Signed, Skye Harper (2 page)

She sent postcards all the time in the beginning, fewer the more time went on. I’ve saved them.

Hey Girlies,

Been dancing in Vegas. Thank goodness I got me them tap lessons I wanted when I was little Momma.

Or

How’s My Girls,

Done met someone who said I could be a star.

And every once in a while a letter would come like this

Maybe I will come home soon.
{ 15 }

Nothing seems to be working my way.

Nanny and me? We have been doing fine. I missed Momma about a year when I was nothing but a baby, but since I have been a-okay. The cards make her more real, and I can imagine her the best person ever, the kind of person Nanny says she was.

Not the kind who would leave her kid.
{ 16 }

10

My Momma, Part Two

Nanny says Momma had “a pretty good self-esteem” and was “never really satisfied” being born and raised in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.

“I told her,” Nanny has said, “not to leave, and for sure not to leave her little girl with an old woman.” (Nanny is in her forties and would look younger, I bet, if she’d lay off the ciggies. All that smoking has made lines appear around her mouth. Her hair, though, is still dark as night with just three white hairs that she won’t pull out when I suggest that she do so. “They double. You pull one out, tomorrow you got two where the one was.” Instead my grandmother complains about going gray.)

When Nanny tells me stories about my mother, I kind of shrug them off. If anything, I feel sort of blah about her. I don’t think of Momma often—except when a postcard comes. Or the dreaded letter. Why should I? She’s not here.

She’s
never
been here.

Instead, I hide the correspondence in a shoe box under my bed and worry about what’s going on with whoever is in love on
General Hospital
or
One Life to Live
. Will I find my own leading man? Or I wonder if I can get a hundred
{ 17 }

bottles collected for five bucks so I can take me and Nanny to the drive-in and buy us hot dogs.

There’s nothing better than a drive-in hot dog.

But the biggest wonder I have is if I will swim in the 1976 Summer Olympics. My most secret goal of all.
{ 18 }

11

Momma’s Thinking

What would my momma think if she knew I was the fastest-swimming girl in all my high school (both with the backstroke
and
the butterfly)?

What would she think to know I timed myself (with Patty Bailey’s help) and have proven I can outswim half the
boys
on the team too?

What would she think if I told her I swim in her old suit, one I found at the bottom of a box of saved items my grandmother has hidden away in case her daughter waltzes herself back home?
{ 19 }

12

More of Momma’s Thinking

Does
she
have a poster of Mark Spitz on her wall?

Did she spend her hard-earned money on
Sports Illustrated
to get the latest facts on him?

Did she find a way into the school pool, long after the bona fide swimmers are gone, and it’s just her and the clock, the lanes marked with blue and white buoys, the sound of life magnified whenever she’s under the water?
{ 20 }

13

Fool

I am fooling myself.

My momma thinks nothing at all about me.

Stolen swimming time or not.
{ 21 }

14

Nanny

Nanny would kill me if she knew I broke into the school to swim.

Kill.

I swear. With her bare hands.

And I know what she would say while she was doing it.
You could have drowned, and been found floating, hair like a blond sheet, facedown. And how would I feel burying my only granddaughter?

Some things—like breaking and entering into the high school’s facility—are better left unsaid.
{ 22 }

15

Nanny, Again

Now Thelma whined at the back door, but I ignored her. Outside, the eaves dripped the leftover rain. Inside, everything felt damp, the way the house always does before and after a good storm.

“What do you think’s gonna happen to Momma?” I said.

Nanny didn’t say anything, just took little sips of her hot coffee.

I sighed, making sure I did it all quietlike. “We don’t need her here,” I said after a minute.

Outside Denny, our rooster, let out a crow that sounded about as breathy as my sigh. That thing is on his last leg. Really. He’s a one-legged rooster that Nanny has grown attached to and won’t kill ’cause she says he’d make a tough chicken stew, but I know it’s because she’s fond of him. She bathes him and lets him inside and everything.

Nanny came to the table, a platter of biscuits in one hand and the pot of hot syrup in the other. I smelled vanilla and maple. My stomach growled. Thelma let out a yip by the screen door.

“Go get the hash browns,” Nanny said, and I did.
{ 23 }

“This day”—Nanny set everything out on hot pads so’s not to scar the Formica—“is the day I been waiting on.”

I swallowed a glob of spit, then filled my blue plate with biscuits, steaming and buttery. I couldn’t split them open fast enough. Piled up those extra-crispy hash browns, too.

“I miss your momma,” Nanny said, then bowed her head, just like that, so we could pray.
{ 24 }

16

Surprise 2

I felt my eyes grow wide, but I tried to keep control of them.

Nanny missed Momma.

Who’da thunk it?
{ 25 }

17

Nanny, Part Three

Nanny hasn’t cried one tear of my entire life. She doesn’t cry at our soaps—and doesn’t look at me when I do.

She didn’t shed a tear at
Love Story
when Ryan O’Neal’s most beloved Ali MacGraw succumbed to cancer and died in his very arms. I cried so hard that Thelma, who sat in the middle at the drive-in, howled when licking my tears away didn’t help. Nanny said, “Love means way more than saying sorry, Winston, and don’t you forget it.” Then she threw her cigarette out the window, gunned the motor, and drove away, almost tearing the speaker off the pole outside the car.

Nanny didn’t shed a tear when Neil Armstrong bounced out of the Apollo 11 capsule saying, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” I got teary eyed at that, right there in the classroom.

She didn’t even cry when Cassius Clay won his fight against Sonny Liston years earlier. And she had five bucks on that one.

No, my grandmother is fierce as a bear and doesn’t have time for tears.
{ 26 }

18

Nanny, Part Four

Here are things Nanny
does
have time for:

1. Me

2. Thelma

3. Her job as head cashier and front-end manager at Leon’s Seafood Restaurant

4. Denny and the rest of the chickens

5. Watching sports

6. Reading Harlequin romances by the stack from our downtown library

7. Soaps with her best and only granddaughter
{ 27 }

19

Worries

I have to say, seeing my nana with her head down like that worried me.

“We can get there somehow,” I said. My fingers were sticky, though I used a fork to eat. “If you want. Nevada’s not so far from New Smyrna Beach.”

Nanny looked up at me. Outside I could hear the chickens waking, letting out soft clucks. They always make these noises that I’m pretty sure mean the day is fresh and new. They got going-to-bed sounds too. I wiped at my forehead, which had gone sweaty with Nanny’s glare.

“More’n two twenty-three hundred miles,” she said.

“Really?”

Nanny nodded. “I checked over with Mr. Wilson.”

Mr. Wilson runs the two gas pumps out on the road into town proper. He laughs at everything I say and gives me chunks of sugarcane when we stop to get gas. He doesn’t mind if we can only afford thirty-two cents worth of fuel. Maybe everybody in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, buys that much at a time.

Oh well. I shrugged. But I said the right thing. “It doesn’t look so far on the map in Mr. Redfoot’s class.”

“I know it,” Nanny said and set to eating.
{ 28 }

20

Working

Nanny and I ate the rest of breakfast in silence, then I went to gather eggs.

“I got to go to work at eleven,” Nanny said. “Check the till and fold up silverware in napkins. You want to bus tables during rush for a bit of cash? Maudy called this morning to say she wouldn’t be in. Again.”

Maudy’s getting ready to marry some navy boy and misses a lot of work.

I’d wanted to stay home and read
The Adventuress
. Her tawny lover would tame her wild desires. Said so on the cover. I wanted to see how the green-eyed vixen got what was coming to her.

Nanny clucked her tongue at me, meaning
Get on with it, girl, make a decision
. She had changed into a pair of black nylon pants and white shirt. Her hair was held back in a silver clasp, and she wore red lipstick, the only makeup she ever puts on. She doesn’t need mascara, not the way her black eyelashes curl up on that tanned skin.

“Depends,” I said, gesturing at the T-shirt-no-bra-cutoff-jeans look that is my fashion statement. Quick, like a hummingbird, came this thought:
What’s Momma wearing
{ 29 }

this morning?
The consideration caused me to stumble a little.

“Hurry it up,” Nanny said. She’d gathered her pocketbook and now stashed a fresh pack of cigarettes in it. Her low heels clicked on the wooden floor.

“Sorry,” I said, gathering my wits. “Can I stay in this? The apron goes to my calves, you know, so I should be okay. People wouldn’t see what I’m wearing.”

This is what I say every morning before going to work.

Nanny shrugged. “If you contain your womanhood.”

That’s what Nanny always says too.

I rolled my eyes. Big bosoms run in the family. Nanny can hardly see over hers. At least, that’s what she says. She also says I am on my way to what God gave her, whether I like it or not. At this point, I don’t care one way or the other. Unless, of course, I can’t see what’s in front of me. Or these bosoms keep me from the Olympics. I bet it’s been known to happen.

“Let’s get then,” Nanny said, so I let Thelma in, fed her, kissed her three times on the forehead, put on a bra, brushed my teeth, waved good-bye to my Mark Spitz poster, and we got.
{ 30 }

21

Nanny’s True Love

Leon’s is about the onliest place in several cities—including Orlando—with seafood so good that every US president has stopped in for a meal at least once. Richard Nixon came in with a whole bunch of people last December.

I don’t know how long ago, Nanny helped her best friend Leon Simmons start the place. A million years ago, maybe? Anyway, I think she hopes he might leave his wife, Janet Green Simmons, and partner up with Nanny for the business and for life.

“Last time I cried,” Nanny told me once, “was over Leon Simmons.”

It was a moment of weakness, the telling.

“I believe you,” I had said.

“But your granddaddy was a good man while he lasted, and he cared for me that little while and now, with him gone, I got all that I need. You and Thelma and Denny.” She’d looked off sort of thoughtful. Had she been thinking of my momma then? And I hadn’t known it?

Granddaddy took off right after he impregnated my grandmother. But not in his car. He rode away on a Greyhound bus. Denny and Thelma weren’t alive at the time.
{ 31 }

With all that leaving going on in my young life (and before it too), you might think me bitter or gimpy or maybe a girl with a twitchy eye. That is not the case.

Here’s how I see it. There is such a thing as one true love.

Sometimes you marry the wrong man and have the wrong kids but the right granddaughter. And later you get a best dog and a pet rooster, too.

Some people are lucky.

Like Nanny and me.
{ 32 }

22

Wishes

Sometimes . . .

Sometimes you wish the man you loved saw you past his long bangs and girlfriends and surfboard.

But that is the way life is.

Maybe some green-eyed vixens are not meant to be tamed. Even if they want taming.
{ 33 }

23

My True Love

On our way out to Leon’s, the Blue Goose sputtering like he couldn’t make it another mile but somehow enduring, I thought about
my
true love. Steve Simmons the First. That’s right. Leon and Janet’s only son. (He is a very close second on the love meter to Mark Spitz.)

This early afternoon, the car windows were down, even though summer was already so hot I thought I’d melt into a puddle of grease. Dang this bra! I sweated extra every place that thing cinched me.

(Soon as I got the apron on, I would take this bra off, hide it in the walk-in freezer near the fresh-cut beef, and put it on before I left work, so the ride home would be cool and comfortable, at least for a mile or so.)

Here’s the scoop. Not about my bra. About Steve Simmons the First.

I have loved Steve since third grade, when I was sure I wouldn’t make it home from school and he towed me on his bike to the light at the big road. We separated there, and I walked the rest of the way, stopping only to pee in the ditch where the weeds were high, and I was worried a snake might bite me in the privates.
{ 34 }

Anyway.