Knee-Deep in Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page B

and dark as a carpet. Sitting in the car, she was shivering with desire, an open throbbing stretch empty of everything but yearning. Her mother was the pause right before the shudder. Helene wanted her mama. Maybe even her daddy too.
    When they pulled into the driveway, Helene said, “Do you still know the way down there?”
    Ed slid the car into park and sighed. “Helene.”
    â€œJust draw me a map, okay? That’s all I’m asking.” Before he could answer, Helene hopped out of the car to water the wilting flowers in the yard. She had hummed with purpose since reading Queen Ester’s letter and, unlike her previous trips to her mother’s house, now she’d had time to plan. While Uncle Ed went inside to collect Aunt Annie b’s clothes for the church donation, Helene kicked at the tires of her aunt’s 1967 Chevy Impala, checking their air pressure. She got in, cleaned out the passenger seat, and then went through the glove compartment; she even thought of giving the Chevy a coat of Turtle Wax but changed her mind when she reached the back porch and found Annie b’s old trunk.
    Its groan welcomed her as she opened the lid. She crouched low to collect forgotten evidence: old letters, still in their worn envelopes, that she hadn’t read since she was fourteen; a faded photo of her mother and grandmother surrounded by friends in front of their house; a torn page from the Lafayette telephone book that held neither her mother’s name nor her grandmother’s but the number of the abandoned sawmill where her father, Duck, had worked until he died. She slid them into her pocketbook, these slices of her family’s past without her.
    Entering the house, Helene hounded her uncle to draw the map to her mother’s house, not letting up even though he had shriveled since her aunt’s death. The skin of his cheeks and hands was now drawn tightly against pronounced bones, and his stomach, which had once looked like muscle that didn’t know when to stop growing, lay slack inside his shirt.
    Uncle Ed sat down and etched out a map on a piece of cardboard, showing his niece how to jump through time and not get lost on the way. “South of Lafayette, east of Canfield, and a ways from the lake they got and you there—there’s your mama. Waiting for you, in a manner of speaking.
    â€œThere’s a walking bridge over Bacaw’s Creek. Fore you get there, the road breaks in two. Now, you just take FM493 and you should be there in no time at all.” Uncle Ed stared at the sheet of cardboard. “Watch out for FM493, cause you just get that one sign; there ain’t gone be nothing else to show you the way.” He shook his head. “Just stubborn, you. Anybody else with the kind of want you got in your teeth would of dropped it by now.”
    â€œI know it,” she said. “I know it.” And she grabbed the map from his hand.
    *   *   *
    Ed accompanied his niece out to the driveway. “You check the tires?” He patted the top of Annie b’s Chevy. The car looked shabby. Both fenders were painted with primer and Ed had yet to put on the new muffler he had bought from the mechanic. “Don’t get your heart set on your mama.”
    â€œI’m not.”
    â€œAin’t that what you always said? You know I done always wanted nothing but right for you.”
    â€œShe’s my mother. How could she be anything but right for me?” After hearing the fear in his voice, Helene’s next words were smooth and beseeching. “Don’t worry, you’ve got all those ladies to look after you while I’m gone.”
    â€œI’m just trying to tell you—”
    â€œThis time is different. I’m an adult now.” Both remembered the trip he and Helene had made to Queen Ester’s ten years ago. Helene had convinced Uncle Ed to drive her out to the house. From the passenger seat, she had