Free The Last Noel by Michael Malone Page B

fall in love, the world wouldn’t be easy on them. Love was hard enough without adding in other people's nastiness about race. It was probably all for the best. And both of them were too busy to get serious anyhow; children didn’t used to keep so busy. Kaye had two jobs and a dozen or more after-school projects on top of his sports programs. And Judy kept Noni wound up tight enough to snap a watch spring. She couldn’t have worked her harder if she’d been planning to enter her in a pet show. It had been just the same with Judy's parents pushing her when she was little:Judy had to come in first in every swim meet, win the blue at every horse show.
    Noni was a sweeter child than her mother had ever been. Sometimes Amma felt like she could see Noni's heart right there in her face. She could see Noni's heart filling up with all this love she wanted to give folks. But folks wouldn’t take enough of it to give her ease. Noni was all feelings, always had been. She was like her brother Gordon that way.
    Wade now, he was a different story. Ever since Gordon died, it was like Wade had joined hands with the devil, like he’d decided that if the Good get killed, he’d better be as bad as he could be. He’d flunked out of one military school and got himself thrown out of another one. Then the university here turned him down, in spite of how they still had Bud Tilden's shirt hanging from the rafters of their stadium, in spite of how some Gordon or other had even built them their library. Now Wade was home for the holidays from the pokey little college in Atlanta where they’d had to send him. Home and up to worse than his mama knew. Vodka bottles in the trash and old marijuana butts in ashtrays under his bed with a bunch of filthy magazines. Pills of every color rolling around in his sock drawer.
    Getting into college, thought Amma, that's not something I’ll have to worry about with Kaye. Not with his good grades at Moors High, not the way he’d scored on that test they’d had to drive to Raleigh for. Plus, once Kaye had gotten his height—just like she’d told him he would—once he’d shot up all that way—Kaye had sports going for him, too. Or could have going for him, if he’d cared anything about it and could learn to stop his back-talking the coach.
    â€œYour boy's got an attitude problem,” the coach came over to Clayhome to tell her and Tatlock. “And he's got a motivation problem. We need to motivate that boy's passion for the game of football.” Well, all the man had heard in reply was along speech from Tatlock about how, back in his teens, he’d played the best football, baseball, and basketball the town of Moors, North Carolina, had ever seen, but because of his color he’d never a chance to show what he could do. Which was possibly even true, for Amma could remember to this day, even in love with Bill King as she’d been at the time, how that Fourth of July at the town park the muscles ruffled in Tat's big back and arms, and how his skinny bat slung around and how the baseball flew like a white bird off into the blue cloudless sky.
    But none of Tat's horn-blowing about the past was any use to Kaye, who might need a push from that football coach if Amma's savings wouldn’t stretch far enough to get him through college. Bills were high, money hard to come by. And her daughter Hope, with six kids, Hope and her husband both working, a good man, but they could always use a little extra help. Plus, Amma was still trying to catch up to what she’d put away three years ago that she’d had to use traveling with Kaye by plane to Philadelphia. But after Deborah had got hold of those pills in the hospital, Amma wasn’t about to stay home; she had to be there at Deborah's side to pull her through, even if it broke her heart when she saw she might as well have been a stranger off the street to her own daughter.
    Yes, Amma