Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh Page B

mother.”
    “She’s sleeping.”
    “You go and wake her up then. It’s very important.”
    “Yes’m.” He went to the bathroom and knocked at the door. In the tub his mother stirred. He opened the door a little. “Mama?”
    She groaned and rolled over on her side; she was like a big slow fish kept in a tank.
    “Mama,” he said, louder this time.
    She sat up in the tub. “Charlie Kimble,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s the matter with you? Close your eyes this minute.”
    Charlie did. “Grandma Helen is on the phone.”
    “Damnation. What did I tell you about the phone?” She stood, her back to Charlie, and wrapped herself in a towel. For a momentshe lost her footing, then caught herself against the wall. She stepped out of the tub and went into the living room, leaving a trail of wet footprints.
    “Hello, Helen,” she said into the phone.
    Charlie followed. His sister stuck her head out the bathroom door. “Whata matter?” she said.
    Their mother let out a cry then; in the next moment she dropped the towel. It was a thing Charlie would remember forever: his mother standing naked in the middle of the living room, dripping wet from the bath as if her whole body were weeping.
     
    H ER FATHER was named John Wilkes Bell, for the man who shot Lincoln. He was a big red-haired man who’d been to war and married late. He met Birdie’s mother at a wedding in Charleston. He was at that time forty-six years old.
    He wanted a son but settled for a daughter. He taught Birdie to ride and shoot; he took her fishing and hunting, sometimes inviting Curtis Mabry, the housekeeper’s son, to come along. Then she turned fourteen and began to change; her father became polite and careful, as though she might break. There was no more fishing after that, no more hunting; her father’s rifle was locked away in the hall cabinet, silent behind the glass.
    In the winter Birdie’s mother got sick; for a year father and daughter tiptoed around the dark house, waiting for her to recover. During that time Birdie’s father seemed to forget her entirely, as if what he’d always suspected, the basic fragility of women, had been confirmed. After her mother’s death the house stayed dark. Every morning her father walked to his law office in town; every eveninghe came back drunk, was fed by Ella Mabry and put to bed in his clothes. By the time Birdie went off to Hambley, she no longer knew her father. She hadn’t known him in a long time.
    He drove her to Hambley himself, a hot August day in the middle of a drought, dust in her hair and in her mouth, through the open windows a smell of hay. She would study sacred music; she would learn to play the organ. There had been no discussion of whether or why. Her father had arranged everything himself.
    While she was away at school, he married a widow he’d met on a trip to Richmond. Birdie found out that winter when she came home for Christmas vacation. When they pulled up to the house, Helen was standing on the front porch, hugging herself in a homely gray coat. She was tall and plain, with a long equine face and dull brown hair cut short like a man’s. At dinner she sat in Birdie’s mother’s chair. Once Birdie had walked past her father’s bedroom and seen Helen at the dressing table using her mother’s hairbrush.
    After Christmas Birdie went back to Hambley. By summertime she was married and pregnant, living in Missouri with someone else’s parents.
     
    T HEY RODE to the bus station in the rain; the taxi cost three dollars. Birdie tipped the driver, then paid for their tickets with her last twenty. She’d already spent her one paycheck from the luncheonette: phone, electricity, the rebuilt transmission for the car. As they waited for the bus, she gave Charlie a quarter.
    “Go get yourself a soda pop,” she said.
    It was done: her last dollar broken into coins. She felt the urge to celebrate. All summer long she’d waited for this, the end of theend,