The Homemaker — Part III

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<– Parts I, II 

Mr. Powell picked me up early the next morning when the light had just broken and the air was still dewy and cool. I saw him coming up the drive in a gray Explorer and headed out of the trailer before he could get a glimpse inside. He stepped down from his SUV, and his eyes scanned my home from over the roof of his car. I could see his tongue working inside his mouth, like he was chewing something as he thought.

I hadn’t slept the night before and had stayed up making drop biscuits. I was so terrified he would change his mind about the job that my hands were shaking. I gripped my round plastic food container and held it to my chest.

“Well, get on in,” he said finally, and I let out my pent-up breath.

I didn’t say anything on the way, but listened to Mr. Powell talk about his daughter who was marrying a lawyer in Atlanta. She and his wife were up there trying on wedding dresses. And his son, who had attended the private school, was starting his second year at UGA in pre-med — all honors classes.

Mr. Powell drove past the old house. The tall grass was seeding and the lantana growing on the side of the porch was a bushy riot of pale pink, yellow and white.  The windows reminded me of the eyes you see on folks in the nursing homes — empty and waiting.  As I looked out the windshield, I felt the same sensation I did that night when Sharee and I had broken in. That the place could see me.

“I done told Randall Bozeman he needed to cut the grass,” Mr. Powell said, jerking his head toward the house. “Don’t none of them Bozemans take care of nothing.”

“Do you think anyone could fix it up like on This Old House?”

“Shoot. It’d be easier just to start over. Everybody wants an old house until they live in one.”

We turned onto the road running along the pecan grove and pulled into the gravel circle drive of a flat white bungalow.  In the center of the yard was a stone bird bath nestled among azalea bushes. Around the perimeter were scattered bright pink crepe myrtles. Several pots filled with tiny purple flowers were set on the concrete pad in front of the door.

I stepped down from the Explorer and gazed through the neat rows of pecan trees. I could see the gray bones of the old house through the leaves. At that moment, I wanted this job more than I had anything before. Anxiety dug like a cat’s claw into my chest. What if these nice people found out about my family? What if I screwed up and Mr. Powell said I couldn’t come back?

But he came for me every day. I would use the spray head to give Mrs. Powell a shower as she sat in the special chair set in the bathtub. Then I would dry her off and help her dress. Her hands shook so bad that I had to apply her Mary Kay makeup for her. She wanted bright blue eye shadow that matched her eyes and pink lipstick. I drove her Buick to the beauty parlor every Tuesday so she could get her fine white hair fixed.

She would sit at the kitchen table while I made meals. I baked biscuits, pastries and casseroles using the recipes that she had written on index cards. She would tell me stories about the people whose names were scribbled on the recipes.  Ann’s whipping cream cake. Hilda’s green bean salad. The recipes came from old neighbors, church members, and some were her mother’s and grandmother’s.

In the afternoons, if the temperature wasn’t too high, she would sit under the large umbrella I opened on the picnic table and give me orders about how to take care of her garden. I learned how to fertilize her azaleas and grafted hydrangeas and forsythia. I would use her old gardening gloves and a shovel to plant yellow pansies around her mailbox in the winter and hot pink impatiens in the spring. At the hardware store, Mrs. Powell picked out lattice that I leaned against her house, and I wove a fragrant jasmine vine through the crisscrossing slats.

Sometimes, when Mrs. Powell was napping, I walked up to the old house.  Plywood covered up where we had broken in, so I would cup my hands and peer through the windows or just sit on the steps, close my eyes, and listen to the rising wind rustle the pecan leaves. I began to make up my own romances in my head about people who might have lived in the house, and I envisioned them walking about a beautiful garden of stone walls and falling ivy, like in Mrs. Powell’s gardening books.

I was outside cutting big blooms of purple hydrangeas to put in a vase when I saw a white truck drive up behind the old house. A man of medium height, clad in jeans, a red cap and a white t-shirt over his muscular shoulders stepped down from the cab. He walked around the house with an uneven gait, not exactly a limp, but a slight drag to his left leg. He returned to his truck, leaned against the hood and took off his hat, revealing a dark bronze face and head full of shiny black hair. A Mexican.

I heard my own sharp inhalation. The only Mexicans I knew worked in the chicken processing plant or on building crews. I was terrified that he had come to see about tearing down my house. Maybe they were finally going to do like Mr. Powell suggested. Demolish it and build something new.

He drew out a key from his front jeans pocket, opened the padlock on the back door and disappeared inside.  I walked to the edge of the pecan grove, gripping my fistful of flowers, and waited for him to come out until I finally had to leave to get Mrs. Powell up from her nap.

I helped her to the bathroom and then led her to her favorite spot on the sofa. I pulled up a TV tray and turned on PBS to a travel show on Greece. I returned to the kitchen to get out some butterbeans I had been simmering on the stove. As I put them in a bowl, I looked through the kitchen window. The truck was still there and the back door still open. But an hour later, as dusk was setting in, I returned to make dinner and saw that the truck was gone.

That night, and for several other nights, I lay in my bed with my door locked and a pillow around my head so I didn’t have to hear the noise coming from my parent’s den. My house was going to be demolished. Put down like a sick dog. A knot in my stomach burned, and I drew my legs up. Perhaps I had believed that all my fantasies and stories about the place were like tiny prayers to save it for me. That if I cared for something enough, the invisible hand of God would intervene or such. But that was stupid. I was stupid. God didn’t care about old houses, not when so many people were suffering in the world. Like those starving children with swollen bellies on the covers of pamphlets they gave out at church.

I studied my dresser. Purple cotton PJs stuck out the top edge of the stuffed drawer, the surface stacked with cracked paperback books that I got at Goodwill. The chain with my gold cross hung off the side of the mirror. This was all that was mine. All I owned. I thought about the guidance counselor’s words: “You can’t just float through life thinking Mommy or Daddy or somebody will take care of you.”

Part IV –>