Found (5)

The landlord's man came out in January and hung a new door.

It was a different color from the frame and it did not sit right, and he said the frame had been sprung and would want replacing and that was not what he had been sent to do. He put a new knob on it with a key that turned hard. Laverne asked him what she owed and he said it had been taken care of, and she did not ask by who.

The kitchen table had a clean place on it about the size of a magazine, where the register had sat since November. She wiped the table around it for three weeks before she started wiping across it.

In the drawer under the phone, with the tape and the church directory and the flashlight, there was a pink carbon copy of something with her name printed at the top. She had not read it. She had put it in there the way you put a thing down when your hands are full, and it had stayed.

They took the tree down at the mall the first week of January. Laverne went by there on the way to the agency and they had the lift out and two men on it and most of it already in pieces on a pallet.

Neither of them ever said anything about it.

Aldina's hair grew out unevenly on the left.

She went back to school after the break and told Amber she had gotten it cut in town, and Laverne heard her say it from the front seat and did not correct her.

The Friday after that, Amber was in the back and asked was it true they were moving, and Aldina said they were going to a house on Sunset with three bedrooms and a carport and she was getting the front one with the window on the road.

"When," Amber said.

"When my mama says."

Laverne drove. There was a light at Sunset and she sat at it and it changed and she went on through.

Nobody from the agency said anything. Nobody at the Winn-Dixie said anything. Kenny Lackey's boy waved at her from the bay when she went by on Old 421, the way he always had.

Twice the phone rang and there was nobody on it.

On a Saturday morning at the end of the month Aldina was at the table with a bowl and Laverne was standing at the sink, and Aldina said, "That night when you got the water."

Laverne turned the tap off.

"Which night."

"Before the dentist." Aldina put her spoon down. She was not looking up, but she was not hiding either; she said it the way she said the weather. "There was a man standing at the coats."

"Aldina."

"He was there before you came out. He came in the front and he stood there and he pushed himself back into them with his arms down." She flattened her own palms against her sides to show it. "I could see him from my door because my door was open."

Laverne stood with her hand on the tap.

"You stopped," Aldina said. "You stopped right by him. And he stopped breathing. He held it the whole time you were standing there. And then you went in your room and he waited a while and then he went out the front and pulled it to behind him so it wouldn't click."

The heat pump came on under the house and ran.

"His jacket sounded like a grocery bag," Aldina said. "Every time he moved."

She waited.

She was eight years old and she had done it the way you do a thing you have practiced, all in order, everything in it that mattered and nothing that did not, and now she waited with her hands in her lap to find out which way it was going to go.

Laverne did not say she was dreaming.

She did not say raccoons, and she did not say the coats, and she did not say she had been at Hollis's that day and that Hollis smoked in the house with the windows shut and that it got in everything and stayed for days.

She came over and sat down across from her daughter and put her hands flat on the table, one on either side of the clean place, and she looked at her, and Aldina looked back.

Then Aldina picked up her spoon.

She finished the cereal and rinsed the bowl and put it in the drainer, and got her shoes from beside her bed, and put them on sitting on the floor by the door, and went out to sit in the car.

Laverne stayed where she was.

From the table she could see down the hall to the coats on their pegs, her work coat and Aldina's and the old green one nobody wore, hanging exactly the way they had hung all winter, in the space a man had stood in, in the dark, holding his breath, eighteen inches from her hand.

~End~