02 Lily Nevada by Cecelia Holland

Author:Cecelia Holland [Holland, Cecelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History - American
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

At dinner that night, in the Baldwin dining room, she kept noticing the silverware, the shining dishes, how much they left on their plates. How well dressed everybody was. How everything was padded, the floors with carpets, the tables with linen, the people with clothes, hiding away what was underneath. Charlie said, “Darling, you’re not eating much. Did you go find that Dorothea?”

“Yes,” Lily said. The power of that meeting was still on her and she was unwilling to dilute it by telling anybody else.

“Well?” Charlie asked. Bellamy and Eva were watching her from the other side of the table.

“She was a Negro,” Lily said.

Harry said, “Fought a whole goddamned war, a lot of good boys got killed, just so they could lay around and eat watermelon.”

Lily flung her fork down and got up and went away from the table. Eva called out, “Lily, what’s wrong?” Lily went on across the dining room and to the back door and down past the kitchen to her room, and sat there in the dark a while.

She remembered Serafa, the woman she had lived with in Los Angeles, when she was 15. Serafa had been Indian and Mexican and African and probably white, too, in there somewhere. Lily did not remember that she had even noticed Serafa’s color then. Maybe because she had been with King, her foster father, an outlaw, and saw herself as an outlaw also, a stranger in a strange land, and so she had been one with all the strange. Or maybe she had just been too young to notice. Or maybe she had noticed, then, and didn’t care now to remember.

She thought about King.

She didn’t allow herself to do that much. He had taken care of her, after her father died; she had gotten to love him, and his bloody death still made her sick to think of. What she liked to remember was the Irish burr of his voice in the dark, telling her stories. His arms around her, protecting her.

He had loved her back. He had loved her first, when she was suspicious and afraid of him. He had loved her without expecting anything back, for herself alone. He had lost his little sister once, and put her in that place, and cherished her.

She thought: I could do that. I could choose a new mother.

There was a knock on the door. She said, “Yes.”

Bellamy came in. “My child. Is there something wrong? Will you talk to me about it?”

“Oh, David.”

Now suddenly she was crying, like a little baby, and Bellamy sat down beside her and put his arm around her and let her weep on his shoulder, and it all came out about Dorothea, the poor little darkies, the hard cold benches, the threadbare clothes, while Bellamy patted her shoulder and murmured.

At the end, she sat there in the wreckage, her nose running, feeling wrung out. Bellamy said, “But you don’t believe that this is your mother.”

“No. She’s much too young.” She took his handkerchief from him and blew her nose.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.