Make Lemonade

Jolly is gone for two days and LaVaughn stays with her kids, causing her to miss a day of school. Her mother is “in her outrage” (27) about the situation, but Jolly finally returns and pays LaVaughn. Jolly doesn’t “look so good” (28), but LaVaughn is afraid to ask her what happened. When LaVaughn leaves, Jeremy is still “at the lemon pot” (27), watching.

Back at school, LaVaughn struggles to catch up with what she missed, but when the social-studies teacher appears to be reaching for LaVaughn’s shoulder, perhaps to sympathize or offer help, LaVaughn quickly walks away.

Jolly only has three diapers left, so LaVaughn tries to potty-train Jeremy, but he wets himself. Meanwhile, LaVaughn studies hard and gets A-minuses on two tests, and becomes “determined” (30) to succeed with Jeremy as she did with school. Jeremy still doesn’t catch on, but he talks to the lemon pot the same way LaVaughn talked to him, saying “‘This is a pot, and you stand right HEOH/and you gonna GO’” (30). Finally, Jeremy uses the bathroom correctly, and LaVaughn and baby Jilly form “a committee of congratulations” (31). LaVaughn tells Jeremy “‘you’re a big boy now’” (31), and when Jilly tries to help him pull his pants up, he insists on doing it himself.

Jolly comes home with her face “scraped/like it had a grater taken to it,/like it was cheese” (33), and she tells LaVaughn she has no family to call. Jilly screams and Jeremy tries to “cure” her injury with a towel (33). LaVaughn finds herself entranced by the cockroaches climbing a lamp, the light “glowing their shells all shiny” (34). Finally LaVaughn shakes herself free from her trance, realizes she’s “not the only one crying” (34), and gets Jolly some ice.

LaVaughn calls her mom, who arrives with a first-aid kit and sternly tells Jolly, “you need to take hold, girl” (35). For a moment, LaVaughn watches “Jolly’s cheek/floating on my mother’s shoulder;/lying there all quiet/waiting to be healed” (36). However, when LaVaughn and her mother return home, Mother becomes judgmental again, saying Jolly is “a mess” and has to “lie in” the “bad bed” she’s made (37). LaVaughn wonders how her mother can be “soft and sorry one second,” and “such a hard referee the next” (37).

LaVaughn enlists Jeremy’s help to clean the apartment, the two of them scrubbing the floor until they see it’s “bluish” (38) underneath all the grime. LaVaughn tells Jeremy he’s a good boy, and Jeremy confidently repeats, “‘Good boy sure’” (39).

LaVaughn teaches Jeremy to make his bed, insisting he keep working until all the wrinkles are smoothed, and telling him to make his bed “‘out of self-respect’” (40). Jeremy lies on the now-made bed “as proud as he can be/of not understanding a single thing” LaVaughn has told him (41).

LaVaughn’s mother again expresses concern about the babysitting job, saying “‘That Jolly she’s got hold of you,’” and that the older teen doesn’t set a “good example” (42). LaVaughn mulls over how to explain why she stays, and she remembers a time she and Jolly muted the TV, making up silly dialogue to go with the images until they “laughed like fools” (43). Instead of telling her mom the story, LaVaughn just promises to “‘be careful’” (43). The chapter ends with LaVaughn asking the reader if “You ever laughed so hard/nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute” (44), like she and Jolly did. 

LaVaughn wonders what it’s like to have no family, as Jolly does, and she remembers a photograph of herself and both parents at a picnic when she was very young. LaVaughn isn’t sure if she remembers the picnic itself, or if she’s studied the photo so hard she “knows [it] by heart” (45). She describes her mom’s carefree appearance in the picture—“actually wearing shorts and laughing in the sunshine/like there’s no problem” (46)—and goes on to say that she can remember her father only in “little tiny pieces” (46) that occasionally catch her by surprise.

Jill has started crawling, which means she’s making huge messes and causing trouble for LaVaughn. LaVaughn sings her a song that begins, “‘There was a little girl,/She had a little curl’” (47), as Jilly actually does have a “trademark curl” (48) on her forehead. Just like the girl in the song, when Jilly is good, she is very good, but “‘when she was bad,/she was horrid’” (49).

After listening to the song, Jeremy sneaks up on Jilly and cuts off her lock of hair, and LaVaughn imagines she hears Jeremy’s thoughts: “If Miss Jilly don’t have any more special curl/she’ll stop doing her bad things” (5). LaVaughn wants to hit Jeremy, but instead she makes herself count to twenty, then takes both kids to the kitchen and divides an orange between them.

Jolly asks LaVaughn what happened to her father, and LaVaughn doesn’t want to tell Jolly the truth—that her dad, who could have been in a gang but focused on sports instead, was shot “on a playground,” playing basketball, when a “gang gun ma[de] a lifetime mistake” (52). LaVaughn just tells Jolly her dad died when she was little and briefly describes his funeral. Jolly responds that she went to a funeral as well, for one of the “Box Guys and Box Girls” (52) who lived in boxes behind the hardware store. Jolly reveals that she was also a Box Girl, living on the streets with other kids, none of whom “had folks” to care for them (53). LaVaughn thinks that while her dad’s death is one big burden, “Jolly’s burdens is probably too many to count” (53).