Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

smiled back down at me.
    “Yeah, probably,” she said. “And if it won’t, it just won’t. Sometimes, Bone, you got to do things you wish you didn’t have to, and I don’t want to hurt that old woman. I really don’t. But Glen needs to take care of this, you understand? He needs to do it, and I’ve got to let him.” She ground out the cigarette under her heel but didn’t go back inside until Daddy Glen got off the phone.
    “Now they understand.” He tapped his forefinger on Reese’s nose happily and made her giggle. “They know how it’s gonna be now, for sure.”
    Two weeks later Grandma Parsons showed up late Sunday afternoon while Daddy Glen was over at his brother James’s new office helping the painting crew put up shelves. “Two hundred and fifty dollars,” she told Mama quickly when she got out of Matthew’s truck. He’d driven her down to see us but wouldn’t get out himself. “It’s due you since Lyle was in the army for six months before they found out he had bad feet. Like I told your husband, they sent it over to me and wouldn’t make it out to you unless you filed those papers. But I’ve brought it down to you in cash. I never should have got it, but Lyle still had me listed as his only family, just never got around to changing it, I suppose. I told them it should rightly go to you and Reese. I did, but they never paid me no mind.” She looked up once at Mama and then down at Reese, who had run up to grab her around the hips. Her face was tense, and her fingers shook as she raked them through Reese’s curls.
    “You gonna get a lot of money then, Grandma?” Reese asked her.
    “No, child. And I don’t care.”
    “You come on in, Mrs. Parsons.” Mama looked embarrassed, her fingers pulling at the belt loops of her shirtwaist dress. “Let me get you some ice tea, and you can sit with your grandchild a while.”
    Mrs. Parsons looked like she was going to cry. “I thought maybe you weren’t gonna let me see her no more.”
    “Oh God!” Mama took Mrs. Parsons by the shoulders and pulled her into a quick embrace. “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t let nobody else do that either. You can see Reese anytime you want. You know how much she loves you.”
    The two of them swayed slightly, Mrs. Parsons stiffly as if she was still unsure of her welcome and Mama as if she could barely hold in all the other things she wanted to say. Grandma Parsons’s brother kept his face turned away, smoking out the window of his truck. I kept close to Mama and watched the muscles in his neck jump as the two women sniffed and cleared their throats.
    “Well.” Mrs. Parsons licked her lips. “Maybe I’ll just come in a minute, have a little water before we start back.”
    “You could stay for dinner.” Mama’s face was flushed red and getting darker as I watched.
    “Well, no, we couldn’t do that.” Mrs. Parsons glanced over at her brother’s shoulder, but he didn’t turn to look at her. “We do have to get back. I’ll just stay a minute or two.”
    It wasn’t until she was sitting on Mama’s Sears sofa, with Reese drawn up between her legs and the envelope with the money “from the insurance” passed over to Mama, that Grandma Parsons relaxed a little. She got her brush out so she could pull the tangles out of Reese’s white-blond hair and keep her hands busy. “Your hair was red as fire when you were born,” she told Reese. “Now it’s as white as your daddy’s was.”
    Reese liked being told she looked like her daddy, and she kept his picture hidden in her underwear drawer where Daddy Glen wouldn’t see it and get his feelings hurt. Now and then, I’d go get it out myself, look into that grinning boy’s face that had nothing to do with me, and get all hot and tight with jealousy. Lyle had been as pretty as a girl and so white-blond he could have been a model in magazines. Reese had hair as fine as Lyle’s and a smile that came easy and fast, but she had too the Boatwrights’