Queen Of Ashes

The South

Ariana said, “Miss Loretta said Mama went south.”

He kept on sawing at the bread with the butter knife, though there wasn’t any butter in the house anyway. “Miss Loretta talks too much.”

“Did she?”

He set the knife down. Not loud. Just slow and exact, which was somehow worse.

“I don’t know where your mama is.”

Ariana turned from the sink. “How come?”

His jaw moved once before he answered. He had gray starting in his beard at the chin, though he wasn’t really old enough for all that.

“Because she left.”

Ariana stood there with water still dropping off her hands into the sink.

“She didn’t tell us?”

“No.”

He turned back to the stove.

“Why?”

He stirred the noodles, then the tomatoes, not looking at her. “Some people don’t stay when things get bad.”

Ariana frowned. “It was bad for you too.”

He gave a little laugh, but there wasn’t anything funny in it. “Yeah. Guess it was.”

She wiped her hands on her skirt. The hem was already damp from where she had spilled water before.

“Will she come back?”

The spoon stopped for a second.

“I wouldn’t go waiting on it.”

“You don’t know though.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

Right then the pot boiled over, hissing all over the burner. He cursed and dragged it sideways off the flame. Ariana jumped a little. He looked at her like he might say something, maybe make it alright some kind of way, but he didn’t. He just turned the fire down and wiped at the stove with the dish rag that always smelled a little sour, clean or not.

They ate at the table under the yellow light that flickered every now and then for no reason anybody could fix. Tomato noodles. Bread. Water in jelly glasses. Her father tore a piece off the loaf and slid the bigger half onto her plate like he wasn’t paying attention.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I ate already.”

That was a lie. A thin one.

She twisted noodles around her fork the way the girls at school did on spaghetti day, except these were too soft and kept coming apart. Her father ate fast at first. Then slower, after he noticed how much she still had left.

From downstairs came music, the bass knocking up through the floor. Somebody yelled in the hall. Then it went quiet again.

Ariana said, “Keisha got new shoes.”

Her father kept looking at his plate. “Oh yeah?”

“They light up.”

“Mhm.”

“When you walk.”

“I know.”

She stopped. “I didn’t say I wanted them.”

He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I didn’t say you did.”

“No, but you was acting”

“I said I didn’t say that.”

They both went quiet after that because they both knew.

She looked down at her noodles until there wasn’t any steam left on them.

After a while he said, not as hard, “Maybe after payday we can look.”

“Okay.”

She nodded, though payday had other things waiting on it already. Rent. The light bill. Whatever else came up and always did.

He stood first and took both plates to the sink. The faucet made that knocking sound in the wall when he turned it on. Ariana stayed at the table a minute, flattening a wet bread crumb under her thumb. Then she brought over the cups. He rinsed them right away and put them upside down on the towel.

Ariana leaned against the counter. “Did she leave because of me?”

Her father stopped with one hand still in the dishwater.

He turned around slow. “No.”

He said it too fast, almost snapping it, and that did not help.

Ariana looked down at her bare feet on the cracked linoleum. There was a burn mark near the stove shaped kind of like a fat thumb. When she was littler she used to stand on it and see how much of her foot could hang off.

“You don’t know that,” she said.

His face changed and went still. “I know enough.”

“You said you don’t know where she is.”

“That ain’t the same.”

“But you don’t.”

“Ariana.”

That was the voice that meant stop now.

He dried his hands and hung the rag back over the faucet. “Your mama left because she left. It wasn’t because of you.”

She picked at a bit of skin by her thumbnail until it stung.

He looked worn out then. Not just tired exactly. Worn through. In his face, his shoulders, all of him.

“Go get your stuff ready for tomorrow,” he said.

“I already did.”

“Check it again.”

It wasn’t really about school things. She knew that, even if he didn’t say it plain. Still she went into the other room and knelt by her books. Her reader had a bent cover. One math paper was folded up into quarters because she didn’t have a folder to put it in. She stacked everything. Then did it again because there wasn’t anything else to do.

From the kitchen she could hear him scrape the pot, run water, open the cupboard. Then nothing for a few seconds. Then the sound of his chair dragging a little over the floor.

“Daddy?” she said.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

He didn’t answer.

After a while he said, quieter this time, “Bring me that towel off the chair.”

She brought it to him. He took it without looking up.

Miss Loretta laughed through the wall and then started coughing again. Ariana stood in the kitchen doorway with the towel smell still on her fingers and watched her father’s back while he wiped the same plate over and over, though it was already clean.