Aunt Pearl was punching our doorbell and calling out, “Open this door.”
For a moment, I saw a spark in Mama’s eyes. The spark she’d lost since my father joined up to go “beat the tar out of Adolf Hitler.”
I felt a spark too —a spark of fear. Aunt Pearl had visited us once before, and she’d been quite a force to reckon with —I questioned the desperation that had driven me to ask her for help. But as I walked to the door, I looked back at my mother, a whisper of herself, both physically and emotionally, and I knew that it had been the right thing to do.
Besides, I didn’t have any other choice. At twelve years old, what was I going to do? I’d burned every pot and pan in our home, I’d used up every bit of food from the grocery and they wouldn’t deliver any more on credit, and I had no other adults to turn to. I had no one and nowhere to go for help but to a family member I had met just once —a family member my father didn’t like much and whom my mother had run away from as soon as she could. It seemed when my father left for war, my mother left too.
I pushed my fear down and opened the door.
Aunt Pearl bustled right in. She was tall and bulky, just as I remembered, wearing some hideous dress of indistinguishable style. (My mother raised me to place great store in fashion. It obviously mattered little to Aunt Pearl.) She stood before Mama and took her pulse. I
suppose that’s what she did, because she picked up Mama’s thin wrist with her beefy hand and briefly looked at the sensible wristwatch she wore.
“We will go to Snowden,” she said.
I blinked and found my voice. “No.” I swallowed. “I mean, actually, I thought you could help here.”
She continued to hold Mama’s wrist. She said nothing but looked up at me in disdain. I’d remembered that look —and the pinched nose that went with it — correctly.
I went on babbling. “I have school. My books.”
Aunt Pearl pulled Mama out of her chair, pushed her up the stairs, and began to pack my mother’s clothes. The woman who was my aunt spoke to us both. “We will go home. To Snowden.”
And so, in early September 1942, we did.
Chapter One The journey took a lifetime, or at least it seemed that way. My world had just collapsed.
I’d expected Aunt Pearl to help me there, in Baltimore. I’d expected . . . Oh, I’d expected I don’t know what. I had had time
to prepare for my father leaving. He told my mother and me he was planning to volunteer; he showed us his uniform; we had parties in the neighborhood; he showed me newspaper articles about Hitler and the WAR (he always spoke of it as if it were in all capital letters).
With Aunt Pearl, our departure was a whirl; things moved fast, slow, then fast again. I found myself making comparisons about things that mattered little but would have mattered a great deal to my mother if she’d been
acting like my mother anymore. But she wasn’t.
We caught a train to Lexington, Virginia, a nothing of a town compared to Baltimore. We spent the night there, in the most uncomfortable bed, which we all three shared, a difficult task, since Aunt Pearl took up more than her share. That bed smelled funny too, like old soap. I wasn’t allowed any bedtime routines before going to sleep, as Aunt Pearl immediately turned off the light. I understood Mama and Aunt Pearl were probably tired, especially since Mama looked tired all the time, but I wished I could have read for a little while. Too bad I had no books.
As I waited for sleep on that lumpy mattress, trapped between the stranger my mother had become and the stranger who was my aunt, I tried to comfort myself by thinking of good memories; instead, I fought with the memories of the past few months.
I thought of my shoe salesman father, who didn’t have to go to war, as it said in the letter I’d found squirreled in the depths of the closet. The letter told him that as the “sole provider of a minor and an unhealthy dependent,” he would not be expected to serve.
Yet he’d
volunteered to go, proud to serve in his sharply creased private’s uniform. Gone after a whirlwind of parties and sendoffs for “my hero,” as Mama called him. I wondered if that “unhealthy dependent” meant Mama, because she had had to go away for a few days the previous year for some “fresh air,” days when I’d stayed with my friend Peggy and her family.
When Mama returned, nobody, not even Peggy, would jump rope or play tag or jacks with me anymore.
That’s when Mama told me books could be my best friends. She wouldn’t let me read Nancy Drew or
Lad: A Dog. She wanted me to read
important books that made me look smart. I carried them around to make her happy, but I didn’t even understand the first pages. Still, holding them made me feel close to her.
Finally, I felt myself drifting off to sleep in that crowded bed, and I surrendered to it.
In the morning, we learned that the train track at Balcony Downs had been washed out by mud. Aunt Pearl wasn’t willing to wait for the repairs.
“Perhaps you could borrow a car?” I asked.
Aunt Pearl looked at me with a stone face. “Can’t drive a car. Besides, you’d get sick. I get sick in cars on that mountain, and I’ve been living around here forever.” She tapped her lips with her right index finger, then nodded. “We’ll go by river.”
Copyright © 2019 by Jeri Watts. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
