Read Knee-Deep in Wonder for Free Online Page B

ears pierced, or over the boy when she was thirteen who was too short, too ugly, just too-too, because the time was gone. And the one question that Helene could ask—Just where were you, Mama?—she could answer herself, and to hear her mother say it would have knocked her down. As a child she had circled around Aunt Annie b, riddling her with questions. “But if she just gone, why don’t she come back and take me with her?” Her eight-year-old logic reasoned: I’m so small she wouldn’t even know I’m with her. Finally, in desperation, Annie b told her niece the truth: her mother was not traveling the world looking for a place to settle, she was always in the same place, but Helene had to stay with her aunt and uncle just the same. Then Helene had turned to praying, nightly chants that Annie b tried to scour away with chores, but Helene was single-minded. She murmured, knees creaking on the wooden floor, full of eight-year-old desire, I want my mama.
    And so she began to talk to God. Soft and sweet, she told him that she too wanted to be sky. Once, Helene had heard a rattling at the curtain, and, mid-conversation she had stopped to see who was there. Helene thought it might be God or, better still, her mother. She went to the window and knelt in front of the glass, putting her hands up to meet her mother’s; they would have been touching were it not for the pane. Helene whispered, “Mama is you you? Mama?” But Queen Ester couldn’t hear her daughter.
    Helene thought her mother must have seen her lips move, because Queen Ester raised her voice and pressed her face tightly against the glass. The distortion frightened Helene so much she took off down the hall and ran crying to her aunt that there was a monster outside her window. Sucking her teeth and looking down at the floor, Annie b said to Helene, “Naw, that’s your mama.”
    Eighteen years ago, but Helene still remembered shaking. Aunt Annie b kissed Helene on the ear and said, “Gone to bed now,” but she was licking her eye tooth, so Helene knew Annie b was mad and waited for the howling to start. When Aunt Annie b opened the door, Helene saw her mother standing on tiptoe trying to see beyond her aunt’s shoulder. Helene heard her mother mumbling, although now she could hear the embarrassment as well. “How you been, b? Look like you done moved again.”
    Annie b grabbed Queen Ester by the coat collar to whisper something that was intended to slice her in half. “Can’t you be decent?”
    And it did. Queen Ester fell back from the porch, kicking up dust, pulling on her hair, and in a scream filled with question marks, she repeated Annie b’s last word: “Decent? Decent? Decent?” She ran a curve around the house and Helene fled back to her room. Once inside, she saw Queen Ester galloping past the window, her mother’s ratty coat waving good-bye as she rushed into the night air.
    *   *   *
    Helene’s car stopped at the tip of her mother’s wilderness, and what she saw first was as she remembered: a whisper of a path trying to forget itself through tall grass. Frayed rope barely held back bushes on the verge of becoming trees. The trail circled and turned, cutting a route in the trees that beckoned as a resting spot, only to push through and spill out into a swept yard. Whatever her mother did to make money didn’t show itself in the front yard—no chickens or pig pen, no sizable garden filled with tomatoes or cabbage. Helene panted as she saw the peeking white of her mother’s house, which seemed to stand sweet and alone in the middle of nothing, its arms thrown up in disrepair because its bricked bottom had cracked in several places and the foundations had given way. Faded white clapboard peeled away from the decaying wood underneath, and a railed wooden porch ran the length of the front. All the windows looked misplaced. The