Chapter 5
On her own, Delia drove over to Holiness
Redeemer to watch the congregation gather three Sundays in a row.
It was the one place she could be sure to see them—Amanda and Dede,
and Grandma Windsor prodding them before her. Her eyes sought out
her girls as soon as the doors opened at the end of the service.
But just as Delia remembered, Grandma Windsor was always the last
to leave. The old woman stayed in her seat until the pews around
her were empty, eyes down and lips moving in prayer while everyone
shifted and stood and wondered if they should sit back down and
contemplate their sins. When Clint and Delia went to church with
her the week before the wedding, Delia knew the moment she stood up
that Grandma Windsor had been looking forward to her blunder. The
woman had stared at her in pleased disdain, her lips curling
slightly and her black eyes flickering to Clint’s face to be sure
he knew what Delia had done. Before then Delia had not realized how
much Clint’s mother hated her. Afterward there was no denying that
Grandma Windsor was waging a war of contempt, that she would rather
her son had gone to his grave than take up with the Byrd girl, who
didn’t know enough to sit quietly in a pew until her betters
signaled that she could rise.
Delia watched people come out of the church two and
three at a time, and when it seemed there was no one left, Grandma
Windsor stepped out with the girls. She hugged her big purse and
nodded once at the preacher, Reverend John Hillman, Delia saw on
the sign out front, which also proclaimed, “Repent! Repent! The
blood of the Lamb cries out.” Amanda and Dede kept their heads down
and made no move that did not mimic Grandma Windsor. Delia drew
breath as if there were not enough air in the world to ease her
emptiness. Her eyes widened and followed the girls while her face
went stiff with pain. They were exactly as she had imagined and
nothing at all as she had hoped. Amanda was a taller, sterner
version of Grandma Windsor, but Dede looked so much like Delia’s
own lost mother that it hurt her heart. Delia bent forward and
pressed her chin to the steering wheel to keep from rushing out to
embrace them. Her girls looked miserable. Her girls looked like
they wouldn’t know how to be happy if someone paid them to
try.
Dede’s mouth was swollen and pouty. She trailed
after her grandmother and sister, with her shoulders angling away
from them and her hips moving jerkily, like a mechanical toy yanked
along by a string. Beside her Amanda hunched her shoulders and
clung to Grandma Windsor’s hip, though the old woman never looked
back at her. Amanda appeared to be modeling herself on her
grandmother, her hair tied back in a little-old-lady bun, her lips
pressing her teeth in a practiced line of disapproval, her teenage
legs stepping gingerly as if her hips were calcified and arthritic.
Tears blurred Delia’s vision, and all she could think was how much
like her the girls seemed, like Delia at their age, angry and
lonely and fighting all the time to keep what she felt from showing
in her face.
God means this to hurt, Delia thought, as a bitter,
prickly tingling ran up and down her arms. She could almost feel
Dede’s soft shoulders under her fingers, smell the soap-sharp scent
of Amanda’s flaxen hair. She wanted to jump out of the Datsun and
run to them, and shake love into their wounded hearts. Her eyes
tracked the members of the congregation, women she had last seen at
her wedding and men she remembered sipping whiskey on Granddaddy
Windsor’s front porch. Not all of them had hated her. A few had
looked at her with pity. But there would be no pity in them now.
She was the fallen woman, the whore of Babylon, the bitch-whelp who
had abandoned her young. No one on that lawn would let her near her
girls. With one will, they would chase her away.
On the second Sunday, Delia’s stomach lurched when
Clint pulled up in his rusty white Chevy pickup before the service
started, and leaned out to hand an envelope over to Grandma
Windsor. He was thinner and older than she expected, his dirty
blond hair scraping the collar of one of those white uniform shirts
Delia had ironed so many times. She pushed the apple of her palm
into her mouth and bit down hard as he turned his head in her
direction and she saw the face clearly. No, not Clint, but some
blue-eyed white man just about his age. Delia realized that she was
shaking. She remembered Clint’s charcoal eyes under that blond
hair, the gray that darkened when he got angry. Those eyes had
seemed almost black her last two years in Cayro. The man lifted a
hand to wave at the minister, and Delia started her car too
unnerved to think about seeing her girls again.
The third Sunday, Delia got out of the car and
walked up the church steps behind the last of the congregation just
as the choir broke into “All Blessings” and the organ boomed out
over the worshipers. From the back row she could see her girls up
near the front, their bowed blond heads right beside Grandma
Windsor’s tight gray bun. Delia stared at them, steeling herself to
keep her seat once Reverend Hillman closed the service. She wanted
to be sitting there when the girls walked past. She wanted to put
her hand out and touch them, lift her eyes and see their faces when
they realized who she was.
Tears slipped down Delia’s face. She did not hear
the sermon. She barely registered the choir. Only halfway through
the service did she notice that the family in the pew across the
aisle was looking in her direction, the father glaring angrily and
the mother pick-faced and rigid. The two brown-haired youngsters
with them kept squirming and looking up at their parents. No more
than eight or nine, the boys had no way of knowing who Delia was,
but there was no missing their parents’ outrage. Their big, curious
eyes kept shifting to Delia and back to their dad.
A flush bloomed on Delia’s cheeks. Sweat broke on
her forehead and beneath her dress. Her eyes roamed the nearby
pews. A dozen people were shifting and craning their necks. Each
glance was scalding. Each pursed mouth pressed a nerve. As the stir
increased, more people turned to look. Delia locked her hands
together in a double fist and kept her eyes on them through the
rest of the service. She had told herself that she could stand it,
the outrage and contempt, the likelihood that Grandma Windsor would
slap her face and curse her—anything to stand close to her girls
and speak their names. But at the benediction Delia stood up and
walked out without looking back. She had been wrong. She was not
ready. If these strangers looked at her with such loathing, what
would she find in her daughters’ eyes?
But as Delia was driving away from Holiness
Redeemer, the hand of God reached out to her again over at Cayro
Baptist Tabernacle. Mrs. Pearlman looked for Delia that morning
and, when she didn’t see her, spoke bluntly to M.T. on the church
steps. The arthritis in her wrists and elbows had grown so bad that
she was keeping the Bonnet going only through stubborn
determination and a high tolerance for pain. Her stubbornness was
limitless, but the flexibility in her fingers was almost gone. She
no longer trusted herself with a pair of sharp scissors, and
neither did her customers. Even her regulars had started to go over
to Marietta, and her business depended on occasional strangers who
didn’t know better.
“Have Delia come see me,” she told M.T. “If we can
come to an agreement, I might have some work for her at the
Bonnet.” Her powdered cheeks trembled as she spoke, and her right
hand settled more tightly on her cane, but her voice was firm and
her words audible to the women standing around. M.T. nodded.
“Marcia, what are you thinking?” said Nadine
Reitower, head of the Mothers’ Relief Fund. “You don’t want to take
that hussy into your business.”
Ruby and Pearl snickered into their Bibles, but
M.T. didn’t hear.
Mrs. Pearlman’s eyes had sparked. “There’s barely
any business to speak of. I haven’t even seen you this month. Have
I, Nadine?”
Mrs. Reitower blushed. Her hand rose toward the
little hat that held back her brown curls, but she stopped herself.
“That woman’s a scandal,” she said. “No one will come to the shop
if you put her in there.”
Marcia looked around at the women standing on the
church steps. “Good Christians will,” she said. “Good Christian
women who know what it is to sin and ask forgiveness, I think they
will come. There’s no scandal in repentance, no scandal in working
hard and paying your bills. And Delia Byrd used to work for me. I
know what she can do. She was one of the best hairdressers I ever
hired. Won’t have lost that. Could probably even take care of that
cowlick problem of yours, Nadine. Save you a bundle on hats and
hairpins.”
Nadine scowled and M.T. hooted. She herded the
twins back into the Buick and drove directly to Delia’s to tell her
the good news. “Girl,” she shouted happily when Delia met her at
the driveway, “wait till I tell you what you missed at
church.”
Delia gave Sally two weeks’ notice and
started in at the Bonnet on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The rest of
the week she worked at Beck-man’s department store in Marietta, in
the tiny beauty shop behind the Misses’ Dresses and winter coats.
The first few people who came into the Bonnet and saw Delia there
stared like she had two heads and the mark of Satan on each of
them, but her old detachment had come back. She just nodded blandly
at the outraged faces and walked away when they complained. This
was work she could do with both eyes closed and half her mind
engaged elsewhere. When she put her hands on a woman’s head, Delia
Byrd felt almost as powerful as she had when she stood onstage with
Mud Dog. This was work she knew. This was work she was good at. It
healed something in her soul to be doing good work, even if she did
it on sufferance for way too little money.
Delia did her job. She did relaxed-curl permanents
for women she had gone to high school with, tinting gray hair back
to brown. Impassively she did modified punk cuts for the teenage
daughters of women who wouldn’t speak to her, ignoring their timid
questions about Randall and the band. When Marcia told her she was
a wonder and the lady at Beckman’s started paying her more money,
Delia didn’t seem to notice. It was as if her brain was already
overfull, too much to be worked out and too little time. She wore
denim wrap-around skirts and cotton blouses right out of the
Goodwill box, bought Cissy jeans from the Sears Roebuck outlet and
plain white T-shirts sealed in plastic packages.
Once or twice Cissy came home to see Delia sitting
at the kitchen table with her face stricken and empty, but as soon
as she stepped in the door, Delia would be up and bustling
around.
“What you want, Little Bit, something to eat?”
Delia’s voice was always loud and bright.
Cissy would shake her head and run back to her
room. This was a new version of her mother, not the familiar
stumbling Delia from Venice Beach and not that banshee who drove
them across the country. Some days Cissy actually missed the
weeping Delia in her gray stinking T-shirt. At least that Delia had
left her alone.
John Hillman, minister of the Holiness
Redeemer Church of God, lived out on the Poinsette Road southwest
of town. Delia had already been out to his house one Saturday after
work, when his wife told her he was visiting some sick folks out in
the country. The woman had looked at Delia with a neutral
expression, but her eyes were burning and intent, and her mouth
reminded Delia of that cook who cursed her the first morning in
Cayro. Probably hopes I’ll burn in hell, Delia thought, keeping her
own face as carefully composed as Mrs. Hillman’s.
On her second try Delia spotted the minister on his
way out to his car just as she was driving up. She called to him
with relief. She had figured she could face his wife once, maybe
twice more before losing her confidence.
“Reverend,” she said, “I’m Delia Byrd.” She
considered using the Windsor name, but she could not bear to say
it. Besides, she told herself, surely the man knew who she was as
well as his wife did.
Reverend Hillman reached for her hand. “Mrs. Byrd,”
he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Delia was startled. “You have?”
“My wife said you had stopped by.” He smiled
gently. “And I knew your people. I knew your mother.”
Delia felt all her air leave her. Reverend
Hillman’s eyes were deep-set, sad, and compassionate. He looked at
her like she was a child who had fallen and was turning to him to
raise her up. For an instant Delia was that child, and then a wave
of nausea flooded her throat.
“I didn’t know that,” she said, and swallowed
painfully. “That you knew my mother. I didn’t know that.”
“Well, I’m not a young man.” The minister brushed
dust down the front of his trousers. “And I’ve lived in Cayro most
of my life. I was away when you married Clint Windsor, I’m‘sorry to
say. Didn’t come back to take over the parish until after you had
gone.”
Gone, Delia thought. Not run off, but gone. “I
don’t remember you,” she said.
“But I remember you.” Reverend Hillman put his
hands together in a steeple. “I remember you the Easter after your
family was lost—the look on your face when you came to listen to
the choir service. You came alone and you stayed at the back. You
were just a spit of a girl, and so badly hurt I prayed for you with
all my heart. But I was young and unsure of myself. When you didn’t
come back, I never went after you. I’ve regretted that for
years.”
“I was all right,” Delia said.
“Were you?” Reverend Hillman leaned forward.
Was I? Delia wondered. Probably not.
“Are you all right now?”
Delia laughed. “Probably not,” she said, unable to
stop herself from grinning like a fool. She had not been prepared
for this.
He smiled back at her. “Well, maybe we can do
something about that.”
“I want to see my girls,” Delia blurted. “That’s
why I came to you. They’re with Grandma Windsor.”
“Louise Windsor, yes.” Reverend Hillman nodded and
looked over at his car. “It’s been hard for her, I think. But they
are fine girls, Deirdre and Amanda. Fine girls. And of course you
want to see them. Who would know better how hard it is to lose a
mother?” He turned back to her.
“I saw you at church a few weeks ago, but you left
early. Have you spoken to Mrs. Windsor yet?”
“No, I hadn’t thought she would want to speak to
me.”
He studied the toes of his shiny black shoes.
“Probably not,” he agreed. “A lot of anger in Louise Windsor, a
lot.” He sighed. “You want me to speak to her?”
Delia felt as if her hips had turned to jelly. She
had no idea how to stand when she was not wound up tight to argue
or plead or fight off an attack. Was he really going to help her?
“Oh yes,” she breathed.
Reverend Hillman licked his lips and glanced at his
car again. “I have to ask you, Mrs. Byrd. Are you going to be
coming to join us at Holiness?”
Delia’s hips locked. “I hadn’t planned on it,” she
said. “I’ve been going to Cayro Baptist with my friend M.T., but
I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Other than stay here. I’m going
to stay in Cayro, that’s for certain.”
For a moment Delia imagined herself attending
Holiness Redeemer, under the gaze of Mrs. Hillman and Grandma
Windsor and all those old men who had done business with Clint and
his daddy. The minister had surprised her by talking about her
family, mentioning her mother. But no, Delia thought, she was not
going to join his church.
Reverend Hillman’s eyes were trained on her, sad
and knowing. “Well,” he said after a moment, “you should take your
time deciding what to do, but I’m glad you’re here to stay. There’s
good people here, some hard ones and some that are pretty worn
down. But good-hearted people nonetheless—who will be watching over
you. There are lots of those.”
Delia’s throat constricted. He wasn’t going to help
her after all. She pulled her hands up to her belly, pressing hard
below her heart. “Thank you,” she said, “for talking to me—I
appreciate it.”
“Oh, thank me later,” Reverend Hillman said. “After
I speak to Louise. Maybe she’ll listen to me. If she does, we’ll
see if you can’t get a little time with your girls.”
Delia gaped at him. Reverend Hillman ran his hand
once over his almost bald head and walked to his car. “We’ll talk
again,” he said. “Louise is not going to be happy to see me, so
this might take a little time. We’ll talk when I have something to
tell you.”
Delia watched him drive away and looked back at the
house. Mrs. Hillman was at the window, her face like a storm cloud
and her mouth like a seam. Delia dipped her head and smiled. Some
days you get a little, she thought. Some days you get a lot.
Three months after Delia started working at
the Bonnet, Marcia Pearlman had a stroke while locking up the shop
one Saturday afternoon. She slid sideways and cawed like a crow
just as Delia reached her car. When Delia ran back, Mrs. Pearlman
kicked twice and rolled over unconscious.
For several weeks the Bonnet was closed while
Marcia lay curled in a bed at the hospital. Delia visited her every
other day, watching as she slowly regained the ability to speak and
move. She was angry at the doctors and then angry at God. “Damn,”
she said for the first time in her life, tears streaming down her
cheeks. She wanted to sit up, say what she had to say, and take
care of herself, but her left leg buckled at every effort to stand
and her left arm dangled uselessly, the wrist already turning in
and the fingers going blue-gray.
The doctor told her she had done remarkably well. A
stroke was an unpredictable thing. She could have been so much
worse off, crippled for life and unable to talk. “Damn,” Mrs.
Pearlman said, “damn damn,” and waved him away from the bed.
“I got nobody,” she told Delia in a halting mumble.
“Little Social Security. Little savings. Not much.” She shifted her
left arm. “Damn hand hurts. Damn.”
“You got friends,” Delia told her. “Good
friends.”
“Friends.” Mrs. Pearlman sighed. “Need money. You
can make me some money.” Her brown eyes were flinty and keen. “You
got talent. I let you run my shop. You make me some money.”
Delia frowned.
The shop and the building belonged to her outright,
Mrs. Pearlman explained painfully. “But won’t sell it. Lease it to
you. Lease it to you, and you’ll make me some money. And”—she
paused and forced her lips into a smile—“you got to do my hair.
Every week you got to do my hair.”
“If I run the shop, people might not come.”
“Who comes now?” Mrs. Pearlman shrugged weakly.
“You’re good. Time passes. They’ll come. You’ll make me the money I
need.” She closed her eyes, then opened them and fixed them on
Delia.
“Anything you do to the shop, you pay for,” she
said. “I pay for nothing.”
Slowly Delia nodded.
“Good.” Mrs. Pearlman shook her arm again. “Damn
damn,” she said with a frown. “Damn damn.”
Marcia’s insurance man drew up a lease, and Delia
called Rosemary in California to ask for a loan. If she was going
to run the shop herself, she meant to repair what years of neglect
had done.
“Just what I have always wanted,” Rosemary shouted
into the phone. “To be part owner of a white woman’s beauty
salon.”
“Well, I won’t exactly own it. I’ll be leasing it,
but I’ll do your hair when you come visit.” Rosemary could hear the
smile in Delia’s voice. “I’ll read up on weaving and stuff, do it
any way you want.”
The Bonnet had been a beauty parlor for forty years
and a garage before that. It was just a concrete-floored
outbuilding for what had been the Cayro Hotel, but the hotel was
long gone. The Bonnet was nothing much—one big room with a set of
sinks in a section walled off by a low-hanging arch—but it was the
first place Delia had ever earned a paycheck, the site, she swore,
of too many of her beginnings and endings. From the back window she
had watched the police take her uncle Luke away to jail and
Granddaddy Byrd threaten the sheriff. From the front window, with
its screen of dying plants, she had watched the sunset the night
she knew herself ready to say yes to Clint Windsor’s proposal of
marriage. And it was in the Bonnet’s doorway that she had staggered
and felt the wet stream between her thighs and known by the
salt-sweet smell and the bite of pain that Amanda was about to be
born.
When Delia decided to take over the Bonnet, M.T.
quit her job at the A&P. “We’ll do fine,” she said when Delia
protested. “You and me will do just fine. We’ll get the shop open
and going in no time. You wait and see.”
M.T. read everything she could find on bookkeeping
and tax accounting, signed up for a course at the junior college,
and designed her own system around what Delia said she needed.
“Real friends,” M.T. told Cissy. “Your mama and I are real friends,
and we know how to take care of each other.”
“Well, I hope so,” Delia said with a laugh. “We’ll
either do fine together or go to hell in a handcart. Either way,
we’ll take care of each other.”
“Why you think Marcia Pearlman was so set on you
taking the shop?” Steph asked. She had agreed to take a chair once
the Bonnet opened—strictly on commission, of course, just like
M.T.
“Maybe ’cause she and I both know it suits
me.”
“Yeah?” M.T. turned a page in her accounting book.
“You think a building is you all over?”
“In a way. I think it is a weight,” Delia said. “I
think this place is something you carry. I know how to carry it,
and I appreciate it, God knows. Couldn’t make a living no other
way, but I also know what Marcia Pearlman intends. For a Baptist
lady, that woman is almost Catholic. She expects expiation, public
and precise. This is where Marcia Pearlman thinks I should be. This
is the price she thinks I should pay for all my sins, doing hair
till I die and cursing her name with every water bill. I even think
she means it kindly. In her own way I think she’s ensuring my
chance at salvation. I don’t imagine she cares if I like what I’m
doing. Happiness don’t matter much in the Baptist scheme of
things.”
“You think the hippies care if you happy?” M.T.
sniffed. She got defensive when Delia started talking about
Baptists in that tone. For all her jokes, M.T. knew herself a good
Baptist woman.
“No,” Delia agreed. “An’t no hippies keeping track
around here either.”
Delia and M.T. and Stephanie were working
on the shop one afternoon when a big sky-blue Oldsmobile pulled up
and Granddaddy Byrd got out. Delia had never seen the car before,
or the woman behind the wheel.
“You got yourself a girlfriend?” M.T. asked when he
came inside.
“Harrumph!” he said, but heat showed on his
cheeks.
Standing at one of the sinks, Delia watched him
come toward her. They hadn’t spoken since she arrived in Cayro, and
she couldn’t imagine what had brought him to the Bonnet.
“I got some stuff for you.” Granddaddy Byrd’s
tongue appeared and wet his lower lip. “Some curtains and stuff you
had in boxes. Thought you could use them here.” The color in his
face deepened.
M.T. waved an arm at Stephanie. “Let’s go get some
Cokes,” she said. “I’m choking on dust.” The two women edged past
the old man with a quizzical smile in Delia’s direction.
“I appreciate the curtains,” Delia said, “you
bringing them by.” She glanced out the window. The big square-faced
woman in the car certainly didn’t look like any kind of
girlfriend.
“That’s Mrs. Stone,” Granddaddy Byrd said quickly.
“The deputy told me I can’t drive no more, and she’s been helping
me out.”
“You have an accident?”
“No, no. Just bumped a little old garbage can at
the post office. Nothing hurt.” He licked his lips again. “There’s
some flowerpots too. In the car. I thought maybe you’d want to
clean up that window, put in some better pots.”
“That’s real nice of you, Granddaddy.”
“You an’t spoken to Clint yet, have you?” he said
abruptly.
Delia reached for the mop M.T. had left propped
against the sink. “No.”
“He’s pretty sick,” Granddaddy Byrd said. “Some
people say it’s serious. Somebody said it was bad enough he might
die.”
Delia’s hands closed around the mop handle. Sick?
What kind of sick? “I hadn’t heard that,” she said.
Granddaddy Byrd nodded at her. “I figured you
wouldn’t have heard. Thought you should know.” He looked around the
shop. “You’re working hard.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why did you think I should
know?”
Her grandfather looked at her. “You went to talk to
Reverend Hillman, didn’t you? You went out to the church? Well,
Clint don’t go out there, and Louise Windsor an’t about to tell
nobody her business. Seemed to me you should know what’s going on.”
He shuffled his feet. “You want to get those girls, you need to
know what is going on.”
They looked at each other, the old man with his
flushed cheeks and his faded eyes, and Delia with her hands locked
around that mop like it was holding her up.
“Thank you,” she said finally.
Granddaddy Byrd dropped his head. “You got to help
me, if you want that stuff in the car.”
Delia was carrying the last carton in when M.T. and
Steph came back.
“You all right?” M.T. asked her.
Delia put the box down. “He told me Clint was
sick,” she said. “You know anything about that?”
“Sick or crazy, I don’t think anybody knows for
sure.” Steph dropped in her chair, pushed her mousy brown hair
back, and looked at herself in the mirror. She had been talking
about dyeing it red like Delia’s.
“Somebody said he was sick last summer.” M.T. was
frowning. “But nobody has seen him in so long. I didn’t know
anything to tell you.”
“An’t he working out at Firestone?” Delia
asked.
“Well, not the last year. He was for a long time.”
Steph turned her chair toward Delia. “Is it cancer? People talked
about something like that, but I thought it was just gossip.”
“The Windsors keep to themselves pretty much. You
know that,” M.T. said. “Clint an’t been right in years, always
drinking himself into the ground. Don’t think I’ve laid eyes on him
since his daddy died and his mama had that big service. I saw the
girls then. I wrote you about that.”
Delia nodded.
“Well, after that Clint went to live with his mama
for a few years, straightened up a little. But he kept your old
house, used the money from his daddy’s insurance to buy it
outright. I think his mama wanted him to stay with her and the
girls, but he didn’t.”
Steph spun around in her chair. “My Lyle swears
Clint can’t stand his mama and that’s why he keeps the house, so he
don’t have to stay where he can’t stand to be.”
“She is a hard woman.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a fact.”
“But do you think he’s really sick?” Delia stood up
and grabbed the mop again.
“I don’t know,” M.T. said. “I just don’t
know.”
“I’ll find out,” Steph promised. “Just give me a
few days and I’ll find out everything.”
The plan was to reopen the Bonnet in
February, and there were only two real obstacles. One was the
effort required to get the shop itself ready, but Rosemary’s check
helped immensely, and neither Delia nor M.T. was afraid of hard
work. Steph complained a lot, but she got down to it too, helping
with the scraping and scrubbing while M.T. and Delia did the
painting themselves. Most of the paint came again from Sally, who
seemed to have endless stockpiles stored out in her garage,
cleansers and paper goods bought at discount and bins of stuff
other people had thrown out that Sally knew would come in handy
someday. That meant that some of the paint was old and useless and
all of it came in odd colors. Delia and M.T. experimented until
they produced a great quantity of a curious peach glaze.
“I like it,” Steph told them, and they took that as
gospel. It was a good thing they all liked the color, because the
greasy, stained walls of the old beauty shop needed three coats. It
was also fortunate that they had a little money to buy white for
the ceiling.
“Too much of a good thing is always a problem,”
Steph said. “And I think I would turn bilious if this was all there
was all over everything.”
The curtains Granddaddy Byrd had brought were faded
and tattered, but Delia put the pots to good use in the front
window, salvaging a few of Mrs. Pearlman’s plants and buying new
ones to create a fantasy jungle that would draw people into the
shop.
Once the work was in progress, the other obstacle
loomed larger. Nadine Reitower confronted M.T. on the sidewalk one
afternoon, demanding to know what they thought they were doing
giving over an institution like the Bonnet to a woman like Delia
Byrd. Since she hadn’t made any headway with Marcia Pearlman, she
had decided to confront the beast in its lair.
“I didn’t give her nothing,” M.T. said, “though I
would sure enough. You know perfectly well that Marcia’s leasing
the shop to Delia now that she can’t run it no more.”
Nadine plucked at the thin lace collar that
protruded from her pink sweater, which was buttoned all the way up.
“I told Marcia before I wouldn’t have Delia Byrd touching me. Now
that hussy’s taking over the only place I’ve ever gone to get my
hair done!”
“Nothing is going to rub off on you, you know,”
M.T. said. “You an’t gonna take sin from the touch of Delia’s
hand.”
“Marcia should never have given that woman the shop
in the first place.” Nadine tossed her head, and her hen-brown bun
bobbed dangerously. She was showing the effect of not having been
to a hairdresser for a while.
“She didn’t give it to her.” M.T. spoke
impatiently. “It’s a lease. Steep rent too, and money Marcia is
going to need. Seems to me you should be more concerned with making
sure Marcia gets her money out of the fallen woman than keeping the
fallen woman from doing decent work. If she don’t manage the
Bonnet, what you think she’s going to do? She won’t have no choice
but to offer sin and wicked ways at half price to support herself
and her child!”
“You are a rude and vulgar woman.” Nadine’s
forehead was shiny with sudden sweat.
“Yes, I am, and I’m late too.” M.T. stepped around
Nadine and marched to the Bonnet’s door.
That evening M.T. and Steph discussed the problem
over a plate of fried potatoes and shrimp at Goober’s restaurant
and bar.
“You think anyone will come?” Steph fretted.
“I think a few will come just because Delia’s so
scandalous,” M.T. said. “And a few will never come no matter if
Delia suddenly had a halo light up over her spotless soul.” She
dipped a potato stick in ketchup and popped it in her mouth. “Hell,
if she hadn’t run off to become rich and famous, Delia would own
the Bonnet by now.”
“She is good with hair,” Steph agreed.
M.T. chewed happily. “We just have to remind
everyone of that before Nadine Reitower can remind them what a
sinner Delia is.”
“It would help if Delia made up with Clint.” Steph
picked at her shrimp. They were pitiful, but Goober’s made the best
fried potatoes in the state. “I asked around, and it looks like old
man Byrd is right. Way I hear it, that man might die.”
“One thing at a time,” M.T. said. “One thing at a
time. How we gonna get these fool women into the Bonnet?” She bit
into another potato. “What you think? Should we run some contest?
Or offer makeovers to the home economics teachers?”
“Naaa.” Steph swirled ketchup all over her shrimp.
“Junior discount maybe. But all we got to do is get the girls to
talking about how their mothers won’t go to Delia. Make her sound
really dangerous and scandalous, and they’ll come to us. We’ll get
the mothers when they see what she does for their girls. And we’ll
keep our rates lower than Beckman’s.”
M.T. laughed. “Stephanie, you are one smart woman,”
she said, and ordered another plate of fried potatoes.