How I Got to Be Queen

I WATCHED JUSTINE ACROSS THE STREET. I SEEN HER from the window. Even with Sheldon and Jeffrey asking for lunch, I seen clear enough to know she was up to her old tricks. I said to myself, that queen, she’s up to it again. This time it was a boy, a black boy whose name I’d learn in a matter of hours. Justine wastes no time. But just then I pulled away from the window, in case the two little guys might see me looking. Kids have a way of telling things, after all.

Nothing was unpacked. Not even the kitchen this time. I pulled a towel from boxes on the floor and dusted the paper plates left from breakfast. What food we had was on the table. A half-loaf of Wonder Bread. Two large jars of peanut butter. Two cans of pie filling. Justine went for another loaf of bread, jam and a packet of lemonade mix. She’d got far as the store, which is kitty-corner, just down the street, in plain view from the window.

She stood on one side of the bicycle rack, by the newspaper stand. She stood with a hand on her hip, her head lifted and tilted to the side. Like she was taking a dare, or fixing on some scheme. It’s what she does. It makes people notice her. She draws them in that way. She looked black as the boy straddling a bike on the other side of the rack.

I wondered what Mom would do if she seen her there. That’s if Mom wasn’t at the cannery with Auntie. I think it’s bad the way Justine and Mom talk to each other when there’s trouble. “Damned black-neck squaw,” Mom says. “Dirty fat Indian, you don’t even know which Filipino in that apple orchard is my father,” Justine says. On and on it goes. Of course, Mom doesn’t say much any other time. And if Justine goes on long enough, Mom goes out or watches TV. Like nothing was ever started. Like she does with just about anything else.

I took the longest time setting two pieces of bread on each plate. I found things to look for: the aluminum pie tins, the rolling pin. “I’m going to make a pie,” I said to the boys standing at the table. “We’ll have a party with pie and lemonade.” They shifted on their feet with no patience. “All right,” I said. “You act like starved rats and you look worse than pigs. Now wash up.” I spread peanut butter on the bread, then sprinkled on some sugar. “I don’t want no complaining,” I told them when they came back.

JUSTINE CAME IN ABOUT 4, AN HOUR BEFOREMOM. SHE PUT THE BAG of groceries on the table.

“Now what good’s that?” I asked. “You might as well go back and get the burger and tortillas for dinner. And get flour. I got canned pumpkin for pies.”

“Don’t give me no s---, Alice,” she said. Times like this she played older sister. She wasn’t listening to me. She just shook that silky hair and said: “I’m in love. And he is fine. Oo-whee, sis, the boy is fine.”

She was talking like a black person. It’s one of her things. I don’t mean talking like a black person. Justine does things so you notice. She goes for a response. Like what she started with Jack, the boys’ father. Which is behind us coming to Santa Rosa. Mom says it’s Justine’s fault. I say Jack was old and his family would’ve come for him sooner or later anyway. Giving Justine credit just feeds the fire.

It started with a Social Security check that wandered to the bottom of Mom’s purse and stuck itself into something or other. Since a week went by and it didn’t come up for air, Jack started to get edgy. “My money, where is it?” he kept asking. He was at the point if his dinner wasn’t on time, you was trying to starve him. If a door or window was left open, you wanted him to die of pneumonia. It didn’t surprise me he called Clifford, his son.

“What do you mean, you lost it?” Clifford said to Mom.

I heard Jack make the call, so I figured trouble. Clifford and Mom have a history, and Clifford was all along dead against Mom being conservator and signing for Jack. True, Jack wasn’t in his right mind half the time, and his insides was shot. Like a sponge that doesn’t suck water is what the clinic doctor said. But Mom wasn’t no crook. Clifford, who’s more stubborn than a ass and looks worse, seen none of it.

“What’s the matter, Mollie, you start on the bottle again?”

Mom was sitting next to Jack. I opened my huckleberry jam. I made toast and set the table. I looked at the place mats and the food. Anyone could see the old man was cared for and fed.

“Cliff,” I said. “Why not put a stop on the check? Go to the Social Security.” I felt funny saying Cliff. For a while, it was Dad.

“Yeah, and what’s my father supposed to eat in the meantime? You kids is using up his money.” Then he looked at Mom. “I’m telling you, Mollie, I’m sick of what’s going on here.”

He brushed past Justine, who stood in the doorway. I said the check would turn up. Justine said, “Who cares?”

But Justine seen how to use the situation to her end. She never liked Jack. “He nags Mom,” she said. I said, “How can he give anybody else attention when he’s half dead?” Justine didn’t see my point. And it was Easter vacation, no school and no work in the orchards, which means you had nothing to do, no one to see. Or, in Justine’s case, nowhere else to pull her stunts.

All of a sudden Justine was dressed up. I mean dressed up every day. She found clothes I never knowed existed in that house. She mixed skirts and blouses in different ways. She wore down her eyeliner pencil in a week. Each morning she worked her hair into a hive the size of Sheldon’s basketball. And when that was done, she sat at the kitchen table across from Jack, painting her nails the color of a red jellybean. Then, when Mom went to sign up at the cannery, she started on how she was going to buy a stereo. “I put down $50 at the Golden Ear,” she said.

That got Justine her response.

Clifford made it from the reservation in one hour. And he wasn’t alone. His white woman was with him, the woman who opens her mouth only when her nose is plugged and she can’t breathe. Her I wasn’t afraid of. It was Evangeline, his sister, who’d just as soon spit as say hello. She hates Mom. She looked at me like I was Mom’s bare foot and she wanted to smash it under her work boots.

I knowed the old man’d gone into the bedroom and called someone. I figured one of his kids. I just never thought I’d see them on the front porch so fast. And neither did Justine. She never got the pleasure of being falsely accused of stealing.

Clifford left his woman and sister on guard. Like we would lift the last penny from Jack’s pockets. Then he came back with suitcases and boxes. “Come on, Dad,” he said, “Evangeline is going to take care of you. She won’t spend the money on her kids. Not like this lot of swine.”

Mom wasn’t legal with Jack. There was nothing she could do. It was agreed about the checks only because he lived with us. Since the car was Jack’s, it was gone, too. Even so, she walked to town, then took the bus to Santa Rosa and canceled the check at the Social Security. Of course, three days later it floats up from the mess in her purse.

Auntie drove her to the res, but it was no use. Evangeline wouldn’t let her see Jack. Evangeline didn’t care about the check. I know what Evangeline said. I heard it before. “You screwed my brother, then went for my father. Dirty whore. I don’t believe those two kids are my father’s. Now get.” I reminded Mom that we are from Lake County. “We’re not from that res,” I said.

JUSTINE UNLOADED WHAT I FIRST SENT HER FOR, then tore off for the dinner stuff. This time she was back right away. She kept the boys out of my hair. I got busy. My nerves pushed me. Rolling dough for pies, I thought of things. Which is a way I calm my nerves when working won’t do it alone. I didn’t like what I seen at the store and my imagination started to get the best of me. I thought of Jack. I guess because I hadn’t made a pie since we left Healdsburg and came here. I thought how he’d settle down his griping when I cooked. Mom called me whenever he started screeching. He acted drunk, though the hardest thing he took them days was ginger ale. I’d roll pie dough and not notice when he picked berries or apples or whatever it was out of the bowl. He was quiet. I thought that’s what a grandfather would be like.

I set the pies in the oven. Then I got to work on dinner. I turned meat in one skillet and warmed torts in the other. I sent Justine to the store again, this time for cheese and chili sauce. The skillet of meat, a plate of warm torts, sliced cheese and toast was on the table when Mom got home. Her place is at the head. It’s where I put things, like the cheese and chili sauce, which she likes on her meat, so you know.

She didn’t say anything. I knowed she was tired. She finished eating, then cleaned up and went to play cards with Auntie like she did every night. “Tomorrow, we’ll start on the boxes,” she told me before she left. She was standing in the kitchen then, combing back her washed hair with Sheldon’s pink comb. I kept on with the dishes. After two weeks, I thought to myself. Then, with my hands in the greasy water, I resolved to start unpacking myself, no matter what she did. We couldn’t wait to see if we was going to stay here or not. Tomorrow, I told myself, first thing. I heard the front door slam.

I was still scrubbing, finishing the damn skillets, when I turned to tell the boys to take a bath before I gave them pie, which I had cooling on the sink. I thought Justine was behind me, with them at the table. But she wasn’t. She was standing there with her friend.

“This is Ducker,” she said.

First thing I noticed, the boys wasn’t there. “They’re taking baths,” Justine said, seeing how I was looking at the empty seats.

She was referring to them not seeing Ducker. I never heard the door open since it slammed behind Mom. My ears pick up on them things. So I was caught off guard. Justine didn’t have to embarrass me. “Close your mouth,” she said. “You look like Clifford’s wife.”

I thought of the boys again. The bathroom door was shut. Then I thought this Ducker might think I’m stupid, or prejudiced on account of him being black. My mind was going in a few directions at once. I said what made no sense given the circumstances.

“Here, Mr. Ducker, sit down and have some pie.” I put a pie on the table.

Justine started laughing. I knew she thought I was in shock seeing this black person in our house.

“It ain’t Mr. Ducker ,” she said. “It’s Ducker. Ducker Peoples.”

“Well . . . .”

“We don’t want pie,” she said. She looked toward the bathroom, then to Ducker. “We’re going for a walk.”

“Nice to meet you . . . .” he said, stopping when he got to my name.

“Alice,” Justine said.

“Alice,” he said.

I was still standing in the same place after they went out the front door. I tore to the window. Then I seen what he looked like. When they was across the street, almost to the store, I remembered who it was in front of me two minutes before. Funny thing about Ducker, he wasn’t a man. Well, I mean grown. He was a kid, looked like. Bony arms hanging from flapping short sleeves. His face, shiny smooth, no hair. Like he should be chewing bubble gum and keeping baseball cards. Not holding on to Justine, who was 16 and looked it.

“Who was here?”

I jumped around, half scared to death. It was Sheldon and Jeffrey out of the bathtub, drying their naked bodies.

“Now dry off in the bathroom,” I said.

“Sound like a nigger.”

“Hush up, Sheldon.”

“Who was here?”

“Nobody.”

NEXT DAY, MOM WAS IN THE KITCHEN, PUTTING things in cupboards. I heard her even before I got up. Even then I didn’t think she’d make a day of it.

“It’s Tuesday,” she said. “Day off.”

She finished with the kitchen before I started breakfast. I had to open cupboards to find things. She was in the bedroom by the time I could help her. Her things she put in the closet first. I seen her red dress from where I was standing, opening the boys’ boxes. It’s like crinoline, with ruffles. She wears it with her black patent-leather shoes with the sides busted out. Like at Great-Auntie’s funeral. Or when she came home with Clifford. Same thing with Jack.

“I guess this means we’re staying here,” I said.

This move was a trial. Ever since we came to Santa Rosa seemed nothing worked for very long. First that house on West 7th we couldn’t afford. Then the one by the freeway, which no one told us they was going to tear down for development. Got two months rent from us, anyway. And now this, which Auntie, whose idea it was for us to come here, got from the landlord she knows.

“What choice do we have?” she asked.

The way she said that matched her busyness putting things away. It concerned me. I was the one who put things away, after all. It was just this time she made such a big deal about the neighborhood. I guess she finally got tired of moving. Just three months in Santa Rosa, and three times already.

“Well,” I said. “I like it here. It’s a change.”

“A lot of blacks,” Mom said. “Auntie didn’t say so much about that.”

“Not everyone can be a Pomo Indian,” I said. Since Mom had her stuff on the bed, I spread the boys’ things on their sleeping bags, which I hadn’t rolled up yet. I sorted underwear on my knees. I thought of reminding her that Justine is part Filipino, and that I’m part Mexican. But that was what Justine would do.

“It’s nice having Auntie up the street,” I said. I liked the way Mom called her cousin Auntie, which she did for us kids. “I like hearing Auntie tell stories.”

“Ah, don’t listen to that old Indian stuff.”

Auntie cooks good. She’s got recipes. And she’s classy. Slender-bodied, not like me and Mom. She knows how to talk to social workers, them kind of people.

I got up and put the folded things in the boys’ drawers. Mom was hanging up Justine’s and my clothes. “Is this OK?” I asked, seeing how she was putting things where she wanted.

“Your sister, I don’t know what she’ll do here. Run with them kids out there. Niggers, anything.”

That made it click. My worries took form in a picture. Justine and Ducker. Still, I wasn’t certain, I mean about Mom just then. Did Sheldon or Jeffrey see last night and tell? It’s how Mom says things, by not saying them. It puts you in a place where you don’t know if she’s meaning something or not. Unless it’s with Justine in a fight.

I was caught, trapped and bothered just the same. Mom kept working, her back to me.

“Don’t worry about Justine,” I said.

WE HAD A NORMAL FAMILY dinner that night. I fixed chops and fried potatoes. I cut celery sticks and carrots. People need greens. But this family don’t ever eat them. Which is one reason there’s so much crabbing. They’re stopped up. Mom stayed and helped with the dishes before she went to Auntie’s. Of course, while things looked peaceful, I imagined a disaster. Like Ducker knocking on the door. I wondered if Mom was hanging around in case that happened. I heard loudmouth Sheldon saying, “It’s him, it’s him.” But nothing happened. Even after Mom left.

The boys opened drawers, looking to find where I put their clothes. They kept bugging me about getting the TV fixed and hooked up. Justine moved stuff in the closet to her liking. Me, I only wanted a long-enough couch in the living room. I was sleeping on the floor with the boys. I can’t sleep in the bed with Mom and Justine. No rest, even with them out like a light.

Next day Mom went fishing to the coast with Auntie. Auntie’s uncle and her mom, they sat in the car when Auntie came in for Mom. I stood on the front porch to say hello. The old lady stuck her white head out and said for me to come along. “I can’t,” I said. Then she said to me in Indian what men used to say in the old days when they set out fishing. “Get the grill ready, then.”

“Damn cannery’s so cheap. Got illegals instead of working us extra days,” Mom said when she came out of the bedroom.

“Don’t think of work, Mollie,” Auntie said.

Justine padded up and stood with me to wave goodby. She was still waving after the car left. I thought she was nuts until I seen it was Ducker she was waving forward. Bold as daylight. He walked right up the front porch.

“Morning, Alice,” he said.

I thought of my mouth this time. I kept it closed. And I thought what to do. Already the boys seen everything. I got some bread in a plastic bag and headed for the park. I carried Jeffrey part of the way. Sheldon I just about dragged by the hair.

“What’s so big about seeing goldfish?” he said, whining like he does. A sure trait of his father. Proof I would have for Evangeline.

“Shut up,” I said. “You damn-ass brat.”

“You just don’t want us there with that . . . .”

I slapped his face. Then he started crying like I tied him to a stake and burned him. Which I wanted to do. We was at the park by then. I put bread in the water for the fish. But nothing worked. Sheldon screamed so the whole park could hear. “I’m telling Mom,” he said. Then I thought of the opposite of fire. Water. And I had it right there.

“Shut up,” I said, “before I drown you. Shut up, damn you.” Then Jeffrey started crying. “Now see,” I said. “Stop it, Sheldon. Please.”

I threatened the police. Sheldon quit some, but I knowed what weapon he was harboring, what he’d use against me the minute he saw Mom. I looked at the soggy bread floating on the empty water.

“I’ll get the TV fixed,” I said. “But not if you act like that, Sheldon.”

So I spent what was left in the tobacco tin. It’s how I kept Ducker in the house and the boys quiet.

Ducker got to be a regular thing. And his friends. The only break I got was Mom’s days off. Every night the party was on like clockwork. Soon as Mom was gone to Auntie’s 10 minutes. Then a worse deal. If Mom went fishing on a day off, the party was all day. I was never one for school, but I wanted this summer over.

Ducker brought his radio. I seen every latest dance. Imagine Justine. She was in her element. She knowed the dances best of anybody and showed it. The boys clapped. It was just boys coming to the house. “Why should girls come here?” Justine said when I asked. “We’re the girls.”

We had talks, Justine and me. I told her how we couldn’t go on like this. She told me not to be so shy. “Don’t be afraid to smile,” she said. “Don’t be worried about your weight.”

Then she said how she had a plan for when school started. “I’ll show them snobby white girls,” she said. “I’ll show them Indians from Jack’s res, too.” She pictured herself walking down the hall with Ducker. She was going to lose 15 pounds. She was going to wear all kinds of makeup on her face. People would be shocked. They’d be scared of her.

“You already did that plan at Healdsburg,” I said, reminding her of how it got her a white boy and a hassle with his family so she hit the mother, knocking her tooth out, and the cops came and took her to juvie and told the welfare to take us from Mom.

“Well, everything turned out OK,” she said. “You have to see who you are, Alice. Look around and see what you see. See what you can do. How you can be queen. The queen is the baddest. She knows it all. That’s how she’s queen. Like how I walk at school. Don’t be worried about your weight. Some boys like it.”

Only thing I was worried about was her plan. I couldn’t see the outcome to this one yet. I wasn’t a queen. She tried to get certain of Ducker’s friends with me. “The kids won’t tell, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said.

This was true. It was not just the TV keeping the boys quiet now. It was Ducker. He took them to the schoolyard. He showed them all his basketball stuff. After that, I might as well disappear into thin air far as Sheldon cared. I had to get Ducker to get Sheldon to mind.

If it was Mom’s day off and she went fishing, I took Jeffrey to the park and left Sheldon with Justine. Not that I felt right about it. Another thing I must say, I had a friend. Anthony. Not a boyfriend, not in my mind. Anthony just made himself useful tagging along. “Now don’t forget bread for the fish,” he said if we was going to the park. Sometimes we did that on Mom’s day off, all of us. What else Anthony and me talked about I don’t know. I got used to him. I didn’t even think of him being black. Until we run into Auntie’s uncle and her mom in the park.

I couldn’t get out of it. The two old ones sitting on the park bench seen me five minutes before I seen them. The old lady was looking away, the Indian style of looking away. Like you know she seen you and looked away so you don’t have to see her. In them situations, it’s a sign to help yourself and keep walking.

I was hardly 50 feet from them. Anthony with me. He was carrying Jeffrey on his shoulders. I knowed the picture they seen. I turned straight around, in the direction we came, and went behind the tall cypress trees, out of sight. It wasn’t just that Anthony was black. I don’t even think it was black people that bothered Mom so much. It was anything disturbing. It was what nobody talked about.

I FOUND THE SHEETS THAT day. I remember. I had my senses. After what happened in the park, I was thinking. I knowed if I tried to wash the sheets in the sink anybody might see the blood. Anybody could walk in. So I burned them out back in the garbage can. Justine never mentioned a thing, even when I was cleaning up. “Me and Ducker had the most fun,” she said, after Mom went to Auntie’s that night.

Indians say blood is a sign of the devil. Where it spills will be poison everlasting. That’s how a place gets taboo. Auntie told me a story once. It was at Great-Auntie Lena’s funeral. It was to explain why Mom didn’t cry, why Mom didn’t like Great-Auntie, who raised Mom and didn’t like having to raise her. Great-Auntie got stuck with Mom and her sisters after some man poisoned Mom’s mom. But here’s what I think of. How Mom and her sisters found their mom in a puddle of salamander eggs and blood. Mom’s sister, Daisy, she’s in jail. Her other sister, Rose, her husband killed with a hatchet.

With Justine, the expected worried me as much as the unexpected. The expected, I worried when. The unexpected, what. When came like a straight shot, it turned out. Mom came home early from Auntie’s that same night. After the park, Justine’s blood, and all my cleaning. Why that night? Why at all? Maybe she didn’t want us to think she was dumb. Maybe she had to keep face for Auntie, if the old lady said something to Auntie. I don’t know. I can’t believe Mom didn’t know what was going on before.

By this time our house was party central. It was Justine’s party. She was queen. That’s what the boys called her. Dance, Justine, dance. The neighborhood knowed Justine. She was dressing again. She was dressed up every day. Mom saw the party. She stood in the doorway half a minute, then turned around and left.

I unplugged Ducker’s radio. I told everyone to get out. Must’ve been 10 guys there. Something came over me so I was fierce. Justine said to shut up. The older sister again. Usually I ignored her, kept on about my business. Like Mom most of the time. But this time I was Justine and more. I was going to floor her with the weight of my body. She must’ve seen because she was stopped cold. She tore out the front door with the guys.

Sheldon and Jeffrey, I put in the tub. Sheldon, I slapped in the mouth for no reason. He never made a peep. Neither one of them did. I put them to bed. No TV.

I finished the dishes and put them away. I wiped down the stove and refrigerator with Windex. I did the kitchen table, too. Then I put together flour and water for torts. Torts by scratch. Mom’s favorite. I was plopping them when Justine snuck past to the bedroom.

I finished. I set the torts on the clean table. I placed a fresh kitchen towel over the pile to keep in the warmth. Then next to a place mat made of paper towels I put a half cube of butter and the sugar bowl with a spoon next to it. Finally, I filled a glass with ice cubes and put it to the left of the place mat, opposite the butter and sugar.

Mom didn’t come home until late. Around midnight. I was in the front room. I must’ve been dozing in the chair because when I opened my eyes, half startled, Mom was past me, turning into the bedroom. I thought of Justine and Mom in that bed together. I didn’t hear a sound. Then I dozed again.

It was early morning when I heard it. Like two roosters woke up and found themselves in the same pen. It started low in the bedroom, then came at full blast to the kitchen. Really loud. I thought of the boys. I pictured them hiding their heads for cover in their sleeping bags. I didn’t move from the chair where I’d been all night.

Mom was hollering. “You’re the lowest dirty, black-neck squaw. Chink . . . .” And Justine. “Which one is my father? Tell me, you drunk slob, lowlife Indian. Prove you’re not the whore everyone says you are.”

Then I heard the cupboard and something slam on the kitchen table. I couldn’t believe my ears. I knowed without seeing what it was. Still, I didn’t move. I don’t know, it was strange. Then Mom comes out, her hair all wild from sleeping, and takes off, out the front door.

“Look how stupid,” Justine said, nodding to the shotgun on the table. It was Jack’s, what he forgot. I was still rubbing my eyes, just standing there. I picked it up and put it away.

“Fat bitch thought she was going to scare me with that,” Justine said.

“Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up.”

I turned on the oven and warmed the untouched torts for breakfast.

MOM MIGHT AS WELL’VE moved to Auntie’s. We hardly seen her, except when she came back to sleep. She put money in the tobacco tin for me to spend. Like when she was drinking, only now we never seen her, and I didn’t have to keep the money in my pockets for fear she’d take it out of the tin. Once, when she was drinking, she accused me of stealing the money. I’d spent it, of course, and gave her what I had left. Five dollars. She went berserk, hollering in the back yard. Just screaming, no words. Someone called the police. She stopped when they got there, then locked herself in the bathroom and cried herself to sleep. Later, to bug Mom, Justine said she called the police.

Mom strayed, like I said. It was me and Justine and the boys. And Ducker and Anthony and whoever else. Seemed nothing I could do.

We walked together, all of us. Who I mentioned. Justine didn’t hang back at the house with Ducker so much anymore. She didn’t say it, but I knowed she was anxious to try out with other boys what she had tried out with Ducker. Certain things she said. The ways she talked to Ducker’s friends and looked at them. Especially Kolvey, who was bigger, more grown, like a man. Signs Justine was up to something.

Anyway, I fixed lunches. Most days we went to the park. Sometimes we walked other places. Like the fairgrounds where they was putting up the rides. Once we took a bus to the mall. Anthony helped me with things. He carried the Coolmate so we’d have cold pop. Another thing he did was the shopping. “What do you need?” he asked me. Like we was a pair. But there was nothing between us. In fact, lots of times at the park I went off by myself. I left him where Justine was pulling her stunts and where the two old ones sat and seen whatever they wanted. I took Jeffrey and went behind the cypress trees. He was the only one obeyed me. “Time to take a nap,” I told him. It was cool there, away from everyone, and I pulled him close and slept.

It was Anthony who got me up. He told me something was going on with Justine. I was dead asleep on the grass there, and I felt Jeffrey slip from my arms.

“What?” I asked.

But by this time both Jeffrey and Anthony was looking through the trees. Then I seen it, too. Some skinny black girl and a couple of her friends, small and skinny like her, stood about 20 yards from Justine. Far enough so they was shouting and I could hear. The black girl was sticking out her hand, curling her finger like a caterpillar walking. “Miss Doris say for Mr. Ducker Peoples to come right this minute,” she was saying.

The boys was still on the ground, sitting there. Justine was standing in all her clothes and makeup. Red lips. Nails. “What’s this Miss Doris s---?” she said.

The girl shifted her weight to one side and put her hand on her hip. “Miss Doris say for Ducker to come right this minute if he knows what’s good for him.”

“Miss Doris say eat s---,” Justine said.

Then I grabbed Jeffrey. It happened fast. Justine crossed the line. She was face to face with that girl and, with no words, just popped her one upside the head. The girl went over, like she flopped, hitting the ground on her side. Her two friends jumped back, like Justine would go after them next.

“Justine say to eat s--- Miss Doris,” Justine said, looking down at that girl, who was sitting up now holding her face.

“I’m telling you, your sister shouldn’t’ve done that,” Anthony said.

Something in the way he said that scared me. Like I knowed he told the truth.

“There’s your grandparents,” he said.

I looked to where Anthony was looking. With the commotion I hadn’t seen the old ones on the bench. They was walking in the opposite direction, away.

“They ain’t my grandparents,” I said.

IT WAS IN THE AIR. JUSTINE’S doings filled the rooms of our house, in every cupboard I opened, every potato I sliced. Like you seen the white of the potato and seen Justine when you was doing everything not to. And it was outside. Like fog in the streets. It was between the houses, across at the store. You seen it in the way a bird sat still on the telephone wire.

I made macaroni and cheese and potato salad. Macaroni and cheese is easy. Just boil macaroni and melt the cheese. Potato salad, that takes time. Boiling the potatoes, chopping celery and onions. Mayonnaise. All that. I did it. And more. Two pies from scratch. And a cake, even if that was from a box. You’d think we was still on the reservation and I was putting up food for a funeral.

Mom knowed, too. After dinner, she didn’t go to Auntie’s. How could she explain herself being there when Auntie and them knowed about the trouble here?

I never sat, not once while the others ate. The pies and all that. And I started right in with the dishes. I frosted the cake and set it on the table with a knife and new paper plates. I folded paper towels to make napkins at each place. I put a plastic fork on top of each napkin. I thought of ice cream, but it was too late for that.

I was scrubbing the pots when I heard the first noises and looked over my shoulder and seen the crowd collecting outside on the street. From the sink, if you turned around, you could look through the kitchen door and the front door to the street. I wanted to close the front door, but I didn’t move. I mean, I kept on in the kitchen. Mom was at the table, kind of peeking out. She had her hands on her knees. Straight arms, like she does when she’s going to get up. The boys looked at the cake like they was waiting for me to cut it. I was just about to do that. I thought, what am I doing forgetting about the cake?

Then Justine came out from the bedroom.

She was in Mom’s red dress. That’s no get-up for the occasion, I thought. Not that I lingered on that thought just then. Mom got up and went into the bedroom and the boys followed her. The bedroom door closed.

“Don’t do it,” I said to Justine.

I guess someone outside seen her, too, because the yelling and name-calling rose up. “Dirty whore.” “Come out and pick on someone your own size.” “Slut.” All that. I looked once, then, and the street was filled with people. Some was near the steps. Young people, old people, kids, filling the air. Shouting.

“You don’t have to do it, Justine,” I told her again. “Just tell them you didn’t mean for them guys to go and say yes.”

She looked at me straight. Not like she was mad, or even scared. Kind of like she had a plan. Like she does when she tilts her head and half smiles at you. “I told them, ‘Yes, I will fight that Miss Doris’ sisters,’ because I ain’t scared of nobody. Not three big-ass, mean nigger bitches, nobody. They’ll see. I’m the queen, remember?”

That’s when I took inventory of her get-up. The red dress, too big for Justine, was cinched with a black belt, which matched her pump shoes. And she had nylons on and the delicate gold necklace she found in the girls’ gym. Her hair was done up just so. Her face, it was a movie star. This I was focusing on all the while the people outside came closer and louder. The house was surrounded. I thought, girls fight in old clothes. Like the times in Healdsburg when Justine met in the park to fight someone.

“Anyway,” I said, “you can’t fight in them clothes.”

She was still looking at me the same way. Half smiling like I didn’t know a thing. And she kept up that smiling and looking straight at me when she reached to the table and picked up the knife. She tucked it in the front dress pocket, her hand on the handle, and walked out.

With that many people surrounding the house and screaming, everything is clattering. The walls, windows. It’s like things is going to cave in or blow wide apart. You look where the first rip is. And I seen it. A rock through the front window. Glass shattering. A hole wide as a fist.

I was in the doorway between the kitchen and front room. That was far as I got, and when I looked out for Justine, after seeing that rock come through the window, she was gone. Just the crowd screaming and the empty house. Like the boys and Mom wasn’t even there. Like they was rolling away, around the corner, out of reach. Everybody. It all just went so fast. The whole place blowing apart. Then I seen the hole again. I turned around and started putting dishes away. I don’t know what. I opened cupboards and seen the gun. Jack’s shotgun. I ran to the front porch and shot it.

I DIDN’T KNOW NOTHING AFTER that. Just colors. Everybody moving. Voices. People talking to me.

“Dumb-ass bitch. What’d you do that for?”

“Alice, you’re the queen now. Nobody’s going to mess with you, girl.”

“Dumb-ass bitch.”

“Hey, Alice. You’re bad, girl. Justine never got a lick in.”

“Stupid, crazy bitch. Now the cops’ll come. Dumb-ass bitch.”

They said I just stood there with that gun. Like a statue or something. Like I been there a hundred years.

I thought of that and the other things I heard after, when I started to gain my senses. I was standing in the kitchen, against the sink. Auntie was there by that time, and a good thing. She was talking to two cops in our kitchen. She said the blast wasn’t a gun, some kids throwed a cherry bomb at our window and made a hole. They believed her, because they never searched the house. She was in official’s clothes, the kind that match her voice when she talks to social workers.

“It’s a single-parent family,” she was saying. “It’s an Indian family just moved to town.”

I looked at Justine. She was lifting a neat piece of chocolate cake to her mouth with a plastic fork. Her I’d have to reckon with on account of I upset her show. I looked at Mom and the boys. They was eating cake, too. Auntie was still talking, painting that picture of us not capable of nothing. I seen the cops looking at the table while she talked. I seen what they seen, what Auntie was saying. But I seen more. I seen everything.