Maybe it was a mistake. All she knew was that her mama, Luther Mae, was hollering at the top of her lungs for her to “Bring her womanish behind back, right now!” In fact, there didn’t seem to be any other sounds at all on that late summer day in front of Dr. Baker’s neat brick office building. Just the strange, trumpeting tone of Luther Mae Timmons’s words. “Girl, I said come back here!” Elsie had to turn around. Her mama’s voice sounded shaky, that way it always did when Papa brought her a tiny sack of peppermints along with his paycheck, or when that big black phone would ring and she’d sit down hard, because somebody—some cousin or aunt, or uncle’s first wife—had died. Elsie had to shade her eyes; fall hadn’t set in deep enough yet to dull the brightness of the Southern sun. As the automatic glass door began to shut, Elsie could see her mother out there, slapping her thigh in frustration … no, it was fear! The navy pleats fanned in and out at each strike, and Elsie imagined the nasty red welts that must be rising on her mother’s Carnation-milk skin.
