car and managed to fill up this room with stuff he was supposed to be fixing.”
Letty offered a sympathetic smile.
“Take my advice, Letty. Don’t ever get your honey where you get your money.”
“My mimi used to tell me that all the time,” Letty said.
“You ever been married?”
“No.”
“So, you didn’t ever marry Maya’s daddy?” Ava asked. “I mean, I’m not judging you if you didn’t. Come to think of it, I’ve got two kids and I thank God for ’em every day, but I wish now that I hadn’t married either of their daddies.”
Letty glanced over at Maya, who was busily digging through a bin of bed linens.
“Actually, Maya is my niece,” Letty said quietly, letting her guard down just a little.
“Look, Letty,” Maya said, holding up a flowered purple and yellow polyester bedspread. “For Ellie’s bed.”
“Ellie? So you’ve got two kids?” Ava asked, looking confused.
“No. Ellie is Maya’s best friend. The stuffed elephant.”
“Oh.” Ava smiled at Maya, then turned back to Letty, her voice just above a whisper. “Where are her parents?”
“Deceased,” Letty said sadly. This was not exactly a lie. After all, Tanya was dead and Evan was dead as far as she was concerned.
“Sorry,” Ava said. She was about to say something else when her hip buzzed. She grabbed her phone from the back pocket of her jeans.
“Oh Lord. Sorry. That’s my electrician saying he’s on his way. I’m gonna leave you to it then. Just put stuff in the dumpster right by where you’re parked. When you’re ready for cleaning supplies come on back to the office and I’ll give you one of the housekeeping carts. Okay?”
“Thanks,” Letty said.
When Ava was gone she looked around the room and sighed. “Where do I even start?”
She heard Mimi’s voice in her ear. “The only way to begin is to just dig in.”
Letty and Tanya had spent two summers during their troublesome teen years with her mother’s parents, Mimi and BopBop, on their farm in Indiana, this while Terri was in the honeymoon phase of life with her third husband, Bobby Ray Braithwaite.
Eventually, and to absolutely nobody’s surprise, the marriage imploded, and after BopBop’s stroke and subsequent death, their summer sojourns ended and they’d moved back down to a seedy mobile home park in Tennessee, where Terri had taken possession of Bobby Ray’s double-wide. Mimi had driven them down to Knoxville in BopBop’s Chevy Impala, helped move them into the trailer, filled the refrigerator and cupboard with groceries, then, reluctantly, two days later, returned to the farm.
“You girls look after each other, y’hear?” Mimi had said, wrapping an arm around each of the sisters. “Your mama, bless her heart, it’s all she can do to take care of herself, so it’s gonna be up to you, Letty, to look after Tanya. And Tanya, you listen to what Letty tells you. Promise me that, okay?”
The girls had nodded dutifully, and waved, as Mimi drove away, honking the Impala’s horn until she was out of the girls’ sight. It would be the last time they ever saw their only grandparent.
Now Letty loaded a pile of linens into the wheelbarrow, plopped Maya on top, and trundled it out to the dumpster. After heaving the contents into the dumpster she unlocked her car and retrieved an armload of Maya’s things: her battered copy of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a small pink plastic lunch box containing Maya’s crayons and coloring book, and the girl’s suitcase, which featured her favorite Disney character, Elsa, from Frozen. She glanced around to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then grabbed the canvas tote she’d taken from Tanya’s closet. She was already uneasy about letting that tote bag out of her sight, even inside her locked car.
“Let’s go for ride, Letty,” Maya said, climbing back into the wheelbarrow.
“Okay, but when we get back to the room, Letty has to work, and you get to play, okay? I’ve got your book and your crayons. Can you do that and be a good girl while I get our room cleaned up?”
Maya nodded vigorously, sending her curls shaking. “I’m a good, big girl.”
Letty dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “You are the biggest, bestest girl in the world.”
* * *
By noon, she’d managed to clear debris from half the room, making dozens of trips back and forth to the dumpster, while Maya constructed a pillow fort from the least objectionable sheets and pillows Letty salvaged from the piles of rejected bed linens.