Call Me Tuesday Read online

  Copyright 2012 by Leigh Byrne

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  ISBN: 1463690029

  ISBN 13: 9781463690021

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62111-167-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011961407

  CreateSpace, North Charleston, SC

  To my husband, Wally,

  for his unwavering love and support, and

  to my best friend, Paula,

  for never allowing me to give up

  Table of Contents

  SNAP

  Chapter 1

  OUR PERFECT FAMILY

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  THE STRANGER IN MAMA’S CLOTHES

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  GREYHOUND TO A NEW LIFE

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  SNAP

  1

  Mama knocked twice on my bedroom door. “There’s a god-awful stench coming from in there,” she said. “You need to take your bucket outside and empty it.”

  At one time, when I first started using the bucket as a toilet, the acrid air in my room had burned the inside of my nose, and everything I ate and drank tasted like the smell of pee. But now, after months of constant exposure, I hardly noticed it at all. I was only aware, whenever I left my room, that the air outside it was different, thinner, crisper—different.

  I heard the two-by-four Mama kept wedged under my doorknob fall hard, as usual, as if she had kicked it away, but its impact to the floor was muffled by the carpet in the hallway. Like an angry fist blocked by a pillow.

  The sound of the two-by-four falling was always the same. Every morning, as I waited for her to come and let me out to go to school, or to do my chores, I listened for it with both anticipation and dread, hoping one day it would be different. I kept thinking if the sound was different, then maybe other things beyond the door might be different too.

  As I made my way down the stairs, balancing the half-full bucket against my thigh, I noticed the house was quiet for a Saturday. When I came to the bottom of the stairway, I looked around, and realized no one was home but Mama and me. I always got nervous when I was alone with her.

  I passed the kitchen and saw her leaning up against the counter stirring creamer into a cup of coffee. She hadn’t been up long; she still had on a sleeping gown, and her hair was matted to the back of her head. When I walked by her, she glanced up at me, and tapped her spoon on the side of her cup. “Make sure you take it far away from the house.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I yelled, on my way out the back door.

  I went out into the yard to a grassy area under a tree, and sat the bucket down. I had learned if I dumped it all at once, the pee sometimes stayed on the surface of the earth, and my feet got wet. So, tilting the bucket slightly, I poured slowly, and watched its contents seep into the grass and wrap its rusty fingers around the tree roots.

  When I came back inside, Mama met me at the door. “I need some potatoes peeled for lunch,” she said, and then went into the kitchen again.

  After I returned the bucket to my room, I stood before her, awaiting my next instructions.

  She pointed to a corner where she’d spread some newspaper on the floor. “Sit down over there,” she said. Then she pulled a sack of potatoes from the pantry, and plopped them beside me, along with a deep soup pan. She handed me a paring knife. “Now get to peeling.”

  Taking a potato from the sack, I started to work right away. Mama went back over to the counter, picked up her coffee, and began walking the floor. Sipping her coffee, she paced and stared at me, her steps getting faster and faster, as she became fueled by the caffeine.

  I ignored her. Concentrated on the potato in my hand, on keeping the peeling the way she required it to be—thin enough to see through when she held it up to the light.

  Finally, she stopped, tilted her head to one side. “I swear you get homelier every day,” she said.

  If I had been younger, I would have cried, crushed by her words. But in the last couple of years, I’d become much tougher. So what, I thought, acting as if I hadn’t heard her. I don’t care what you think of me anymore.

  “I hoped you might get prettier when you became a teenager, but I do believe you’re even uglier.” She paused, took a long drink of her coffee, allowing enough time for what she had said to sink in. “I feel sorry for you. Honestly, I don’t know how you’re going to make it on your own. I mean, I always had men standing in line to take care of me, but with your face, I doubt you’ll be able to find anyone.”

  Sliding the knife blade under the peel of a fresh potato, I tried to imagine her at thirteen, a bubbly cheerleader with a head full of shiny red curls and perfect skin. It was a stretch. She had gained about thirty pounds in the last year or so, and her hair was brassy and brittle from constant bleaching. The scar from her accident, deep and severe, slashed across her cheek like a lightning bolt.

  For several minutes she went on walking, and talking, and I continued to ignore her. Every so often I caught a glimpse of her as she passed, but I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The only sound I allowed in my head was the knife scraping across the potatoes.

  When I had finished, and there was a mountain of paper-thin peelings in front of me, Mama snatched up the pan filled with creamy, spotless potatoes. “Now, pick up the papers and put them in the trash,” she said. “I have another chore for you to do.”

  She pulled a brown paper grocery bag from a cabinet drawer, and motioned for me to follow her into the family room. “I want you to pick up all the crumbs on the carpet in here,” she said. With her finger she drew a series of small circles in the air above an area of the floor littered with crumpled potato chips. “Don’t stop until this whole room is clean.”

  She handed me the paper bag, and I nodded my head as if I understood her. But I didn’t. I had never understood why she made me use my fingers to pick up specks of dirt and food crumbs from the floor when she had a perfectly good vacuum cleaner.

  On her way back to the kitchen, she stopped in the hallway and pointed in the direction of the back door, where there were dirt clods and mud ground into the carpet. “On second thought, start there,” she said, “and work your way up the hall, into the family room.”

  I trudged down the hall, dragging the paper ba
g beside me. When I came to the top of the steps leading to the door, I sat and stared at the dirty carpet, wondering where Daddy and the boys had gone. Wishing I were with them.

  About ten minutes later, Mama came back to check on my progress, and found me sitting down on the job. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked, her voice reflecting disbelief more than anger.

  Had it been a year, a month, or even a few days, earlier, I would have been terrified of what she might do to me for disobeying her. I would have dropped to my knees and started picking up crumbs, scratching mud. But on this day, something was different. This day I didn’t budge when I heard her coming.

  “Answer me!” she shouted.

  I didn’t turn around.

  Suddenly I heard the rapid pounding of her feet against the floor behind me. “Answer me!” she shouted again. This time with her words came the blunt force of her foot in the small of my back, and a hot pain in my kidney. “I said answer me, damn it!”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her cock her leg back to kick me again. Before she could deliver the blow, I sprang to my feet, grabbed her by one of her wrists, and dug my fingers into the soft flesh of the underside of her forearm.

  Looking down, into her eyes, I tried to decipher what she was feeling from a facial expression I’d never before seen. I had known my mama at her darkest time, in her deepest pain. And, certainly, I’d witnessed her anger again and again. But never, under the safety of Daddy’s six foot seven inch wingspan, had I known her to be afraid.

  “My name is Tuesday, Mama!” I said, twisting her arm. “Say my name! Say it! Say Tuesday!”

  The words had come out of my mouth, and yet the voice I heard, full of vengeance and bitterness, sounded strangely foreign to my ears. One part of me was entirely detached from what was happening, as if I were watching some mean, crazed intruder holding my mama by the wrist. At the same time, another part was well aware of what I was doing, of every detail of the instant: the blood rushing through my head, the smell of coffee on her breath, her pulse throbbing under my hand.

  “I’ll call you what I damn well please!” A grimace cut across her face. “Take your hands off me!”

  I tightened my grip. “Don’t you think you’ve punished me enough, Mama? Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough for what I did? I can’t take it anymore! I won’t take it anymore!”

  She tugged her arm back, trying to pull free of my clutch. “Take your hands off me—now!” she demanded.

  Then, in an instant, something—maybe it was the tone of her voice—caused the courage I had seconds earlier to desert me, and I dropped her arm like it was a hot wire. And once again I became a frightened child, ready to obey her every command in the same instinctive way I had always obeyed her.

  I expected her to attack me. This time I wanted her to. This time I’d asked for it, deserved it. I braced myself for the punch I knew was inevitable.

  But nothing happened.

  Maybe she had seen something in my eyes when I was squeezing her arm, and knew if she made an attempt to hurt me again, it would unleash all the rage I had pent up inside, the rage she had created. Maybe she was scared of me.

  She looked down at her arm, and examined the purple crescents my fingernails had imprinted there. When she finally looked up again, I saw that her complexion was colorless, her bottom lip quivering. We stood face to face, stunned, as if neither of us was able to process what had just happened, as if neither of us knew what to do next.

  “Get out of my sight,” she said, trying to sound in control with a voice that was thin and shaky. “Go to your room—now!”

  Pushing past her, I bounded up the stairs, clearing two at a time. When I got in my room, I shut the door behind me and pressed my back up against it.

  After a few minutes, I heard Mama wedge the two-by-four under my doorknob. All at once, my legs gave out, and I slid down to the floor. “I’m sorry, Mama!” I cried out to her, as she walked back down the stairs. “I didn’t mean it!”

  OUR PERFECT

  FAMILY

  2

  I was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Audrey, holding one of her cold, stiff feet in my hands. Mama was beside me with the other foot, showing me how to use gentle pressure with my thumbs to roll away the loose, cheesy flesh from between Audrey’s toes, and scratch off the more stubborn patches with my fingernails.

  The dead skin that accumulated on Audrey’s feet had to be tended to on a regular basis. Not because it itched, or was uncomfortable to her in any way; she couldn’t feel anything south of her hips. And not because of how gross it looked, all yellow and crusty—but because of the smell, nauseatingly sweet, like meat when it first begins to go bad. If the skin wasn’t cleared away, at least weekly, the smell of it would first permeate every surface in the bedroom Audrey and I shared, and then waft down the hallway, gradually claiming the rest of the house.

  “It stinks,” I whined.

  “Then breathe through your mouth,” Mama said.

  “I am breathing through my mouth, and I can still smell it.”

  “Shush before you hurt your sister’s feelings.”

  Mama always called Audrey my sister, but she wasn’t really. She was only my half sister because she had a different father than my brothers and me. Mama said he deserted her after she got pregnant, and she had to drop out of high school when she was only seventeen and take care of a baby all by herself.

  She handed me a bottle of Rose Milk. “Try adding some of this.”

  I pumped a mound of the pink lotion into my palm, slathered it between my hands, and began rolling away the skin on Audrey’s feet, like Mama had showed me.

  “Still stinks,” I mumbled under my breath.

  “Tuesday, not another word!”

  I loved how she said my name in her syrupy, Southern way, like, Tooos-de. I loved my name too. I was named after the beautiful actress from the sixties, Tuesday Weld.

  “I had my mind all set to name you Marilyn, you know, after Marilyn Monroe,” Mama had explained. “Then a few hours before you were born, out of the clear blue, one of the nurses at the hospital up and asked me, ‘Has anybody ever told you that you resemble Tuesday Weld?’ Well, I figured it had to be a sign. I mean, it was the perfect name for you, because you were born that night, and it was on a Tuesday!” She leaned in to me and whispered, “Actually, it was seven minutes past twelve, Wednesday morning, but it was still dark out, so it felt like Tuesday to me.”

  Mama liked to name her kids after famous people. Audrey was named after Audrey Hepburn, and she wanted to name my older brother, Nick, after Charlton Heston. But Daddy stepped in and vetoed the idea, insisting his firstborn be his namesake. He couldn’t think of anything to save my younger brother, James Dean, though.

  Mama got up, lit a cherry incense stick, and stuck it in an empty bud vase on Audrey’s dresser. As I watched the thin smoke spiral up into the room, I thought about death.

  My only experience with death had been the previous summer. It was hot that day, hot enough, as we say in the South, to fry bacon on the sidewalk, and so my brothers, Nick Jr. and Jimmy D., and I had brought our game of hide-and-seek inside our house to cool off under the air-conditioner.

  It was my turn to hide. I was standing in the living room trying to decide between behind the couch, or under the drop leaf table, when I got the idea in my head that it would be neat if I could slip outside and hide in the bushes in front of the house. I was sure my brothers would never look for me there.

  I could hear them in the kitchen counting…eighty-nine… ninety…ninety-one, so I eased open the door to go out. As I stepped onto the front porch, Jacque, Mama’s toy poodle, came from nowhere, weaved through my legs, and dashed out into the yard.

  Jacque, a hyper dog, had always been confined to a leash whenever we took him out because Mama was afraid he might run into the road. Now, unrestrained in the open yard for the first time, he was crazy with his freedom, darting in all direction
s.

  I knew Mama would be upset with me if she found out I had let him loose, so I chased after him, thinking I could catch him and bring him back inside before she realized what had happened. But Jacque was fast, and I was no match for his sharp side-to-side movement. I was determined, though, and driven by my fear of getting into trouble. So after a feverish pursuit, resulting in two grass-skinned knees, I did manage to trap him between some bushes and the mailbox.

  Quickly, I dove to grab him. But he dodged away from me. I dove again, and this time he ran through the bushes, and into the road, right in the path of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle.

  The next thing I remember is hearing three sounds at once: the screech of car brakes, a yelp, and a thud. I rushed into the road, the asphalt scorching the bottoms of my bare feet, and found Jacque lying in front of the Volkswagen, motionless. He looked like he had stretched out for an afternoon nap, except his tongue hung from the side of his open mouth, and blood trickled from one nostril.

  Daddy, Mama, and my brothers came running out of the house to see what all the commotion was about. Mama let out a painful gasp when she saw what had happened, and then covered her mouth with both hands. Daddy bent down and felt of Jacque’s neck, pronounced him dead, and scooped up his limp body from the road.

  We all, including the teenage girl who was driving the Volkswagen, followed Daddy into the backyard, and formed a quiet circle around him, while he dug a grave under a mimosa tree. We stood there in awkward silence for what seemed like the longest time, watching him toss shovel after shovel of dirt over Jacque’s body.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “Daddy, did Jacque hurt when he got hit by the car?”

  Everybody turned and looked at me at once.

  Daddy stopped digging, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist, and propped one arm on the shovel. “Oh, no, honey, it all happened so fast he didn’t feel a thing.”

  “How did he get outside in the first place?” Mama asked no one in particular.

  “He ran through my legs when I was going out the door!” I piped up. “He was so fast I didn’t even see him coming!”