Laying in bed now, I did the numbering in my head—we needed six hundred fifty more dollars to buy the both of us.
I broke the quiet. “Is this how you gonna be all night—sit in the dark and stare up at a hole in the wall?”
“It’s something to do. Go on back to sleep.”
Go back to sleep—that was a lot of useless.
“Where do you keep the key to the chest?”
“Is that how you gon be? Lay there figurin’ how to peek at my quilt? The key hid on the back of nowhere.”
I let it be, and my mind drifted off to Sarah.
I didn’t care for this Mr. Williams. The only thing he’d ever said to me was, “Remove yourself hastily.” I’d been building a fire in the drawing room so the man could get himself warm, and that’s what he had to say, Remove yourself hastily.
I couldn’t see Sarah married to him any more than I could see myself married to Goodis. He still trailed after me, wanting you know what. Mauma said, tell him, go jump in the lake.
Yesterday, Sarah had asked, “When I marry, would you come with me to live?”
“Leave mauma?”
Real quick, she’d said, “Oh, you don’t have to . . . I just thought . . . Well, I’ll miss you.”
Even though we didn’t have that much to say to each other anymore, I hated to think about us parting. “I reckon I’ll miss you, too,” I told her.
Cross the room, mauma said, “How old you reckon I is?” She never did know her age for sure, didn’t have a record. “Seems I had you when I’m ’bout the same old as you now, and you nineteen. What that make me?”
I counted it in my head. “You’re thirty-eight.”
“That ain’t too old,” she said.
We stayed like that a while, mauma staring at the window, mulling over her age, and me laying in the bed wide awake now, when she cried out, “Look, Handful! Look a here!” She leapt to her feet, bouncing on her knees. “There go ’nother one!”
I bolted from the bed.
“The stars,” she said. “They falling just like they done for your granny-mauma. Come on. Hurry.”
We yanked on our shoes and sack coats, snatched up an old quilt, and were out the door, mauma tearing cross the work yard, me two steps behind.
We spread the quilt on the ground out in the open behind the spirit tree and lay down on top of it. When I looked up, the night opened and the stars poured down.
Each time a star streaked by, mauma laughed low in her throat.
When the stars stopped falling and the sky went still, I saw her hands rub the little mound of her belly.
And I knew then what it was she wasn’t too old for.
Sarah
Sarah, you should sit down. Please.”
That was how Thomas began. He gestured toward the two chairs beside the window that overlooked the piazza, but it was I alone who sat.
It was half past noon, and here was my brother, the au courant of Charleston barristers, interrupting his lawyering to speak with me in the privacy of my room. His face was pale with what I took to be dread.
Naturally, my mind went to Father. One could scarcely look at him these days without worrying about him, this thin, hollowed-out man with the uncertain gait and erratic hand. Despite that, there’d been some improvement lately, enough that he’d returned to his duties on the bench.