All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter Page A

producing flash after flash of memory. A storm was swirling through her mind, and the water from it spilled out of the holes in her head. She cried quietly, and Mary Kate was drawn to her silence.
    She left the girls in the living room and went to the kitchen. When she saw Venita there, crying and scraping away at the pan, she stopped. This was none of her business. She was going to turn and leave when Venita looked up.
    Her eyes were a bruised pink, the color of the crushed petals of a damask rose. In her eyes, mixed right in with the blemished rose color, was a question she had been formulating even in her days of invisibility, a question that she was looking for Mary Kate to answer. But the first words that came to her were “I’m all right.”
    â€œWhy you crying? You crying for something.”
    â€œNothing,” Venita said, and she added, “I had a dream.”
    She told Mary Kate about her dream, and while she talked she scraped the pan. Venita stopped crying while she told it, but when she came to the end, she started crying again.
    â€œMe and Moses ain’t never going to have children.”
    And so here it was. The field that stood between them, so vast and unexplored, reduced to a short walk across a kitchen floor.
    â€œYou don’t know that,” Mary Kate said as she walked to where Venita stood. “Ain’t no way of knowing that,” she said, patting Venita on the back just the way she would have patted a baby.
    Mary Kate was not convinced of the truth of what she had said. She had said it the way you tell a child, “Don’t be scared of the dark. Ain’t nothing in the dark going to hurt you.” She said it like a well-intended lie. Because you could tell your child not to be afraid of the dark and know there was a world of fear there.
    Once when she was home alone at night, when she had only Dorene and Mikey, Mikey came to her. He had heard a noise downstairs. Samuel was pulling some nights so there would be extra money for Christmas, so she had to go investigate the noise. In her sleepy state she got up and tiptoed down the stairs, Mikey at her heels. From the bottom of the stairs she saw the shadow of a man standing in the kitchen. She screamed. Mikey screamed, and they both ran up the stairs. Mikey dove in the bed with her.
    â€œWhat was it, Mama?”
    â€œWhat you think it was? Shush now.”
    She told Samuel about it the next morning. “That wasn’t nothing but my work clothes throwed ’cross a hanger.”
    â€œNo they wasn’t. That’s what them clothes want you to think. Some kind of haint was what it was. Mikey saw it too.”
    â€œWhat you see, son?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “Mama saw something.”
    â€œMama saw something?
Mama
saw something?” The pitch of her voice was rising. “He the one woke
me
up. Talking ’bout
he
heard something. Talking ’bout
Mama
saw something. Spent the whole night clinging to me like a little monkey. Had to peel him off my back this morning.”
    â€œYou got to stop worrying,” Mary Kate said now to Venita. “The Lord going to bless you. He got something good planned for you.”
    â€œYou really think so?” Venita asked. She was calmer. The storm inside her was blowing over.
    â€œLook what he did for Sarah.”
    â€œWho Sarah? She live ’round here?” Venita asked. Just then they heard a crash in the living room.
    â€œSomething broke,” Dorene called out.
    â€œSomething broke, my foot. What you done touched I asked you to let ’lone?” Mary Kate said. “Come on in here and bring the baby.”
    Dorene appeared at the kitchen door holding a squirming Mary. “It ain’t enough you girls make a mess at home, but you to come to somebody else house tearing up. I’m a whip you.”
    â€œDon’t do that,” Venita said. “Come here,” she said to Dorene.