JEWEL Read Online Free Page B

where the voice came from, or whose it was, my mind on chicken and collards and sitting down to eat.
    She said, “Missy Cook, she say bring this here to you.”
    I hadn’t seen her mouth move, her eyes still on the floor. She put her hands together in front of her, held her fingers.
    “Cathe ral? ” I said.
    She looked up. “Yes’m? ” she said, her eyes on my chin, then on my chest, my shoulder.
    I said nothing, only felt my stomach moving, hungry for what lay in the pot. But I was thinking about her, and about this look between us, and about the full sentence that’d come from her lips.
    “I sorry about yo’ papa, ” she said, and finally let down her eyes.
    I heard myself say, “Thank you, ” though I hadn’t felt the words form.
    She looked up at me again. “Missy Cook, she say tell you one more thing.
    She say tell you she the one be paying me to work for y’all. And she say she want you come live with her now yo’ papa gone.” She paused, looked back to the floor. “I mean, now yo’ papa pass on.”
    Missy Cook. My mother’s mother, and suddenly I recognized the line in my mother’s chin, and how she’d held it high, and why, perhaps, Pastor had cowered in whatever small way he had last night, the three times I’d met Missy Cook she’d held her chin the same way, up and above us all, her mouth in a frown that let me know no matter what happened that she was here and would always be here. She was here to stay. She was the woman of standing, of bearing. And my mother was her daughter.
    She lived in Purvis proper, on Willow Street in a big house with windows and drapes and fine china plates we actually ate off of, my momma and me. The last time we were there was just before Daddy’d left, the other two times I’d been too small to recognize an occasion.
    But I’d seen the furniture, and’d been told to stay off of it by the woman who now wanted me to come live with her.
    I said nothing, kept my head as level as I could make it, my eyes cold and steady and focused on Cathe ral, her twisted knots of hair, her thin, cotton dress and bare, black feet.
    “And be one more thing, ” she whispered. She glanced toward the door into the front room, where my momma and Benjamin and three other men were, none of them making a sound. “She say she going raise you up right, ” she whispered, her eyes on the floor again, her voice so quiet I wasn’t even certain she’d spoken. “She not be making the same mistakes she make with yo’ mama. She say you her last chance in this world.”
    She stood with her hands still at her sides, glanced up at me.
    I whispered, “She told you to tell me that? ” She shrugged. “Yes’m.
    Except the last part. The part about raising you up right, and about the mistakes and all.”
    Though my stomach felt as though it might die on me right then, the smell of cornbread and milk gravy now making its way into me, I held on, thinking instead of my momma marrying some halfbreed Choctaw who couldn’t read or write, me being born to the two of them, so that in Missy Cook’s eyes I was the biggest mistake her daughter could ever make. And now I was her personal mission, what she wanted to save from the horrors of low-living in this world.
    I looked at the photograph in my hand, wondered at the man there, my grandpa, and what it took to hold your head just that way, who you had to be.
    I looked at Cathe ral. I said, “Why did you tell me? ” She shrugged again. “Don’t need no reason.” She paused. “Just figured to warn you.”
    Then I wasn’t hungry anymore, and I turned, went into the front room and past them all, nothing any different than when I had left, my daddy’s belongings still spread on the floor. I went to my room, got from under my bed one of my tablets, a pencil. I took one more look at the photograph, then slipped it between pages in the back of the tablet.
    When I came back into the kitchen, Cathe ral had already pulled out the food from the pot,