Knee-Deep in Wonder by April Reynolds Page A

month to do it again, thrilled with Queen Ester’s delight and surprise.
    Slowly, once in a while became night after night. After tucking Queen Ester into bed, Liberty would appear again in her daughter’s doorway to ask breathlessly, as if the thought had just crossed her mind, “You can come sleep with me, Queenie. I sing you one more song fore bed.” And Queen Ester, who hadn’t fallen asleep at all, put aside her pretending to stumble into her mother’s arms. She had been waiting on her mother’s arrival, listening for Liberty’s pacing, since her excitement sprang not from the suspense of whether her mother would come but when. Sometimes Liberty would hold back for just minutes; other nights she would wait for as long as two hours to suddenly step out of the dark. Queen Ester cherished the moment when her mother walked into her room, wearing a mischievous smile, ready to feed her songs that felt like secrets.
    Bye-bye blues, bells ring, birds sing,
    sun is shining, no more pining.
    Just we two, smiling through,
    don’t sigh, don’t cry, bye-bye blues.
    Bye-bye to all your blues and sorrows,
    bye-bye cause they’ll be gone tomorrow.
    The song alone was worth spending an hour and sometimes two, clawing the sleep away, struggling against her body’s warmth. Liberty would sing the lead and Queen Ester would sing its counterpoint:
    Bye-bye blues, bells will ring and birds all sing.
    Stop your moping, keep on hoping.
    The two of us together, just me and you,
    will keep smiling, smiling through.
    So don’t you sigh and don’t you cry.
    Bye-bye blues.
    Liberty knew very few songs from beginning to end. So what if the song Queen Ester loved best contained the words “just we two”?
    They would live three more years alone, eight years altogether without husband, friend, or neighbor, and all the while Liberty treated their love like something covert, though there was no one watching. She knew Sweets had left, but to admit he was gone for good meant they were now two, a breakable number. So she treated Queen Ester as if someone lurked around the corner to snatch her. Strangely enough, it felt like the best way to be with her daughter—at once playful and imperiled. Whether they were two or three, love didn’t mean a thing until someone threatened to pull it away.
    By the time Sweets walked out, Liberty had skimmed five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars. Sweets had to sleep, and Liberty had taken as much as twenty dollars from his money clip at any one time. Sweets hadn’t noticed. And if he had, so what? She was the wife. Now church shoes were worn all through the week. Liberty dressed Queen Ester in the same outfit, ordered in three different colors. At forty-two cents a pound, Liberty fed them round steak every third month. Like her love, the money seemed endless. They lived high for almost eight years: ice cream on Sundays, rose-scented soap for washing up, hour-long baths till Queen Ester stepped out from the tub gleaming. Liberty had no friend to shove reality down her throat, no one to say, “Sweets been gone for how long? Girl, he ain’t coming back. You better hold on to that money you took off him.” Liberty treated her husband’s disappearance like an extended vacation. Man get that mad, got to walk it off. And that takes a spell. No need to cut corners; Sweets would be back to fill her pockets any day now. Never mind that any day stretched into eight years.
    But in 1933, the five thousand three hundred sixty-eight dollars Liberty had thought would last as long as Sweets was gone had dwindled down to two. And without Sweets’s ever-full money clip, things fell down at Liberty’s house. Lemon cakes and rhubarb pies made just because became a habit of the past. The generator in the backyard broke and Liberty didn’t have the money to fix it. Now she and Queen Ester had dinners lit by kerosene lamps and candles.