The Dance Boots Read Free Page B

everybody liked her. Remember that, Buster? Remember how she used to give us kids money?”
    It was a good afternoon. We drank tea and ate doughnuts and left on the plate for Shirley the rest of the magical peanut butter cookies that my mother had made especially for her. She showed us the gallon jars of swamp tea that Joe Washington had sent down from Mozhay for her to drink, just a little bit at a time, all day. She was feeling a lot better, she said, felt like she had more energy. She felt cold sometimes, though.
    â€œYou should see my X-ray. My lungs, there’s all these little silver spots. You wouldn’t believe there could be so many. The doctor says that’s the cancer, those little silver spots on the X-ray; you should see all of them! Like a swarm of fireflies, it reminds me! But that swamp tea, it’s making me feel a lot better. The doctor said that’s good, that it makes me feel better. He told me to drink all I want.”
    â€œHey, I ever tell you about when my mother was in the hospital, before she died? I was there all the time, every day, and she knew me even when she didn’t know anybody else. Well, she couldn’t swallow anymore, you know how that happens? So, they were feeding her through this little tube, and she was saying to me how she would sure like to have a beer. She couldn’t drink anything, though, through her mouth; everything had to go in through the tube, and so when the doctor came by I asked him about it. ‘She’s wishing for a beer’—I told him this privately ‘do you think it would be all right if I just poured a little bit of beer in that little tube?’ He said to me, ‘Shirley, that dear lady can have anything she wants.’ That’s just what he said, that dear lady could have anything she wanted. SoI brought in a can of beer, and she could watch me pour a little bit into the tube, and she would say, ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.’ Oh, she was funny. ‘Keep it coming, daughter, dear.’ That’s her picture right here, see?” She lifted a handful of photographs from the table. “In this one she’s an old lady, but here she’s younger than I am now. And in this one, you can just barely see her looking over the railing; she’s this little girl right here, just a little girl, at Indian school.”
    She had put on a sweater and was rocking slowly in the recliner. “I have something for you, Artense. Go in my bedroom, sweetheart; it’s past the kitchen, way down at the end of that long hallway, past the bathroom; go in there, and go around the other side of the bed, and underneath the dressing table there’s a pair of boots for you. They’ll fit you; your feet are small, like mine. You can wear them to dance in; they’ll go nice with your dress. You still dance in your blue dress with the red ribbon, don’t you?”
    Her bedroom was feminine, and more light and tidy than I would have thought. Her bed was made, the pink wallpaper print comforter fluffed up and even around the edges. The window shades were pulled up exactly to halfway; over them, the white lace curtains looked starched, spotless. Her many bottles of colognes and lotions looked attractively arranged on the mirrored tray on the vanity; did she do that deliberately, or did the pattern just occur? The air in the room was dry and smelled like Jean Naté talcum powder; there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere. I found myself tiptoeing into the room toward the tray of perfume bottles, wanting to pick them up and touch them, like a curious little girl on an errand into her grownup aunt’s bedroom. I remembered Shirley at Aunt Lisette’s kitchen table, setting her hair in pin curls. In front of her were two glasses of beer. She drank from one, dipped the comb into the other to dampen each lock before she twirled it quickly around her finger and bobby-pinned it against her scalp. I stood at