Free The Last Noel by Michael Malone Page A

illnesses of Judy's were real; they were just a way for Judy to get attention from her busy daddy and mama. But Noni had been truly sick; she had almost died. The Tildens had brought her home to Moors from the airport in an ambulance bed. And then it had taken the child another month lying in her room before she could start back to school at Gordon Junior.
    Amma would say this for her grandson Kaye, back then he’d brought over his books and helped Noni with her homework evening after evening that whole spring. Every day beforehe hurried off to his job dispatching at the taxi company, he was over there at Heaven's Hill helping Noni. Bud Tilden had treated him like his own son, he was there so much. Kaye had been a good friend to Noni.
    And Noni had been a good friend to him. When her health got better, the two of them started spending every evening here at Clayhome, laughing, listening to those rock and roll records, learning some new dance or other that they’d seen on television. Back in Philadelphia, Deborah had taught Kaye to love to dance, and he and Noni got to be really good at all their fast steps and combinations, though they never did seem to do any dancing anywhere except here in Amma's house.
    Funny, Kaye loved to dance but he wouldn’t have a thing to do with music any other way, even though he had a nice voice, tenor like Amma's daddy Grover King. Noni had found out how Kaye had played violin in Philadelphia back in the fourth and fifth grades, and she’d kept at him and gotten Amma to keep at him to join that little school orchestra she was in at Gordon Junior. Amma had taken Tatlock to one of their concerts where Noni had the solo on the piano. But it wasn’t too long before Kaye quit his violin. And not too much longer before it seemed like he’d just about quit Noni, too.
    Now all Kaye could talk about was how the Tildens were the problem with America and how everybody else was the problem, except for the people he had pictures of covering the walls of his room. Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and such. These last few years Kaye had stopped making new Popsicle stick cemeteries for his mama and instead had started taping up all these newspaper photographs on his walls until his room finally looked to Amma like the shotgun house Tatlock had grown up in out in the country, wallpapered with tin signs and pictures cut out of store catalogues. After Kaye taped the pictures to the wall, he wrote things in black marker on them, just like Deborah had written on her little crosses. SoledadBrothers, ACQUITTED. Angela Davis, ACQUITTED. George Jackson, KILLED. ATTICA.
    A few months ago Noni had told Amma that she never saw Kaye much at school anymore; somehow both of them had started running with their own crowds and had drifted apart. Noni said that their friendship had gotten harder to keep up anyhow: Kaye acted so angry with her every time he told her about something he’d seen on the news. But how was Noni supposed to make up to him for the last four hundred years of American history? Why was he taking it out on her?
    Amma had hugged Noni and told her that the past was a heavy thing, too heavy to lift unless everybody lifted together. It would all work out in the Lord's good time. “The Lord's too slow for Kaye,” Noni told her.
    Deep down, Kaye's grandmother had thought maybe it was just as well that he’d stopped spending so much time with Noni. She had always wondered if the real reason Judy had sent Noni up to that New England school hadn’t been to get her away from Kaye. And if the child hadn’t gotten so sick up there that first semester, Judy could have kept them apart, too, that way. But if that had been her plan, it had backfired. Noni came home and the teenagers had gotten closer than ever. It was clear to Amma that Judy didn’t like her daughter's friendship with Kaye, or her husband's affection for him either, not one bit.
    Of course, if those children did