“Congratulations, sir,” crowed Hely, banging down the glass, though he wasn’t in check and there was nothing unusual about the play. “A brilliant coup.” It was a line from the chess tournament in the movie and he was proud of himself for remembering it.
They played on. Hely captured one of Harriet’s pawns with his bishop, and smacked himself on the forehead when Harriet immediately leapt a knight forward to take the bishop. “You can’t do that,” he said, although he really didn’t know if she could or not; he had a hard time keeping track of how knights were able to jump, which was too bad because knights were the pieces that Harriet liked most and used best.
Harriet was staring at the board, her chin cupped moodily in her hand. “I think he knows who I am,” she said suddenly.
“You didn’t say anything, did you?” said Hely uneasily. Though he admired her daring, he had not really thought it a good idea for Harriet to go down to the pool hall on her own.
“He came outside and stared at me. Just standing there, without moving.”
Hely moved a pawn without thinking, just for something to do. Suddenly he felt very tired and grumpy. He didn’t like lemonade—he preferred Coke—and chess wasn’t his idea of a good time. He had a chess set of his own—a nice one, that his father had given him—but he never played except when Harriet came over, and mostly he used the pieces for G.I. Joe tombstones.
————
The heat pressed down heavy, even with the fan whirring and the shades halfway drawn, and Tat’s allergies weighed cumbrous and lopsided in her head. The BC headache powder had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She put
Not a peep from the porch: the children were playing quietly enough, but it was hard to rest, knowing they were in the house. There was so much to worry about in the little collection of waifs over on George Street, and so little to be done for any of them, she thought, as she reached for the water glass on her bedside table. And Allison—who, in her heart, Tat loved the best of her two great-nieces—was the child she worried about most. Allison was like her mother, Charlotte, too tender for her own good. In Tat’s experience, it was the mild, gentle girls like Allison and her mother who got beaten down and brutalized by life. Harriet was like her grandmother—too much like her, which was why Tat had never been particularly comfortable around her; she was a bright-eyed tiger cub, cute enough now that she was small, but less so with every inch she grew. And though Harriet was not yet old enough to take care of herself, that day would arrive soon enough and then she—like Edith—would thrive no matter what befell her, be it famine or bank crash or Russian invasion.
The bedroom door squealed. Tat started, palm to her ribcage. “Harriet?”
Old Scratch—Tatty’s black tomcat—leapt lightly up on the bed and sat looking at her, switching his tail.
“What you doing in here, Bombo?” he said—or, rather, Tatty said for him, in the shrill, insolent singsong that she and her sisters had employed since childhood to carry on conversations with their pets.
“You scared me to death, Scratch,” she replied, dropping an octave to her natural voice.
“I know how to open the door, Bombo.”
“Hush.” She got up and closed the door. When she lay down again, the cat curled up comfortably beside her knee, and before long they were both asleep.
————
Danny’s grandmother, Gum, winced as with both hands she strained uselessly to lift a cast-iron skillet of cornbread from the stove.
“Here Gum, let me hep you,” said Farish, jumping up so fast that he knocked over the aluminum kitchen chair.
Gum ducked and scraped away from the stove, smiling up at her favorite grandson. “Oh Farish.
Danny sat staring at the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he was somewhere else. The trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there was hardly room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was an unpleasant place to sit even in winter. A few minutes ago, he’d drifted off into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl—not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at a shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d drawn deliciously close, as if to kiss him—but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of the memory made him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savor the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted desperately to slip back into it.
But instead he was here. “Farish,” his grandmother was saying, “I sure do hate for you to get up.” Anxiously, pressing her hands together, she followed the salt and syrup with her eyes as Farish reached over and banged them down on the table. “Please don’t worry with that.”
