Playing With Matches by Carolyn Wall Read Free Book Online

away so much food, and she bent to the work like she was shoveling dirt, digging deeper and deeper into the heap. I could not clean my own plate for watching.
    By the time Claudie was gnawing on her third chop bone, her face was shiny with grease and the kitchen heat. She mopped up pickled chow-chow with a fourth buttered biscuit, and when Auntie offered, she slid the last three tomato slices into her mouth. At one point she rose from the table and walked around the kitchen. I couldn’t think what she was doing, or looking for.
    “Miss Claudie, I’m glad you came to sup with us,” Uncle Cunny said. “I believe there’s dessert, if you’d like a slice.”
    From the sideboard, Auntie brought the pink cake and, with her hair frizzing from the heat and all the labor of preparing a fine dinner, struck a match and lit six candles. Claudie’s eyes bugged out.
    I closed my own while I made a wish.
    “What you doin’?” Claudie said.
    “Haven’t you seen a birthday cake before?”
    Ever so slow, she shook her head.
    “You make a wish and blow out the candles.” And I did.
    Auntie cut slices and set them on our plates.
    Claudie lifted the whole triangle to her mouth. Auntie asked, would she like a second piece? Yes, ma’am . And the same to honey drizzled on the last biscuit, too.
    While I licked icing from my fork, Auntie told Claudie that she had a few small things for Miz Maytubby, if she would be so kind as to carry them home, and Claudie said Yes, ma’am again. I knew what those things were because we’d often loaded baskets and grocery boxes with cartons of eggs and great bunches of greens from our garden, bread Auntie had baked herself. I helped tote them. But while she went to each door and knocked, I had to wait in the road. When I once asked why, Auntie told me I could visit when I learned to properly hold my tongue. I didn’t know what that meant.
    Just now I’d grown weary of the silence, so I took my own turn with Maytubby inquiries, like I didn’t see Claudie every day of my life.
    Having passed into my sixth year, I felt like a grown-up. I squared my shoulders and asked, “How’s your daddy doin’, Claudie? He still gone off?” And, “Lord, I ain’t ever seen anybody eat so much!”
    Claudie looked stunned. Her eyes slid to her near-empty glass of milk. “You know my daddy run off,” she murmured. “He ain’t been back since.”
    “He just up and walk away?” I said because this was a subject I was curious about. Especially since no one could even recount my own daddy’s name. “After your little brothers were born?”
    Claudie nodded.
    “Clea June,” Auntie warned. “Claudie, let me pour you more milk.”
    “Y’all got so many mouths to feed,” I went on, repeating what I’d heard Miss Shookie say. “You think he’d go before there was thirteen of you .”
    Auntie and Uncle sat frozen in their seats.
    “We only twelve now,” Claudie whispered, setting her biscuit down. “One died.”
    Thinking I could lift this gloom with a joke, I said, “Too bad it wasn’t more.”
    But I knew it was wrong. The room fell away. I felt darkness run up past my neck to my cheeks, and was shattered at the cruelty of my own tongue. My mouth was my surest trip to hell. Here among the remains of dinner, around the crumbs and frosting and globs of honey on the table, God would surely strike me dead.
    Uncle cleared his throat and said what a fine meal Auntie had prepared.
    “I only meant,” I said, “everyone saying times are hard, and with y’all livin’ on welfare checks—”
    “I believe dinner is over,” Auntie said, and was on the edge of rising when a knock came on the screen and through its mesh I saw tall, skinny Alvadene, soaked in the rain. She had her little girl on her hip and a sweater over their heads. “I’m sorry to bother y’all, but Claudie got to come home.”
    I shot out of my chair. “No! It’s my birthday, and she ain’t done with her cake!”
    “Eulogenie