The House You Pass On The Way Read online

  “Devil beating his wife today, ain’t he?” one of the men said. He grinned. A wide, nearly toothless grin.

  Staggerlee smiled, looking out to where the sun had peeked out a bit between two clouds. It was an old expression, one she had heard her father use a couple of times—sun showers meant the devil was beating his wife. It didn’t make any sense but it was always funny to hear.

  Her father laughed and pulled over.

  “We’re going to be late,” Staggerlee said, getting nervous. “Tyler’ll be waiting.”

  He looked at his watch. “We’ll make it, sugar. Let me just say a quick hello.”

  Another man came up to the truck—a dark, gray-haired man in work pants and a shirt so washed out, Staggerlee couldn’t guess what its original color had been.

  “Your south field’s gonna need plowing before the sun gets too hot, Canan. I got some time next week I could get to it, if you’d like.”

  “That’d be as good a time as any, Trev. Just come on by and do it and let me know how much you got coming to you.”

  Trev smiled. “That your baby girl there?”

  Daddy nodded.

  “How you doing, brown sugar child?”

  “Fine, sir.”

  “She getting big, ain’t she?” He turned back to the men. “Y’all see Canan’s baby girl—she just about grown, ain’t she?”

  Staggerlee’s face grew hot.

  “Look just like he spit her out,” another man said.

  “Be beating boys off with a stick soon, Canan. My big-headed boy Derrick’s in your class, ain’t he?” He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the rain dripping from his forehead.

  “Yes, sir.” His son was loud and gangly. Once, a few years back, he had put an apple on her desk, with a tiny red heart taped to it. Staggerlee had eaten the apple and returned the red heart. She had no idea what he had intended for her to do with it. After that, he had seemed cold toward her.

  “Adeen got another one coming.” Her father grinned.

  Derrick’s father whistled, low and steady, then turned to the group again. “Y’all hear that? Another one coming.”

  They all hooted.

  “Can’t keep the rooster in the barn, can you?” Trev grinned.

  Daddy smiled, and Trev tapped the truck once and stepped away.

  “You give my best to your family,” he said as Daddy started the engine. “I’ll see y’all sometime next week.”

  They drove off slowly, Daddy grinning and giving one last wave before he turned at the corner. When he got around his men friends, he seemed to step into a different person—someone relaxed and easygoing and ready to laugh. He had known some of those men all his life. Staggerlee leaned out the window and squinted against the wind. Her mother didn’t have this—a group of people to laugh with. She spent most of her time alone or with the family or knitting or reading.

  “You think Mama’s lonely?” Staggerlee asked, poking her head back in.

  Her father glanced at her. “Where’d that come from?”

  Staggerlee shrugged. “It’s just that you have your men-folk friends in town and Sweet Gum’s mostly all black people. Mama doesn’t have anyone.”

  “You think she doesn’t have anyone because Sweet Gum is mostly black folk?” Daddy asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Staggerlee shrugged again. “I didn’t mean that. I mean, she just doesn’t have anyone. I don’t know if it’s about black or white.”

  Daddy frowned. “Good—’cause it’s not. Your mother’s always been on solo. And I wouldn’t have brought her back to Sweet Gum if she hadn’t wanted to come here.” He looked over at her.

  “She seems so alone, though.”

  “She is alone. Some people go crazy if they feel like they don’t have any type of community or close friends and whatnot. Your mama’s not like that. She never did like a big social kind of lifestyle, always preferred to be by herself. Or now, with me and you kids.”

  “Well, I figure I’d like to have me a good friend in my lifetime.”

  Daddy patted her leg. “Then you will, Miss Staggerlee. You will.”

  But she wasn’t sure she believed him.

  Chapter Seven

  THE RAIN STOPPED HALFWAY TO TUDOR. BY THE TIME they arrived, the roads were hot and dusty again.

  Tudor Station was small—not much more than a store-front with a ticket counter and a dusty red dirt road where Trailways pulled in once a day. Staggerlee climbed down from the truck and looked around at the station. Today it seemed shabby, dusty and bare. She swallowed. What would Tyler think of it?

  “I guess she’s on her way,” she said, brushing off the knees of her overalls and smoothing her ponytail back. Her feet were sweating inside her hiking boots, and she couldn’t tell whether it was nervousness or heat.

  When the bus pulled in, it took the driver a moment to get the door open. Staggerlee bit her cuticle. She moved a step closer to her father and waited.

  Tyler stepped down carrying a duffel bag. The sun was hot and bright now, and she shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted at them—a half smile working one side of her face. Staggerlee felt her mouth go dry. Tyler was beautiful, like nobody she had ever seen before.

  Daddy rushed over, smiling and taking her duffel. “Tyler, I’m your uncle Elijah. Good to see you. Real good!” He gave her a quick hug. “Come meet your cousin, girl.”

  Staggerlee shoved her hands in her pockets and stared down at her boots. It was the kind of beautiful you couldn’t put a finger on. Separately, all the parts of Tyler’s face didn’t add up to anything. But together they were beautiful. She tried to keep her eyes on her boots, but something kept pulling her gaze back.

  “I’m Stag . . . Staggerlee,” she said when they walked over.

  Tyler gave her a strange look and shifted her knapsack higher onto her shoulder. She was wearing a dungaree jacket with TROUT stitched across one of the pockets. Underneath the jacket, she was all in black.

  Staggerlee took a deep breath. “Guess you’re Tyler.”

  Tyler shook her head and raised an eyebrow.

  “My name is Trout.” Her voice was soft and even. She looked Staggerlee over, and her eyes seemed to click into place as though she had just decided something. She pulled her lips to one side of her face. It made her look older than fourteen. “I thought your name was Evangeline Ian.”

  Staggerlee hadn’t expected her not to have an accent. It sounded strange, how clear her words came out.

  “I thought yours was Tyler.”

  She smiled, and Staggerlee smiled back, kicking one of her hiking boots against a rock.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Well, Ida and Jonathan tried that name out on me.”

  They stared at each other, smiling. One of Trout’s eyebrows curved into an arch, which made her look skeptical even when she was smiling. Staggerlee remembered all those love-at-first-sight stories she used to read—how she had never believed them. But standing there, in the Tudor bus station, she felt something weird happening inside her stomach and all around her—like something pounding, trying to get out of her. Her mind kept running back to Hazel in those cornflowers.

  “Seems neither of you were happy with the names your mamas gave you,” Daddy said.

  Staggerlee jumped. She had forgotten he was standing there.

  He lifted Trout’s duffel into the back of the truck.

  “My mother named me Danielle, sir. Ida and Jonathan named me Tyler.”

  “And you don’t consider Ida and Jonathan your people?” Daddy asked. “Because if they’re not your people, then what does that make me and this fine daughter of mine, who just drove a good long way to pick up a city-slick niece and cousin we heard was coming in from Baltimore?”

  Staggerlee glared at him. He seemed out of place—like a wall between her and Trout.

  “Yes, sir,” Trout said quietly, glancing away from him. “They’re my people. They raised me.”

  “Well then, Miss Trout Danielle Tyler,”
Daddy said, “welcome to Calmuth County. My mama, your grandma, named me Elijah and I think I’ll hold on to that name awhile.”

  Trout smiled and followed behind Daddy, taking high steps to keep her shoes from getting covered in red dust.

  “It’s a losing battle, Trout,” Staggerlee said, pointing down at her own hiking boots.

  “You always wear those boots?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “They look like it. I brought stuff with me to keep my shoes shined. You can use it if you want. Can we ride in back, Uncle Elijah?” She hoisted her knapsack into the truck.

  Staggerlee frowned. Who’d ever heard of shiny hiking boots?

  “Probably get a bit windy back there,” Daddy said.

  “I don’t mind.” She looked at Staggerlee. “You mind, Staggerlee?”

  “No.” Maybe Staggerlee would have followed Trout to the end of the world.

  “Okay then,” Daddy said, climbing into the cab.

  Trout climbed into the back easily and scooted to one corner. Staggerlee climbed up after her and settled against a bag of fertilizer her father had picked up in town. Red dust kicked up around the truck as he slowly maneuvered it back onto the main road. Staggerlee tried not to look at Trout, but Trout was looking hard at her, so that every time Staggerlee’s eyes slid in Trout’s direction, they bumped smack against hers.

  Staggerlee started braiding her hair—hoping to keep the wind from whipping it into snarls.

  “Don’t do that,” Trout said. “I like it.”

  Staggerlee let it drop back into a ponytail.

  “Ida said she was sending me here to spend time with some ladies and gentlemen,” Trout said above the noise of the truck. “You sure don’t look like a lady.”

  “How’s a lady supposed to look?”

  Trout shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I guess liking lipstick and dresses and stuff. Wearing bras. Ida says one day I’m going to be too big for T-shirts. I hope that day isn’t planning on coming soon.”

  “I still wear T-shirts too.”

  Trout smiled. “Good. Otherwise, I’d be embarrassed.”

  “And anyway, Ida never even met us before.”

  “I know. But we’ve seen lots of pictures. You know—in newspapers and magazines and stuff.”

  “Didn’t reporters bother you all?” Staggerlee asked.

  “Shoot,” Trout said. “Once in a blue. They don’t care anything about our boring lives. Ida married a college professor. Hallique started a couple of fund-raising organizations for black people—for a while, reporters were into that. But the organizations ran out of money and she went back to her regular life being a secretary. They wanted you guys for the dirt. Look at you—you could pass for white. The press loves that kind of stuff.”

  Staggerlee looked away. At school she had been called “Light-bright.” She hated it, the way the word sounded so much like a swear, how girls’ mouths curved so nastily when they screamed it. When she was younger, she hated how light she was, how people stared and called her beautiful or ugly just because of it. Some mornings, she wanted to pull her skin back and walk outside with just her blood and veins and bone showing. What would people say then? What names would they come up with? She looked at Trout. Her skin was dark brown like Daddy’s. Staggerlee wanted to touch it, to run her hands along Trout’s arm. She wanted to ask her what it was like to walk inside that skin every day.

  “Why would I want to pass?” Her voice came out sounding cold. “I know what I am.”

  Trout narrowed her eyes, smirking. “What are you?”

  It was a test, Staggerlee knew. One she had had to take a thousand times. Choose a side, Trout was saying. Black or white.

  “I’m me. That’s all.”

  Trout’s eyes softened. Staggerlee stared into them. They were brown and clear as water.

  “Yeah,” Trout said. “I hear that.” She turned away from Staggerlee and watched the passing land for a while, squinting against the dust. “That’s all anybody is—themselves. People all the time wanting to change that.”

  She looked old sitting there, all huddled into her jacket.

  “Are you glad you came here?”

  Trout looked thoughtful a moment. “I don’t know yet.” She sighed. “I miss Hallique.” For a minute she looked like she’d start crying. But then she blinked and her eyes were distant again.

  Staggerlee leaned back and stared out over the land. The pictures they had of her father’s people had been taken a long time ago. In most of them, Hallique and Ida were little girls, and there were a few of them as teenagers. Hallique never smiled in any of the pictures. When Staggerlee had asked her father why, he’d said, “That’s how she was—straight-faced.”

  “What do you miss about her?” Staggerlee asked Trout now.

  Trout shrugged. “I look over at her chair at the table and it’s empty and I know it’ll always be empty now. And her pictures. I look at them and . . . I don’t know. She’s there in them but she’s not, too.” She reached into her knapsack and pulled out a small stack of pictures with a rubber band around it.

  “We went to the shore last year.” She handed the picture to Staggerlee. “This is me and Hallique.”

  Staggerlee stared at the picture a long time. The woman in it was tall and dark like Daddy. Her hair was braided and pinned to the top of her head. She wore tiny wire-frame glasses and had an arm across Trout’s shoulder. They were both laughing into the camera.

  “That’s Hallique?” Staggerlee asked softly.

  “Yeah.”

  “I never saw a picture with her smiling.” She stared at the picture again. They were both wearing shorts. Trout was wearing an orange bathing suit beneath hers. Hallique wore a T-shirt with something written across it Staggerlee couldn’t read.

  “She said when she was young, she was too busy worrying about what her life was gonna be like when she grew up. But after the bombing, she said she was going to live—that tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed.” Trout frowned. “Or something like that.”

  “Then why’d she stop talking to Daddy, if she was going to live?”

  Trout shrugged. “She never talked about that. Neither one of them did. It was like your daddy was dead and buried. Hardly any pictures either—except what they clipped from the newspaper.”

  “They hated us.”

  “They didn’t hate you. They just didn’t think about you all. I guess that’s just as bad, huh?”

  Staggerlee nodded. “Somebody dies and then everyone scrambles to make things right.”

  Trout raised her eyebrow. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Like Ida Mae letting us finally meet you. Finally writing to us. It took somebody dying.”

  “Yeah,” Trout said, looking away from her. “Somebody dying.” She got quiet, and Staggerlee wondered what she had said wrong.

  “Anyway, Hallique smiled all the time,” Trout said. “I think that’s what I’ll miss the most. The way she laughed at Jonathan’s silly jokes. I think I was closest to Hallique. I could tell her anything.” Trout looked down at the stack. “Ida Mae’s not like that. Ida Mae’s got big plans for me.”

  She held out another picture. “That’s them. Ida and Jonathan.”

  Staggerlee stared at the picture a moment. Ida Mae was short and round. She was waving the camera away the way Mama did sometimes when she had had enough picture taking. But Jonathan was holding her by the shoulders, playfully, as though he was making her stand still for one more. He was handsome, younger than Staggerlee had expected him to be.

  “They’re good-looking,” Staggerlee said finally, handing the picture back.

  Trout nodded. “I know, and I know I don’t look like them either.”

  “You’re good-looking,” Staggerlee said quickly.

  Trout smiled and winked at her. Something about the wink made Staggerlee’s stomach flutter.

  They were driving through Calmuth. The land stretched out green and gold in the sun. Trout leaned ba
ck against the cab. “It’s pretty here.”

  “Baltimore pretty?”

  Trout sat up. “You know why Ida is sending me here?”

  Staggerlee frowned. “You wanted to come!”

  “Is that what she said in her letters?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you want to come? To meet us?”

  Trout leaned back again, looking relieved and pent up at the same time. “It’s bigger than that,” she sighed.

  Trout looked at her a moment, as though she was trying to figure out if Staggerlee would understand something. Then she shook her head.

  “Bigger than what?” Staggerlee asked.

  “Nothing,” Trout said.

  Staggerlee took her harmonica out of her back pocket and started blowing into it. The music surrounded them. She felt scared suddenly that Trout had brought something deep with her, something that concerned both of them. Trout made her feel small and shaky. And her lips were scary, the way they curved into a smile.

  Staggerlee started playing “Moonlight in Vermont.” Over and over she had watched the film clip of her grandmother singing it with Ella Fitzgerald. Their voices together were beautiful. Later in the song, a man came out and started playing the trumpet. Staggerlee played that part now. She felt herself disappearing inside the music.

  “‘Moonlight in Vermont ...,’ ” Trout began to sing.

  Staggerlee frowned, unsure whether or not she had heard right. She had never heard anyone but her grandmother and Ella sing the song, and now here was Trout. She began to play more softly. Trout smiled and continued singing, her voice sweet and low. She sang with her eyes closed, her head thrown back. Staggerlee stared at her mouth, the way it moved to form the words. She felt her throat closing up, felt tears beginning to form behind her eyes. She stopped playing suddenly and stared down at her harmonica.

  “Why’d you stop?”

  “How do you know that song?”

  Trout frowned. “The same way you do, silly. Grandma sang it. We have it on video.”

  They had the same grandmother. Georgia Canan. Somehow that seemed strange to Staggerlee, that this Trout shared her grandmother.

  “We have it on video too,” Staggerlee said.

  Trout stared out at the passing road, smiling. “I like when she and Ella do that little step,” she said, moving her shoulders. “And then they go ‘Oooh oooh oooh. Ooooh.’ I love that.”