Not long after they found Clint, there was a knock on the trailer door. I snuck a peek out the window and seen Clint’s mama smoking a cigarette on the step. I opened the door and looked at her. Since Clint was gone, I didn’t hardly have any feelings.
“Well, are you going to let me in?” she asked real hateful. She came in and looked around. “This place looks like a hogpen.” I didn’t answer her. I just wanted her to leave. “I’ll get right down to it,” she said, tapping ashes in her palm. “This place never did belong to Clint. When his sorry old daddy died, it fell to me. You can’t stay here.”
I could have told her that I didn’t care. Clint might have wanted our baby to live by the water, but the lake scared me now. Instead I asked Clint’s mama, “You’re going to set your own grandbaby out?” Not because I wanted to stay, just because I didn’t understand what kind of person she was. I couldn’t figure out how anybody could be like that.
“I ain’t setting out my grandbaby,” she said. “I’m setting out you.”
“But the baby’s inside of me.”
“It won’t always be,” she said. She had a glint in her eyes that made me feel sick.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” she said. But I seen a smirk at the corners of her mouth. She was wary of me since that time I jumped on her, but she must have hated me so bad she couldn’t resist saying something else mean. “You ain’t fit to raise no youngun.”
I took a step toward her. I felt something coming loose in me again. It was a bad feeling, like somebody else taking over. “Don’t you say that,” I warned her. Even my voice didn’t sound right to my ears. She took a step back and I seen her hand searching behind her for the door handle. “Don’t you say a thing like that to me.”
I put my hands on my belly and balled up the cotton shirt stretched across it. She opened the door and I followed her to it. She backed down the cinder-block steps, keeping her eyes on me. “You better be off my property by tomorrow morning,” she said. “If you ain’t, I’m coming back with the law.” It was all I could do not to take after her. I couldn’t stand to be threatened that way. I seen what happened to Mama. She hollered before she got in the car, when she was too far away for me to come after her, “You ain’t fit!”
Like I said, I didn’t care to leave the trailer. It was too sad without Clint. I couldn’t quit thinking about them fat yellow curls I’d never touch again. I didn’t care if I ever seen water again the rest of my life. I was too tired to care about much of anything. The next day, I took the shovel out to that cedar tree in the woods. It was early and fog hung low to the ground. No birds was singing. I dug up the box’s grave. The ground was soft under the cedar tree needles, easy to loosen up. The sound of the dirt sifting was like Clint whispering to me. Then it turned into Clint’s baby whispering inside my belly. Then it turned into Mama whispering to herself all them miles away, wherever they put her. I couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t take long to reach the box. It wasn’t buried deep. I knelt and took it in my hands. This time it didn’t comfort me. At least I had Clint’s baby. I was sad, but I wasn’t alone.
I took one scratched-up suitcase with some clothes and Mama’s box in it. I walked to the bait shop and called Mr. Thompson to pick me up. I hated to, but him and Zelda and Louise was the only friends I had. We didn’t talk much in the car. We’d never been together by ourselves before. It was a pretty long drive down the interstate, back toward Millertown, before I was at the house where me and Clint got married. I was glad the baby could be there. Maybe while he was inside me he could see through my eyes. I tried to send him a memory of me and Clint standing on the deck in a circle of begonias. Zelda came out to the car to walk me across the yard. “Now, I ain’t staying long,” I told her.
She laughed. “Surely me and Ralph ain’t that bad.”
“I just mean me and the baby will have our own place, soon as I get a job.”
Mr. Thompson took my suitcase as we climbed up the porch steps. He reached across my shoulder and held open the front door for me. “You know you can stay as long as you want. Clint Blevins was like a son to me. But I’ve already got the job situation figured out for you. We’ve been shorthanded over at the store for a while now. I’ve just been putting off hiring anybody. Louise can show you how to work the cash register.”
Mr. Thompson stood there with my suitcase holding the door open as Zelda put her arms around my shoulders and tried to comfort me. I wished I could explain to them what it felt like to know kindness like that, after all the bad times I’d lived through.
I stayed with the Thompsons for two more months. I slept in that room with roses on the wallpaper where my wedding dress was laid out on the bed. When it was warm enough I stood out on the deck and looked off at the creek. Seemed like I could feel Clint beside me, slipping a ring on my finger all over again. When the ache in my chest got too big, I’d go back inside. I worried it wasn’t good for the baby, for me to hurt like that.
Mr. Thompson had sweet eyes and a nice face, and being around him made me think it might be all right to have a daddy. When he noticed a hole coming in the toe of my shoe he said to Zelda, “Get that youngun something decent to put on her feet.” One day he got worried because Zelda’s blood used to get low when she was expecting. He made me liver and onions and I choked it down to ease his mind. He made sure I got plenty of milk, too. My belly growed bigger and marks striped my breasts. Sometimes I seen the baby’s fist or foot ripple across my middle. I talked to him in my head, about his daddy and Mama and Johnny. I told him all Mama’s stories about our people, even about the curse and the haint blue eyes. One time Mama had said, “Granny thought I broke the curse.” But I wondered if she had. If there was any such thing as curses, I knowed this baby would be the one to break it. He’d bring an end to the suffering all of us had lived through, going all the way back to them great-aunts Mama used to tell us about. Whatever it was in our blood that brought bad things down on us, this baby would chase it away.
It was all right working at the grocery store, even though my ankles swelled up from being on my feet. It made me feel closer to Clint, spending my days how he did when I wasn’t around. Mr. Thompson had hired a new bagboy after Clint drowned named Roy. His face turned red when I stared at him. I liked to watch him work because I knowed it was what Clint used to do. There was sad times, but mostly it was a comfort being there. Louise and Mr. Thompson and the other cashier Debbie was always cutting up. It was a happy place, with people bustling around. I seen why Clint liked working there.
One day Louise hollered at me from her cash register. “Hey, Laura, I just about forgot. There’s a house come open for rent right down the street from me. It’s little but it don’t cost much, and you and the baby won’t need a lot of room.” That evening me and Zelda rode out with Louise to take a look at it. Right off I knowed it would be fine, even though one of the front windowpanes was cracked. It was bright yellow, my favorite color in the world. Down the bank from its yard there was a car wash. Louise said, “Now, it might get noisy over yonder during the day.” I didn’t mind because I’d be at the store and the baby would be there with me. Zelda had offered to fix up Mr. Thompson’s office in the back with a bassinet and a playpen. She said she’d keep him in there while I worked. She liked to hang around the store anyway, and she didn’t have any grandbabies yet. When I tried to say no, she said, “Please let me do this for you.” So the noise from the car wash wouldn’t bother the baby’s naps. Another good thing was Louise being my neighbor, we could ride to and from work together and I’d help pay for the gas.