“She’s two?” My heart broke for her.
“Just.”
“Gavin can keep your memory alive for her,” I said. It was the best I could do.
“I hope so.” She ate another spoonful of ice cream, while my coffee was still untouched and growing cold. “I know he’ll try.”
“I think you’re amazing, Lois,” I said. “And it amazes me that you can talk about this so openly with me.”
“Well, I don’t with everyone,” she said. “But as I said, I’ve come to grips with this. And you’re a very good listener.”
“Anytime you feel like talking, you can call me.” I was sincere. I wanted to help her somehow. “Even in the middle of the night.”
“How sweet you are,” she said. “Robert certainly got lucky when he found you.”
“Thank you,” I said, although I doubted Robert was feeling very lucky about that these days.
She swallowed another bite of her sundae and I took my first sip of the cold coffee. For a moment, neither of us spoke.
“What was troubling you in the grocery store?” she asked. “When I saw your face, I knew something was really wrong.”
I looked at the reflection of the overhead lights shimmering in my coffee. “It’s just a case I’m working on. Two teenaged girls I’ve come to care about, which is a no-no.”
“Oh, that’s bull,” Lois said. “It’s impossible to care too much.”
“Tell that to my supervisor.”
“I will. Give me her phone number.”
I had the feeling she meant it and I smiled. “I took them to the beach,” I said. “They’d never seen the ocean and their lives are … well, they’re not much fun. I honestly didn’t know I was breaking the rules. I read the manual, but I guess that part didn’t sink in.”
“There are too many silly rules in our lives,” she said, “and our lives are far too short to pay attention to them.” She’d finished her sundae and pushed the empty dish a couple of inches toward the back of the counter. “I wish I’d broken more of them,” she said. “So that’s what I’m doing these days. I eat sundaes whenever I want, and I chat with a friend instead of grocery shopping. Maybe I’ll even run naked through Cameron Village.”
I laughed. “You’ve got guts,” I said.
“And so do you.” She patted me on the shoulder. “Those girls will remember that beach trip for as long as they live.”
30
Ivy
Nonnie opened the kitchen door and there was Nurse Ann, standing on the porch ready to knock. My heart dropped smack to my toes. It was too soon for her to come. I didn’t figure out how to tell Nonnie about the baby yet. I stood in the middle of the kitchen like I was stuck to the floor.
“You was just here,” Nonnie said to her. “I told you I’d stop eating so much. I’m just about starved to death already.”
“I’m not here to see you, today,” Nurse Ann said. “I’m here to check on Ivy and the baby.”
Nonnie looked good and confused. “He’s outside somewhere with his mama,” she said. “Mary Ella’s been keeping a better eye on him, so you don’t need to be coming around all the—”
“Not Baby William,” Nurse Ann said. “Ivy’s baby.”
“What are you talking about?” Nonnie looked from her to me.
“I didn’t tell her yet,” I said to Nurse Ann.
Nonnie catched on. Her eyes got big and her face went red. “No!” she hollered, and she came at me, her hands flying, ready to swat me good. I covered my face with my arms and Nurse Ann tried to grab Nonnie.
“Winona!” she said, her long braid flying all over the place. “Stop it! Stop!” But Nonnie was too riled up.
“You whore!” she said, smacking my head. “You’re just like your sister. What are we gonna do with another baby in the house?”
I dropped down next to one of the kitchen chairs and ducked under the table like a scared dog. She still tried to get to me, but she was tuckered out and had no wind left.
“Sit down!” Nurse Ann barked at her. “You’re going to have a stroke if you don’t get a handle on yourself.”
Nonnie was breathing hard and I got out from under the other side of the table, glad to have it between me and her. Nurse Ann had her fingers on Nonnie’s wrist and was looking at her watch. Nonnie’s face was redder than I ever seen it.
“You’re a disgrace,” she said to me.
“Hush,” Nurse Ann said. She let go of Nonnie’s wrist and wrote something in that notebook she always carried. “Now you listen to me, Winona. I’m going to take Ivy in the bedroom and examine her and when I come out we can talk. Till then I want you to just sit here at the table and rest.”
“Can you get her one of them abortions?” Nonnie asked.
Did she mean give my baby away? I’d never do that.
“No, ma’am, I certainly cannot,” Nurse Ann said. She waved her hand toward the bedroom. “Let’s go, Ivy,” she said.
I didn’t want to go with her but it was better than staying with Nonnie, so I did. Nurse Ann shut the door behind us as far as it would go.
“Why didn’t you tell her?” she asked.
“Why’d you think?” I asked. “I don’t want to get kilt. She would of done me in if you wasn’t here.”
“Sit down,” she said, pointing to the bed, and I sat. “Mrs. Forrester said you had no idea you were pregnant.”
“He always pulled out.”
“Well, you learned your lesson there, now didn’t you? That doesn’t work. Why do you think I gave you that spermicidal jelly, Ivy?”
I looked out the window, remembering Mary Ella taking one of the boxes of jelly. “Mary Ella took some of it,” I said. “You better give her some more before it’s too late for her, too.”
“Who’s the boy?” she asked, opening up her medicine bag.
“Nobody.”
She made a disgusted face at my answer. “I need you to take off your underwear and lay back on the bed so I can check inside you,” she said.
“What?” I said. “No!”
I remembered how she’d come in the bedroom a time or two with Mary Ella in the months before Baby William was born. Was she checking inside her then? I thought she was just listening to Mary Ella’s heart and looking at her eyes and throat. Nurse Ann was supposed to bring Baby William into the world until Mrs. Werkman told us about Mary Ella’s appendix and sent her to the hospital instead.
“It won’t hurt,” she said. “I’m just going to feel inside you. Make sure the baby’s healthy and—”
“You can feel it?” If she could feel it up there, what was to keep it from falling out of me?
“I can feel your uterus.”
“What’s that?”
“Your womb,” she said. “You’ll see. Just take off your underwear now.”
I stood up and reached under my dress and pulled off my stretched-out old drawers. I laid them on the bed and sat down again.
She put a rubber glove on her hand. “Now move back a little and put your feet on the bed and spread your legs open wide.”
I put my feet up but I wasn’t doing any spreading. “Don’t want to,” I said.
“Well, Ivy, I know this isn’t the first time you’ve spread your legs open or else you wouldn’t be in the state you’re in, isn’t that true? Come on now.”
I done like I was told and closed my eyes while she put her fingers inside me and moved them around and pressed all over my belly. “You are good and pregnant,” she said, pulling out her hand. She took off the glove and told me I could sit up. I pulled my dress down. My knees was shaking.
“Every time I asked you about your period, you told me you were keeping track of it.”
“I thought I was,” I lied. I didn’t know what else to say.
“Do you actually know when your last period was?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I’d say you’re somewhere between five and six months,” she said. “Closer to six, I’d say. That means
you’ll have a baby around Thanksgiving time. The baby’s small, so it’s hard to tell. Might be epilepsy or poor nutrition causing that or you might not be as far along as I think you are. Did you have any morning sickness a while back? Any throwing up in the morning?”
I thought of one week in the spring when I felt like throwing up every day while I waited for the bus. I never did, though. “No,” I said. Outside the door, I could hear Mary Ella’s voice. Then Nonnie’s. Then both together. And then one more voice I couldn’t place right away. Mrs. Forrester? Yes, that was it. I was glad she was here.
“Have you been taking any of that medicine you used to take for your seizures? Your fits?”
“No, ma’am.” I hated that medicine. It made me feel dizzy and strange.
“Well, if you’re doing all right without it, that’s probably best for now,” she said. “It could hurt your baby. I’m going to leave you some special vitamins and I want you to take one every single morning. I know you aren’t very religious about taking medication, but this is important.”
“What’s religion got to do with it?”
She sighed. “Absolutely nothing. I’ll leave these on the shelf next to Nonnie’s pills, okay?” She leaned over and took my hands. “Ivy, you’re not a bad girl. You help Nonnie remember to take her medicine and test her urine. She’s told me that. You know how to take care of other people. Now take care of you, okay? Take care of yourself because it’s not just you anymore. It’s that little baby, too.”
I nodded. “Should I take two of them pills instead?” I asked. “Would that be better?”
She shook her head. “Just one. Too much of a good thing is no good at all.”
I walked behind her into the living room, afraid Nonnie was going to come at me again, but she was wore out and sitting on the sofa now, the sheets still on it from when she slept there last night. Mrs. Forrester stood inside the front door, real quiet. Mary Ella, though, was squealing and jumping up and down and she hugged me. “We gonna have another Baby William!” she said.
I hoped my baby was a girl, but didn’t say nothing.
“I have something for you,” Nurse Ann said to Mrs. Forrester. She wasn’t friendly to her at all. It was like she was mad. She sat on the edge of the sofa and wrote something real fast on a piece of paper on top of her notebook. Then she stood up and shoved the paper at Mrs. Forrester, who took it from her. “Tear up the petition form you already have from me and type this one up instead,” she said.
She called me into the kitchen and put a big bottle of pills next to Nonnie’s little one and her testing pills on the shelf. “Here’s those vitamins I told you about,” she said to me. “Just one a day.”
“I know,” I said.
She left by the kitchen door, and when I went back into the living room, I saw Mrs. Forrester still standing by the door, reading the paper Nurse Ann gave her. Then she stuck it in that case she always carried.
“How are you?” she asked me.
“She said it’s gonna be a Thanksgiving baby,” I said. I knew that wasn’t what she’d said but I couldn’t remember her exact words and I liked how “Thanksgiving baby” sounded.
Mary Ella was rocking Baby William in the rocker and he was babbling his words that wasn’t really words. “This is a happy day,” she said.
“Lord.” Nonnie put her head in her hands. “She thinks this is a happy day! I’m living with two imbeciles, Mrs. Forrester. Lord, help me, please. Three of ’em, you count Baby William. And now a fourth coming.”
“It’s my dream,” said Mary Ella.
“No more school for me,” I said to Mrs. Forrester, hoping she might have some way to fix that. I knew she had the only clear-thinking brain in the house.
She nodded. “I’ll talk to them,” she said. “Maybe there’s a way you can continue your schoolwork from home.”
“Ain’t no way,” Nonnie said, like Mrs. Forrester was stupid.
My knees was still jittery, and I sat down on the sofa, as far from Nonnie as I could get.
“This is my dream,” Mary Ella said again, and Mrs. Forrester looked at her.
“What’s your dream, Mary Ella?” she asked.
“Me and Ivy having babies together. I dreamed about it and now it’s a dream come true.”
Mrs. Forrester went in the kitchen and brung out one of the chairs and put it right next to Mary Ella’s rocking chair. She rubbed her hand over Baby William’s back. “It’s really not good to have babies when you’re not married, though,” she said. “Too hard to do it on your own.”
“Now, that’s the first true thing anybody’s said in this house today,” Nonnie said.
“I know,” Mary Ella said. “I didn’t mean we should have a lot of babies right now. When we’re married we can. I want five. Baby William and four more.”
“Is there someone you wish you could marry, Mary Ella?” Mrs. Forrester was almost whispering to her. I leaned forward to hear because I wanted to know the answer myself, but Mary Ella only rested her cheek on Baby William’s curls.
“Nobody yet,” she said. “But someday I’ll meet the right boy.”
“Five children,” Mrs. Forrester said. “That’s a handful.”
I knew what she was thinking: Mary Ella couldn’t keep a good eye on even one little boy.
“It’s a handful,” I said, “but now that I’ll be out of school, I can help her.”
Mrs. Forrester stood up. “I think I’d better get going,” she said. She looked at me. “I just wanted to make sure Nurse Ann got here to see you today.”
“Well,” I said, “she sure did.” I was afraid of Mrs. Forrester leaving, but I got up and opened the door for her and went out on the porch to watch her walk across the yard to the woods. I wished I could just walk away myself. I didn’t want to go back in the house.
I had the feeling Nonnie wasn’t done with me yet.
31
Jane
I’d parked my car between the woods and the tobacco field, and now I sat behind the steering wheel in the heat, rereading the form Ann had handed me to go with the petition. I’d type it up when I got back to the office. It was time to send the petition to the board. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
I looked toward the fields where the Jordan boys were helping Henry Allen with the mule. So, Mary Ella wanted five children, I thought, remembering her happiness over Ivy’s pregnancy. It was her dream and she had no idea it was impossible. Maybe it was right to prevent her from having more, but it wasn’t right that she had that dream. I didn’t care if she was deemed feebleminded. I didn’t care.
I felt angry as I turned the key in the ignition. I wouldn’t deceive these girls I’d come to care about. I’d hope and pray the board would turn down Ivy’s petition, but if they didn’t I would tell her. And I was going to tell Mary Ella as well. If she was capable of understanding that she could have those five children, then she was capable of understanding that she couldn’t.
32
Jane
33
Ivy
Three days passed since Nurse Ann was here, and Nonnie hadn’t spoke one word to me. The only time she looked at me it was like she wanted to shoot me dead, so I tried my best to stay out of her way. When me and Mary Ella got back from the barn today, though, all of a sudden Nonnie started screaming at me. I’d ruined her life, she yelled. I’d ruined everybody’s life. She wanted to know who the boy was, and when I wouldn’t say, she yelled, “Well, he better be white, that’s all I can say!” We got into a shouting match so loud it made Baby William scream his head off and Mary Ella start to cry. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, Nonnie ran out the back door. Was she going out there to cool off? I hoped so.
“I never seen her so mad,” Mary Ella said. She stood in a corner of the living room like she was trying to hide from all the noise, hugging Baby William to herself.
“I know,” I said, though I had seen her that mad once before—when Mary Ella turned up pregnant three years ago.
Mary Ella walked over to the rocker and sat down, Baby William in her lap. I flopped down on the sofa, trying to cool off after all the hollering. My baby was doing somersaults inside me and ever since Nurse Ann said she could feel it up in there I worried about it falling out, so I tried to sit as much as I could when I wasn’t at the barn.
“There’s Mrs. Forrester again.” Mary Ella pointed through the front door and I stood up to see her walking toward the house.
“Today ain’t her day for Avery,” I said. That was usually when she’d stop by. Either way, I was glad to see her. I started walking to the door when all of a sudden Nonnie came rushing at me from the kitchen, carrying a switch, and I knew she hadn’t gone outside to cool off at all. She just went to find something worse than her cane to hit me with.
I ran behind the one big chair in the room. “Mrs. Forrester’s coming!” I pointed to the door. “Don’t hit me!”
“I don’t care if Jesus Christ hisself is coming!” Nonnie yelled at me, waving the switch through the air. She couldn’t reach me and I kept the chair between me and her.
“Don’t hit her, Nonnie!” Mary Ella shouted from her chair. She was covering poor Baby William’s ears with her hands.
“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Forrester stood in the doorway and I saw what she was seeing: a house full of crazy people.
“This child needs a whupping!” Nonnie said.
“That won’t change anything.” Mrs. Forrester said exactly what I’d been thinking. A whupping might work if you stole a biscuit off somebody else’s plate, but it wasn’t gonna change me having a baby.
“Don’t matter.” Nonnie sliced the switch through the air, hitting the seat of the chair with a whack, and I sure was glad I wasn’t sitting there. “She needs it for what she’s done. How am I gonna feed another child?” Her voice cracked like she was about to cry, and I suddenly knew she was more scared than mad. I felt sorry for being the cause.
“Mrs. Forrester will give us more money, won’t you?” I looked at Mrs. Forrester. Every baby meant more money. Not much, but everybody knew they wouldn’t let a new baby starve.