The House You Pass On The Way Read online

  “Was she good, Daddy?” Staggerlee asked softly.

  All spring she had been thinking about good and bad. She didn’t understand it—what made a person good, what made a person bad. She didn’t know what she was. At school, kids said she was stuck-up, thought she was better than other people. Maybe she was stuck-up. Maybe she did think she was better. She didn’t know. So she remained quiet, watched people without joining in. Did that make her bad? Seemed all the girls at school knew who they were somehow. The way they dressed. The way they moved in clusters—laughing and holding their books tight to them. The way they sloe-eyed the boys. She knew she didn’t want this—to be a hanger-on, a follower, a part of somebody else’s pack. But then what was left? Where did she fit in? All her life she’d been thinking it was the mixed blood—the black and the white of her leaving her somewhere in the middle of things. But that wasn’t it. Charlie Horse and Dotti moved so freely in the world, and they had the same blood running through their veins. No. It was something deeper—something lonely inside of her. Something quiet.

  And the night before—what about that? The night before Ida Mae’s letter came, something had happened to Staggerlee. Something hushed and solemn her mother said happened to all girls. And after they had spoken, Mama brought Dotti in to join them and they drank wine from a small crystal glass. A celebration, Mama whispered. But maybe it was bad, this thing that had suddenly changed her from a girl to a woman. Because she couldn’t tell the men about it, not her father, not Charlie Horse, who she had told everything to always. Why did she have to start having secrets from him? What was so bad about it?

  “Was she good, Daddy?” Staggerlee asked again, pressing her hand against her stomach. All morning long, dull pains had been shooting through it. “Hallique. Was she a good person?”

  Her father frowned.

  Hallique and Ida Mae had stopped speaking to him when he married Mama. They said they didn’t have anything against white people, they just didn’t want them in the family. That was twenty years ago. Staggerlee looked down at her arm while she waited for him to answer. Her arm was pale now. By the end of summer, it would be amber.

  “Yes,” her father said finally. “Underneath all the things Hallique did and said, she was good.”

  “But she hated us,” Dotti said.

  Mama shook her head. “She didn’t know you. It was the idea of us she disapproved of.”

  “The idea of us.” Dotti rolled her eyes. “Well, I can’t grieve the idea of her passing.”

  “I would’ve liked to have known her,” Staggerlee said. “Even for just a minute. I would have liked to look in her eyes, her true live eyes, just once before she died. I would have said, ‘Hallique, look at me. I’m your niece. Your blood kin.’”

  The family sitting around her was the only family she knew. No aunts or uncles or grandparents. No cousins or nephews. Just what was in this kitchen and the baby her mother was four months pregnant with. Staggerlee looked around at everybody. Suddenly they seemed small, like a tiny raggedy army trying to hold on.

  Charlie Horse was sitting away from them on a stool at the counter. He sniffed, and Staggerlee wondered if he was trying not to cry. She wanted to hug him the way Dotti was hugging Daddy. A year ago she would have. Even a week ago. But now she felt strange, distant—different from him. When she was young, they would spend hours sitting out by the river. Charlie had played piano since he was two. He would sit by the river with his hands out in front of him as if they were resting on the black and white keys of his piano. And he’d talk about the songs he was going to write one day while his fingers danced excitedly—like they could hardly wait.

  “Hallique was the one who sang,” Charlie Horse said now, looking down at his fingers. Maybe he was thinking of the music he and Hallique could have made together. “She cut a couple of records, didn’t she?”

  “Two,” Daddy said. “Cut two records back in sixty-eight. But when she and Ida Mae were so mean about your mama, I threw those records out.” His eyes filled up again. When they were young, Daddy had told them once, Hallique would dress him up in her frilly blouses and push him around in a stroller with her baby dolls. He said he loved the way she took such time with him, unlike Ida Mae, who was older.

  “Somebody should have been strong enough to say something,” Charlie Horse said softly. “Twenty years is a long time to go without speaking.”

  Staggerlee nodded. No one talked about the twenty years of not speaking. It was an unwritten rule.

  Battle started whining to get down from the high chair. Staggerlee reached over and pulled him out and watched him take off for a stack of toys in the corner of the kitchen. She excused herself to go to the bathroom.

  In the bathroom, she stared into the mirror. She had grown taller over the winter, and her hair had gone from dark to reddish brown. She pulled a lock of it down over her eye and watched it spring back. Her lips were full across her face like Daddy’s. What had Hallique known about them? That they were mixed-race, black and white joined together—what their grandparents had fought for and what had killed them.

  Staggerlee took a step back from the mirror and pressed her hand against her chest. Her breasts were sore. Her mother had said this would pass. How long? What had it been like for Dotti the first time? And Mama? She hadn’t said much to her and Dotti last night. Mama was quiet that way. “I’m used to working things out on my own,” she had said once. “In my own mind.”

  “Ida Mae and Hallique were already living in Maryland when your grandparents died,” her father was saying when Staggerlee came back to the kitchen. “I was up in New York. We all came back here for the funeral. Must’ve been a thousand-something people paying their respects.” He sniffed. “I brought your mama. . . . We’d been dating a couple of months by then.”

  “They know the story, Elijah,” Mama said. Daddy ignored her. Mama was wrong. They knew bits and pieces of a hundred stories. But not one whole one.

  Mama pulled her needles and yarn from a bag beside her chair and started knitting. The yarn was a soft blue that made Staggerlee think of cornflowers. Once when Staggerlee had asked her mother about learning to knit, her mother had said, “My mother taught me.” Something in her mother’s voice let Staggerlee know that that was all she was going to say about it. Mama’s parents had disappeared a long time ago—they hadn’t approved of the marriage either. Some days, Staggerlee felt surrounded by disappeared people, old photographs and bits of stories of people who had long ago left the picture.

  “My sisters didn’t like the idea of me and Adeen being together,” Daddy was saying. “Ida Mae was a big revolutionary back then, and Hallique bonded to Ida Mae after our folks died.”

  “That was the last we saw of them,” Mama added.

  Daddy nodded. “I wrote and invited them to the wedding, but they never showed. Didn’t even reply to the invite. Wrote again to let them know me and Adeen had moved back here to Sweet Gum and that Adeen was pregnant.” He pointed his chin at Charlie Horse. “Called them a couple of times back then, but they’d stopped answering their phone. Heard from some folks that Ida’d married, and I didn’t even know her last name anymore.”

  “What about Hallique?” Dotti asked.

  “Couple of years back,” Daddy said, “she wrote saying she wanted things to be better between us. Wanted to get to know you all . . . said she was sorry for all those years she didn’t speak or write or send a birthday card ...”

  Mama was knitting faster now, her fingers blurring across the yarn.

  “You never wrote her back, did you?” Staggerlee bit her bottom lip.

  Daddy shook his head, pulled his hand across his eyes.

  “What about us?” Staggerlee said, her heart pounding hard against her chest. “What about us, Daddy?”

  “Staggerlee.” He slammed his hand against the table. “I didn’t think she’d die.” He started crying again, hard, loud sobs. “I thought there’d be time.”

  Her mother reached across
the table and stroked her head.

  “I want to hear the rest of Ida’s letter.” Staggerlee pulled away from her. “Before someone gets the keen idea to throw it away.”

  Her mother started reading again, looking at the letter over her knitting.

  “. . . My husband Jonathan woke up from a nap this afternoon saying he had had himself a dream about you all and all day long, that dream stayed on his mind. He and I got to talking and we figured all these years of having the family all disconnected have just been a waste of good living. We want to come visit and have you all come to Maryland—the whole family. Last I read, you was about to have a third child. I guess it might just be more than that by now. Jonathan’s teaching at Old Dominion these days and this summer we’re already too busy to think about a trip further south. Some time ago, we adopted us the sweetest baby girl. We call her Tyler after Mama’s sister Tyler—the one that passed a few years before Mama and Daddy did. Tyler says she wants to come spend some time with you all this summer and me and Jonathan sat and talked and figured it was high time to start the reuniting process. Tyler’ll be fifteen come fall. I put one of her school pictures in with this letter. ...”

  “My age?” Staggerlee said. “She’s my age?”

  Her mother reached inside the envelope. She studied the picture a moment before handing it around the table.

  Staggerlee stared at the photo. It wasn’t a regular school picture—the head-shot kind with a bookshelf or an American flag waving behind the person. In the photo, Tyler was standing in a field. In the distance, a cheerleading squad was practicing, and even farther out, a football team was running in a straight line. But right up front, in the middle of the frame, Tyler stood dressed in black, her hands on her hips, looking sidelong at the camera as if she were daring the photographer to say smile.

  “Looks like she has an edge to her,” Mama said.

  Staggerlee looked at the picture again. Tyler reminded her of Hazel, this friend she had once. She didn’t look anything like Hazel, not really, except for the way she was looking at the camera—looking at Staggerlee—skeptical, like she’d heard every story in the world a million times.

  “I want her to come,” Staggerlee said, staring at the picture.

  “We’ll see how the rest of the spring goes—”

  “No ‘we’ll see,’ Mama. I want her to come!”

  Mama looked at her sharply, but Staggerlee glared back.

  “It’s always ‘we’ll see.’ You’d think after twenty years, we’d be jumping at the chance to see some family.”

  “She’s adopted, anyway,” Dotti said.

  “Still family,” Staggerlee said. “If Daddy’s sister raised her.”

  Dotti ignored her.

  “It’s a lot of thinking to do, Stag,” Daddy said softly. “We barely know them—never even met Jonathan and Tyler. And with all this stuff going on—”

  “I know.”

  A month before, Mama’s doctor had told her she’d have to take time off from her job as a paralegal, and stay off her feet as much as possible if she wanted the baby born healthy. Charlie Horse had pretty much taken over for her, cooking all the family’s meals and staying on Staggerlee and Dotti to keep Battle and the house clean.

  Mama got up and set the kettle on the stove for tea. She moved slowly, one hand beneath her small stomach.

  “It’s not about Ida Mae and Hallique,” Staggerlee said. “Not anymore anyway. It’s about Tyler. That’s who I’m asking you to say yes to.”

  Dotti frowned. “Well, if she comes, don’t expect me to be taking care of her, showing her around—”

  “Nobody expects anything from you, Dotti. And, boy, do you deliver.” Staggerlee glared at her sister, running her tongue over the place where one of her front teeth overlapped the other. Dotti was only two years older, but she was a stranger more than a sister. At sixteen, she was filled with what Mama called “a restless spirit.” She had their mother’s thick black hair coiling down past her back and straight white teeth like Daddy. And unlike Staggerlee, Dotti was always surrounded by friends. Twice she’d gotten voted most popular, and once, prettiest. The last time Staggerlee had invited her to walk along the river, Dotti had frowned like it was a ridiculous idea. She doesn’t understand the river the way I do, Staggerlee remembered thinking. The way you can come across somebody fly-fishing if you get up early enough or close to evening. The sound of the reel is pretty. Some days, watching the fishermen, she started thinking she really didn’t need anybody else. But there were nights when she stood outside Dotti’s bedroom door, listening to her and her friends.

  Dotti started clearing away the breakfast dishes.

  “Are you going to say yes?” Staggerlee turned back to Mama. “You don’t have to do anything, Mama. I’ll do it. And maybe Tyler could help out too.”

  Her mother’s face softened. She looked at Staggerlee a long time. And Staggerlee felt embarrassed. Was it that obvious, she wondered, how lonely she was? She thought about turning away, hiding her face from Mama. But she didn’t. Maybe a year ago she would’ve ducked her head or blinked. But she was a woman now. Mama had said so.

  “If it’s that important to you then, honey ...” She turned to Daddy.

  “Then yes—yes, Tyler can come,” he said.

  Staggerlee smiled, picking up Tyler’s picture again. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s that important.”

  Chapter Two

  SHE HAD KISSED A GIRL ONCE. IN SIXTH GRADE. Hazel. She didn’t remember how she and Hazel started being friends. Hazel showed up to school late in the year and somehow they had just started hanging together. Hazel’s mother made all her clothes and didn’t allow her to wear anything but dresses that stopped right below her knees. All her dresses were pastel—even in the winter, she would show up to school in pale green and blue dresses with huge sashes tied in the back. The dresses made her look young and old at the same time. Her hair was thick and coiling, but her mother made her wear it pulled back into a tight braid. At school, Hazel undid her braid and let her hair go wild. She had a way of laughing that made Staggerlee feel warm and safe. They had kissed after school one day, behind a patch of blue cornflowers.

  Soon after, Staggerlee came down with the chicken pox and ended up staying home from school for a week. She didn’t mind that Hazel didn’t come visit—their house was far away from everyone and hard to get to. When she returned to school, Hazel was huddled in the school yard with a group of girls. Staggerlee walked toward them slowly, knowing something terrible was about to happen. They were whispering, but as she got closer they stopped, and Hazel turned slowly, her lavender old-lady dress spinning out from under her.

  Staggerlee touched her fingers to her lips, wanting Hazel to remember the way the cornflowers had swayed, the way the sun set down all gold and pretty that afternoon. Wanting her to remember how she had said, “I could stay here forever—just me and you right here in all of this blue.” But when Hazel turned to her, her eyes were blank, unfamiliar. A stranger’s eyes.

  “Your grandparents was killed by a bomb?” she asked, her eyes slitted. “Those Canans they got the statues of up in town—those were your people?”

  “Were,” Staggerlee said. “Before I was born. They were my grandparents, but I didn’t know them.” Behind Hazel, the other girls looked on, their lips hard across their faces.

  “You never told me that, Stag,” she said, her voice all full of hurt. “All these things I’m hearing now that you never told me.”

  “It’s nothing, Hazel. Doesn’t have anything to do with me. This is me—the person you see standing here. I didn’t even know them.”

  Someone giggled.

  “That’s ’cause they died,” one of the girls—a girl named Chloe—said. “And they must have left y’all lots of money and everything. That’s why you think you better than everybody else, ’cause of your grandpeople. That’s why y’all live way out like you do and you think you too cute to talk to anybody.”

  “I don’t
think I’m better or cute. Hazel, you know that.”

  “You didn’t tell me. You made believe you were just regular, like all of us. But you ain’t.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. That afternoon, nestled down in the cornflowers, Hazel had put her hand on Staggerlee’s cheek and said, “You’re beautiful, Staggerlee. Inside and out. I wish I was beautiful inside and out like you.” Staggerlee swallowed. She should have told Hazel then that she thought she was beautiful too. All the things she should have said to Hazel came rushing to her at once.

  “Plus, she got a white mama, Hazel. I bet she didn’t tell you that either,” another girl said—a light-skinned girl everyone called Bug because of her small head and big dark eyes.

  Staggerlee glared at her. Her father had said African Americans were all mixed up—not just the out-and-out mixed-race kids, but that all black people weren’t a hundred percent African unless they never left Africa. He said most likely even the darkest black had some white blood somewhere in their veins, and the lighter ones, well, unless they were albino Africans, then they had some too.

  “And her mama thinks she’s better than everyone too—just ’cause she’s white,” Bug continued.

  “You don’t even know my mother,” Staggerlee whispered, feeling herself turning to stone. She wanted to disappear, to melt into the ground and be gone.

  “Everyone knows your mama. It’s only three, four white women in all of Sweet Gum and only one of them married to your daddy. My ma see her in town, say she don’t hardly speak to people, all these years she been in Sweet Gum. Nobody needs y’all.”

  “She doesn’t speak to people ’cause that’s her way,” Staggerlee said, hating her mother, how quiet and inside herself she was in public. She had never been like Daddy, who seemed to know everyone in town. He was full of “Good mornings” and “What you know goods,” grinning and slapping men on the back, winking and tipping his hat to the women.