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He led Cat back into the small room and Andie’s eyelashes blinked. “Mama, what are you doing here?”
“Came back to see about you, Andie. How you feeling?”
Andie couldn’t tilt her head back. Not as she wanted to and not without pain, so she looked at Cat through filtered eyelashes and kept her chin very still. “Mama. If you don’t go to work tonight, they be firing you. No more singing. You still got time to go get the streetcar and get on to work.”
Cat could tell that Mike, despite his earlier promises of getting her something to eat, was completely riveted to this conversation. Riveted on the child in the bed. His daughter. “I’ll take care of all that, sugar. You don’t have to worry.”
“If you don’t get to work, they’ll turn out all the lights as they did before.”
Any other time, any other place, she might have snapped at Andie to stay out of her business. But Mike watched her. Why did she care what he thought? Every time he came into her life, he caused confusion and imbalance, but if he was able to make Andie walk again, she would do whatever, say whatever. She couldn’t afford to have him be angry.
“Pet. Just go to sleep now. Mr. um. Mike here said he would bring lunch.”
“When you wake up, it will be here for you. You need to get rest. When they come in to work with you, you going to need all of the energy you can get for them limbs to start working again.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
Cat reached for her daughter’s scrawny hand through the sheet. “You mustn’t speak like that, Andie.”
Mike had grabbed at the other. “’Specially since it isn’t so. You just a little youngin’, sound like you know so much, but maybe you don’t know what you think you know. You come to a new place now. Things going to change.”
Mike walked out the door and Cat swept the tears away with her sleeve. What would he do? How did he know? Did Andie have something to say to the big man who left the door? No. Andie’s lashes fluttered down on her face and she was fast asleep. Again.
Weary, doubtless, from all of the burdens Cat had put on her.
She would do better by her daughter from now on.
Chapter Five
Mike shouldn’t have promised Cat her daughter would walk again.
Andie’s matchstick limbs looked like burned broken firewood at the end of a picnic. The ravages of the disease hit her in all places and tears sprang to his eyes after he pulled back the sheet on her little body. Her white cotton nightdress could do little to hide the damage.
He hadn’t wanted to cry since the war had taken a toll on his own body. Now, even those tears were wasteful, self-centered. He had some life where he was able to walk around, had years of playing football with his brothers back in Alabama before the family had moved north to Pittsburgh for job opportunities. This child had nothing. She was only nine, and polio had taken all of that from her.
“What’s wrong with you?” A clear determined voice broke into his thoughts.
Andie.
She might not be able to lift her own chin, but she had something to say for sure.
“Ain’t nothing wrong. I’m going to help you get a jump on your therapy, is all. You are done resting miss. We going to work.”
Her keen eyes regarded him. He started to look down away from her, but kept his gaze up. Who was the adult here?
“My mother told you not to touch me.”
“How you supposed to get better if I don’t?”
“Maybe I’m not supposed to. Put the sheet back.”
“I’m not doing it. I’m taking you to the therapy room after you eat some of this breakfast.”
“In the hospital, they said I was a goner. No point in eating breakfast.”
His stomach sank into his comfortable soled shoe when he heard her refer to herself so casually.
“You been through the worst of it, chocolate drop. You had the fever and you come out on the other side. You’re still here. It’s what you do with it that matters.” He pulled the tray of mashed cereal closer to her readying to feed her.
