Lou Ann’s Grandmother Logan and Lou Ann’s new baby were both asleep in the front room with the curtains drawn against the afternoon heat. For the last two weeks Granny Logan had stomped around the house snapping the curtains shut just as fast as Lou Ann could open them, until finally Lou Ann gave up the effort and they all moved around in the gloom of a dimly lit house. “You’d think somebody had died, instead of just being born,” Lou Ann complained, but the old woman declared that the heat was unnatural for January and would cause the baby to grow up measly and unwholesome.
When she woke up, Granny Logan would deny she had been sleeping. She had said she only needed to rest her eyes for the trip back to Kentucky, three days on the Greyhound.
In the kitchen Ivy Logan and Lou Ann were packing a paper bag with baloney sandwiches and yellow apples and a Mason jar of cold tea. Ivy’s heavy arms and apron-covered front moved around like she was the boss, even in her daughter’s unfamiliar kitchen. Under her breath she hummed one line of a hymn, “All our sins and griefs to bear,” over and over until Lou Ann thought she would scream. It was an old habit.
Lou Ann pushed her damp blond hair back from her face and told her mother she wished she would stay a few days more. Whenever Ivy looked at her Lou Ann could feel the tired half-moons under her own eyes.
“You haven’t hardly had time to say boo to Angel. He’ll have Tuesday off and we could take the truck and all go someplace. We could all fit in some way. Or otherwise I could stay here with Dwayne Ray, and you all go. It’s a shame for you to come all this way from home and not see what you can see.”
Surprisingly, Angel had agreed to move back in until after her mother and grandmother’s visit. He might be hard to talk to and unreasonable in every other way but at least, Lou Ann realized, he knew the power of mothers and grandmothers. If Granny Logan had known they were getting a divorce she would have had an apoplectic. At the very least, she and Ivy would insist that Lou Ann come back home.
“Oh, honey, we seen plenty from the bus,” Ivy said. “Them old big cactus and every kind of thing. Lordy, and them big buildings downtown, all glass it looked to me like. I expect we’ll see a good sight more on the way home.”
“I guess, but it seems like we haven’t done a thing since you got here but set around and look at the baby.”
“Well, that’s what we come for, honey. Now we’ve done helped you have him, and get settled with him, and we’re anxious to get on home. The heat puts Mother Logan in a mood.”
“I know it.” Lou Ann breathed in slowly through her nose. She was beginning to believe that the hot, dry air in her chest might be the poison her grandmother claimed it to be. “I wish I could have put you up better than we did,” she said.
“You put us up just fine. You know her, it wouldn’t make no difference if it was the Queen a Sheba a-putting us up, she’d be crosspatch. She just don’t sleep good out of her own bed.” Ivy untied the borrowed apron and smoothed down the front of her navy-blue dress. Lou Ann remembered the dress from about a hundred church potluck suppers. Just the sight of it made her feel stuffed with potato-chip casseroles and Coca-Cola cake.
“Mama,” she said, and then started over because her voice was too low to hear. “Mama, when Daddy was alive…” She was not sure what she meant to ask. Did you talk to each other? Was he the person you saved things up to say to, or was it like now? A houseful of women for everything, for company. Ivy was not looking at her daughter but her hands were still, for once. “Did Granny Logan always live with you, from the beginning?”
Ivy peered into the brown bag and then rolled the top down tightly. “Not her with us. We lived with her.”
“Is that how you wanted it?” Lou Ann felt embarrassed.
“I guess I always thought it would have been something to go off on our own, like you done. But there was so much work in them days, no time for fun, and besides I’d of been scared to death out someplace all by myself.”
“It wouldn’t be all by yourself. You would have been with Daddy.”
“I s’pose,” Ivy said. “But we didn’t think about it that way.” She turned back to the sink to wash her hands, then pulled the dish towel down from the wooden ring over the sink, refolded it, and hung it back up. “I want you to run on in there now and tell Mother Logan we’ve got to get ready to go.”
Ivy and her mother-in-law were not speaking, on account of one thing or another. Lou Ann could never keep track. She wondered what the trip would be like for them, all those days and nights on the Greyhound. But they were sure to find some way of having a conversation. In the past, in times of necessity, she had seen her mother and grandmother address one another through perfect strangers.
“Granny Logan.” Lou Ann put her hand gently on the old woman’s shoulder, feeling the shoulder bones through the dark, slick cloth of her dress. At the same time she opened her eyes the baby started to cry. “You have a nice catnap, Granny?” she asked, hurrying to pick up the baby and bounce him on her hip. She always thought he sounded like he was choking.
“It was just my eyes, needed a rest. I weren’t sleeping.” She held tightly to the arms of the chair until she knew where she was. “I told you, the heat’s done put that baby into a colic. He needs a mustard plaster to draw out the heat.”
“Mama says tell you it’s time to get your grip packed. She says you all are fixing to leave tonight.”
“My grip’s done packed.”
“All right then. You want a bite of supper before you go?”
“Why don’t you come on home with us, honey? You and the baby.”
“Me and Angel and the baby, Granny. I’ve been married now for practically five years, remember?” She felt like such a sneak, letting on as though her marriage was just fine. It was like presenting her mother and grandmother with a pretty Christmas package to take back with them, with nothing but tissue paper inside. She had never lied to them before, that she could remember, but something in her would not let them be right about Angel.
“Angel’s got good work at the bottling plant,” she told Granny Logan. This, at least, was true. “We like it here.”
“I don’t see how a body could like no place where it don’t rain. Law, I’m parched. Get me a glass of water.”
“I’ll get it for you in a minute,” she said, switching the baby to her other hip, knowing that in a minute Granny Logan would have forgotten her request. “You get used to it. When we first moved out I had sore throats all the time. I was scared to death I’d caught throat cancer like that what’s her name on TV. You know, that had to stop singing?” Lou Ann realized Granny Logan wouldn’t know NBC from pinto beans. “But I turned out to be fine, of course. And it don’t bother him one bit, does it?” She crooked a finger under the baby’s chin and looked into the foggy blue eyes. “Dwayne Ray’s a Tucson boy, aren’t you?”
Lou Ann’s baby had not been born on Christmas, or even the day after. He had come early on the morning of January 1, just missing First Baby of the Year at St. Joseph’s Hospital by about forty-five minutes. Lou Ann later thought that if she had just pushed a little harder she might have gotten the year of free diapers from Bottom Dollar Diaper Service. That was the prize. It would have come in handy now that her washing-machine fund, which was meager enough to begin with, had been parceled out to all the neighborhood kids.
“I don’t see how a body can grow no tobaccy if it don’t rain,” Granny Logan said.
“They don’t grow tobacco here. No crops hardly at all, just factories and stuff, and tourists that come down here for the winter. It’s real pretty out in the mountains. We could have showed you, if you hadn’t had to go back so soon.” The baby coughed again and she jiggled him up and down. “And it’s not usually this hot in January, either. You heard it yourself, Granny, the man on the radio saying it was the hottest January temperatures on record.”
“You talk different. I knowed you was going to put on airs.”
“Granny, I do not.”
“Don’t talk back to me, child, you do. I can hear it. I expect you’ll be persuadin’ the baby that his people’s just ignorant hill folks.”
Ivy brought in the bags of food and her suitcase, which was held together with a leather belt. Lou Ann recognized the belt as one she had been whipped with years ago, when her father was alive.
“Honey,” Ivy said, “tell Mother Logan not to start in on you again. We’ve got to git.”
“Tell Ivy to mind her business and I’ll mind mine. Here, I brung you something for the baby.” Granny Logan retrieved her black velvet purse, purpled with age and wear around the clasp, and rummaged through it with slow, swollen knuckles. Lou Ann tried not to watch.
After a minute the old woman produced a Coke bottle filled with cloudy water. The bent metal cap had been pushed back on and covered with cellophane, tied around and around with string.
Lou Ann shifted the baby onto her hip, pushed her hair behind her ear, and took the bottle with her free hand. “What is it?”
“That’s Tug Fork water. For baptizing the baby.”
The water inside the bottle looked milky and cool. A fine brown sediment stuck to the glass bottom when she tipped it sideways.
“I remember when you was baptized in Tug Fork, you was just a little old bit of a thing. And scared to death. When the reverend went to dunk you over, you hollered right out. Law, I remember that so good.”
“That’s good, Granny. You remember something I don’t.” Lou Ann wondered how Granny Logan was picturing a baptism in one bottle of water. Of course, the original plan had been to have Dwayne Ray sprinkled as a Catholic, but Granny would die if she knew that. And everything was up in the air now, anyway, with Angel gone.
“Doll baby, I reckon we’re all set,” Ivy said. “Oh, I hate to go. Let me hold my grandbaby again. You see he gets enough to eat now, Lou Ann. I always had plenty of milk for you and your brother, but you’re not as stout as I was. You never was a stout girl. It’s not my fault you wouldn’t eat what I put down in front of you.” She gave the baby a bounce on her pleated bosom. “Lordy mercy, he’ll be all growed up before we see him again, I expect.”
“I’m as fat as a hog since I had him, Mama, and you know it.”
“Remember you have to use both sides. If you just nurse him on one side you’ll go dry.”
“Don’t expect I’ll see him again a-tall,” Granny Logan grunted. “Not his old great-grandmaw.”
“Mama, I wish you’d wait till Angel gets home and we could drive you down to the station. You’re going to get all confused if you try to take the bus. You’ve got to change downtown.” The way they had both managed to avoid Angel he might as well not have moved back in.
“It’s a sin to be working on Sunday. He ought to be home with his family on the Lord’s day,” Granny Logan said, and sighed. “I guess I oughtn’t expect better from a heathern Mexican.”
“It’s shift work,” Lou Ann explained again. “He’s just got to go in when they tell him to, and that’s that. And he’s not a heathen. He was born right here in America, same as the rest of us.” Just because he wasn’t baptized in some old dirty crick, Lou Ann added in a voice way too low for Granny Logan to hear.
“Who tells him to?” the old woman demanded. Lou Ann looked at her mother.
“We’ll manage, with the bus and all,” Ivy said.
“That don’t make it right, do it? Just because some other heathern tells him to work on the Lord’s day?”
Lou Ann found a scrap of paper and wrote down the name of the stop and the number of the bus they would have to take downtown. Ivy handed back the baby and took the paper. She looked at it carefully before she folded it twice, tucked it in her purse, and began helping Granny Logan on with her coat.
“Granny, you’re not going to need that coat,” Lou Ann said. “I swear it’s eighty degrees out there.”
“You’ll swear yourself to tarnation if you don’t watch out. Don’t tell me I’m not going to need no coat, child. It’s January.” Her old hand pawed the air for a few seconds before Ivy silently caught it and corralled it in the heavy black sleeve.
“Lou Ann, honey, don’t let him play with that ink pen,” Ivy said over her shoulder. “He’ll put his eyes out before he even gets a good start in life.”
The baby was waving his fist vaguely in the direction of the blue pen in Lou Ann’s breast pocket, although he couldn’t have grabbed it or picked it up if his little life depended on it.
“All right, Mama,” Lou Ann said quietly. She wrapped the baby in a thin blanket in spite of the heat because she knew one or the other of the two women would fuss if she didn’t. “Let me help you with the stairs, Granny,” she said, but Granny Logan brushed her hand away.
Heat waves rising from the pavement made the brown grass and the palm tree trunks appear to wiggle above the sidewalk, making Lou Ann think of cartoons she had seen of strange lands where palm trees did the hula. They reached the little bus stop with its concrete bench.
“Don’t sit on it,” she warned. “It’ll be hot as a poker in this sun.” Granny Logan and Ivy stepped back from the bench like startled children, and Lou Ann felt pleased that she was able to tell them something they didn’t already know. The three women stood beside the bench, all looking in the direction from which the bus would come.
“Pew, don’t they make a stink,” Mother Logan said when the bus arrived. Ivy put her arms around both Lou Ann and the baby, then picked up the two bags and boarded the bus, lifting her feet high for the two big steps. At the top she turned and reached down for her mother-in-law, her sturdy, creased hand closing around the old knuckles. The bus driver leaned on his elbows over the steering wheel and stared ahead.
“I just wish you wasn’t so far away,” Ivy said as the doors hissed together.
“I know,” she mouthed. “Wave bye to your great-grandmaw,” Lou Ann told the baby, but they were on the wrong side to see.
She imagined herself running after the bus and banging on the door, the bus driver letting her climb up and settle herself and the baby onto the wide seat between her mother and grandmother. “Tell your mother to hand me that jar of tea,” Granny Logan would say to her. “I’ll be dry as a old stick fence before we get back to Kentucky.”
One block down and across the street, old Bobby Bingo sold vegetables out of his dilapidated truck. Lou Ann had been tempted by his tomatoes, which looked better than the hard pink ones at the grocery; those didn’t seem like tomatoes at all, but some sickly city fruit maybe grown inside a warehouse. She had finally collected the nerve to ask how much they cost and was surprised that they were less than grocery tomatoes. On her way home she made up her mind to buy some more.
“Hi, tomato lady,” Bingo said. “I remember you.”
She flushed. “Are they still forty-five a pound?”
“No, fifty-five. End of the season.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “It’s still a good price.” She looked at every one in the box and picked out six, handing them to the old man one at a time with her free hand. With her other hand she adjusted the baby on her hip taking extra care, as she had been instructed, to support his wobbly head. “Your tomatoes are the first good ones I’ve had since back home.” She felt her heart do something strange when she said “back home.”
Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought, though she couldn’t help liking him.
He squinted at her. “You’re not from here? I didn’t think so.” He shook out a wad of odd-sized plastic bags, chose one with red letters on it, and bagged the tomatoes. “Seventy-five,” he said, weighing them up and down in his hand before he put them on the scales. “And an apple for Johnny,” he said, picking out a red apple and shaking it at the baby.
“His name’s Dwayne Ray, and he thanks you very much I’m sure but he don’t have any teeth yet.” Lou Ann laughed. She was embarrassed, but it felt so good to laugh that she was afraid next she would cry.
“That’s good,” Bingo said. “Soon as they get teeth, they start to bite. You know my boy?”
Lou Ann shook her head.
“Sure you do. He’s on TV every night, he sells cars. He’s a real big guy in cars.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a TV. My husband took it to his new apartment.” She couldn’t believe, after deceiving her own mother and grandmother for two entire weeks, that she was admitting to a complete stranger on the street that her marriage had failed.
He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Makes me sick every time he comes on. Don’t even call himself by his own name-‘Bill Bing’ he says. ‘Come on down to Bill Bing Cadillac,’ he says. ‘Bill Bing has just the thing.’ I always wanted him to be a real big guy, you know. Well, look at him now. He don’t even eat vegetables. If he was here right now he would tell you he don’t know who I am. ‘Get rid of that old truck,’ he says to me. ‘What you need to sell this garbage for? I could buy you a house in Beverly Hills right now,’ he says to me. ‘What?’ I tell him. You crazy? Beverly Hills? Probably they don’t even eat vegetables in Beverly Hills, just Alaska King Crab and bread sticks!’ I tell him. “You want to make me happy, you give me a new Cadillac and I can sell my vegetables out of the trunk.’” Bingo shook his head. ‘You want grapes? Good grapes this week.”
“No, just the tomatoes.” She handed him three quarters.
“Here, take the grapes. Johnny can eat the grapes. Seedless.” He put them in the bag with the tomatoes. “Let me tell you something, tomato lady. Whatever you want the most, it’s going to be the worst thing for you.”
Back at the house she laid down the baby for his nap, then carefully washed the produce and put it in the refrigerator, all the while feeling her mother’s eyes on her hands. “The worst thing for you,” she kept repeating under her breath until she annoyed herself. She moved around the edges of the rooms as though her big mother and demanding grandmother were still there taking up most of the space; the house felt both empty and cramped at the same time, and Lou Ann felt a craving for something she couldn’t put a finger on, maybe some kind of food she had eaten a long time ago. She opened the curtains in the front room to let in the light. The sky was hard and bright, not a blue sky full of water. Strangely enough, it still surprised her sometimes to open that window and not see Kentucky.
She noticed the Coke bottle sitting on the low wooden bureau along with two of Granny Logan’s hairpins. The old-fashioned hairpins gave her a sad, spooky feeling. Once she had found a pair of her father’s work gloves in the tobacco barn, still molded to the curved shape of his hands, long after he was dead.
The bottle had leaked a wet ring on the wood, which Lou Ann tried to wipe up with the hem of her jumper. She was concerned about it staining, since the furniture wasn’t actually hers. The house had come furnished. She thought for a long time about what to do with the bottle and finally set it on the glass shelf of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
Later, while she was nursing the baby in the front room, she closed her eyes and tried to remember being baptized in Tug Fork. She could see the child in a white dress, her sunburned arms stiff at the elbows, and could hear her cry out as she went over backwards, but she could not feel that child’s terror as the knees buckled and the green water closed over the face. The strong light from the window took on a watery look behind her closed eyelids and she could see it all perfectly. But couldn’t feel it. She thought of her mother and automatically switched the baby to her other breast.
She was still nursing when Angel came home. She opened her eyes. The late-afternoon light on the mountains made them look pink and flat like a picture postcard.
She heard Angel in the kitchen. He moved around in there for quite a while before he said anything to Lou Ann, and it struck her that his presence was different from the feeling of women filling up the house. He could be there, or not, and it hardly made any difference. Like a bug or a mouse scratching in the cupboards at night-you could get up and chase after it, or just go back to sleep and let it be. This was good, she decided.
When he came into the front room she could hear the jingle of his leg.
“They gone?” he asked behind her.
“Yes.”
“I’m packing my shaving stuff,” he said. Angel had a moustache but shaved the rest of his face often, sometimes twice a day. “Did you see my belt buckle? The silver one with the sheepshank on it?” he asked her.
“The what on it?”
“Sheepshank. It’s a rope tied in a knot.”
“Oh. I wondered what that was on there.”
“So did you see it?”
“No. Not lately, I mean.”
“What about my Toros cap?”
“Is that the blue one?”
‘Yeah.”
‘You left that in Manny Quiroz’s car. Remember?”
“Damn it, Manny moved to San Diego.”
“Well, I can’t help it. That’s what you did with it.”
“Damn.”
He was standing close enough behind her so she could smell the faint, sweet smell of beer on his breath. It was a familiar smell, but today it made Lou Ann wonder about bars and the bottling plant and the other places Angel went every day that she had never seen. She turned her head in time to watch him leave the room, his work shirt rolled up at the elbows and dirty from doing something all day, she did not know exactly what. For a brief instant, no longer than a heartbeat, it felt strange to be living in the same house with this person who was not even related to her.
But of course he’s related. He’s my husband. Was my husband.
“What the hell is this?” he called from the bathroom.
She leaned back in the rocking chair where she sat facing east out the big window. “It’s water from Tug Fork, the crick at home that I was baptized in. Me and I guess practically everybody else in my family. Granny Logan brought it for baptizing Dwayne Ray. Wouldn’t you know she’d bring something weird like that?”
She heard the chugging sound of the water as he poured it down the drain. The baby’s sucking at her felt good, as if he might suck the ache right out of her breast.