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  From what I could tell, the only thing they did was slide a little farther away. You could see dollar bills and change gliding smoothly from one pocket to the next around the whole yard. Good thing nobody asked me what I’d bet on, because I woulda told them how Peaches and Cal were one hundred percent sure it was gonna be a boy since Peaches was from a family of four brothers. They’d already picked out the name: Calvin junior, of course. No question about it, the two of them insisted the baby was gonna be a boy and a star athlete because of how strong he’d been kicking Peaches in the ribs for weeks.

  After maybe an hour or so had passed, the church door opened and a hush fell over the entire churchyard. The crowd was wilting in the heat and if it had been much longer we woulda been puddles of Crayola. But Cal came outta the church just in time holding a little bundle in his arms and everybody leaped up to see what it was. Cal was smiling as wide as the Mississippi River.

  “It’s a girl!” he hollered.

  Which just goes to show you that girls can kick as hard as boys, I guess.

  A whoop went up from the crowd, and Cal looked around. “Where’s Levi standing?” he said, acting like I was part of his family or something.

  I lifted up my big arm reluctantly, feeling all those strangers staring.

  “Come on up here!” He waved.

  Man oh man, I did not want to go up there, but I did. Aunt Odella woulda been real proud of my manners because I did not make a rude face while leaning down and looking at that baby, even though it was hard not to. Never saw anything so ugly in my whole life. The baby’s face was a wrinkled shade of purplish brown and she had a huge puff of soft black hair on her head. I’m telling you, she looked like a shrunk-up prune lady wearing a black feather hat.

  “Ain’t she the most beautiful thing?” Cal breathed.

  I nodded solemnly, saying yes she was, and hoped God would not strike me dead for telling an outright lie on the front steps of his church.

  Somebody in the crowd called out, “What’s her name?”

  Heck, now that was a problem. I could see Cal’s eyes roll wildly and I could tell he was panicking because he was still thinking Calvin junior. No other possibilities had even floated through his mind yet. Trying to help, I glanced around, as if a good name might be hiding somewhere nearby. My eyes fell on the church sign: Our Lady of Victory.

  Well, she was a lady. Ugly, but a lady.

  “Victory,” I offered, and Cal grabbed hold of that name like I’d just lobbed him a football in the last minute of a championship game.

  “She’s Victory,” he shouted to the crowd.

  I gotta admit I was kinda pleased with myself for coming up with that name outta thin air and all. Queen Bee Walker, who named me by accident too, woulda been proud.

  19. Love Conquers All

  Now, it didn’t take long for that prune-faced baby to become the center of her own tiny universe. Me and Peaches and Cal were the only planets in her universe and our sole purpose was to revolve around her, day and night. It was a good thing people brought us food during the first week after she was born because we woulda starved to death if they hadn’t. The pots of chicken and rice they left on the porch saved our lives. If nothing showed up by suppertime, me and Cal would cook frankfurters and open a can of Heinz baked beans outta pure desperation. After a couple of days, I never wanted to see another plate of franks and beans as long as I lived. Got pretty tired of warmed-over chicken and rice too.

  Far as I could tell, that baby never slept one minute of its life. It did two things. Cried at the top of its puny lungs. And shot things outta both ends, if you know what I mean. Nothing else. You couldn’t get a wink of sleep if you were in the same room with her, so me and Cal had started dragging two army cots onto the wide porch and sleeping outside, with who knows what crawling over us in the middle of the night. We were peppered with bug bites. Peaches swore we’d probably caught fleas from being out there in the dark like two strays. Every night she’d start crying, watching us leave.

  I figured something in Peaches’s mind must’ve dissolved after having the baby. She cried almost as much as Victory and lost her temper over the smallest things. It was as if that strong pumpkin lady had suddenly turned all mushy and soft. One morning, when she burned off a little clump of hair on the back of her head while putting in a curl, you woulda thought she’d whacked off her own arm with a butcher knife. Hearing her screams, one of the neighbors came running over to check she wasn’t dying.

  Another morning, she found the note I hadn’t sent to Aunt Odella yet. “You mean you never mailed this letter to your auntie?” she said, waving the wallpaper scrap in the air. With all the things that had happened, I hadn’t found the post office or stamps or an envelope yet. Plus, like I said, all of us had been too busy to think. “You march it to the post office this minute and mail it,” she said, her eyes popping mad. “Your people are probably worried sick.”

  I kept a careful eye on Cal’s truck, figuring it was only a matter of time before Peaches ran off from us and left Victory on the passenger seat with a note written on a napkin.

  * * *

  “Naw,” Cal said when I told him one night what I was worrying about. “No chance.” We were stretched out on the porch, barefoot, eating a bowl of peanuts in the dark. I gotta admit, I never had much of a taste for peanuts before, but now I couldn’t get enough of them. Me and Cal would put a big bowl between us and spend the evening sitting on the porch, just outta range of Peaches’s wrath, cracking the shells and flicking the pieces into the shadows.

  “Women, all of them, go a little crazy after having a baby,” Cal said, splitting a shell between his teeth. “She’ll be fine in no time. I ain’t worried one little bit about Peaches.”

  I tried explaining about Queen Bee Walker leaving me and how you couldn’t be sure. How my daddy was taken by complete surprise, people said.

  “Shoot, I can’t picture anybody going and leaving you and Boots in the dust like that lady did. She musta been just plain nuts. That’s the only explanation,” Cal answered. “Plus, if Peaches was gonna leave me, I’d be the first to know.” He grinned, his teeth flashing white in the shadows. “The whole town of Southern Pines would know. Shucks, McDeeds Creek would shrivel up in its banks. Birds would fall outta the air—”

  I gave Cal a soft punch in the arm. “Stop. I ain’t joking.”

  “All right, Legs.” Cal tried to look serious. “I’ll keep an eye on my old gal in case she gets the crazy idea to steal the truck and take off without me.”

  It was silent for a few minutes. The crickets were making a whirring racket in the darkness. Something was scratching under the porch. A woodstove was going in somebody’s kitchen, for no good reason that I could think of, since it must’ve been ninety-eight degrees that May night. A haze of smoke hung over the whole neighborhood.

  Cal swatted at a bug and leaned back against the house. “So you wanna hear how I met Peaches? It’s a good story—might give you some ideas of how to meet a pretty gal someday.”

  I said no thanks, but Cal ignored me.

  “About two years ago, me and a few of the other fellows were coming back from a training exercise in one of those six-by-sixes, army trucks, down there in Georgia. It was hotter than a firecracker that day. I was driving the truck, which was a heap of junk, going down a winding country road faster than I should have, when all of a sudden this tall gal with thready braids flopping all over her head—I’m telling you she looked like a wild woman—leaped in front of my truck, holding a sign. It was a wonder I didn’t run her over because that truck had prayers for brakes.” He glanced over at me. “Guess what the sign said.”

  I cracked a dusty peanut with my thumbs and pretended not to be too interested.

  “It said—right there in black and white—Peaches and Cal. And I thought to myself, ‘Holy smokes—this must be the woman I’m meant to marry. A lady named Peaches.’ ”

  I snorted loudly and brushed peanut shells off my shirt
. I wasn’t stupid enough to fall for this crazy tale.

  “I ain’t finished yet, Legs—keep on listening. See, then the crazy-looking gal got a little closer to my truck and I saw how there was another word, real teeny-tiny, squeezed sideways into the corner of the sign, because it didn’t fit. The word was Lemonade. That’s when it hit me—Peaches and Cool Lemonade. That’s what the sign was advertising. Cool, not Cal. Shucks, it didn’t have nothing to do with me. Nothing at all.

  “Still, I wasn’t ready to bug out right then. I looked back at the rickety stand where the lady had been sitting. There were way too many baskets of peaches still waiting to be bought and a jug of lemonade getting warm in the sun. So I asked her, ‘How much for two baskets of peaches and a drink?’ ‘Fifteen cents,’ she told me. ‘And what’s your name?’ I asked her as she handed me my change. She gave me this prickly old glare and told me it was none of my darned business, so I said all right, I’d just call her Peaches.”

  Cal chuckled. “Every week, whenever I passed through town or something, I’d stop by that rattletrap stand, wave, and holler, ‘Hey, Peaches. How ya doing today?’ Then I’d buy a basket or two of peaches and some lemonade from her, so she’d have to talk to me. It took a whole month before she finally agreed to go to church with me one Sunday. Rest is history. Her real name’s Pauline. Don’t that sound like an uptight, schoolteachery name?” Cal rolled his eyes.

  I had to admit I couldn’t picture Peaches as Pauline.

  “So, of course, I kept on calling her Peaches, even after we got married. Let’s see, counting today”—Cal held up his fingers—“we been married almost a year and six months. A Georgia country gal and a city boy from Richmond, Virginia. See, that’s how you know it’s real love.”

  “How?” I said, in spite of myself.

  “Because I can’t stand peaches. Haven’t eaten a thing with peaches in it since I was a baby. Worst fruit ever. But love conquers all. If it’s real love, you’ll do anything for it, even buying twenty-two baskets of peaches you can’t much stand to look at, let alone eat. Just to get a date with a pretty girl.”

  Now, I didn’t want to argue with Cal, but it seemed to me that love and a few baskets of peaches might conquer some people, but it didn’t conquer everybody. Love didn’t keep me from being left on the passenger seat of a Ford, with a goodbye note, for instance. It didn’t keep Margie, who I’d met on the train, from giving away the special cake she’d made for her fellow before it even got to Washington, D.C. And love had probably given up on the likes of Aunt Odella.

  Anyhow, the whole subject was starting to get old fast.

  “You see that lightning bug?” I pointed in the direction of a flicker that had glowed by the bushes near the gate. “It’s not even the end of May and I swear that was a lightning bug.”

  Cal pelted me with a handful of peanut shells. “You don’t like my love stories?”

  I shrugged, hoping he’d get the message that I didn’t.

  Inside the house, Victory let out one of her earsplitting howls, and Cal gave a weary sigh. “You ever hear the story about the cat who swallowed a whole ball of yarn?” A small grin tugged at the corner of Cal’s mouth, so you knew his sad idea of a joke was coming next, but I went along with it anyhow.

  “Well, there was this cat, see, who got real hungry one night. And there was no food at all to be found in her house, so she went and gobbled up a ball of yarn instead. Right after that, guess what happened?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Well, she had a half-dozen kittens,” Cal kept on. “But there was something very strange about those kittens. You wanna know what it was?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  Being Cal, he started hooting and falling over, even before getting to the punch line. “They were all born with knitted sweaters!”

  I busted up too, even though it wasn’t all that funny. It was stupid funny, you know what I mean? Kinda like love.

  “Y’all stop making that racket,” Peaches shouted, and rapped on the window above our heads. “The baby’s sleeping.”

  Cal grinned and closed his eyes. “See, that’s pure love right there. You heard it.”

  Sure it was. I was still gonna keep an eye on the truck.

  20. Kilogram

  Being stuck on the porch every night gives you a lot of time to think. I swear some nights my brain was like the jazz clubs back in Chicago. It didn’t open until after dark. I’d be lying there, trying to snooze, but my brain would be wide awake and kicking. If one of MawMaw Sands’s imaginary shooting stars had sailed over the house and landed in the garden late one night, I can promise you I woulda been the person to see it.

  Sometimes I tried to pass the time by dreaming up things my father might be doing at that moment. Was he sitting on a dark train somewhere in the United States, waiting on orders? Or standing on the deck of a troopship steaming across the Pacific? Or jumping outta an airplane over enemy territory? He often looked more like a superhero than a human being in my imagination. As if a parachuting Captain Marvel had become my father overnight.

  * * *

  When I heard back from Aunt Odella, her words didn’t ease my mind much either. After getting my note in the mail, my aunt sent a speedy reply by telegram saying I should let her know as soon as I got any news from my father—or if I didn’t hear from him soon, she’d send money for a ticket home. The telegram ended with the words God bless folks keeping you, meaning Cal and Peaches, I guess. Even being as short on words as it was, the note must’ve cost a lot to send, Peaches said—maybe thinking a little better of my aunt after we got it.

  Trouble was, there’d been no word from my father or the other paratroopers since they’d left town. It had been almost four weeks. We weren’t getting much war news either because Peaches had traded away the radio, not long after the president’s speech. In fact, I’d been standing in the kitchen on the day Cal came home to find the radio missing and the worst piece of art you ever saw sitting in its place. A peacock. Painted metallic silver and gold, with wilted feathers for its tail and chips of red glass for its eyes.

  Cal asked, “Where’s the radio gone to?”

  “Thought something else looked better sitting there instead,” Peaches answered, smooth as meringue on a pie, not letting a hint of shame at what she’d done slip into her voice. I stayed quiet and kept drying dishes, not letting on what I already knew, of course. Figured Cal was smart enough to find out the truth himself. He didn’t need me.

  “So you moved the radio somewhere else?” He stepped into the bedroom to look for it.

  “Miz Mayberry down the street needed a radio,” Peaches said, still sounding innocent.

  Cal’s head poked out through the bedroom doorway, eyebrows rising. “You gave her ours?”

  “You can’t put a price on art,” Peaches answered, pulling herself up to her full noble queen height. “Miz Mayberry bought the peacock from a real famous artist in Florida. I told her how I wouldn’t mind having something to brighten up the kitchen, and she gave it to me in exchange for that old worthless radio. Thought it was a fair trade because when all is said and done, art’s gonna be around long after this miserable war ends. Nobody’ll need their radios then.”

  We hadn’t had much news since.

  Only reminder of us still being at war was the sharp smell of the boot polish Cal used every night. After supper, he’d sit in the kitchen for an hour at least, hunched over the table, shining the brass on his uniform with Blitz cloth and polishing the same jump boots he’d polished the night before.

  The cast had finally been taken off his foot, so he was wearing both boots, but he still walked with a slight limp. According to Cal—who could rarely be believed—the army docs had advised him to jump out of a plane and land on a tree stump with his good foot next just to even things out. And if that didn’t work, he was supposed to allow himself a few days of walking practice, and pretty soon everything would be good as new.

  All of us
were too busy to realize what that verdict would mean.

  On the morning the letter arrived from the army, me and Cal were doing laundry in the kitchen. We’d been trying to keep up with Peaches’s laundry jobs so there’d be extra money still coming in. With our elbows deep in Rinso suds, we probably looked like a couple of girls as we washed dinner napkins from the resorts and starched officers’ dress shirts from Camp Mackall—leaving Peaches to worry about taking care of baby Victory, who was still a wailing handful of trouble.

  Coming up the steps, the postman ducked around a row of freshly washed sheets me and Cal had just strung across the porch, still dripping gently. “Mail for Sergeant Calvin R. Thomas,” he announced through the screen door.

  Even though the words weren’t spoken that loudly, I’m telling you they silenced the whole house faster than a preacher standing up to talk at a funeral. In the bedroom, Victory stopped in mid-howl. Cal’s hands, in the middle of wringing out a shirt, stopped and sagged into the washtub we were using. I worried about his whole body tumbling into the suds next, from the way he looked.

  “You want me to get it?” I asked, not knowing what to think. Had Aunt Odella sent us another message?

  “Naw.” He stood up and walked slowly toward the door. “It’s for me.”

  As the screen door squeaked open and Cal reached for the envelope, the entire neighborhood suddenly got dead quiet as well. No birds making a sound for a hundred miles. Not a whisper of air moving.

  The postman kept his expression carefully blank as he handed over the mail. You could tell he’d practiced giving the right look—keeping his eyes fixed only on the envelope and not on the person getting it. I’m sure he had to play the part a lot with all the bad news he had to deliver in the war.

  After the fellow left, Cal kept staring at the letter too. Not reading it yet. Just looking at it. In the bedroom, there was the muffled sound of Peaches crying. My feet began to move on their own, doing a nervous bounce on the black and white linoleum. When Archie’s brother went missing in action in Germany, the news came in a War Department telegram and Archie’s momma collapsed into a heap when she got it. They had to fetch a doctor to revive her.