” Athena spun on her, really looking at her at last. A dishwater blonde, Pamela missed being pretty by a wide margin—nose too broad, eyes too small. The thick makeup with which she tried to cover a large strawberry birthmark on her cheek did not enhance her doughy complexion; yet the overall effect managed to be not unpleasant. She smiled a lot. Athena forced a smile of her own. “Why don’t you stay a little while?” Appalled by her own desperation, she turned away quickly when Pamela beamed. “Is there any coffee?”
“I just made some fresh.” Pam bustled over to the butane stove, lit it and began to reheat the cold mud left over from breakfast. “I’ll rinse out some cups. What’s that you got there?”
“I found it on the back stoop.” Athena held it up. “Is it yours?”
The other woman took a closer look. “Matty musta found it.”
“Matthew was out?”
“Just…for a minute.” Pam shuffled her big feet. “I brung over some more fresh eggs,” she added. “They’re in the icebox.”
Pushing aside a Ouija board, Athena cleared a spot amid the dirty dishes on the table. When she dumped out the contents of the string bag, bobby pins spilled, scattering like insects, and out tumbled a hairbrush, makeup, a bathing suit. “No name,” she said. “Must’ve been dropped from a car.”
“Can I have it?”
“Matthew couldn’t have gone all the way to the highway? Could he? Where is he?”
Pam shrugged. “In the other room, I guess.”
Gathering things up, Athena stuffed them back in the bag. Come on, girl. She tossed the bag aside and slowly crossed the kitchen. As a loose board bounced under her, exaggerating her limp, she gritted her teeth. “Matthew?” She stood in the living-room doorway and looked around at the battered furniture and the crumbling holes in the carpet. “Matthew?” Behind her in the kitchen, she heard the dog get up with a yawning stretch, and a mumbling whisper came from behind the stairway. “Matthew, what are you doing over there?”
Hidden in the shadowed corner, the boy refused to look up when she walked over to him. He kept his face down, his back pressed against the locked door that led into the closed-off section of the house. “Nn-nnooo…” Matty hunched into himself. “…ammy?” He began a gasping mumble down into his chest that worked toward a clogged weeping. “Sn-no t-time…don-wanna…go’way…” His words emerged as bubbles of sound.
Helpless before such obvious misery, his mother had no idea what to do. “Stop that.” She noted the drool that ran along the boy’s chin and averted her eyes. And I was going to ask him about that bag. She repressed a painful desire to laugh. What point could there be in questioning a…in questioning him? She made her voice pleasant. “Matthew, it’s time for you to go to bed.” Placing her hands on his bony shoulders, she attempted to point him toward the stairs. The boy struggled, sniveling, and she tightened her grip. His shoulders were damp with spittle and sweat. She recoiled, and Matthew shrieked.
Pamela rushed out of the bright kitchen. “Oh, what’s the matter with my boy?” Matty flew to her, burying his face in her dress. “I’ll take care of it, ’Thena,” she said. “What’s the matter with my big boy now? Is he crying? Is my big boy crying? You know what I think, don’t you? I think somebody’s tired. That’s what I think.” The boy’s arms stayed clenched about her thick waist, while her words—consoling and cooing and caressing—flowed over him, and she petted his head, wiping at his face with her dress. Gradually, he stopped trembling. As Dooley clawed lazily at the living-room carpet, Pam steered the boy up the steps. “Look at him, crying like a little baby—you should be ashamed. ’Thena? Does he feel hot to you?”
Athena just stood there.
“Are you a big boy or not? Huh? Aren’t you a big boy?” Pam called over her shoulder, “He is getting real big, ain’t he? Hard to believe he was only nine last Christmas.”
Athena followed them slowly up the stairs. I could never do that. She listened to her sister-in-law, to the warm, moronic flow of her words. Never.
“Now are you going to be a good boy for Pammy and stop crying and get undressed by yourself to night, like a good boy, like you did the other night? Huh? Are you gonna be a good boy?”
The child’s mumbled reply seemed almost inaudible, incomprehensible, but Pamela kissed the top of his tousled blond head as though she’d caught every word. Perhaps she does understand him. She watched their backs. Pam’s flowered dress looked homemade, Matty’s T-shirt had small holes in it. Perhaps it’s some private language they speak. Just the two of them. Seeing the way Matty clung to Pam’s soft roundness, she ran a tentative hand over her own sides and sharp hips.
All the way up the stairs, Pamela blabbered to Matty and Athena in turn. When he looked at his mother, the boy wailed and became so much dead weight. She would have gone back down, but Pamela never stopped talking to her.
Somehow they managed to carry him, squeezed bodily between them, up the narrow attic steps.
The cot springs creaked. “There you go now.” The light came on, and Pamela undid the boy’s belt. “Don’t you want to stop crying now?” Pam got his pants off, clucked over the scabs and bramble cuts. She left the dirty T-shirt on.