“Well, she could be,” Alice says. “I’m not taking her side, but she sounded like she could be real worried.”
“Don’t tell her where we are, okay?”
“Taylor, honey, all you’ve given me is a phone number of a pay phone. For all I know you’re at the North Pole.”
“If we were, maybe Santa Claus would pull some strings and get our lights turned back on.”
Alice feels the familiar deep frustration of loving someone by telephone. She wants to hug Taylor more than anything, and can’t. So much voice and so little touch seems unnatural, like it could turn your skin inside out if you’re not careful.
“Well, anyway, good luck when you talk to her, Mama. I better hang up on you now before you buy the phone company.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m just putting it on Sugar’s bill.
She said we could work it out later on.”
“Okay, Mama. Bye.”
Alice waits. “Bye,” she says, and then, “I love you,” but the clear space at the other end of the line that held Taylor has already closed.
She sits slumped in the chair, feeling paralyzed. She feels the faces of Sugar’s many grandchildren smiling at her from their frames on the wall. The ones who finished high school—mostly girls—Sugar has hung in the top row; below them, like a row of straight teeth, are the handsome, smiling, tricky-looking boys.
Sugar looks up. “Alice, honey, you look like you just run over your dog. How’s that girl of yours?”
“She’s all right. Having trouble making her payments.”
“Isn’t that the way,” Sugar says, sounding as if this were an old joke. “Come over here and I’ll show you what I’m making for Reena.”
Alice sits next to Sugar and has a look: terrapin shells with holes drilled in them, and gravel rattling inside. “It’s her shackles for the stomp dance,” Sugar says. “The young girls wear them on their legs. She thinks it’s the cat’s meow. Most of the kids would just as soon go to the powwows, where they can drink beer, but Reena’s real interested in the stomp dance.”
Alice takes one of the shackles in her hands. It’s surprisingly heavy. The fist-sized shells are sewn with leather thongs to the cut-off top of a cowboy boot, to make a sort of bumpy legging. The whole thing laces up the front with strips of gingham.
“Don’t she get tired with all that weight on her legs?” Alice asks, not really seeing the point.
“Well, she’ll have to practice. They wrap towels around their legs before they put them on, so they won’t blister.
These are training shackles, four shells on each one. As she gets better at it we’ll add more, till she gets up to thirteen.”
Alice hears the cough of a reluctant lawn mower starting up, then dying. “Why thirteen?”
Sugar thinks. “I don’t know. Maybe Roscoe would know.
That’s just the number.” She stands and looks outside, shading her eyes. “There’s one of the grandkids come to cut my grass. I can’t tell which one. You want some hot coffee?”
“No thanks,” Alice says. “I’m jumpy enough already.”
Sugar looks at her. “You are. Let’s go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.”
Alice is amazed by her cousin. Sugar is bent over with arthritis and doesn’t move fast, but she never seems to stop moving. Today she is wearing a flowered apron that looks like a seed catalog, and cotton slippers instead of tennis shoes. She told Alice at breakfast she always knows when there’s a storm coming in, because she can’t get her shoes on.
Alice follows her out the door and down a worn path through the yard, to where a tall boy in huge unlaced sneakers is fiddling with the mower. He stands up and bends his head down for Sugar’s kiss. A tiny blue butterfly lands on her shoulder.
“That means I’m gonna get a new apron,” Sugar says, turning her head and pursing her lips to look at the butterfly before it darts away. Sugar’s laugh is a wonderful, rising giggle.
She and Alice traipse down the hill past the outdoor kitchen, a wood stove with a pile of kindling beside it for cooking and canning when it’s too hot indoors. “We planted this mulberry tree when we moved here,” she tells Alice.
“First thing Roscoe said we had to do.”
“He likes mulberries?”
“No, he likes peaches. The birds like the mulberries better, so they’ll leave the peaches to us. These here are Indian peaches, they call them. Blood red in the center.” Sugar stops and looks at the dark mulberries scattered on the ground. “I wonder why chickens don’t eat them.”