Dirty Faces - Book 2

Chapter 37: Preparations

Chapter 37: Preparations

Aunt Betty pushed the bedroom door open and laid the armload of freshly-picked flowers she bore on the vanity. The fishy odor of the salmon patties Leslie was frying up drifted in and mingled with the sweet scent of the flowers. It wasn't especially pleasant.

Ralph had gone, Kody had not returned, and Adam wandered between the bedroom and kitchen in a pathetic effort to abandon neither Ginny nor Leslie. They both would have been fine, but Ginny guessed he thought he was helping in some way. She looked away from the vanity and back at her hands, clasped in her lap as she sat at the foot of Mama's bed, where she'd been since she ran out of tears.

Aunt Betty picked up the pitcher and basin from the bedside table. "Gather some towels and washcloths, darlin'. We gotta get your mama all prettied up." She left the room and Ginny lingered another moment on the bed before dragging herself to the chest of drawers. She removed a couple towels and cloths from the bottom drawer and sat back in her spot.

Aunt Betty returned with fresh water and Mama's ivory soap, placed them on the bedside table, and turned up the lamp. The flame danced as adjusted to its new size, giving the shadows the illusion of movement, before finally settling and filling the room with a cozy, warm glow. Ginny left her spot and walked around to the other side of the bed. She looked down at Mama, and then squeezed her eyes shut. That wasn't what Mama was supposed to look like.

"Ginny?"

She opened her eyes to meet Aunt Betty's, gazing back at her from across the bed. "Did you help get your Granny ready last year?"

Ginny shook her head. "They did it all at the funeral home."

Aunt Betty nodded. "Leslie offered to help, but I reckoned the two of us could manage." She considered Ginny for a moment, and then cleared her throat. "Well, we'd best work fast. She'll get stiff and it'll make our job all the more difficult."

Ginny thought of all the stupid, dead possums she'd seen lying along the side of the road, their bodies bloated, all four legs sticking straight out, swarmed by flies. She felt sick. Mama was no different from the possums. She was like roadkill.

Aunt Betty began pulling Mama's arm out of her nightgown and Ginny, reluctantly, did likewise on the other side. "Be thinking about what you wanna dress her in," said Aunt Betty.

"OK," said Ginny. It wasn't much of a decision, seeing as Mama only had one Sunday dress.

They tugged the gown over Mama's head and Ginny shuddered at the sight of her body. She'd been changing and bathing her, so the paleness, the bones jutting out, the general sunken appearance−none of it was really new, but somehow this was different. Ginny couldn't put her finger on just what was different; maybe it was that this was merely the shell of what had been her mother, or maybe it was the knowledge this was the last bath, the last change of clothes.

Aunt Betty wet a rag, wrung it out, and handed it to Ginny. Ginny began wiping the crust from the corners of Mama's eyes, smoothed her brows, ran the cloth across all the hollows of her face. "I was just a little older than you when I lost my ma," said Aunt Betty, as she ran a soapy cloth over Mama's limp hair.

"What did you do?"

"Well, Pa wasn't much account. Certainly wasn't fit to be looking after seven young'uns on his own." She draped the washcloth over the side of the basin and returned to Mama's hair, working it into a lather. "Soon as Ma was in the ground, men came a-courting. All much older than me, of course. He remarried himself within a few months, managed to get my sister Mable married off, and it wasn't long after I was, too. A man named Riggs."