“And then?”
“They sent me someplace else, but by then my grades were crap again. The dad was retired military. When he told me to shape up or ship out, I shipped. I was seventeen. I hit the streets, hooked up with a pimp, and was doing okay until I ended up here. But if I could make a wish and have it come true, I’d be back in Andrea’s kitchen, stuffing my face with chocolate-chip cookies.”
“What about you, Sadie?” Sandy had asked. “If you could eat anything in the world, what would it be?”
“My grandma’s fried chicken,” she answered at once. “No doubt about it.”
“And you, Latisha?”
“Lyle’s pancakes,” she answered.
“Who’s Lyle?”
“My stepfather,” Latisha said.
“Whoa, you got a stepfather who actually cooks? I got one of those, too. Problem is, the only thing he cooks is meth, and that’s how both he and my mom ended up in the slammer. But about these pancakes,” Sadie continued, sticking to the topic at hand. “Buttermilk or plain?”
“Plain.”
“Thick or thin?”
“Thin—really thin—with peanut butter and maple syrup.”
While Sadie and Sandy went on talking about food, Latisha withdrew from the conversation. It was odd to realize how much she missed Lyle and his pancakes. When he had first shown up in her mother’s life, she’d regarded Lyle Montgomery Richards as a threat and the source of all evil.
For one thing, through most of Latisha’s life it had been just her mother, Lou Ann, and her. What Latisha knew of her father came from the gold-framed photo of him in his marine dress uniform that had always sat on the chest of drawers in her mother’s bedroom next to the presentation box containing the folded flag from his coffin. Corporal Samuel Honoré Marcum had perished in an IED blast near Mosul, on December 21, 2005. He was twenty-four at the time of his death and left behind a twenty-two-year-old widow and a four-year-old daughter. Latisha’s first memory was of the man in the uniform kneeling in front of her mother and handing her that carefully folded flag—all blue and white, her mother had told her, with no red showing.
After the funeral they had gone to live with Lou Ann’s mother, Granny Lou, in her shotgun house on Gaty Avenue in East St. Louis. Granny Lou wasn’t your basic sweetness-and-light kind of grandmother. A diabetic who had lost both legs, she was a wheelchair-bound, mean-spirited, and cantankerous old woman, one who needed her daughter’s help every bit as much as Lou Ann and Latisha needed a place to stay.
Lou Ann had some widow’s benefits coming in, and she contributed most of that to the household expenses. She also looked after her mother, doing the bulk of the cooking and cleaning. But Lou Ann was also determined to improve herself in order to provide a better life for Latisha. To that end she had enrolled in the four-year nursing program at St. Louis University. The fact that she could leave Latisha at home with Granny Lou was the only thing that made the two-hour commute and long days of classes remotely possible.
And then one day, when Latisha was nine, Lou Ann had come home with Lyle. He was more than ten years older than her mother—thirty-nine to Lou Ann’s twenty-seven—and a lifelong bachelor. Like Latisha’s father, Lyle had served in the Middle East—U.S. Army rather than Marine Corps. Now out of the service, he drove the #10 bus, and they had met in the course of Lou Ann’s daily commute. He was the driver on the #10 bus that took her from Seventeenth and Missouri to the MetroLink. Over time they had become friends. Now they were about to become more than friends, and Latisha was less than thrilled.
During the long hours when Lou Ann was at school, Granny Lou had ostensibly been in charge, but her babysitting skills were minimal. She was much more engaged in watching whatever was on TV than she was in watching Latisha, who was allowed far greater freedom of action than was probably good for her.
By the time Lyle appeared on the scene, Latisha was in the fifth grade at Dunbar Elementary, the neighborhood’s perennially underachieving school. The fact that Latisha was bringing home indifferent grades from a failing school was a problem for Lou Ann and an even bigger problem for Lyle. He had grown up in University City, another area not known for its outstanding public schools, but his devoutly Catholic parents had seen to it that he attended Christ the King School, and he came away with a solid education, one that had served him well when he went on to University City High School.
When it came to courting Lou Ann Marcum, Latisha’s education was one of Lyle’s big selling points. He had inherited his parents’ two-story, three-bedroom home on Amherst Avenue in University City, and that’s where he continued to live. He assured Lou Ann that if she married him, he’d see to it that Latisha got into Christ the King, too.
By then Lou Ann had been a widow for close to a quarter of her life, and she had spent almost that whole time caring for her mother. Over time Granny Lou’s situation had deteriorated. Now, in addition to being wheelchair-bound, she was virtually blind. Not only did she require more care than Lou Ann could provide, she was almost useless when it came to supervising the headstrong Latisha.
So Lyle, a fixer at heart, had asked Lou Ann to marry him and had come out with all guns blazing, suggesting a nearby assisted-living facility for Granny Lou in addition to a better education for Latisha. It should have been no contest, but he hadn’t taken into consideration that Granny Lou, a lifetime Baptist, would raise holy hell not only about her daughter’s marrying a Catholic but also about his idea of putting Latisha into one of those “dirty papist” schools.
The battle lines had been drawn—with Lyle Richards and Lou Ann on one side and Granny Lou and Latisha on the other. When Lou Ann converted so she and Lyle could have a church wedding, Granny Lou threw a hissy fit and refused to attend. She also insisted that she’d rather die than be stuck in some bedbug-infested nursing home. While Lyle and Lou Ann went off on their honeymoon, Latisha had stayed with Granny Lou, listening to her rant and rave. When the newlyweds returned and it was time for Latisha to move to her new home on the far side of the river, she wasn’t exactly a willing participant.
Lyle had never been married. He’d never had kids. He thought children were to do as they were told and to be seen but not heard. He wanted Latisha to go to school, pay attention, study, and get good grades. He wanted her to keep her room clean and respect her elders. Latisha wanted none of it, except for Saturday-morning breakfasts. That was when Lyle Richards routinely made and served his incredibly wonderful pancakes.
But now, from the vantage point of Latisha’s solitary cot, with her leg chained to the wall and with dry kibble her only food, she thought about Lyle Richards a lot. He was someone who couldn’t help himself. He was always saying dorky things to her and giving her what she thought was stupid advice: What’s to be done is best begun. By the inch it’s a cinch; by the yard it’s hard. If it is to be, it is up to me. God helps those who help themselves.
She could see now that he’d been a kind man who had wanted only the best both for her and for her mother, and she wished she could tell him that she was sorry—sorry for everything.
In the background Sandy and Sadie were still talking about food, while Latisha thought about the people back home. When Lou Ann and Latisha moved out, Granny Lou had disdained her daughter’s suggestion about moving into assisted living. Just because Lou Ann had her nursing degree, that didn’t mean Granny Lou had to listen to her. Assuring Lou Ann that she’d have no trouble hiring someone to take over Lou Ann’s caregiving responsibilities, Granny Lou had insisted on staying on in her own place. Not surprisingly, when the new hired help arrived, they didn’t amount to much. Less than two months after Lou Ann and Latisha moved out, Granny Lou had died alone in her bed after falling into a diabetic coma. Her funeral at Southern Missionary Baptist Church on State Street had been sparsely attended. It was also the last time Latisha had set foot in East St. Louis.