Mr. Brown had tried to tell her the 94 on her original test wasn’t going to hurt her grade, but she refused to let it go.
“Ruby, you missed a question. It’s not the end of the world. Besides, for the rest of your life you’re going to remember what a carpetbagger is. That’s the whole point.”
It wasn’t the whole point. It wasn’t any part of the point. The point was to get an A in the class so she could argue her way out of the so-called Advanced American History junior spring class and take history at the community college instead, because that would help her get out of here and into college—hopefully with a scholarship, hopefully far, far away from this house. Not that she felt the least inclination to explain any of this to Mr. Brown. But she pleaded, and eventually he gave in.
“Okay. But a take-home test. Do it on your own time. Look stuff up.”
“I’ll do it tonight. And I promise, I absolutely will not look stuff up.”
He sighed and sat down to write another fifteen questions, just for her.
She was writing a longer than necessary response about the Ku Klux Klan when her mother came down the stairs and padded into the kitchen, phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, already reaching for the refrigerator door.
“Honey, she’s close by. Right now. I can feel her.”
There was a pause. Her mother, apparently, was gathering information. Ruby tried to return to the Ku Klux Klan.
“Yes, she misses you, too. She’s watching over you. She wanted me to say something about … what is it, honey?”
Diandra was now standing before the open refrigerator. After a moment, she reached for a can of Diet Dr Pepper.
“A cat? Does a cat mean anything to you?”
Silence. Ruby looked down at her test sheet. She still had nine answers to go, but not with the psychic world filling the little kitchen.
“Yes, she said it was a tabby cat. She used the word ‘tabby.’ How’s the cat doing, honey?”
Ruby sat up straight against the little banquette. She was hungry, but she’d promised herself not to make any dinner until she’d done what she needed to do, and finished proving to him what she needed to prove. It was the tail end of their grocery week, and not a whole lot in the fridge, she’d checked, but there was a frozen pizza, and some green beans.
“Oh, that’s good to know. She’s so happy about that. Now honey, we’re almost at half an hour. Do you have more questions for me? Do you want me to stay on the line with you?”
Now Diandra was walking back to the staircase and Ruby watched her go. The house was so old. It had belonged to her grandparents, and her grandfather’s parents even farther back, and though there’d been changes, wallpaper and paint and a wall-to-wall carpet in the living room that was supposed to be beige, there was still old stenciling on the walls in some of the rooms. Around the inside of the front door, for example: a row of misshapen pineapples. Those pineapples had never made sense to Ruby, at least not until her class had gone on a day trip to some early American museum and she’d seen the exact same thing in one of the buildings there. Apparently, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, which made it about the last thing that belonged on the wall of their home, because Diandra’s entire life was the opposite of hospitality. She couldn’t even remember the last time somebody had stopped by with a misdelivered piece of mail, let alone for a cup of her mother’s terrible coffee.
Ruby returned to her test. The tabletop was sticky from that morning’s breakfast syrup, or maybe the mac and cheese of last night’s dinner, or maybe something her mother had eaten or done at the table while she’d been at school. The two of them never ate at the table together. Ruby declined, as much as was possible, to place her nutritional well-being in the hands of her mother, who evidently maintained her girlish physique—literally girlish: from the back, mother and daughter looked absurdly alike—through an apparent diet of celery sticks and Diet Dr Pepper. Diandra had stopped feeding her daughter around the time Ruby turned nine, which was also around the time Ruby had learned how to open a can of spaghetti for her own damn self.
