and I think Clifton liked the smell, because sometimes he’d put his nose to my chest and inhale loudly. I always had to check afterward to make sure he hadn’t left a snail trail of snot behind.
“You’re good with that child,” my aunt Ruth said. After dinner but before he was due to be put down for the night I usually walked him up to her little house and let him toddle around a bit. My aunt Ruth had a lot of dolls on shelves in the dining room, and Clifton always pointed up at them like he wanted to look at them. She had a doll dressed like a nun, which was the only way I knew what a nun looked like because there weren’t any in Miller’s Valley, and a doll that was supposed to be a figure skater named Sonja Henie that had belonged to her mother. She had one dressed like Scarlett O’Hara and one dressed like Florence Nightingale, and she had some Cissy dolls, too. Clifton seemed to point at those the most, but Ruth just ignored him. She ignored him when he put his arms in the air to be picked up, too. One day he even took her hand and tried to get her to walk him outside, but that led nowhere.
Ruth’s well was acting up that summer, and my father spent a fair amount of time behind her place, tinkering. He’d put in a new sump pump, too, because the last time there’d been a heavy rain, water had wound up really flooding the basement of her house for the first time.
“Your father can fix anything,” Ruth said. “Gaga,” Clifton shouted, his hands on the sill, his face to the screen so that there was a grimy grid pattern on his nose after. That’s what he called my father, Gaga. “Right out here, little man,” my father shouted back.
“I don’t care so much for children when they’re small,” Ruth said.
“What about me?”
“That was different,” she said, finishing up the crust of a tuna sandwich. It had been maybe a year since my mother had stopped sending meals up to Ruth’s house. “She can look after herself,” my mother said flatly, and a couple of nights later when she caught me with a ham steak and some macaroni and cheese on a plate she took it wordlessly out of my hands and dumped it in the trash.
“That’s a waste of good food,” my father had said.
“I made it, I paid for it, I can do what I want with it,” my mother said. I thought I saw my father wince.
The two of them were at war because the older Clifton got, the more my mother wanted to move him and Callie into the little house where Ruth lived. I didn’t even have to eavesdrop on the heating vent to know about her plans, or my father’s upset with them. They’d fight about it right there in the living room.
“Callie’s doing fine living over there with her mother,” my father would mutter.
“She and the baby are in one room,” my mother countered. “What’s she going to do when he’s out of the crib?”
“We can’t turn Ruth out onto the street.”
“No one is talking about turning anyone out onto the street. There’s always vacancies at those garden apartments down by the hospital. One of the girls in the ER lives there, and her place has a nice big living room, and a little balcony. Not that Ruth would need a balcony. God forbid she should go out on the balcony, the world would end.”
“This is her home.”
“This is our grandson.”
“Ruth’s not a town girl.”
“She’s not a girl, she’s a grown woman and it doesn’t matter where she lives as long as it has walls. It’s not like she’s going to miss the scenery.”
Then my father would play his trump card: “How the heck would we get her out of there?”
And my mother would fold: “I don’t give a rip.” Or a hoot. Or, if her feet really hurt and Callie’s mother had been bragging at the beauty parlor about how much time she spent with the baby, a damn. Even she couldn’t find an answer to the idea of Ruth screaming her lungs out, holding on to the doorjamb as someone tried to drag her into the open.
“I’m her only flesh and blood she’s got in the world and your mother treats me like a boarder,” Ruth said to me, tears running down her cheeks