“There’s a building on Main Street that says Odom’s Hardware on the side. I seen it when I was downtown with Pauline. The woman I stay with.”
I leaned closer to her. “Did you go inside?”
Laura shook her head. “Pauline don’t trade there. But she knows who owns it. She said his name’s Frankie Odom.” She bit her lip. “I reckon he’s our granddaddy.”
I blinked at her. “How do you know that?”
“Pauline said so.”
“Then how does she know?”
Laura looked down at her scuffed shoes. “Everybody knows it.”
“You didn’t go in the store and ask any questions?”
She shook her head again. “Pauline said Frankie Odom ain’t in his right mind anyway. She said he’s got old and senile. His boy runs the store now.”
My stomach dropped. “His boy?”
“Not our daddy,” Laura said quickly. “Our uncle. Pauline called him Hollis.”
“Hollis,” I repeated, so I wouldn’t forget.
Laura twisted her hands in her lap. “Pauline said the Odoms are bad people and I believe her, Johnny. I don’t want any part of them. For Mama to do something like what she might have done to our daddy, he must have been mean.”
My eyes began to sting. “We have people who knew our dad and you don’t care?”
“Can’t we talk about something else?” she asked. “I been missing you so bad.”
“You want to find our mama, though. You’d talk to her, after the way she did us.”
“I don’t know about that, either,” she said. “I used to want us to run away and go find her but I’ve give up on that. I’ve quit believing we’ll all be together again.”
“Don’t lie,” I said. “I know how it is. You’d go to her right now if you could.”
“What do you mean, how it is?”
“I mean you’re just like her.”
“How’s that true? I don’t even know her anymore.”
I clenched my teeth trying to keep in the words, but in the end I couldn’t stop them from tumbling out. “You walked off and left me, just like she did.”
Laura’s eyes widened. “Johnny, you know I never wanted to be away from you.”
I looked down at the floor again. “I don’t know anything.”
Laura spent a long moment thinking. Then she said, “I guess I can’t help being something like Mama, on account of having her blood. But so do you.”
I grabbed her arm. “Don’t say that. I’m not like her.”
Laura looked into my eyes. “Okay, Johnny,” she said. “I wish you’d let me go.”
I took my hand away from her arm and stared down at it. Laura turned her face to the window and the distant blue chain of the mountains, where Chickweed Holler was hidden from us. She rubbed at my fingerprints fading on her skin. I was sorry but I couldn’t take it back. Then Nora Graham cracked the door of the fellowship hall and my time with Laura was over. I didn’t know it would be five years until I saw her again.
LAURA
For a long time I looked forward to Johnny getting out of the children’s home. Nora Graham said she’d place him with a foster family as close to me as she could. I thought even though I was still in middle school and he was starting high school, we might at least get to ride the same bus. When he finally did get out, he lived for a while at a foster home in Millertown and went to the ninth grade. He was on the other side of town so we didn’t ride the same bus, but Nora Graham arranged a visit. Then, before I even got to see him, she said he done something bad and got sent off again. My heart was broke in two. No matter what Johnny thought of me, I loved him better than anything.
When I started high school myself, the girls there was still talking about Johnny. They said he done them wrong in the short time he was there. He’d go with one until he got tired of her and then move on to the next. It wasn’t just the girls Johnny left his mark on, either. This boy named Marshall Lunsford asked if I was Johnny’s sister. He claimed Johnny was his best friend and had been to his house. He said Johnny had lived with his mama’s cousin so they was like family. I couldn’t see Johnny being friends with anybody. He said when Johnny got out of jail they was going hunting together. I figured that boy would be better off to never see Johnny again. It was a sad thing to think about my own brother, but I knowed something was broke in Johnny, the same as it was in me.
I didn’t like high school. The only good thing about it was Clint Blevins. A bunch of us used to stand around and wait for the bus to take us home. One day I felt a finger winding up in my hair. I whipped around and Clint said, “Sorry about that. I couldn’t help it.” Clint was in some classes with me and he was always getting called to the office. Seemed like every week Clint Blevins was in a fight. One time I walked up right after the gym teacher pulled him off of a boy. There was blood all over the hall. It made my belly hurt. I thought Clint was just another mean boy. But when I turned around, I knowed he wasn’t. He had eyes like Mama’s and his hair had fat yellow curls like rings of sunshine. Then I seen something peeking out of his shirt collar, flashing in the sun. He had a chain around his neck, a silver rope. I didn’t know I was fixing to talk until I opened my mouth.
“Your name is Clint,” I said.
“Yeah, but I can’t remember yourn.”
“Laura Odom.”
“You’re a pretty girl, Laura.”
“I favor my mama some. But she has blue eyes like you got. Not black like mine.”
“I like black eyes the best,” Clint said, and followed me up on the bus.
He sat down with me. He said he’d moved back in with his mama, that’s why he rode my bus now. He said, “Me and Daddy was living in a little green trailer beside of the lake. I don’t get along too good with Mama, but Daddy finally drunk hisself to death. She thinks I ortn’t to live out yonder by myself and me still in school.” Clint looked out the window. I felt sorry for him. I could tell how sad he was. “You should’ve seen poor old Daddy there on the last. He was shrunk down to nothing and yeller as a punkin where his liver was bad.” Clint looked up at the bus ceiling. I moved my hand closer to his on the seat between us. I think that made him feel better.
“Where’d you get that silver necklace?” I asked to change the subject.
“From Louise,” he said. I got jealous. Later I found out she was just the gray-headed cashier down at the grocery store where he worked.
Clint got off the bus at a house behind the laundrymat. After that, we set together every day. He told me all about his life. I seen the stories in my mind. Clint couldn’t remember things being any different. His daddy held down a janitor job before he started drinking, and his mama worked in the school lunchroom before she went on welfare. When he was a baby they rented a farmhouse beside of a pond. But the first thing Clint remembered was living in that house behind the laundrymat. When he talked about it, I could smell warm clean clothes drifting across the yard. He said when he was real little it was like being wrapped in a blanket. But later on the smell of laundry got to where it gagged him. Too many times Clint had set in the weeds out behind the house, with the cinder blocks and busted glass, smelling that laundrymat and listening to his mama holler and carry on. Then after while he would see his daddy plod off down the street holding a whiskey bottle with a cut place over his eye where she throwed something at him.
Clint said sometimes he used to slip in the laundrymat and watch the clothes float in them glass portholes. He’d listen to the blue jean buttons and loose change clinking around. He’d watch that round and round motion and get sad, thinking about a circle that kept going and didn’t end up anywhere. Sometimes his daddy found him and bought him a Coke in a glass bottle and a pack of peanuts to pour in it. Then Clint said that old laundrymat life was finally over, at least for a while. His daddy got a job driving the garbage truck long enough to put back some money. One day he came out of the house with a paper sack in his arms. Clint’s mama was screaming and throwing his things out behind him. Clint followed his daddy in the street and asked, “Where are we going?” His daddy said, “I got us a little spot by the lake.” Clint said when they got down to the water, it was the prettiest place he ever seen. Him and his daddy was happy there from the start.