The Last Noel Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re going is up those stairs.” She pointed through the sweet-smelling kitchen to the narrow steps whose edges had been worn by time as round as river stones; they led to the room that was now going to be Kaye's.
    â€œFine!” He crossed his arms emphatically. “Fine! That's the only place I want to go. You think I want to go watch Aunt Yolanda wait on those people? You’re the one making me show up where nobody gives a rat's—” The gray-haired woman held up a warning finger and the boy closed his mouth over the last word of his sentence. “You’re the one,” he repeated in a stubborn mutter.
    â€œThat's right. I’m the one.” Carefully smoothing the wrinkles from a piece of used green tissue paper, she pushed it across the tabletop at him. “Here. Wrap that candy up.” On a card she wrote in her flowing formal schoolhouse script, “Merry Christmas from Aunt Ma, Uncle Tatlock, and Kaye.”
    It was Kaye King's fifth holiday trip down to North Carolina since he’d met Noni, but this Christmas everything was changing. This time there would be no train ride back with his mother to Philadelphia after New Year's; instead he would stay in Moors and live with his grandparents. Nineteen sixty-eight had been a hard year for Kaye's mother, with losses too fast and too deep for her cemetery of sticks and rubber bands to contain—in the end, a harder year than the boy could hide from those who would separate them.
    Finally in November, when the sky in West Philadelphia was always gray and the days too quickly gave way to night, his mother gave way as well, retreating to a darkness from which, despite all the tricks his years with her had taught him, he could not bring her back. After she was carried strapped on a gurney to a hospital, her sister, unable to support the boy,called home to North Carolina for help. Amma Fairley sent Kaye a train ticket.
    Now his grandmother watched him as he turned the radio dial from a choir on her church music station singing “Jesus the Light of the World” over to loud Motown on the rock station, in order, she knew, to keep her from talking. Abruptly, Aretha Franklin shouted, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me!” The old radio spluttered static as if indignant at the change.
    Kaye hit the plastic box hard with his fist, then yanked out its plug.
    â€œWhat you so angry about, Kaye?”
    â€œNothing.”
    But that wasn’t true, although he claimed otherwise, even to himself. Kaye was angry. Angry with his mother for choosing madness over him, with his aunt for choosing her own children. Angry at his expulsion from the urban turbulence of the world he knew, where—despite his small size—he’d won, with his fearless audacity, a place for himself. He was angry with his grandparents for living in the South where he would have to fight alien battles on a foreign terrain with unfamiliar weapons.
    He didn’t want to live in Moors, North Carolina, and go to the Tildens’ holiday party at Heaven's Hill. He dreaded entering a new school where he would have to explain details about his parents to strangers. What was wrong with his mother? Where was his father? He didn’t want to admit that, as far as he knew, his parents had never married and that he’d never laid eyes on his father, although he did have a snapshot of this young man, taken at a march in Montgomery, that he kept with his mother's Popsicle-stick crosses in her shoebox called “The Promised Land.”
    Kaye had brought this shoebox with him on the train with his large duffel bag. That's all he’d brought. What few toys he’dhad, he’d given away to friends. He’d returned his books, his sports gear, and his used violin to the school that had lent them to him. He didn’t want to play the violin down here in Moors. He didn’t want to start school at Gordon Junior High in a room of