what did I do? Did I remain businesslike and ask pertinent questions? Did I thank her for taking on such a risky topic? No, instead of laughing, I started blubbering into the phone, crying like a kid getting a polio shot.
“Calm down, Miss Phelan,” she’d said, “this is hardly going to be a best-seller,” but I just kept crying while she fed me the details. “We’re only offering a four-hundred-dollar advance and then another four hundred dollars when it’s finished... are you . . . listening?”
“Ye-yes ma’am.”
“And there’s definitely some editing you have to do. The Sarah section is in the best shape,” she’d said, and I tell Aibileen this through her fits and snorts.
Aibileen sniffs, wipes her eyes, smiles. We finally calm down, drinking coffee that Minny had to get up and put on for us.
“She really likes Gertrude, too,” I say to Minny. I pick up the paper and read the quote I’d written so I wouldn’t forget it. “ ‘Gertrude is every Southern white woman’s nightmare. I adore her.’ ”
For a second, Minny actually looks me in the eye. Her face softens into a childlike smile. “She say that? Bout me?”
Aibileen laughs. “It’s like she know you from five hundred miles away.”
“She said it’ll be at least six months until it comes out. Sometime in August.”
Aibileen is still smiling, completely undeterred by anything I’ve said. And honestly, I’m grateful for this. I knew she’d be excited, but I was afraid she’d be a little disappointed, too. Seeing her makes me realize, I’m not disappointed at all. I’m just happy.
We sit and talk another few minutes, drinking coffee and tea, until I look at my watch. “I told Daddy I’d be home in an hour.” Daddy is at home with Mother. I took a risk and left him Aibileen’s number just in case, telling him I was going to visit a friend named Sarah.
They both walk me to the door, which is new for Minny. I tell Aibileen I’ll call her as soon as I get Missus Stein’s notes in the mail.
“So six months from now, we’ll finally know what’s gone happen,” Minny says, “good, bad, or nothing.”
“It might be nothing,” I say, wondering if anyone will even buy the book.
“Well, I’m counting on good,” Aibileen says.
Minny crosses her arms over her chest. “I better count on bad then. Somebody got to.”
Minny doesn’t look worried about book sales. She looks worried about what will happen when the women of Jackson read what we’ve written about them.
AIBILEEN
chapter 29
THE HEAT done seeped into everything. For a week now it’s been a hundred degrees and ninety-nine percent humidity. Get any wetter, we be swimming. Can’t get my sheets to dry on the line, my front door won’t close it done swell up so much. Sho nuff couldn’t get a meringue to whip. Even my church wig starting to frizz.
This morning, I can’t even get my hose on. My legs is too swollen. I figure I just do it when I get to Miss Leefolt’s, in the air-condition. It must be record heat, cause I been tending to white folks for forty-one years and this the first time in history I ever went to work without no hose on.
But Miss Leefolt’s house be hotter than my own. “Aibileen, go on and get the tea brewed and... salad plates . . . wipe them down now . . .” She ain’t even come in the kitchen today. She in the living room and she done pull a chair next to the wall vent, so what’s left a the air-condition blowing up her slip. That’s all she got on, her full slip and her earrings. I wait on white ladies who walk right out the bedroom wearing nothing but they personality, but Miss Leefolt don’t do like that.
Ever once in a while, that air-condition motor go phheeewww. Like it just giving up. Miss Leefolt call the repairman twice now and he say he coming, but I bet he ain’t. Too hot.
“And don’t forget... that silver thingamajig—cornichon server, it’s in the . . .”
But she give up before she finish, like it’s too hot to even tell me what to do. And you know that be hot. Seem like everbody in town got the heat-crazies. Go out on the street and it feel real still, eerie, like right before a tornado hit. Or maybe it’s just me, jittery cause a the book. It’s coming out on Friday.