Swan Place Read Free

afraid it’s bad news.” A long pause, then, “Yeah.” I shut my eyes tight and stayed just as still as could be, believing with all my heart that if I moved so much as my little finger, my cot would tilt, the whole world would tilt, and I’d fall out of bed and down into some deep, dark faraway place—wherever my mama was, all cold and dead.
    Mama!
    Then it almost seemed that my cot dropped away from under me, and I was floating up in the air, high above our little gray house and the other ones just like it, all lined up along the silent street, like little shaggy gray ponies waiting for a race to start and falling asleep while they were waiting. And I could look down on the big chinaberry tree in our yard, where the mockingbird curled his toes around a twig and sang his babysong into the darkness. Slowly I floated back down onto my cot, inside the bluepapered walls of the room in the little gray house, where nothing was ever going to be the same again.
    I heard Roy-Ellis hang up the phone and go along the hallway, into the kitchen, where the table was still covered with old, rainbow-colored newspapers and the thick white cups holding all those Easter egg colors—purple and blue, yellow and red, green and orange. And in the refrigerator were the three egg cartons holding all those pretty eggs we were supposed to hunt for in the tall grass in the backyard that afternoon. Only now, Mama was gone. And right then and there—in a way I’ll never understand—I knew that my path had just split in two again , that it had split with that very first ring of the telephone. Just like it split for the first time when my daddy—my real daddy, that is—ran off and left me and Mama when some blond-headed lady in the office of the construction company where he worked asked him if he would drive her to California, and he did. And he never came back.
    Maybe I could understand how he could leave me , because I was skinny and covered in freckles. I had wild-looking red hair, and my teeth were way too big for my face. But how could he leave Mama, and her so pretty and sweet—and her expecting a little baby any day, a baby that would be Molly, my little sister? That was the first time my path split, and Mama cried on Aunt Bett’s shoulder and said she didn’t know how we would be able to get along without him—without a paycheck coming in. So I decided I would stop loving him, right then and there. It really wasn’t hard, and it made me feel better right away. Now, Mama had gone off and left me and Molly and Little Ellis, and if I could only stop loving her too, maybe I wouldn’t hurt so bad.
    But then I thought about Mama not going off and leaving me because she wanted to, like my daddy did. So, lying there in the darkness, I figured that I would always love my mama, but that from then on—from that very minute—I wasn’t going to love anybody else in the whole world, not ever again. Because if I didn’t love anybody, I wouldn’t have to hurt so bad.
    I heard Roy-Ellis come back into the living room, and his footsteps stopped right outside the door to our room. The knob turned, the door opened, and his voice came over me like a wave, like how I feel when I’m going to be sick at my stomach.
    “Dove, honey? You awake?”
    “I’m awake.”
    “Well, come on out here and let me talk to you a little bit,” he said.
    I threw back the covers and sat up, expecting my cot to tilt. But it didn’t, and I went out into the living room where Roy-Ellis was sitting on the couch with his head in his hands.
    “You don’t have to tell me, Roy-Ellis,” I whispered. “I already know.” My voice tried to catch, but I wouldn’t let it.
    “Let’s not say anything around the little ones just yet,” Roy-Ellis said, and he didn’t look at me. Just cleared his throat, got up, and flicked the switch to turn on the porch light. So I figured Aunt Bett was on her way. We sat there without speaking, both of us looking mostly at the floor.