Cavedweller

  After her sons were born, Amanda became obsessed with trying once again to organize another Christian Girls’ Coalition. Her new emphasis was the high school itself, the girls who smoked outside Dede’s convenience store and laughed into their palms when Amanda came in with her boys.

  “They act like they’re not afraid of God or anything,” Amanda complained every time she came into the store.

  “They’re not.” Dede was the only person allowed to smoke in the store itself, but she only seemed to actually do it when someone she did not like came in. As soon as Amanda put her hand on the metal bar that held the Camel Red Pack sign, Dede would pull out her pack and start rolling a cigarette between her fingers. “Except for me. All of them are just a little scared of me, and I work that. I work it for all I’m worth.”

  “They should learn a little respect.”

  “Oh, they’re learning.” Dede smiled slow and flicked ashes in the direction of the muscular dystrophy can. She kept her eyes on little Michael. “They’re learning, I promise you.” Dede knew why her sister came in, knew that Amanda wanted her to put up one of her little posters. Under her arm Amanda carried a set of the cardboard prints that featured Jesus with the crown of thorns biting into his brow and one finger uplifted to point skyward right in front of his nose. Dede actually had one of those up for a while. It made her giggle at the idea of a Son of God who would pick his nose—the kind of savior she could appreciate. But the joke was no longer so satisfying. Amanda seemed more and more to have lost her focus, to come into the store to buy a can of evaporated milk instead of to lecture Dede on the prospects of hellfire and damnation. Some days Dede missed the old Amanda, the one that pulled over the rack of adult magazines after some of the boys had deliberately pulled down the brown paper sheathes that were supposed to spare the Christian eye.

  Nadine ate the strawberries Nolan had left out for her breakfast, but first she rolled them in soft butter and dragged them through the sugar dish. Smiling in the morning light with that butter on her lips, she was careful not to wake Tacey Brithouse, who lay asleep across her notebooks on the kitchen table. The rich cinnamon of Tacey’s bare arms glowed in the sunshine coming in the windows. Tacey had moved in with the Reitowers after hitting her mama’s boyfriend in the head with a garden rake—a story she was happy to tell anyone. She was working at Biscuit World at the time and occasionally helping Nolan out with Nadine. One morning she came into Biscuit World covered with dirt and blood and unable to stop shaking. It took Nolan a good hour to calm her down and find out what had happened: the boyfriend had burned one of her journals, and she had tried to knock his head in.

  Nolan went over to talk to Tacey’s mama, Althea, but the woman was full of outrage. She tossed a box of Tacey’s clothes at him and told him to “keep her away from here till she’s ready to apologize.” Since then Tacey had been taking care of Nadine in exchange for room and board, moving into Nadine’s old bedroom upstairs now that Nadine was using the sewing room on the first floor. Tacey had a partial scholarship to Spelman for the fall, and had a stack of unfinished manuscripts in a box under her bed. “You wait,” she told Nolan. “Someday you’ll tell everybody you knew me when.” Nolan did not doubt her.

  Tacey was supposed to make sure Nadine had a good breakfast before she left for school, but she had a tendency to stay up late reading or writing in her notebooks, and often napped while Nadine poured sugar on her fruit or slathered butter across her toast. They liked each other well enough, though sometimes Tacey could barely believe the things the old white woman said. There was, for example, Nadine’s assumption that Tacey was sleeping with the garbage men, the mailman, her teachers, and the preacher at her church, Little River Methodist.

  “Black girls don’t have to wait like us white girls do,” Nadine remarked one morning not long after Tacey moved in. “My mama told me. It’s in the blood, all that heat from Africa.”

  “That right?” Tacey drawled.

  Nadine nodded. “Oh, you know. Black girls get to do everything. Me, I never got to do nothing.” Nadine smacked her lips and sighed. “If I’d been born black, I could have been sucking men’s titties since I was twelve.”

  “And why would you want to do that?”

  Nadine looked surprised. “ ’Cause they taste so good. Men’s titties taste better than women’s do, you know.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, course you did, with all the men you been with.”

  “Mrs. Reitower, I have never been with a man.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to humor me. If I could get up out of this chair, I’d go sit naked on the garbage cans in the morning just to see if the boys would let me suck on their shoulders and put my heels up on their hips.” She sighed again, a perfect heartbroken sigh.

  Tacey snorted and shook her head. “Mrs. Reitower, you are scary.”

  “Oh, you should have known me before,” Nadine said. “I was something, yes. I was.”

  Nadine liked to listen to the stories Tacey wrote, long romantic tales of black women fighting to become rich and famous and succeeding beyond their dreams. “Like that woman, what’s her name,” Nadine told Nolan. “Tacey makes you think you are just right there.”

  Tacey laughed. “That’s me, the black Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, Rosamunde what’s her name. Lord, Mrs. Reitower, I’m going to have to read you some good black women, give you some better reference points.”

  For weeks Tacey read her favorites out loud while Nadine did her ankle lifts and stretching exercises. Sometimes Nadine would stop and say, “Read me that part again.” Soon she took to mixing quotes from Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor with her standbys from the Bible. “Lord, son, the things I never knew,” she kept saying. Nolan smiled. He liked to lie on his bed and listen to his mama and Tacey read together. In his dreams it was their chorus that lulled him along, their antiphony and Dede’s laugh.

  Sometimes Tacey brought Nadine little fried pies when she came home from school, and Nadine sneaked away to eat them in the bathroom with the door closed so that Nolan wouldn’t see. Tacey knew she shouldn’t do it, but the hunger in Nadine’s eye was hard to bear.

  “You stay out of the sugar dish,” she scolded Nadine.

  “Oh, I love you better than sugar, Tacey,” Nadine promised.

  “Sure you do, honey, and if you could fry me in butter you’d love me even more.”

  Dede loved her box cutter. Razor-sharp, it was not supposed to be used on things like boxes of cigarettes and candy—paper- and plastic-wrapped items that it could slice as easily as the cardboard. A little nick in a cigarette pack meant stale cigarettes and returns to be written up. But Dede wrapped her cutter in blue duct tape from her little hardware display and gouged her initials in the handle. She used it for everything, the perishable items as well as the boxes of canned goods.

  “What I need is a holster for it,” Dede told Cissy. “Need a holster for my weapon. Someone messes with me, I’ll cut them bad.”

  The cutter was in her hand when Billy Tucker came in the door that Thursday morning in September. Dede was kneeling on the floor, her knees cushioned by cutoff carton tops. She had been opening boxes and stamping prices all morning. First of the month, Thursdays around ten-thirty or eleven, after the late-morning rush was when she restocked. Candy and cigarettes she did weekly from boxes she had already opened and put in the cooler. Bread came in twice a week, along with milk and beer. Tampax, specialty perishables, chips and crackers, and paper products were the secondary sellers, which came in on the monthly schedule—Thursday morning and first of the month, the days when the cutter was never out of Dede’s hand.

  “Billy!” Dede was surprised to see him but not displeased. Although they had broken up, she still liked the way he looked. “What you doing down here?”

  Billy wore a work shirt with “Chevron” emblazoned above his name on the pocket. He smiled and produced a little silver .38. “I’m gonna to kill you ass,” he said, and extended
the gun straight out in front of him, the trigger line-sighted directly between Dede’s eyes.

  “Lord, Billy!” Dede’s hand tightened on the box cutter, but she was more than six feet away from him and her weapon was no good at all. She watched his fingers move to cock the gun, the little metal piece under his thumb pulling back and clicking into place. Dede shifted her gaze to Billy’s face. “I didn’t even know you were mad,” she said.

  His eyes flooded with tears, and his lips pulled back in a grimace. “Course you didn‘t, bitch. You an’t looked twice at me all these last few months. You say we gonna be friends. You say we always gonna be special, and then you call me but the once. And it’s ’cause you want to buy some grass! What am I supposed to think, huh?” He shook the gun. “What am I supposed to think?” Dede started to come up off her knees, and he waved the gun wildly.

  “Don’t you move. You stay right there. You look at me now, bitch. You look at me.”

  “I’m looking,” Dede said. “I’m looking at you, Billy. You say what you mean. I’ll listen to anything you say.” She pressed the blade of the cutter down through the cardboard she was kneeling on right into the linoleum floor, keeping her eyes fixed on Billy’s and her expression as gentle as possible. She had to think of something fast, but for the first time in Dede’s life, nothing came to mind.

  Althea Brithouse stopped in at Biscuit World that Thursday morning a little after 10:00 to see Nolan. She had been out to the house twice but missed him each time and had not wanted to speak to Tacey. After her anger subsided and the sting of indignation eased, Althea found herself worrying about her youngest. Next to Tacey, her boys were simple, she thought, sweet-natured and easygoing; they were just like their father, and like their father they knew exactly how to charm Althea and get what they wanted. For Jamal, that meant early enlistment in the navy. For David, it was permission to move to Atlanta and work for Althea’s brother in his garden center.

  Thank God David hadn’t wanted to quit school. Sidney had never finished school, and if he hadn’t been such a good husband and such a hardworking man, the Lord knew what kind of life they would have had. It was from him that David got his green thumb, that ancestral ability to suck a little dirt and know exactly what nutrients the soil required. A decade after the accident that killed him, Sidney’s garden was still thriving, even though Althea had done no more than turn on the sprinkler every now and then.

  It was a pity there was so little of Sidney in Tacey. The girl was her mama all over again, but smarter, Althea admitted. Tacey was the smartest of them all, and so headstrong she drove Althea to distraction.

  “Mother-daughter stuff,” Althea told Nolan. “It’s old and complicated and predictable as spring. Why, I didn’t speak to my mama for fifteen years, from the time I left school to the week Tacey’s daddy died. It don’t mean we don’t love each other. I love my girl, I just can’t stand her right now. Which don’t mean I want to see her in trouble or wouldn’t kill the man who would do her wrong.” The look she gave Nolan was level and sharp.

  Nolan nodded, unsure whether he was being’ threatened or reassured. “Tacey’s in no trouble, ma’am,” he said. “She’s been saving my life, if you want to know the truth. She’s helping me with my mama, and I promise you she has not missed a day of school.”

  “I know.” Althea pursed her lips and looked around. “I checked.” She had also checked on Nolan while she was at it. From what she heard, he did not seem the type to mess with her child. People said he was in love with some girl worked at the mini-market, said he was Christian and reliable and no worse than she should expect. But people might say anything. Althea had wanted to look the boy in the eye.

  “I heard she wasn’t working here anymore, that she was working at your house.” Tacey had originally taken the job at Biscuit World to earn money for college, and while Althea knew her girl was bright enough to get a scholarship, she also knew no scholarship would pay for everything. Tacey had explained her carefully plotted scheme—the cash savings account that Althea promised to match. It was one of the things they had fought about, money and what Althea did and did not understand. Sometimes Tacey treated her mama as if she were dumb as dirt and nowhere near as trustworthy.

  “She earns as much working for me.” Nolan was thinking about Tacey’s brothers. Big, Tacey had sworn. Her brothers were big as football players and seriously fast. Nolan didn’t want Althea to misunderstand his arrangement with Tacey. “A little more, actually,” he added. “And she gets along good with my mama—which I got to tell you is pretty much a miracle. Mama’s been—welt, different, since she had her last stroke.”

  Nolan felt the blush that crept over his face but could do nothing about it. “Different” was such an inadequate word to describe Nadine. Nothing short of a novel would have done her justice these days. Alternately maddening and endearing, Nadine was totally absorbed in Althea’s daughter even as she continued to appall them both by saying impossibly rude things as sweetly as she professed her love.

  “Strokes are awful.” Althea ignored the blush. Boy was ashamed of his mama, that was only to be expected. “My granddad had a terrible time after his stroke. Your mama crippled much?”

  “Pretty much. She broke her hip. She’s had a bad time since my daddy died.”

  Nolan was relaxing. From Tacey he had the impression that Althea was terror incarnate, but this plainspoken woman reminded him of Dede’s mama, Delia. She had the same watchful reserve, and she obviously cared deeply about her daughter.

  “Tacey is wonderful with Mama. It’s like I said, she’s just saving my life.”

  “Yes, well.” Althea hugged her pocketbook to her midriff. “I just wanted to be sure she was all right. The way she took off, I wasn’t sure where she would wind up. Tacey has a temper, you know. Like me, I suppose.” She smiled.

  “Yes ma’am. She sure has a sense of herself. She knows what she wants.”

  “Oh, she does. She does.” Althea smiled again. “Don’t you tell her I came around to talk to you. Better she should just go on the way she is, come home when she feels like it. Probably when she can show me up some way, boast of how well she’s done. She gets that big scholarship check, she’ll come around to show it to me.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Nolan was exhausted. After Tacey’s mother left, he had the run of his career at Biscuit World and sold out earlier than ever before. Even his daddy never closed so early. He checked his watch twice, and it confirmed the record both times. It was just eleven o’clock and he was on his way home.

  “Damn,” Nolan sighed happily. For a change he might even get in a nap. At the corner of Starrett and Terrill, he paused briefly. He always stopped in at the convenience store on Thursdays, said a few words to Dede, and then picked up some club soda and the little giveaway papers. Nadine and Tacey liked to read the ads. They swore they were going to start hitting the flea markets as soon as Nadine got stronger. That wasn’t likely, but Nadine loved the lists of what people were offering for sale.

  “A full layette set,” she’d read. “No more babies coming to that house.” Pool tables, “like-new” exercise equipment, and elaborate stereo systems prompted her to speculate on the kind of people who were moving into Cayro. “People who buy stuff they an’t ever gonna use. People from Atlanta or Nashville, that’s who we’re getting. A few more years and no one will recognize this town.”

  Nolan wiped his neck and rocked his head from side to side, listening to the muscles pop. His mama was right, he thought. Things were changing so fast. Some days he felt as if he were constantly losing ground. He should go home and do his exercises, take a hot bath and lie down for a while. Get some rest. He could drop by the store later, when he wasn’t so tired. And if he got in a good long nap, he could try the sheet music Delia’s friend Rosemary had sent from California, a Tone Kwas duet for clarinets. If he had time, he could try each of the parts. He glanced over at the lot and saw only one truck outside the store, a Chevron emblem o
n the door.

  “Billy Tucker. Oh, hell.” Nolan almost went on by, but then he remembered how busy Dede could get in the afternoons. He rocked his head again. “All right,” he said to Billy Tucker’s truck as he pulled into the lot. He could see Billy’s green shirt just inside the door as he climbed out of his car and walked toward the store.

  On the third step he saw the gun. Nolan stopped. Billy Tucker was standing in Dede’s convenience store with a gun in his hand.

  “Oh, Lord,” Nolan whispered.

  He looked around quickly, up the road and back down toward Delia’s place. There was no one around, no cars in sight. Nolan looked back to the store. He saw Billy take a step forward. The gun in his hand was angled down. Nolan went forward another two steps and saw Dede on the floor, her face turned up and expressionless, her gaze intent on Billy’s face.

  There was a shout and Nolan flinched. Billy was yelling. The gun in his hand wavered and shook. Billy’s head rocked and swung. There were mumbled unintelligible sounds coming through the glass facade of the store. Cursing. Nolan listened to Billy cursing in a deadened monotone. He’s gone crazy, Nolan thought. Billy Tucker has gone crazy and he’s going to kill Dede.

  “I said stay down, bitch!” The words were muffled and peculiar through the glass doors, almost rubbery and echoing as if coming from the other end of a tunnel.

  Nolan moved forward carefully, quietly. A bird was singing in a tree at the edge of the lot. Dede’s face was still upturned and empty. Billy had lowered the gun a little, and was holding it now in front of his belly, the sight still centered on Dede.

  “You don’t give a shit about me,” he screamed. “You just always thinking about your silly-ass self.”

  Nolan put his hand on the right double door. A wave of dizziness swung over him. He looked down and saw his shadow, small and hunched, just visible in the patch of sunlight that shone through the glass-paneled door. He had no idea what he was going to do. I’m going to get killed, he thought.