some shit. It was No. 4 all along.” Then she turned to Mrs. Handy and said, “Got any whiskey?”
On a September morning fourteen years later, Miss Carmel read Barbara Jean’s name aloud from the roster in her ninth grade English class. After placing her clipboard down on her desk, Miss Carmel walked over to Barbara Jean and, for the first time, uttered the words that would begin most of their encounters for the next four decades. “Girl, did you know you were born on my davenport?”
Once Barbara Jean had married Lester and his business had taken off, most of the town lined up to kiss her ass in order to get on Lester’s good side. But Carmel Handy continued to greet her that same way. Barbara Jean supposed it spoke well of Miss Carmel’s character that the wealth she came into didn’t change her old teacher’s behavior toward her one bit. But she still hated her for it. It shamed her to admit it, but Barbara Jean felt relieved when, in her eighties, Miss Carmel developed the habit of telling each black woman around Barbara Jean’s age who crossed her path that she was born on her sofa. Eventually, the tale of the baby born in her front room became so bound up with Miss Carmel’s short-circuiting brain that nearly everyone forgot that the story was rooted in fact or had anything to do with Barbara Jean.
Carmel Handy’s block was one of the first to be demolished when housing developers and the university bought up most of Leaning Tree in the 1980s and ’90s. On the day they bulldozed that little brick bungalow, Barbara Jean drove over to Miss Carmel’s street and drank a champagne toast in the front seat of her new Mercedes.
As she stood in the All-You-Can-Eat at the center of an expanding circle of grief over Big Earl’s passing, Barbara Jean listened to Carmel Handy reminding her, yet again, of her low origins. Barbara Jean thought then of the taste of the champagne she sipped that day in her car as she watched the workmen scratch Miss Carmel’s home out of existence. That delicious memory helped her not to scream.
Chapter 7
The night before Big Earl’s funeral, Barbara Jean dreamed that she and Lester were walking along a rutted dirt road on a cool fall day. They exhaled clouds of white mist while rust, yellow, and brown leaves floated around them in a circle, as if they were at the center of a cyclone. Because of the storm of leaves, Barbara Jean was just barely able to make out the path ahead of them. She held Lester’s arm tight to keep from twisting her ankle in the tire tracks embedded in the road. Even in her dreams, she always wore heels.
After a time, the leaf storm around them thinned enough to reveal a river ahead. On the opposite shore, a small boy waved. Then, just as they lifted their hands to wave back, a woman in a silvery, iridescent gown appeared, hovering in the air above their heads. The woman said, “Lester, the water is frozen. Just walk on over and get him. He’s waiting.” But it was November or December in the dream and the river was clearly only half frozen. Barbara Jean could see the bubbling and churning current just beneath the brittle surface of the ice. She dug her fingers into the rough cloth of her husband’s winter coat to keep him from going out onto the river. As Lester’s sleeve escaped her grasp, Barbara Jean woke up with her pulse racing and both of her arms reaching out for Lester.
She’d had that dream, or one nearly identical to it, for years. Sometimes it was spring or summer in the dream and, instead of a dangerously thin layer of ice, it was a decrepit rope bridge with rotted wooden slats that spanned the water. But she always dreamed of the same road, the dirt trail that had once formed the western border of Leaning Tree. It had been paved ages ago, or so Barbara Jean had been told. She hadn’t gone near it in years. She always dreamed of the same waving boy, her lost Adam. The woman in the air also never varied. It was always her mother.
Barbara Jean awakened from her dream with a sore back from being curled up for hours on one of the two Chippendale wingback chairs that sat by the fireplace in the library of her home. The chairs