The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes

  “I knew you were smart,” he said. “Where’s your family?”

  She wondered how much to say. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, okay?” she said.

  “Sure, okay.”

  She played with the wrapper from her straw. “My mother is dead, too,” she began.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “She had breast cancer, even though she was only in her twenties, and we moved down here from New Jersey so she could be in a study at Duke. She died when I was twelve, and then I got kind of shuffled around.”

  Tim reached across the table and rested his hand on hers. “In her twenties.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think that happened.”

  His eyelashes were as pale as his hair and very long. She studied them to keep from doing something stupid, like turning her hand over to grasp his. “Neither did she,” she said, “so she never looked for a lump or anything.” She didn’t tell him that she would always have to be vigilant about her own health. She didn’t want him to start thinking of her as a woman who would lose both her breasts, the way her mother had.

  “What do you mean, you got shuffled around?”

  He hadn’t moved his hand from hers. As a matter of fact, he tightened it around her fingers, running his thumb over the skin above her knuckles. Her pulse thrummed beneath his fingertips.

  “Well,” she said, “they put me in this place…I was never sure what it was, exactly…I called it juvenile hall because it was full of kids who were screwed up.”

  “A residential facility.”

  She smiled. “Right, Mr. Social Worker.”

  “Go on.”

  “I stayed there while they tried to find my father. My parents weren’t married and I’d never met him. It turned out he was in prison for molesting kids, so I guess it’s just as well that I never did.”

  “I’d say so.” Tim nodded. “It must have been a huge disappoint—”

  Bets picked that moment to show up with their orders, and Tim had no choice but to let go of CeeCee’s hand while she put his food in front of him.

  “Here you go, hon,” Bets said to CeeCee as she set down the key lime pie. “You want some extra sauce, Timmy?” she asked.

  Timmy? CeeCee squirmed. How well did Bets know him?

  “We’re good,” Tim said.

  “Okay,” Bets moved on to another table, calling over her shoulder, “Y’all enjoy, now.”

  Tim pushed his plate an inch or so toward her. “You want a bite?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Looks good, though.” She played with her straw wrapper again as he bit into his sandwich.

  “So,” he said, once he’d swallowed, “after they found your father, then what happened?”

  “They put me in foster care.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You’ve had some experience with social workers.”

  “Plenty.” She drew the tines of her fork across the smooth, pale surface of her pie. “I was in six different foster homes. It wasn’t because I was a problem,” she added. “Just crazy circumstances.”

  He nodded. He understood.

  “The last one was the best. It was a single woman with some young kids who were really sweet. As soon as I graduated, though, I was on my own.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” he said, taking a sip of water.

  “It wasn’t all bad,” she said. “I met a lot of people. You can learn something from everyone you meet.”

  “That’s a very wise statement.”

  “Hey, Gleason!”

  CeeCee turned to see one of the jocks walking toward their table. He was black, clean-cut and handsome, and probably seven feet tall. She’d see him around town from time to time, usually carrying a basketball. Sometimes she could hear him dribbling the ball even before she saw him.

  “Hey, Wally, what’s up?” Tim set down his glass and slid his palm across Wally’s in greeting.

  Wally shook his head in disgust. “That chick you saw me with the other night? She laid a bad trip on me, man,” he said.

  Tim laughed. “Tell me something new.”

  “You hangin’ at the Cave tonight?”

  “Not tonight.” Tim nodded in her direction. “This is CeeCee,” he said.

  CeeCee raised her hand in a small wave. “Hi,” she said.

  “Out to lunch with that hair, girl,” Wally said, in what she assumed was a compliment.

  “Thanks.”

  “All right, boss,” Wally said to Tim. “Check ya later.”

  They watched Wally walk away, his hand smacking the air as he bounced an invisible basketball.

  “Do you know everyone in Chapel Hill?” she asked.

  Tim laughed. “I’ve lived here a long time.” He picked up the sandwich from his plate. “You have to talk for a while so I can make a bigger dent in this thing,” he said. “Tell me about your mother. Were you close to her?”

  He was definitely social-worker material. He wasn’t shy about the questions he asked. “Well.” She ran the tines of her fork the other way on the pie and admired the checkerboard pattern she’d created. “My mother was an amazing person,” she said. “She knew she was going to die and she did her best to prepare me for it, although you can never really be prepared. I guess you know all about that.”

  He nodded as he chewed, his face solemn.

  “At first, she was really angry,” she said, remembering how her mother would snap at her for the slightest infraction. “Then she’d sort of…you know, swing between being angry and being down. And then she got very calm.”

  “DABDA,” Tim said.

  “Dabda?”

  “The five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.”

  “Wow, yes, that fits,” she said. “What’s bargaining, though?”

  “It’s like making a deal with God.” He wiped his lips with his napkin. “Dear God, if you let me get better, I’ll never do anything bad again.”

  “I don’t know if she did that,” CeeCee said. It hurt to imagine her mother trying to bargain her way out of the inevitable. “I did, though.” She laughed at the realization. “I was always promising God I’d be a good girl if he’d make her better.”

  “I think you were probably a very good girl.” Tim’s voice was gentle.

  She looked at her uneaten pie. “I’d expected a miracle would save her right up until the end. You know what she did?” She couldn’t believe she was going to tell him this. “She wrote me letters before she died,” she said. “There are about sixty of them. She put each one in a sealed envelope and wrote on it when I should open it. There was one for the day after her funeral, and then one for each birthday, and then there’d be some that were sort of haphazardly dated, for years when she thought I’d need a lot of advice, I guess. Like for when I turned sixteen, there was an envelope that said ‘Sixteen,’ then one that said ‘Sixteen and five days,’ and then ‘Sixteen and two months,’ and so on.”

  Tim swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and shook his head in amazement. “How phenomenal,” he said. “She was how old?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Man, I don’t know if I could be that strong in her shoes.”

  She was glad she’d told him.

  “So you still have dozens of letters from her to open?” he asked.

  “Actually, no.” She laughed. “I opened every single one of them the day after her funeral.” She’d sat alone in the guest bedroom of an ancient great-aunt reading her mother’s words, many of which she’d been too young to understand, but not too young to treasure. She’d cried and rocked and hugged herself for comfort as she read them, feeling the loss deep in her bones. There was much in those letters she hadn’t understood. She’d skimmed over the advice about sex, too young even to be titillated by it. The words of wisdom on child rearing were meaningless to her. It didn’t matter that she didn’t understand them; she cherished every stroke of her mother’s pen. “I still have them, though.” The letters
were under her bed in a box that had traveled with her from foster home to foster home. They were all she had left of her mother. “She always told me I could decide whether to be happy or sad,” she said. “When she got to the…what did you call that part of the acronym? Acceptance?”

  “Right.”

  “I guess that’s when she told me that she realized she could spend her last days being a miserable bitch—her words, not mine—or she could spend them being grateful for the time she and I had together. She made up this song about being thankful for the morning and the trees and the air. She said I should sing that song to myself every morning, and—” She suddenly clamped her mouth shut, embarrassed. She was saying too much, almost giddy with the relief of having an attentive listener.

  “Why’d you stop?” he asked.

  “I’m talking too much.”

  “Do you sing the song?”

  She nodded. “In my head, I do.”

  “And it helps?”

  “So much. I feel like she’s still there with me. So I try to be thankful for everything, including every hard thing that’s happened to me.” She looked down at her pie. She’d made a mess of it. “Whew,” she said. “I never talk this much. About my life, I mean. Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize,” he said. “I like getting to know you better. And I think you were lucky to have that mother of yours as long as you did.”

  “I haven’t given you a chance to talk at all,” she said.

  “We have time for that, CeeCee.” Tim stared at her for a moment, then smiled. “I like you a lot,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as positive as you are.”

  The compliment meant more to her than anything else he might say. If you were positive, you could do anything.

  He offered her a ride home after they left the restaurant. She climbed into his white Ford van, the overhead light giving her a glimpse of the mattress in the back, and her knees nearly gave out from under her. She wanted him to suggest they go into the dark cavern back there. She wanted him to be her first lover. But when he pulled up in front of the Victorian boardinghouse, he got out of the van and walked around to open her door.

  “I wish I could ask you in,” she said, as he walked her up the porch steps, “but we’re not allowed to have male visitors in our room.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her. It was a light kiss and she had to make herself pull away before she asked for more.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” he said. The porch light was reflected in his eyes, and he gave her hair a little tug, like the black woman had done at the bus stop.

  She returned his smile with a wave, then unlocked the door and raced upstairs. She wanted to tell Ronnie about this perfect night, even though her roommate would never understand why she felt such a thrill over being able to talk to someone the way she’d talked to Tim. Look at all she’d told him! He even knew she was a virgin. She could tell him anything about herself and he would receive it all with compassion and understanding.

  Next time, she’d give him a chance to tell her everything about his life, and she’d listen with the same attentiveness he’d shown her.

  She was a completely honest person, though. It would never occur to her that he was not.

  Chapter Four

  I have no idea what kind of girl you are now, so I don’t know what to say to help you and I hate that I can’t be there with you. I get so angry sometimes that I won’t be able to watch you grow up!

  Here are a few things you need to know. First, don’t have sex! But if you do, get birth control pills or condoms. You can get them at Planned Parenthood. Second, sex is not all it’s cracked up to be. The earth doesn’t move, especially not the first time, and any woman who tells you that it does is a liar. Third, don’t trust boys! Here are some lies they’ll tell you to get you to sleep with them:

  1) I never felt this way about anyone before.

  2) Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning.

  3) My balls (testicles) will turn blue and explode if we don’t make love.

  4) I promise I’ll pull out before I come.

  I can’t believe I’m writing this to you, my little twelve-year-old baby! It’s hard to imagine you’ll ever be old enough to need this advice, but for what it’s worth, there it is.

  The room she shared with Ronnie was not much bigger than a closet. Their twin beds were perpendicular to each other, and two narrow dressers lined the wall, leaving barely enough room to walk across the floor. Two nights after her date with Tim, CeeCee came home after working a double shift.

  “Any messages?” she asked, her attention darting toward the phone. She’d seen Tim at breakfast that morning, but the coffee shop had been crowded and there’d been no time to talk.

  “Uh-uh, sorry.” Ronnie looked up from her bed, where she was painting her toenails. “But there’s a package for you.” She nodded toward CeeCee’s bed, where a small, square box wrapped in brown paper rested on her pillow.

  “Weird,” CeeCee said. It was rare for her to get mail. She picked up the package by the cord tied around it. Light as air. Her name and address were printed in black ink.

  “I shook it and it sounds empty to me,” Ronnie said. “How’d tonight go? I take it Tim didn’t stop in?”

  “No.” CeeCee sat on her bed and kicked off her tennis shoes. Her feet hurt and she massaged her toes through her kneesocks. “Is he ever going to ask me out again?”

  “I hope so.” Ronnie sounded genuinely sympathetic.

  “Why can’t I just ask him?” CeeCee pulled one end of the cord, but it was tightly knotted. “Why do we always have to wait to be asked? Can I borrow your nail clippers?”

  Ronnie tossed the clippers to her. “If he doesn’t ask you out again, he’s a cretin. You don’t want him.”

  Yes, I do. She had constant fantasies about Tim picking her up after her shift, driving to a park, someplace quiet and private, and making love to her on the mattress in the back of the van. “I should never have told him I was a virgin,” she said.

  “Well, that’s a no-brainer,” Ronnie agreed. She’d screamed so loudly when CeeCee told her about her “I’ve never had sex” comment that their landlady rushed in, afraid they were being murdered.

  CeeCee clipped the cord and ripped the paper from the package to reveal a flimsy white cardboard box. She lifted the lid and gasped.

  “There’s money in here!” she said.

  “What?” Ronnie set her nail polish on the windowsill and rushed to CeeCee’s bed. “Holy crap,” she said, peering into the box. “How much?”

  CeeCee pulled out the wad of bills and started counting.

  “They’re all fifties,” Ronnie said.

  “Six hundred, six-fifty,” CeeCee counted, shaking her head in disbelief. “Seven hundred, seven-fifty.”

  “Oh my God,” Ronnie said as the number grew. She grabbed the brown paper the box had been wrapped in. “Was there any name anywhere?”

  “Shh,” CeeCee said. She was up to twelve hundred and her hands were starting to shake.

  Ronnie watched in silence until CeeCee had counted one hundred fifty-dollar bills. Five thousand dollars. They looked at each other.

  “I don’t get it,” CeeCee said.

  “Maybe, like, your last foster mother sent it?” Ronnie suggested. “You said she was really nice.”

  “Really nice and really poor,” CeeCee said.

  Ronnie picked up one of the fifties, squinting at it as she held it up to the light. “Are there any marks or clues or anything on the bills?”

  CeeCee riffled through the bills and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” Ronnie said, “when you were baring your soul to Tim the other night, did you happen to mention that you were penniless?” She was reading CeeCee’s mind.

  “But why would he do this?” CeeCee asked in a whisper.

  “That—” Ronnie gnawed her lip “—is a very scary question.”
r />   She poured Tim’s coffee the following morning. “I got a package in the mail yesterday,” she said.

  “A package?” He looked innocent. “What was in it?”

  “Money.” She set the coffeepot on his table and whipped out her order pad. “Tim, tell me the truth. Did you send it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His blond, sun-lit curls gave him a soft, angelic look.

  “It was five thousand dollars.”

  Tim nodded as though impressed. “That would take you through a couple of years of college and then some, wouldn’t it?”

  She slapped her order pad onto the table. “It’s from you?” she asked.

  “CeeCee, settle down.” Tim laughed. “If it were from me, I wouldn’t tell you because I wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to me. I wouldn’t tell you because I’d want you to have it, no strings attached. If you and I broke up tomorrow, I’d still want you to have it. If I’d been the one to give it to you, that is.”

  If they broke up? He considered them a couple? She didn’t allow the elation to show in her face.

  “I’m getting angry,” she said, instead. “Tell me.”

  “Look, CeeCee.” He patted her arm. “Whoever sent it wouldn’t have done it if they couldn’t afford it, right? So, you need it. Just enjoy it. Buy me supper with it tonight. And put the rest in the bank the first chance you get.”

  They ate at a Moroccan restaurant, sitting on the floor in a small room all to themselves. Tim ordered a bottle of wine and, away from the eyes of their waiter, she drank from his glass. Soon the money was forgotten, and she felt relaxed and a little loopy. They told every old joke they could remember and sang songs from The Beatles’ White Album, which she knew because her mother had loved The Beatles. CeeCee told him about the time she saw The Beatles in Atlantic City at the age of five, because her mother’s friends had a bunch of tickets and they’d been unable to find a babysitter for her. It had been one of the most traumatic events of her early life. She couldn’t hear the music for the screaming of the fans, and everyone had stood on their chairs while she sat on the floor, her hands over her ears. Still, Tim was impressed. He’d never gotten to see them at all.