Free Mercy Train by Rae Meadows

know, Mrs. Baker. With the funny squished face. Maybe you’ll help me with it?”
    Violet nodded, wanting to keep her mother buoyed.
    â€œI won’t go there anymore. To the Madam’s.” Lilibeth turned away, her eyes glossy.
    The air from the open window was cool and only a little fishy. Violet tapped the pane with her finger, forcing herself not to grab for the hope that threw out a new line whenever her mother was her mother again.
    â€œYou aren’t sorry you came with me, are you, baby girl?” Lilibeth’s face threatened to fold, her eyes water-clear, exposed.
    â€œNo, Mama,” Violet said. And she wasn’t.
    Her mother filled bowl after bowl with cold water from the sink and emptied them into a tin tub on the floor. She wrapped towels around the pot and added the boiling water.
    â€œI didn’t know they would cut off your pretty hair,” she said, helping Violet pull the dress over her head. “I’m sorry about that.”
    The warm water turned Violet’s skin pink, and her dirt turned the bathwater gray. She closed her eyes as her mother cupped water over her head. She had missed her mother, an instinctual, wordless ache, no matter how she had tried to convince herself otherwise, no matter how much she did not want to need someone whose eyes seemed permanently cast on some distant shore that no one else could see.
    â€œYou look more like your father with your new hair.”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    â€œHe was handsome,” Lilibeth said. “In his way.”
    When they had married, and it became apparent that Lilibeth could not maintain the cookstove or take care of the chickens or even bake biscuits—“Why should I know those things?” she had said to Violet—Bluford made it known that he felt cheated. Any fondness between them had dried up and blown away like crackled remnants of dead leaves.
    â€œDo you think he misses us?” Violet asked.
    â€œI don’t think he does,” her mother said, slowly lathering Violet’s hair. “But we don’t miss him neither, do we?” She giggled. “That stupid way he used to walk, all hunched like, you remember? Like he was afraid frogs were going to start falling from the sky.”
    â€œHow about how he ate a biscuit? Tearing the whole top off with his mouth and chewing so the whole world could see what was going on in there,” Violet said.
    â€œWhat about his mother? That ugly woman. Her face all pebbled. Belching at the table.”
    â€œI hated how he called me girl ,” Violet said.
    The bathwater was quickly cooling to tepid. Lilibeth rinsed Violet’s hair and helped her dry herself with a thin towel they had brought from Kentucky. She was calmed by her mother’s touch, soothed by her closeness.
    â€œYou were never his,” Lilibeth said, lying on the bed. “I mean, one look at those ice-blue eyes. You were always mine. You made me a mother. You’re the only one who can ever say that.” She closed her eyes.
    Violet pulled one of her old dresses on over her head. “I’m hungry,” she said.
    â€œCheck the cupboard. I can make you something in a bit.”
    â€œAre you going out later?” Violet asked.
    â€œMr. Smith is taking me to the cabaret. I think it will be quite marvelous.”
    Reginald Smith was a poet with sleepy eyes who wore a frayed pauper’s coat but checked the time with a gold watch. His wealthy uptown family gave him a handsome allowance, which kept him in shabby comfort in a sprawling, rattletrap apartment, where, Violet guessed, her mother often slept. When he wasn’t locked away, wringing out a poem that would surely cause a sensation if only he could get it to the right people—“He writes beautiful things, Vi; they wouldn’t know what to make of him back home”—he would dote on Lilibeth and call her darling, and promenade her around town. Violet had met