Free Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven

had left it. Granny had made up the bed with fresh sheets and a coverlet, just the way Mama always did. It looked like Mama might walk in at any moment to fold back the covers and get into bed, like she’d just gotten up for a minute and would be right back. There was still a hollow in the pillow where her head had been.
    I took Mama’s nightgown off the bedpost and held it up to me. It smelled like Mama, only the sickness smell was gone. It was just Mama now—a mix of lavender and honeysuckle and the lye soap with spices in it that Granny sometimes made. I sat on the very edge of the bed so that I wouldn’t disturb anything.
    I spread Mama’s nightgown across my lap so it was covering my knees and my legs and hanging down to my feet like I was wearing it. I put my hand in the hollow of the pillow. I sat like that, watching the moonlight come in through the window, and thought how Mama was just here, and how just over a week ago I’d held her hand and talked to her and promised her I would live out there. And now, just like that, she was gone.
    Toward morning, I hung her nightgown on the bedpost and went back to my own room, forgetting all about my daddy and his note. I climbed into bed and curled up in a ball and cried myself to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember dreaming at all.

    The first thing I saw when I rolled over was Johnny Clay sitting up in his bed. I said, “What are you doing?”
    He said, “Hush, Velva Jean.”
    I could hear Sweet Fern and Danny talking downstairs. Johnny Clay had opened our door just a sliver and closed the window, even though we might suffocate from the heat, just so he could hear better.
    “We can bring them home with us,” Danny said.
    “No,” said Sweet Fern. “After all they’ve lost, those children will pitch a fit if we make them leave their home. Besides, there’s no room in the apartment.”
    They were talking about Beachard and Johnny Clay and me. Linc was eighteen and already married to Ruby Poole and living on his own, but Beach was fourteen, Johnny Clay was twelve, and I was ten. I sat up in my bed.
    Danny had promised Sweet Fern a beautiful house of her own, which he was going to build with the help of his brothers and his daddy. Sweet Fern had picked the house plan herself from a catalog and she was mighty proud of it. She got it out all the time to look at and show people.
    “It don’t mean we have to give up the house,” Danny said now.
    “I know.” We could hear her sigh even from downstairs. “I guess the thought of that house makes it easier to move back here for a while.” I imagined her looking up at the newspapers on the walls—the ones Mama had put up to cover over the cracks, the ones my brothers and I had learned to read from by studying the articles, advertisements, and cartoon strips—and at the old-fashioned kitchen, which was cramped and not at all fancy, not like the one Sweet Fern would have one day.
    “We could ask Granny and Daddy Hoyt,” Danny said.
    “No.”
    “Or Zona.”
    “No,” Sweet Fern said again. “Granny and Daddy Hoyt are too old to take on these children, and Zona’s not strong enough. Besides, Daddy asked me. He said I was the one to look after them. I’m to be their mother.”
    I started to cough. I coughed so hard that my eyes began to water and I couldn’t get my breath. Johnny Clay jumped on me and put his pillow over my face to get me quiet, but I felt my whole world spinning away from me. Sweet Fern and I didn’t get on at all. She was barely even nice to me, and that was only because Mama used to be around to make her act civil. I couldn’t deny that Sweet Fern was born to be a mother, but I knew without a doubt that I didn’t want her to be mine.
    For ten years, Sweet Fern had been the only girl—Mama and Daddy doted on her; Daddy Hoyt named her himself because she was his first grandbaby—and then I came along and she hated me right from the crib, no matter what Mama said about her