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Chapter Twenty-Five
Gina
The heat made people do crazy things. According to my father, it was the temperature that caused Mama to mow down our town pastor.
But I know better. I was there. It wasn’t pretty. The pastor was stealing from the parish, and Mama hated anyone who stole. She volunteered at the church, and she did the church budget. How she caught him, I don’t know. I only know that she did. She gave him an ultimatum, according to Mona, but he must have felt he was untouchable because he didn’t stop embezzling from the congregation. These are your salt of the earth types. People that work hard for every penny they’ve got. Mama was the type of person who never took no for an answer.
Then one day we just stopped going to church. I was sad because I missed my friends and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs. Jones.
But one Sunday, out of the blue, Mama and I ended up in the car heading to church. Daddy had gone fishing that morning—that was his version of church. He always said God was nowhere if he wasn’t out there on that water. Mama sent Oliver along with him, which she usually didn’t. I threw a bit of a fit. It wasn’t fair that my brother got to go and I didn’t. I couldn’t care less if he were older.
Mama drove us to the church, but instead of going in, we just sat in the lot. I don’t know what happened, only that she was real quiet and nothing was ever good when Mama got quiet. I watched as she white-knuckled the steering wheel. She put the car in reverse, looked over at me, and smiled. “What do you say we stop in town for some ice cream?”
I don’t recall what I said. More than likely, I breathed a sigh of relief that whatever Mama was angry about, it had nothing to do with me. She always hated it when I pouted. My bottom lip would start to quiver, and I would know that I was seconds away from an outburst. Daddy called these “my special powers,” but Mama did not agree. She would give me a look that could kill. Nobody could teach self-control like my mother.
So we’re driving out of the lot when her foot stomps on the brake. She throws her arm across the seat in front of me. When I look up, there was Pastor Richards crossing the lot. “He should have been looking where he was going,” Mama said. Her voice was tight, like she was trying to keep the anger in.
She glanced over at me, giving me the once-over to make sure I was all right. “Do me a favor,” she said, patting my thigh. “Climb in the back, honey.”
I did as she asked. I wasn’t really thinking about anything, except maybe ice cream. “Be thinking about what flavor you want, okay?”
Mama made a quick U-turn and floored it. I didn’t know what we’d hit, just that we hit something. I heard it before I felt it. The thump-thump of the tires going over something solid. “Don’t look back, honey,” she said. “Never look back.”
Her voice was gentle now, like she was trying to calm me. But I could see the panic and the rage in her eyes.
I caught her looking in the rearview mirror. She put the car in reverse and hit the gas once again. It felt like going over a big bump. Two heavy thuds. “What are we thinking… chocolate? Strawberry? Strawberry with sprinkles?”
“Sherbet,” I said. I didn’t know that was going to be one of our last private conversations.
She put the car in drive. “Sherbet it is.”
By the timethe police arrived, I was in bed. I still think about those flashing lights dancing eerily across the walls of my tiny bedroom. I lay awake, unable to sleep. It was too hot, or maybe I was simply too worried, or too scared. You don’t really know these things with certainty when you’re eight, but you know them in a different way.
“Oh, Darlene,” I heard Daddy groan. “What have you done?”
“Justice,” was all she said. I guess that’s when they took her away. Mona came the next day and stayed a little while. I don’t know where Daddy went, but he wasn’t home much.
Looking back, I think he was trying to find a way to hire a lawyer to get Mama out, but I guess he wasn’t all that successful. I know he sold the car, and we didn’t have one for a while. He borrowed the neighbor’s truck sometimes, but mostly Mona helped us out.
I visited Mama in jail, but only once. She didn’t look like herself. Not long after, she made her first attempt at escape. She was almost successful, but the warden found her in the next town over after someone called it in. She had injured herself on the way out, and it was a nasty cut, the kind that might have killed her if she hadn’t sought medical attention.
Going back to that place killed her all the same, but I guess she had a choice to make, and that was it. She wrote me frequent letters, and on my birthday she got what she said was her one phone call.
I’d sit out on the porch, rain or shine, and wait for Vinnie, the mailman, to arrive with the day’s mail. Mama’s letters were always filled with grand adventures. She made prison sound like the worst kind of hell, but she was always the heroine and she always came out on top.
In her second attempt at escape, she made it all the way home. Mama always had a way with people. She could talk her way out of anything—or so I thought then.
I woke up in the dark to her stroking my hair. “Hey, baby,” she said, the biggest grin on her face. I thought I must be dreaming, but she put her finger to my lips, and she sat there long enough for me to know it was real. “I can’t stay,” she told me with tears in her eyes. “But I want you to know I’m sorry. And I love you very, very much.”
I don’t know when she was caught exactly, only that the letters kept coming. She wrote she wanted to be home with us, but she couldn’t and she was sorry. Years later, my father said that if I read between the lines, I would know that Mama thought she would be happier on the outside, but she wasn’t. She realized she couldn’t go home again, and life on the run is hard for a woman.
And then, one day, the letters stopped coming. My birthday came and there was no phone call. I suppose Daddy thought he could lie forever, but I was getting older. I was learning what reading between the lines really meant.
There had been an accident at the prison. Mama had set herself on fire. “What kind of person sets themselves on fire?” I asked later, sometime in my teen years, when I was old enough to understand.
“She always burned herself to keep others warm,” Daddy told me. “That’s just who your mother was.”
