The barber didn’t react to the name Duke Mathews, ignoring the suggestion that he even knew who that was and causing Darren to wonder about the extent of Pete’s stroke. Had he suffered more brain damage than was obvious in his gait, in his bad arm? From what Darren knew of his parents’ dalliance — quick and ill-advised, according to his uncles — there was no way Duke had ever met a brother living in Nacogdoches. “I’m going to go in and see Bell,” Darren said, the name resting funny on his tongue. “She’s got some papers and some things she wanted me to take a look at.”
“That poor girl, I know. I hope you find her,” Pete said.
The screen door creaked when Darren opened it and stepped into a tiny sitting room at the front of the house, overstuffed with two couches and a large, low-lying dark wood coffee table he almost tripped over. Music was playing on a boom box set on a dining-room table that was shoved up against a wall. It had bills and newspapers and a laundry basket on one side of it, the other side with two place settings. Fork and knife on plastic place mats with poinsettias on them, and two glasses of orange juice. The music was Irma Thomas, “Ruler of My Heart,” a swinger from the sixties. He heard his mother singing over the sound of running water in the kitchen. Ruler of my heart, robber of my soul… It felt wrong sneaking up on her like this, during what felt like an intimate moment, a woman singing about a broken heart. He cleared his throat loudly.
“One second, Pete.”
She was just pulling two plates out of the oven. They were covered loosely in foil, swirls of steam escaping the sides, and Bell had fashioned two dishrags into impromptu pot holders. She was starting for the dining-room table when she looked up and realized it was Darren in the kitchen with her and not her brother Pete. The sight of her son stopped her in her tracks. She stared at him for a long moment, a mix of surprise and something akin to tempered relief, a look on her face that suggested any joy at her son’s presence was not yet earned. Then the plates got too hot for standing still and she started walking fast. Darren ducked out of the entryway to the kitchen to allow her to get to the dining-room table quickly. She set the two plates on the plastic Christmas place mats and then looked up, as if she wasn’t sure what to do next.
She asked if she could fix him a plate, that it would do him good to sit down and eat something. Darren ignored this and got down to it: He had more information now and wanted a chance to take a look at the things she had recovered from the trash bin out back of the Rho Beta sorority house. He presented all this with a flat affect that suggested no warmth. Bell gave a little nod of appreciation for her current standing with Darren. This would not be a convivial visit, no sitting down to tea and talk, no baby steps toward reconciliation. By showing up at his house three days ago, his mother had put him back on the clock. He was here to do a job, to gather what information he could to find Sera. “Okay, give me a second,” she said. Then she hollered out to her brother on the front porch, “Petey, your plate is on the table.”
“Butch is almost done,” Pete said. “Be in there in a minute.”
“You want me to put it back in the oven?”
“You sweet for that,” Pete said. “But I’ll be in in a second.”
Brother and sister had an easy rapport. She was warm with him, doting.
In fact, being inside this low-ceilinged four-room house, the walls close, the light dim, and the smell an inviting mix of warm laundry and the home-cooked meal on the table, butter beans and chicken smothered in gravy and onions, Darren felt he’d walked into the kind of home he’d expected when he first met his mother — not the trailer, the run-down tin can that smelled of cheap beer and cigarettes, where he’d actually first laid eyes on Bell Callis when he was an eight-year-old boy, holding his uncle William’s hand, anxious and a little scared to meet this woman he’d only heard about. His mom.
He followed his mother on the narrow trail of low-pile carpet through the house, noting the many unframed watercolors that were taped to the walls, each a variation on a theme, weepy images of the famed Zion Hill Baptist Church — the clover-like windows and Gothic arches, the intricate woodwork and morning light on the cross. Shortly, they arrived at a bedroom. It was tiny, with bright blue shag carpeting that at first glance gave the impression of a bearskin rug made out of Cookie Monster. The walls were a pale blue, giving the decor a seventies ombré effect. In keeping with the look of the decade, the bed was covered with a knotty macramé-style blanket. And resting on top, in neat rows, were hair combs, school papers, a few items of clothing, photographs, toiletries, spiral notebooks, and a bulging pencil case. Bell had taken the time to cover the bed in sheets of wax paper rolled out from a box of it in the kitchen, protecting the “evidence,” as Darren had called it, or her bedspread, or both. For this was clearly Bell’s bedroom. The faint scent of cigarettes, a pack of which he saw resting on the edge of the dresser, next to her car keys for the Nissan parked at his house just a few days ago. That she had saved and protected these pieces of Sera Fuller’s life moved Darren twice over. She’d done it for Sera, yes. But she’d also done this for him.
“You knew I was coming?” he said.
“I hoped.”
She tapped her fingers against the doorjamb, letting the moment hang.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” Bell said, turning back toward the living room and the messy dining-room table where her dinner was waiting.
“Actually, I’d like you to stay.”
He told her the items would mean more with any context Bell might offer, having been around the girl, having cleaned her room and found all this in the trash. “Let’s start with the exact day that you found these items behind the sorority house.”
Darren caught a flash of a smile on her face. She had reeled him in after all.
Only this time he didn’t believe there was any game behind it, other than the thrill of having captured Darren’s attention. And he was willing to give it to her if it meant finding out more about Sera and where she might be. “You were at my house three days ago, on the twentieth,” he said, squeezing any hint of reproach out of his tone. There was no time for rehashing the anger he’d felt over her stealth arrival at his home. “How long before that had you discovered these items in the trash?” he said.
“The day before. It’s what made me decide I needed to find you.”
“And it was all dumped loose like this, or was some of it in bags, like trash bags?”
“It was thrown in there just like this, all over the place. I’m not even sure I got all of it, but I also wasn’t trying to get caught digging through them people’s trash. Woman before me got fired just for telling one of the girls that a peach in her room was gon’ go bad if she didn’t eat it soon. The girl complained that she felt pressured to eat the peach on the spot or hand it over to the maid. She said it felt like extortion.” Bell rolled her eyes.
“Why do you work there, after the way that girl talked to you?” He thought of Kelsey ordering around his sixty-two-year-old mother, how angry it had made him.
“It’s a job, Darren. A good one. The service that hires me out, they pay twelve dollars and twenty-five cents an hour to clean the sorority houses. Ain’t much, but it’s the best job I’ve ever had. Don’t have health insurance yet, but I’m hoping to use this job as a step up to something better.” She sounded focused and clear-eyed, something he was still getting used to. Darren looked at all the materials on the bed.
“You got some latex gloves, kitchen gloves or something?”
“Even better,” Bell said, sounding to Darren a little too enthusiastic as she stepped out of the room. A few moments later, she returned with two sets of tissue-thin black gloves clutched in her hand. “Petey started dyeing his hair last year. Don’t tell him I told you. He’s had a rough enough time of it with the stroke, don’t need me adding on about how he looks like he tripped during a roofing job and tarred his own head.”
Darren chuckled despite himself.
It felt strange having a secret with his mother, one he’d been invited into.
She passed out the gloves and they got to work.
10.
HE COULDN’T understand why Bell wouldn’t let up about the girl’s hair. She showed him three different products Sera had been using that weren’t for her grade of hair, told him coconut oil don’t work for everyone, but most folks don’t know that. In some ways, it was easier these days for the girls to stay off the chemicals, but it was more confusing too. When she quit pressing her hair when she was a teenager in the early seventies, you could go with either a tin of Royal Crown hair grease or whatever you could get off the stove. “Nobody’d ever heard of olive oil back then, but a girl I went to Nacogdoches High School with put canola oil in her hair, and that shit grew me about four inches my senior year,” Bell said, as she studied a brush she’d found. She ran a gloved hand over the multiple rows of teeth, which came apart with a flick of her finger. “This one supposed to enhance curls. I seen that on YouTube. But she must not have been using it right.” It wasn’t that the girl’s hair was ugly, Bell said; it just neither laid down smooth nor stood up with any personality or pride. “Confused is what I would call it.” Darren was only half listening as he flipped through Sera’s schoolwork, loose papers, and a fat spiral notebook from which a typed term paper and her class schedule slid out onto the bed. Something Bell said finally hit a landing pad in his brain.
“You went to high school here, in Nacogdoches?”
Bell nodded as she ran her gloved hands over a bundle of clothes. “My last year, yes. Nacogdoches was one of the first in East Texas to integrate their high school. This was years and years after that court case out of Kansas, mind you, 1970. Two years later, Petey took a job up here so I could enroll. He knew I was smart, thought it was a limit to what I could learn coming out of Camilla in San Jacinto County. Same reason your uncles sent you to high school in Houston when it was your time. It was Petey’s idea for me to live with him. He got a job out here just so I could make the transfer and say he was my guardian. He swept floors at one of the timber mills, worked his way up to janitorial supervisor. He did all that so I could get what the white kids was getting.”
Darren frowned and said, “I didn’t know.”
A cover for I don’t believe you.
“Wouldn’t had no reason to. Time you were born, I was back in Camilla.”
He rolled the story around in his mind. “But you had me when you were sixteen. How would you have finished your senior year of high school here in Nacogdoches?”
It sounded like a fantasy, a dream she might have had a long time ago.
Bell started to address his open doubt, but then she stopped suddenly.
