The Day's Heat Page 25

  In the sun-heated car, Lee warmed her hands on the steering wheel, holding on tightly to overcome the weak, shaky feeling settling in her legs, as though she’d just missed being hit by a truck.

  “Who does the world belong to?” she muttered, looking up through the windshield to the picture-book blue of the sky: “People like Charles, or people like me?” Now, that he had returned to his family, she could chart her husband’s days in clear, predictable patterns, each one fitting perfectly into the next, a plumber’s pipe into a joint. Her life, in contrast, seemed a disconnected puzzle without a clue as to what came next.

  The transfer of the loan took a month to become final, with Lee carrying papers back and forth, dashing off Charles’s name—now without practice—wherever it was needed. Once more, on a change in percentages, Ramsey called Charles at work, asked him to initial the wording of the contract, and once more the banker seemed satisfied that the husband wanted the house in his wife’s name.

  “It’s a smart move, I guess, if Bettlemain Plumbing ever goes under, I guess,” Ramsey said.

  So eventually the loan was transferred from the Teflers’ name into Lee’s, and all the papers were signed without Charles ever making a single appearance at the bank, without his ever having seen a single document.

  That night Lee lay in Charles’s recliner with the television set on but the sound turned off, feeling exalted and let down all at the same time, an escaped feeling—the bank robber who’s made a clean get away.

  The next Saturday, she and Willie Mae started painting the new house. Baby Charlie lay on a pallet on the floor in the middle of the bare living room while his sisters ran, their thin, knobby legs scissoring across the thresholds, across the still green grass of the adjoining yards.

  “You shouldn’t have done all that scrubbing and toting by your ownself, Miss Lee,” Willie Mae scolded, moving through the empty rooms as if inspecting. The stocky colored woman’s searching look at the bare walls and floors seemed to say that cleaning was her province, but she also seemed amazed at the house and that Lee had bought it.

  “’Magine them folks going off and leaving this here fine place. Tell me—how much you pay?”

  The question was a step beyond the usual between them but seemed justified, called as it was from the next room, the doors and windows wide open, the work that lay before them.

  “Well, I only wanted to pay $600 down, but it ended up being $800, with closing costs and all.”

  “What’s that—closing?” Willie Mae’s voice came from the one bathroom, taking on a porcelain echo.

  “I don’t have a clue, Willie,” Lee hollered back. “Something banks make up to get more money.” She poured the thick latex paint into a tilted tray on the floor—an almost-white for every room, bland to go with whatever furniture and curtains the renters might have. “Just figure on paying more than you intended if you ever get a loan.”

  “I got near on $200 saved right now.” Willie Mae’s bedroom flats slapped down the hall, and she stood in the doorway, repeating, “Two hundred, saved up.”

  “You’re saving? For a house?”

  Although Lee knew the details of Willie Mae’s life—the grandchildren and daughters, their laundry work, her problems with Claire—still somehow it was a told-about existence, flat and worrisome, but with little hope of change.

  “Well, I got the house I’m living in now—my granny left it to me—but I want a better one, in a better neighborhood—like this’n here.”

  Did people actually have deeds to those narrow, tilted, unpainted houses on Thrope Street? Lee wondered, and lay newspapers against the baseboards. “That’s great, Willie. You deserve a new house if anyone does.”

  Might as well say, “Go with God.” Lee made a connection with the two coats of the Gospel—if you had two coats, give one away. I have two houses, she thought.

  Throughout the rest of the day and the next, missing Mass, breaking for lunch, nursing for Lee, and taking Willie Mae home and picking her up early again, they painted the different rooms with the creamy white paint. The strong colored woman did most of the roller work. Her short muscular arms were able to keep up the long sweeping strokes, hour after hour. “I feels like I’s really getting a whole lot finished, doing the walls. I hates that little finger work.” So it was left to Lee to paint the trim: the spaces above the baseboards, inching along on all fours; the edges near the ceiling, up on the ladder; and around the windows. By the careful placing of paper to protect the floor from drips, the exacting touch of brush or roll without smudging a ceiling or window pane, they recognized in each other the good workman, the shared pleasure of doing something right.

  The last job, as the late Sunday sun slanted down behind the pines in the front yard, was washing and waxing the hardwood floors. When finished, Lee went next door and brought back two beers. Charles had left his supply. Willie Mae giggled, “Might as well,” and took the long-necked brown bottle, and then they sat on the high concrete front steps, leaning against the stucco wall. Lee nursed Baby Charlie, the tall sweating bottle beside her. The house behind them breathed out the odors of fresh paint, pine-oil, bleach, and floor wax, the floors as nutbrown and beautiful as those in Father Palmer’s rectory.

  “I likes this kinda work best,” Willie Mae said, and took a long swig from the bottle, untied the blue and white bandanna from her head, and wiped her broad, malleable face. “When it’s done, it’s done for keeps, or leastways for a long time. Not like housework—gotta be redid every day.”

  “True,” Lee agreed solemnly, as though to some great insight. “I wish my house were this clean. Seems a shame to let strangers have all the fresh paint and the new.”

  Count on it: whatever happens will be the least expected. For what Lee least expected in that moment of finished work and beer drinking was for her mother-in-law’s great blue Buick Electra to pull up into the Teflers’ front yard. Claire drove diagonally across the driveway, up onto the grass, with as much respect as a teenage boy when he’s cutting through on a bike. She stuck her head out the car window, making a great show of being in a hurry, not able to get down to visit. Lee hadn’t seen the woman since Charles’s departure two weeks earlier.

  “Here, Lee honey, Charles sent you this.” Claire flapped a long business-sized envelope and motioned with her other hand for Lee to come to the car.

  Divorce papers? A subpoena? A warrant for forgery? Lee’s thoughts zigzagged through the possibilities, but she stayed on the steps, felt her nipple squeeze shut, stopping the milk flow. As if to reassure Baby Charlie, she whispered, “It’s only your grandmother.”

  What had Charles told her? Lee thought, and calmed somewhat. Like with the banker, probably not a word the night he went back home, and today, just “Would you take this here to Lee?” which left Claire, as always, to make up any explanation she wanted—as Lee had often seen her do: whole invented conversations between herself and her sons.

  When the car stopped in front of the house, Willie Mae had risen, and now, retying the bandanna, she lurched across the grass, holding her body at an odd, uncomfortable angle, and took the envelope.

  “Thank you, Willie Mae,” Claire’s overly-polite voice followed the colored woman. “I’m so glad you’re here helping Miss Lee.”

  “Me, too, Miss Claire,” was Willie Mae’s sing-song reply, returning to hand the envelope to Lee, then standing, hands folded in front of her great stomach, in attendance at the foot of the steps.

  Cassie and Lill spied their grandmother and ran to the car door, hanging onto the handle, running back to their mother: “Can we go with Memaw? Can we spend the night? Is Daddy at Memaw’s?”

  Claire slowly got out of the car and hugged her granddaughters, seeming to stand at attention and yet bending in a stiff, peculiar way. “Of course, you can come over. Of course, your Daddy’s dying to see you.”

  “It’s a shame Baby Charlie can’t go, too,” Lee said overloud, a bad joke, just for something to say, to fill up the sp
ace in her mind, which was trying to read the inside of the envelope without opening it.

  But Claire answered, “Charles only wants to see the girls—his own children.”

  “Of course. Have it any way you want,” Lee said. So Charles had told his mother. Lee glanced to see if Willie Mae was taking in those stressed, inflected words, but the colored woman had assumed her glazed, uncomprehending, her “I’m a cow” look.

  Claire smoothed her creased dress front like an embarrassed youngster: “I’ll just take them for the evening—but Charles—uh—said, told me he only wanted to see his girls. I’ll bring them back tonight.”

  What have I done? Lee nodded, numb.

  After Claire and the girls drove off, in the quiet children leave behind, Baby Charlie asleep in his playpen on the carport, Lee and Willie Mae finished the beers and crisscrossed the empty yards gathering up toys and papers, and then sat in the nylon webbed chairs in the carport where Charles and Brother used to sit.

  “Want another beer, Willie? There’s plenty left,” Lee asked, and pressed the envelope she’d been carrying up against her forehead. It’s a legal document, she predicted silently.

  “What you think Mr. Charles done sent you?” Willie Mae asked.

  “Well, I’m going to have to find out, aren’t I?”

  Lee slowly ran her thumbnail under the envelope’s flap and lifted. Instead of official white or blue paper, what she’d expected, the edges of several green bills peeked out—five twenties. “Hot damn! It’s money! Willie, it could have been anything—anything!—but it’s money.”

  “See, sometimes they’s happy surprises!” Willie Mae said. “Not too regular, I’ll grant you, but sometimes.” The colored woman slapped her great thighs with both hands, like applauding.

  Then in the autumn half-light under the carport, the two paint-speckled women had another beer each and between swallows chatted over the surprises of the afternoon: Why had Charles sent Lee money? Had Claire really come to get the children, or had she been forced into it out of shame? Did Claire like Willie Mae working for Lee now that Charles was gone? It was heart talk, the most they’d ever discussed anything. What had Charles told Claire about the separation?

  Marveling that Willie Mae herself didn’t ask that question, didn’t ask what “his own children” meant? Lee stretched and, hearing the beer in her voice, said, “I hate to get up and go into my own house. It’s so filthy.”

  “I knows what you mean, girl. I clean Miss Claire’s all day only to come home bone-tired to my own dirt.”

  “The cobbler’s children have no shoes,” Lee said, but could tell Willie Mae had no idea what the saying meant. “Like my sewing,” she explained. “I haven’t made anything for the girls or a dress I’ve really wanted since the blouse for Fa–” she stopped in mid-sentence. Too much; three beers was way too many. She strained to see Willie Mae’s reaction, her expression in the darkening light, but the colored woman’s concentration seemed elsewhere, directed past Lee toward the Teflers’ house.

  “The payment on both these houses ’bout the same?” Willie Mae asked.

  Lee said, yes, the payment, $68.95, was the same; equal almost to the penny.

  “Then why not live there?” Willie Mae nodded at the opposite house. “With them fine hardwood floors you like so much?”

  It seemed too simple at first, and Lee went along as one does with a fantasy: she’d move into the Teflers’ house with everything fresh and clean and new, with no memory of Charles asleep in the recliner—with no recliner.

  She rose and went to get two more beers—the line of bottles in the refrigerator was certainly shorter—and the move from one house to the other seemed more of a possibility. She could, little by little, take her and the girls’ things across the yards. “I’d have to be out and have this house rented by November 1st, Willie. That’s when the payments on both houses are due.”

  “I could help you on weekends, chile, like I did this time. We could paint this house too—all the rooms, a light blue—fresh. I likes the blue you gots in this house, girl.”

  Lee wondered at the change from “Miss Lee” to “chile” and then to “girl”—it was the second time. “I’d pay you, Willie, just like these last two days—$10 a day.” Lee sat, the $100 in her lap, proof she could pay.

  And then Claire drove up in the driveway, opened the Electra’s passenger door, and let the girls out. She opened her door and stood just inside the opening as if not knowing whether to come closer or not. Willie Mae didn’t stand this time, just sat inertly in the lawn chair, holding her beer. Lee stood, wanting to whisper, “Sit up straight, Willie, look sober,” but instead she reached in the side door of the house and flipped on the light switch. Under the sudden brightness, the brown bottles looked larger than life and far too many. Funny how Charles’s and Brother’s empty bottles never seemed so inflated or multiplied like that. And as though to ensure her grandmother’s notice, Lill ran forward and kicked over an empty one, and it crashed into a thousand brown slivers on the concrete.

  Whether out of politeness or curiosity, Claire lingered, asked, “How’s the baby?” She stepped from behind the car door and like a shy child came to stand at the edge of the carport.

  “Here, want to hold him?” Lee said, and walked to where her mother-in-law hesitated. Against Lee’s own rule of never waking the infant, she shifted Baby Charlie’s small warm body from hers and placed him in her mother-in-law’s arms.

  “He’s still beautiful,” Claire said, as if insisting on the fact to herself.

  “It’s going to be all right, Claire, I promise,” Lee told her. “It’s not as bad as you think.”

  Claire didn’t answer, but pressed a halting kiss to the child’s forehead before handing him back.

  In the guilty wake of her mother-in-law’s leaving, feeling exhausted with wickedness and lies, Lee picked up the beer bottles and swept up the glass. Inside, Willie Mae made coffee, and Lee drank two cups. “I’ll be up all night, but I can at least drive you home sober.”

  “I’s not worried, Miss Lee. Miss Claire always makes a body feel like they’s wrong doing. She’s all the time asking me, ‘Who took my dishcloth, my black stockings, my somethin’ or other?” Only way she really talks. Makes me feel likes I done stole everything in her house some time or ’nother.”

  “My mother was the same, Willie. Never trusted anybody. I think it’s the way they were raised.”

  “At’s right. We all, every child in the world, done been brought up wrong.”

  After the coffee, they put Cassie and Lill in the backseat and Baby Charlie in the front, and Lee drove slowly and carefully down to Thrope Street. It was dark now and lights, dancing from fires and steady from bare bulbs, streamed out of the windows and open front doors of the narrow tilting houses. The yards of scraggly hedges and the dirt road seemed full of colored people of all ages: children running, shouting, playing ball or tag, adults on porches or standing close talking, warning the children to get out of the road when a car approached. Somewhere across the curled, rusted tin roofs, a banjo twanged, its tinny voice mingled with the smoke in the lowering sky.

  In front of her house, Willie Mae offered Lee another cup of coffee and she accepted. The girls jumped out of the car, and Lee took Baby Charlie and sat on the edge of the porch with Willie Mae’s daughters, the women she’d never met, only seen when she picked their mother up or dropped her off.

  With introductions, Lee now was able to put names to faces: Louise, Martha, Denny. Baby Charlie was passed back and forth to be looked at in the light from the front door. Cassie and Lill, after a brief hesitation, joined the other children in their games—whatever they were—a free form of tag, mostly running and hollering. And moving within the bands of light and dark, no one seemed a distinct color. It was much easier somehow than it had been on Sunday morning with St. Jerome’s closed faces. Here skin color was softened, everything blurred. Lee held the mug of coffee up to her face, warmed her cheek against it. />
  “Miss Lee’s gonna move into the house we just finished painting,” Willie Mae told her daughters. “Ain’t you, Miss Lee?”

  “Yes,” Lee said, and for the first time, really meant it.

  The move between the two houses actually went easier than Lee expected. And every day she drove Cassie to school, congratulating herself for not looking for the priest as she passed the pecan grove. She returned home to start in the corner of one room, moving clothes and blankets and light furniture to the corresponding room in the Teflers’ house. Lill helped, carrying what her small arms could encompass, and then stayed behind to mind Baby Charlie when she grew tired. What was left of Charles’s belongings and more junk than Lee thought possible was placed in a shed in the back of the Teflers’. And other than a recurring need in one house for something that was invariably still in the other, along with the disconcerted feeling that nothing would ever be where it belonged, the move was accomplished in one week. One of Willie Mae’s daughters’ husbands, Al—a thick blue-black man who refused to enter through the front door—came on Friday and all by himself, with a rented dolly, moved the heavy pieces: the stove and refrigerator, the washer and dryer, the beds and dressers.

  “Do the Bettlemains ever ask about me?” Lee questioned Willie Mae as they carried the last of the kitchen dishes and utensils from one house to the next.