Allison walked to the grocery and got a cardboard box for Ida to carry her cuttings in, so they wouldn’t get broken during the trip. With what money she had—thirty-two dollars, old Christmas money—she bought Ida everything she could think of that Ida might want or need: cans of salmon, which Ida loved to eat for lunch, with crackers; maple syrup; knee-high stockings and a fancy bar of English lavender soap; Fig Newtons; a box of Russell Stover chocolates; a booklet of stamps; a pretty red toothbrush and a tube of striped toothpaste and even a large jar of One-A-Day vitamins.
Allison carried it all home, and then spent a long time that evening out on the back porch, wrapping up Ida’s collection of rooted cuttings, each snuff tin and plastic cup in its own carefully fashioned sleeve of wet newspaper. In the attic was a pretty red box, full of Christmas lights. Allison had dumped them all out on the floor and carried the box down to her bedroom to re-pack the presents, when her mother pattered down the hallway (her pace light, unconcerned) and put her head in at the door.
“It’s lonesome here without Harriet, isn’t it?” she asked brightly. Her face was shiny with cold cream. “Do you want to come in my room and watch television?”
Allison shook her head. She was disturbed: this was very unlike her mother, to go around after ten at night taking an interest, issuing invitations.
“What are you doing? I think you ought to come in with me and watch TV,” said her mother, when Allison did not answer.
“Okay,” said Allison. She stood up.
Her mother was looking at her strangely. Allison, in an agony of embarrassment, glanced away. Sometimes, especially when the two of them were alone together, she sensed keenly her mother’s disappointment that she was herself and not Robin. Her mother couldn’t help this—in fact, she tried touchingly hard to conceal it—but Allison knew that her very existence was a reminder of what was missing, and in deference to her mother’s feelings she did her best to stay out of the way and make herself small and inconspicious around the house. The next few weeks would be difficult, with Ida gone and Harriet away.
“You don’t
Allison felt her face growing red. She avoided her mother’s eye. All the colors in the bedroom—including the box—seemed far too acid and bright.
After her mother left again, Allison finished packing the box and then put the money left over into an envelope, in with the book of stamps, a school picture of herself and her address, carefully printed on a sheet of good stationery. Then she tied the box up with a string of green tinsel.
Much later, in the middle of the night, Allison woke with a start from a bad dream—a dream she’d had before, of standing before a white wall only inches from her face. In the dream she was unable to move, and it was as if she would have to go on looking at the blank wall for the rest of her life.
She lay quietly in the dark, staring at the box on the floor by her bed, until the street lamps went off and the room was blue with the dawn. At last, she got out of bed in her bare feet; with a straight pin from the bureau, she sat down cross-legged by the box, and spent a laborious hour or so pricking out tiny secret messages in the cardboard, until the sun was up and the room was light again: Ida’s last day. IDAJ WE LOVE YOU, the messages on the box said. IDA R. BROWNLEE. COME BACK IDA. DON’T FORGET ME, IDA. LOVE.
————
Though he felt guilty for it, Danny was enjoying his grandmother’s stay in the hospital. Things were easier without her at home, stirring up Farish all the time. And though Farish was doing a lot of drugs (with Gum away, there was nothing to stop him from sitting in front of the television with the razor and the mirror all night long) he wasn’t so likely to blow up at his brothers without the additional strain of gathering three times a day for Gum’s large fried meals in the kitchen.
Danny was doing a lot of drugs himself, but that was all right; he was going to stop soon but he just hadn’t got to that point. And the drugs gave him enough energy to clean the whole trailer. Barefoot, sweating, stripped to his jeans, he washed windows and walls and floors; he threw out all the rancid grease and bacon fat that Gum secreted around the kitchen in smelly old coffee cans; he scrubbed down the bathroom, and polished the linoleum until it shone, and bleached all their old underwear and T-shirts until they were white again. (Their grandmother had never got used to the washing machine Farish had bought her; she was bad about washing the white clothes with colors, so they got gray-looking.)
