Dawn (Cutler 1)

With Momma not yet very strong, I had to get up in the middle of the night to feed Fern. Jimmy complained a lot, pulled the blanket over his head, and moaned, especially when I turned on the lights. He threatened to sleep in the bathtub.

Daddy was-usually grouchy in the morning from his lack of sleep, and as the sleepless nights went on, his face took on a gray, unhealthy look. Early each morning he would sit slumped in his chair, shaking his head like a man who couldn't believe how many storms he had been in. When he was like this, I was afraid to talk to him. Everything he said was usually gloom and doom. Most of the time that meant he was thinking of moving again. What scared me to the deepest place in my heart was the fear that one day he might just move on without us. Even though sometimes he scared me, I loved my father and longed to see one of his rare smiles come my way.

"When your luck turns bad," he would say, "there's nothing to do but change it. A branch that don't bend breaks."

"Momma looks like she's getting thinner and thinner and not stronger and stronger, Daddy," I whispered when I served him a cup of coffee one early morning. "And she won't go to the doctor."

"I know." He shook his head.

I took a deep breath and made the suggestion I knew he wouldn't want to hear. "Maybe we should sell the pearls, Daddy."

Our family owned one thing of value, one thing that had never been used to mend our hard times. A string of pearls so creamy white they took my breath away the one time I'd been allowed to hold them. Momma and Daddy considered them sacred. Jimmy wondered, as I did, why we clung to them so tenaciously. "The money it would bring in would give Momma a chance to really get well," I finished weakly.

Daddy looked up at me quickly and shook his head.

"Your momma would rather die than sell those pearls. That's all we got that ties us, ties you, to family."

How confusing this was to me. Neither Momma nor Daddy wanted to return to their family farms in Georgia to visit our relatives, and yet the pearls, because they were all we had to remind Momma of her family, were treated like something religious, they were kept hidden in the bottom of a dresser drawer. I couldn't recall a time Momma had even worn them.

After Daddy left I was going to go back to sleep, but changed my mind, thinking that it would only make me feel more tired. So I started to get dressed. thought Jimmy was fast asleep. He and I shared an old dresser Daddy had picked up at a lawn sale. It was on his side of the pull-out bed. I tiptoed over to it and slipped my nightgown off. Then I pulled out my drawer gently, searching for my underthings in the subdued light that spilled in from the bulb in the stove when the stove door was left down. I was standing there naked trying to decide what I should wear that would be warm enough for what looked to be another bitterly cold day, when I turned slightly and out of the corner of my eye caught Jimmy gazing up at me.

I know I should have covered up quickly, but he didn't see I had turned slightly and I couldn't help but be intrigued by the way he stared. His gaze moved up and down my body, drinking me in slowly. When he lifted his eyes higher, he saw me watching him. He turned quickly on his back and locked his eyes on the ceiling. I quickly drew my nightgown up against my body, took out what I wanted to wear, and scurried across the room to the bathroom to dress. We didn't talk about it, but I couldn't get the look in his eyes out of my mind.

In January Momma, who was still thin and weak, got a part-time job cleaning Mrs. Anderson's house every Friday. The Andersons owned a small grocery two blocks away. Occasionally Mrs. Anderson gave Momma a nice chicken or a small turkey. One Friday afternoon Daddy surprised Jimmy and me by coming home much earlier from work.

"Old man Stratton's selling the garage," he announced. "With those two bigger and more modern garages being built only blocks away, business has begun to drop off something terrible. People who are buying the garage don't want to run it as a garage. They want the property to develop housing."

Here we go again, I thought—Daddy loses a job and we have to move. When I told one of my friends, Patty Butler, about our many moves, she said she thought it might be fun to go from school to school.

"It's not fun," I told her. "You always feel like you've got ketchup on your face or a big mole on the tip of your nose when you first walk into a new classroom. All the kids turn around and stare and stare, watching my every move and listening to my voice. I had a teacher once who was so angry I had interrupted her class, she made me stand in front of the root until she was finished with her lesson, and all the time the students were goggling me. I didn't know where to shift my eyes. It was so embarrassing," I said, but I knew Patty couldn't understand just how hard it really was to enter a new school and confront new faces so often. She had lived in Richmond all her life. I couldn't even begin to imagine what that was like: to live in the same house and have your own room for as long as you could remember, to have relatives nearby to hold you and love you, to know your neighbors forever and ever and be so close to them, they were like family. I hugged my arms around myself and wished with all my heart that one day I might live like that. But I knew it could never happen. I'd always be a stranger.

Now Jimmy and I looked at each other and turned to Paddy, expecting him to tell us to start packing. But instead of looking sour, he suddenly smiled.

"Where's your ma?" he asked.

"She's not back from work yet, Daddy," I said.

"Well, today's the last day she's gonna work in other people's houses," he said. He looked around the apartment and nodded. "The last time," he repeated. I glanced quickly at Jimmy, who looked just as astonished as I was.

"Why?"

"What's happening?" Jimmy inquired.

"I got a new and much, much better job today," Daddy said.

"We're going to stay here, Daddy?" I asked.

"Yep and that ain't the best yet. You two are gonna go to one of the finest schools in the South, and it ain't gonna cost us nothing," he announced.

"Cost us?" Jimmy said, his face twisted with confusion. "Why should it cost us to go to school, Daddy? It's never cost us before, has it?"

"No, son, but that's because you and your sister been going to public schools, but now you're going to a private school."

"A private school!" I gasped. I wasn't sure, but I thought that meant very wealthy kids whose families had important names and whose fathers owned big estates with mansions and armies of servants and whose mothers were society women who had their pictures taken at charity balls. My heart began to pound. I was excited, but also quite frightened of the idea. When I looked at Jimmy, I saw his eyes had shadowed and grown deep and dark.

"Us? Go to a fancy private school in Richmond?" he asked.

"That's it, son. You're getting in tuition free."