Crumbs

Ginny Rorby

When my mother announced she and Daddy were adopting an infant, her father said, “Be warned, Kathryn, children will be your greatest disappointment.” My mother was an only child.

I always knew I was adopted. When Kristin, my parent’s “natural child,” and I were trotted out for company, Kristin dangled and swung a soup spoon from her pug-nose and Momma told the story of how she and Daddy went to an orphanage, walked the long line of cribs until they came to mine and knew I was the one. Guests applauded. Kristin and I held hands and bowed.

I got over believing the orphanage story in my late teens. I was in my twenties when my Aunt Winona told me the truth. I was born in the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in Washington, D. C. My aunt, its director at the time, chose me for my parents.

I spent four and a half years as an only child, but from the day Kristin, who wasn’t planned, came home from the hospital, I felt Momma loved us differently. If she was angry with me, she struggled to forgive. When Kristin upset her, she labored to stay mad. Confirmation of what I’d sensed all my life would come the day after Momma died.

Daddy died first. Momma, a self-proclaimed coward, refused to stay alone in the house we’d lived in for thirty-four years. Three days after he died, she moved to an assisted-living facility in downtown Orlando. I came up from Miami to help her move. A month later she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died three years to the day after Daddy.

Frank, Kristin’s lawyer husband, was so anxious to see her will he had it delivered between Momma’s death late Saturday afternoon and early Sunday morning. He sounded upbeat when he called me to come over for the reading. Kristin, when I arrived, looked as if she’d been crying.

Frank invited me to join him in their lushly carpeted bathroom, I suppose because, with the door closed, we weren’t likely to be disturbed. He read the will perched on the toilet. I sat on the floor, my back against the tub.

Momma left everything to Kristin: three thousand acres of farmland in Iowa and Nebraska, all the stocks and bonds, our house, which they planned to sell, and all its furnishings. To me, she left five thousand dollars a year for five years, a Royal Doulton figurine entitled My Love, and her 1986 Cadillac. When Frank finished reading, he said, “I think it’s fair, don’t you?”

I left the bathroom and then the house. The unfairness hit me immediately even though my mother had held her wealth over my head since she inherited the farms from her mother. Being left out of her will was a threat I heard many times growing up.

My sister followed me to my car, crying. She hugged me and swore she’d make it right. I knew she wouldn’t. My brother-in-law would never let her. I was so much easier to forfeit.

After the reading, I drove back to our childhood home knowing that my mother had destroyed my relationship with my sister and my niece and nephew, whom I adored. Frank would take care of the guilt she felt and I would, and did, become a persona non grata by Christmas.

The house I’d grown up in was an ugly cinderblock, ‘50s style, split-level with a slanted roof and a fallout shelter in the backyard that dated to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Though unattractive, I knew it would sell quickly because the property was prime Winter Park lakefront. Over the years, since Momma moved out, Kristin and Frank had been packing up the stuff she’d left behind readying the house for sale.

That night, I slept fitfully in the bedroom I used to share with my sister. I finally gave up about dawn and came downstairs. I can’t say I was particularly surprised to find Lucinda, our housekeeper, dead for more than twenty years, sitting at the kitchen’s red-Formica-and-chrome table with her coffee and a filter-less Camel burning in the ashtray. She was dressed just as I remembered, in her starched gray dress with a white apron, her oiled hair pulled into a small tight bun.

She smiled at me when I came into the kitchen. "I've been waiting for you to get up." She was collecting toast crumbs from her plate with a dampened fingertip.

"I was awake off and on all night." I covered a yawn with the back of my hand. "I’m so glad to see you.” I leaned and kissed her cheek. “But what are you doing here?"

"I thought I'd help you pack up some stuff you might want to take with you."

"With two of us, that'll take about ten minutes."

"Not that stuff, Ginny." Lucinda flicked her hand toward the living room where much of the house’s contents were in boxes. Her hand came back to rest over the heart that quit her so long ago.

I put a cup of water in the microwave and opened a new can of Café Vienna.

Lucinda dampened her finger again to collect more crumbs from the maroon plastic plate. I'd forgotten about those ugly plates: four dark green ones, four maroon, square, thick plastic. Momma saved the Irish Beleek for guests, who over the years she'd ceased to invite, too ashamed of Daddy’s drinking.

“I think of you often,” I said. “Even after all these years, I still miss you.”

“I miss you, too, child.”

Tears welled. "Whatever happened to Ruth?" I asked to keep from crying.

Ruth, Lucinda's daughter, had two illegitimate children by different men. Lucinda and Momma used to worry over her all the time. But behind Lucinda’s back, Momma said awful things about Ruth. I often wondered if my mother thought I'd have an illegitimate baby, too, since I'd been one.

"She finally married Reggie's dad."

"That's good."

"No. He couldn't settle down. Ended up in jail before I passed. That may be what finished me off."

"And Reggie. What happened to him? And to...?"

"Carlisle."

"Right."

"I think Reggie might have been okay, but he got kilt in Vietnam. Carlisle, he’s dead, too. Knife fight."

"I'm sorry, Lucinda. Momma never told me."

"I don't think I ever told her. After Martin Luther King got kilt, she quit asking about things and I quit telling her. Nowadays, our boys either dying or ending up in jail is common as salt."

"I know. I’m sorry.” I took my coffee and went to sit opposite her at the table just as I’d done a hundred times before I married and left home. She looked smaller. Back then, she'd been five-foot-three, same height as Momma, but heavy, one-hundred-and-eighty pounds or more. It was Lucinda who taught me how to iron, and told Momma I should be learning to cook, so I wouldn't be thrown out into the world not knowing how to take care of myself. She knew it could happen, and it was cooking and ironing, Lucinda once told me, that had kept her out of the poorhouse.

"Do you remember the day I graduated from high school?" I said.

"Sure do."

"You were making my bed and you sat down and asked me to come sit beside you. You told me how sorry you were that you didn't have a present for me."

Lucinda nodded. "I was proud of you."

"Momma sure wasn’t. She was just happy I managed to graduate, even if it was by the skin of my teeth."

"Ginny, I came with this family when Kristin was born. You was the first child I helped raise to graduate high school. Grades don't matter none. You was whip-smart. Neither of your parents had it in ‘em to help you through them risky years."

"Daddy was from an era when fathers were protected from their children. I guess Momma did the best she could. I was a handful."

"No, you weren't."

"Momma thought I was. As late as last month, she remembered things I’d done when I was seventeen, and I was still trying to make them up to her."

"Your momma was a grudgeful woman."

My mother used to keep Lucinda's vocabulary creations in a notebook along with ones by our neighbor, Betty Waddy. Waddyisms, she called them. Her favorite of Betty's was her description of a dinner at a Polynesian restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale, where she said, “The dancers came out dressed in their native habitat." Her favorite of Lucinda's had been when she told Momma she’d taken the Thanksgiving turkey out of the freezer to “throb.”

"You know what else I remember?" Lucinda said.

I shook my head. I wanted her to go on. Maybe she knew where I’d gone wrong.

"Even as a teenager, you had yourself a center of your own making."

"What do you mean?"

"You graduated in 1962, and I don't think your heart knew I was Black. You managed to grow up in this house and still love me like . . . like we was the same color."

"You're right about loving you. As for the other, I don't think I ever thought about it until that day on the bus, remember?"

"Lordy, do I."

"I've never told anyone this, but the day Kennedy was shot, when I heard, I said, ‘Good.’ Right out loud. I was glad he was dead. I bet the guy who told me—he was crying—still remembers and figures I stayed a sorry bigot all my life."

"You loved your parents and those were their sediments you was soaking up like a sponge."

"I remember asking Momma how they could feel one way about Blacks and different about you. She quoted some editorial she’d read on the difference between Southerners and Yankees. 'We love the individual and hate the race and Yankees love the race and hate the individual.' Isn't that weird? That made sense to me then. I don't think I sorted it out until that day on the bus."

I started to get up for more coffee but sat down again. "It's funny, I remember ‘White Only’ signs, and that Momma had you use the toilet in the storeroom, but I never thought about it. On the bus that day, I knew for the first time those were rules we imposed on you." I ran my finger along Lucinda's ridge of knuckles. "I don't even know what I was doing on that bus. It may have been the only bus ride I ever took."

"No, it wasn't, it's just the only one you remember. You rode the bus to college nearly everyday if a boyfriend didn't pick you up. I was on that same bus going home when it stopped to pick you up. I remember my heart skipped a beat when I saw you—happy to see my girl and knowing for sure, as soon as you see'd me, you'd come to sit with me. Lordy, I was scared. I put that big ole purse of mine in your way and said, ‘It ain't allowed Ginny. This section’s for coloreds.’"

"I remember. I was hurt until I looked where you were looking—at the driver, his eyes watching us in the rearview mirror. The light turned green, the bus stood still. Other people turned to look. I'm sorry, Lucinda. I was such a hot-head, I came so close to sitting down just to show them.”

"When you sat in the row in front of me and he still didn't move that bus, I didn't know what was gonna happen." Lucinda stared past me, eyes on the hideous valances Momma had her seamstress make for the kitchen windows. "I was the most forward sitting colored, and you was the most backwards sitting white. I guess his mind just made the back of your seat the new line between the sections."

"I've thought about that moment as defining for me, you know. I’ve remembered it a hundred times over the years. How'd you keep from hating us, Lucinda?"

For a fleeting moment, something sparked in her eyes, then she reached and took my hand. "Honey, you was a child. You didn't know no better. And look what you became when you was old enough to figure it out."

I laughed. “Yeah, a child a mother couldn't love."

"That was a lacking of your momma's, not yours. Them corn-farms she left your sister were what saved her from sinking under the weight of your daddy's drinking. When I was teaching you to cook and iron, she was planning how to save Kristin, if whatever low-life she married ever cut and run. Don’t let the bitterness at the unfairness of what she done ruin all your tomorrows.” She hesitated. “I didn’t. I had a good a life as the times would allow and it let me love you and your sister and Mr. Noel and your momma. I came today to tell you she did love you. She couldn't help protecting the weaker of you two, the one she felt would need the most help. And I came to remind you that you was my child, too."

I laid my arm out fully beside Lucinda's. My wrinkling white skin; Lucinda's still smooth. I closed my eyes and bowed my head until my cheek rested on both of our arms. I felt Lucinda's hand stroking my hair while I cried.

"Want more coffee?" I finally whispered. But when I looked up, she was gone. I got up, made another cup of coffee, and carried it down to the lake. I wanted to sit there one last time, but jet skiers were tearing at the otherwise calm surface. I turned to go back to the house, but it had been emptied of everything that could give me peace. I looked again at the ugliness of it all and realized, like this morning with Lucinda, all this is mine, the best parts of it: the day fishing on the lake with Daddy when the storm came up and he'd emptied his drink overboard, covered me with his shirt, and rowed us home against the wind. Or Kristin at seventeen, after my high school sweetheart was killed, meeting me in the driveway when I came home for his funeral, hugging, and comforting me. Or the last three years, lying on the bed beside Momma after each of her chemo therapies, waiting together for the sickness to pass. These are mine. The small moments of love and affection I can sort through any time. I went back into the kitchen, emptied, and washed my cup and Lucinda’s plate—picked completely clean of crumbs.