The first night that I spoke to Karen she had asked me if I could call her back. She needed and hour. It seemed odd to me. Here this person calls you saying you're sisters, or half for those who are writing the numbers, and all you need to digest it is an hour?
When she called me back is when I found out what she really needed the hour for.
She wanted to call her aunt, to find out what she knew.
This was my first introduction to Ruby.
Ruby was Dottye's sister.
When Karen asked her the reply was "I don't know anything about her. Dottye had a child while she was in high school but that is all that I know about."
Interesting. We'd find out more truth, or lack of truth as the years went on.
One of the things Karen told me that night nearly broke my heart all over again.
See, when Dottye died, Karen went to live with Ruby. Then to her grandparents, then back to Ruby, then to her father, back to Ruby and back to her father again. Or something along those lines. Does the order really matter? To Karen it probably does, to me it didn't. I only could wish that Dottye had never died so that Karen might have been able to be in one place.
Anyway.
Karen told me that when I called it brought back a childhood dream? Fantasy? Nightmare?
She had in the back of her mind thought that maybe her mom had not died at all. Maybe her mom was locked in a dungeon and Ruby had kept her in it. She couldn't say why it was Ruby who was the monster in this story. My guess is it has something to do with the fact that Ruby told Karen, not even six yet, that crying for her mom to come back didn't do any good. And that she needed to stop crying.
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