Holding Smoke Page 24

  Sukey crossed her arms and picked at a loose thread on the drooping sleeve of her nubby yellow sweater. She screwed up her mouth and thrust out her chin, all while keeping her eyes on Ramey’s boots.

  “Everybody that ever knowed me and Herbert, going all the way back to when we was kids, they knowed we was crazy ’bout each other. For years and years, I couldn’t get my fill of him. He was like a cool glass of lemonade and I’d never been so thirsty in all my life. And he couldn’t get enough of me. I ain’t just saying that, neither. We were like two bodies sharing one skin. One heart and mind. All that other bullshit, too.”

  Sukey exhaled heavily, plucking at her sleeve again.

  “And I knowed what all Herbert was doing. I ain’t never been dumb once in my life. I knowed what he was building out here and I wanted to be part of it. Not just the clothes and the flash, showing off nice things. People whispering ’bout you when you walk into a joint together. People fearing you ’cause they know what your man can do. I mean I wanted to help run things, have a say. Use the brain God gave me. Damn fool got men working for him ’bout as useful as a screen door on a submarine, but don’t seem to matter much to him. I try to put my two cents in and he tells me ain’t none of my business. Like I ain’t waiting every night for him to come home still breathing. Like I ain’t hearing gunshots and sirens in my dreams.”

  Sukey heaved her shoulders and wrapped her sweater tighter over her sunken chest. It was the first time Ramey had ever seen the old woman look frail.

  “Well, I ain’t never been one to back down, neither. I got a mouth on me, yes, sir, and I ain’t ’shamed of it. Soon, it got to be nothing but caterwauling between us. We weren’t sharing that one heart no more. All we was sharing were his fists and my bruises. My blood. My broken bones.”

  Sukey suddenly jerked her head up and fixed Ramey with a soul-ripping stare.

  “Which is still sharing skin, ain’t it? Or so I kept telling myself.”

  Ramey couldn’t move; Sukey didn’t blink. Her face showed no more emotion than a death mask.

  “And then, out of nowhere, like one of them summer storms that just comes up on a day so still you can’t hardly breathe, I’d had enough. I was in the kitchen, cooking up some fatback for him, late one night after he come home. Babies in the next room, sleeping. We had this little card table and Herbert was sitting at it, counting out shares. He’d barely said a word to me in three days. I tried to be all sweet when he’d come home, but he got no time for me. He just hungry, he says. Got to go back out with the boys. So Herbert’s sitting there, ’cross the kitchen, his back to me, laying out cash. And I’m standing there at the stove, my cast iron popping, waiting to turn the bacon over. Then he went and opened his damn mouth, wide enough to catch flies, loud enough to wake the dead six feet down. Hollering something ’bout wanting food on the table when he come home or else. And let me tell you, right then, that summer storm broke.”

  Ramey swallowed, felt the dank walls inching forward, the air pressed out of the room.

  “I folded a dishtowel over the handle of that cast iron pan.”

  Felt Sukey wrapping her up in a spider’s skein.

  “Picked it up, walked it over.”

  The glistening strands garroting her throat. Drawing her closer.

  “Just as calm as could be.”

  Ramey couldn’t look away from those black, spider eyes.

  “And took it to his head.”

  Sukey spat on the floor.

  “That’s it.”

  And let her go. Ramey, shaking and dizzy, felt the walls recede, the room return to normal, the air rush in around her. She gulped in mouthfuls as Sukey turned away, just an old woman again, albeit not one to be messed with.

  “That’s the story. The true one, anyhow.”

  Sukey pulled a jar of mayonnaise down from one of the shelves. She didn’t seem to notice Ramey panting as the tale faded back into legend.

  “Got some mullet in last night. Think I’ll make a fish spread.”

  Sukey shrugged and made to leave, but Ramey blocked her path. She steadied herself, hands on her hips, holding herself to a center. Trying to sort it all out.

  “No, wait. Are you trying to tell me something about Judah, Sukey? That what this was all about?”

  Sukey’s mouth twisted in disgust. She reached around Ramey and pushed open the door.

  “No, stupid girl. I’m trying to tell you something ’bout yourself.”

  *

  From the blank look on his face, Dinah was pretty sure Felton didn’t understand what she was saying. Directly behind her head, the slim refrigerator occupying most of the camper’s tiny kitchen was humming and buzzing distractingly. Dinah tried to scoot farther underneath the wall-mounted table folded down between them, but the tops of her thighs kept jamming into its rusted metal support bars. It was obvious—from the creaking table, the bare countertops, the absence of photographs or knickknacks, any personal touches at all—that Felton hadn’t lived there long. When she’d shown up unannounced, knocking anxiously at his door, he’d not known what to do with her. Felton had quickly tossed an afghan over the paisley recliner in the corner, its cushions slashed, stuffing exposed, but Dinah had declined it. She’d tried not to gape at the threadbare carpet, ripped and rumpled, or the holes perforating the walls or the smashed window above the sink, its panes taped over with plastic. Everything was clean, she could even smell traces of bleach, but there was no denying the camper had recently been ransacked. Apparently, Felton’s life had become more complicated than Dinah could have ever imagined.

  Felton, sitting across from her, also looking very uncomfortable wedged in behind the recliner in a chair he probably had never before used, folded his hands and rested them lightly on the scratched tabletop. Dinah realized with a strange pang in her chest that she and Felton shared the same square nails and thick fingers, the same fleshy palms and ungainly wrists. Felton scrunched his brow, looking at her not so much with confusion, but with complete incomprehension, and cleared his throat.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Dinah tried to think of another way to say it without just saying it. She’d spent years rehearsing this moment in her head. It would come to her at odd moments, sometimes while falling asleep, sometimes while punching a register or slinging drinks, once while driving a getaway car a hundred and ten miles an hour down the highway with flashing lights on her tail. Now that it was finally upon her, the right words were nowhere to be found.

  “Okay. Let me try again. See, your mother, Rowena…”

  Felton nodded along as she tread a convoluted path trying to explain. His head was tilted just slightly and his eyes, though both cautious and curious, were regarding her with an earnestness she’d not expected. The last time she’d seen Felton had been two summers ago. One of the many times throughout the years she’d driven down to Kentsville and hunted him out. Dinah had watched him in the rearview mirror of her Tundra, shuffling out of the Sir Clucks over on the west side of town, a cardboard box of chicken held almost reverently in his arms, shoulders up and blubbery neck bunched, with his eyes cast, as always, on the ground. Not fearful, necessarily, but oblivious. Listless. Languishing. That man did not line up with this man, clear-eyed and straight-backed, and certainly not with the man she had seen in church the night before. That version of Felton had stunned her. Even from the back row she’d been able to tell that something had come over him, electrified him, given him a dynamism that he wielded confidently, naturally, without giving it a second thought. A small part of her was concerned about this sudden change in Felton, and a much larger part was terrified of how it was all going to play out with Sister Tulah.

  “Rowena, after she left you with your aunt, well, Tulah probably told you that your mother died and that’s why you were living with her, but she didn’t. Rowena just couldn’t take care of you anymore. She had to give you up. But then she had me, a couple years later, and then she
did die, but Tulah didn’t take me in like she did you and—”

  “You’re my sister.”

  Felton’s eyes were huge, though there seemed to be no question in them. Wonder, yes, but not surprise.

  “I am.”

  Dinah bobbed her head nervously.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Half-sister, most likely, but you never know. I never could find out for sure.”

  Felton’s eyebrows came together and his head tilted even farther to the side as Dinah watched and waited, trying to decipher the expressions parading across his face. Felton’s mouth flapped open and closed a few times and then he leaned forward, halfway across the table.

  “There was a girl, when I was maybe eighteen or so. I was out sweeping the front walkway of the church, in the middle of the summer. It was so hot and I can still remember the racket of the cicadas. You know, when it’s so quiet and so loud at the same time. I was alone out there and I looked up and there was a girl standing on the other side of the road, almost half in the ditch, weeds up to her knees, watching me.”

  Dinah’s heart was hammering in her chest.

  “She was maybe nine or ten, sunburned all over, I could see across the road. Long brown hair, half in her face. Big eyes. Almost feral. She looked like she’d landed there out of a dream. I raised my hand, but she just kept staring at me and then she bolted down the highway and disappeared back into the woods like a deer. I never saw her again.”

  Felton’s eyes were shimmering with an alchemical intensity, and Dinah was suddenly afraid.

  “Was it you?”

  Dinah nodded, not sure what her answer would mean, and then Felton was out of his chair, his arms around her neck, her shoulders, crushing her. Dinah fumbled her arms out from between them and reached around to hug him back. They were two people who so clearly were unused to embraces, but had been hungry for them all their lives. When Felton finally released her, they both exhaled deeply and haltingly. She pulled the sleeve of her plaid shirt down over her fist and wiped furtively at her eyes as Felton eased himself back across from her.

  “What? How?”

  Dinah was doing her best to hold herself together.

  “It was one of the times I ran away from a foster home.”

  Dinah dropped her eyes.

  “One of the many times. I wasn’t allowed to see you. It was one of the things Tulah made me promise the first time I met her, when I was about seven, I think. She’d visit me sometimes, or talk to me on the phone. I obeyed her because I was so scared of her. And then, because I was scared of what she would do to you. She promised she’d do these horrible things to you if I ever tried to contact you. I don’t think I was even supposed to know about you, or her, but one of my foster moms told me and then Tulah came in to do damage control.”

  Dinah braced herself, ready for the deluge of questions she was sure was about to hit her. About Rowena, who she really was and how she’d died, and about herself. What she had made of her life and why she was only reaching out to Felton just now. She wanted so desperately to unburden herself, but could she really tell Felton the truth? About the things she’d done to survive? All the people she had pretended to be at various points in her life and, perhaps even worse, the person she really was now. If he asked, and she was sure he would, could she admit that the only reason she was sitting across from him right now was because of the murder of another man?

  But all Felton did was repeat her name.

  “Tulah.”

  His mouth turned down.

  “Of course.”

  The intensity seemed to drain away and he was again the man sitting confidentially, but distantly, with hands folded calmly on the table. Dinah waited for the questions, but they never came. As she braced herself, she realized that his eyes were drifting slightly, as if he were watching something happening in his peripheral vision. The silence was stretching out between them, growing thin, though Felton seemed not to notice. Finally, Dinah coughed and scraped her chair back and forth in the inch of available space as she again searched for the right thing to say.

  “That wasn’t the only time I came down to see you, just the first. I’ve come to Kentsville a few times to sort of check on you, from a distance.”

  Felton’s eyes leapt back to her.

  “You were in church last night, sitting in the back. I saw you.”

  “I wanted to talk to you afterward, but you walked out with that red-haired girl as soon as Tulah started up again. I didn’t think I could just reach out in the aisle and grab you.”

  Felton smiled to himself.

  “Juniper.”

  “She seems nice. I talked to her for a second before I knocked. Did you meet her when you were out, wherever you were? Wherever you went?”

  Dinah suddenly realized she had a million questions for Felton, too. About where he’d gone for those months that Tulah said he’d been “out in the world” and what he had done. And so much more. What his life had been like living with Tulah, as an adult, as a child. Had she hurt him? Had he been happy? Had he ever wondered if he was missing someone in his life? Though it was folly, Dinah had always imagined Felton somehow knew about her, had somehow felt her out there, like a missing limb, like how the separated siblings in fairy stories always knew they were never truly alone. Of course, knowing about Felton all her life had never made Dinah feel any less lonely. Only more, perhaps.

  Felton gave her nothing, though.

  “Yes. I did.”

  Dinah picked at a cuticle springing up beside her thumbnail as she tried to figure out what to do now. If Felton had neither questions nor answers for her, where did they go from here? Should she just get up and leave? Let this be the end? Dinah’s shoulders sagged. The moment she’d waited for all her life had finally come and now all she felt was exhaustion.

  “You’re different now, aren’t you? Stronger.”

  “And I was weak before.”

  It wasn’t a question, but Dinah still felt like she had to backpedal. Felton had indeed seemed weak to her before. Weak and privileged, and underneath her longing to meet him, an ugly jealousy had always bubbled. He had been chosen, even if the chooser was Sister Tulah, and she had been cast to the wayside. The wheat winnowed from the chaff.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. I just wasn’t expecting what I saw in the church last night. How you stood up to her. How you spoke. How everyone in the room looked up at you. Their faces.”

  Dinah couldn’t put what she’d witnessed into words. An enigmatic smile began to slink across Felton’s lips.

  “You’ve come to find me at a very strange time, Sister. You are right, I have changed. And I’m going to change the church as well. And you…”

  Felton dropped his hands into his lap and leaned back, regarding her. He paused for so long that Dinah was sure she was somehow being examined, judged, and already deemed inadequate. She almost stood up, almost arrogantly stormed out of the camper—who was he, the bumbling bozo with fried chicken crumbs on his face, to judge her?—but she found she couldn’t move out from underneath that smile. When it broke, there was no trace of mockery in his voice, no ridicule, only invitation. Only a welcome. The words so sweet she felt tears again.

  “You can be a part of it.”

  *

  “You sure you don’t want one of these? It’ll keep you awake like nobody’s business. This is my third one today.”

  Tulah glared at the revolting drink Milo held out to her. Rivulets of melted whipped cream and foamy chocolate ran down the sides of the giant plastic cup, streaking through the frenetic, stylized logo—Beanz! Though they were sitting in the corner by the rain-spattered window, Tulah could still hear every whirr of the espresso machine behind the counter, every whack of some metal contraption used to make such nauseating concoctions, every cellphone beep, every shouted order, every shriek of laughter from the gaggle of adult women dressed like teenagers, all sitting together at a long tab
le running through the middle of the coffee shop. The noise was distracting and Sister Tulah did not appreciate having to lean forward and raise her voice to be heard. She brought her glare up from the iced coffee to Milo’s blanched faced, slowly and deliberately, her eye boring in.

  “I’m awake. What I want is for you to tell me what I’m doing here.”

  Milo slurped noisily from his neon-orange straw and looked away uncomfortably. He hunched over the table and tapped a few keys on the open laptop between them.

  “Internet’s down at my folks’ place again. Dude, before this joint opened up here in Starke, I had to drive down to Gainesville just to find a decent place with free Wi-Fi. And the coffee drinks here are dope. You sure you don’t want to just try something? I mean, they have decaf, too, you know.”

  Sister Tulah decided that if Milo said either the word “coffee” or “dude” to her one more time, she would have his tongue ripped out. She clung to the thought for a moment as she stared hard at Milo, trying to gauge just how bad the news was going to be. He was nervous and stalling, chattering away like an imbecile, which was never a good sign.

  “No. I meant, why did you call me? You said it was important. Urgent. I’m sitting in this cesspool of sin right now because I believed you.”

  Milo tapped and slurped and tapped, finally smacking one of the keys with a flourish.

  “It is. Okay, so take a look at this.”

  He spun the laptop around so Tulah could see the screen. Ads scrolled across the bottom and at the top of the page a banner for the Rip-off Review blinked on and off in angry red. Sister Tulah leaned in closer and squinted her eye. About halfway down, she saw the headline in bold.

  Scam Report: Deer Park Reserve, Bradford County, Florida.

  Tulah didn’t touch the laptop.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Milo stood up and awkwardly bent over the screen, trying to read it upside down.

  “It’s a community board. Anyone can post. It’s sort of like a consumer watchdog site, people warning each other about scams. There’s a bunch of them all over the internet. I’ve been keeping an eye on them since we got that email last week.”