She breaks loose and flurries into the room, me chasing. She flops at the edge of the bed and takes off her top. It’s hard to see where she starts and the dark ends. If this were another night, I’d lay her down, work her panties low, and slide inside — the only alibi she’d believe. But I don’t have the mettle for it. Or tonight I’m made of too much steel for it.
Kim gets up and walks to the dresser. She takes out a paper and pamphlets and tosses them on the bed. The pamphlets show pregnant women. What’s this? I say.
A decision, she says.
Decisions. Our last was not long ago and we said never again.
But the punk in me knows I’ll press soon enough for another, a last (you would hope) clinic visit.
What the pimps in my life, what all the two-bit players and the model apathetic lovers never told me, was this: For those of us who can feel, the guilt never leaves, it only ever gets displaced.
Chapter 17
Do you know how many times I’ve tried?
Big strength was my mother’s blessing. The strength to birth Pat and me in less than a year. To wake every day before dawn to cook and ready us for school and spend the rest of her day mopping and folding and washing and scrubbing, to do that and look past what her husband’s family, Andrew’s parents, Mama Liza and Bubba, who were well off from bootlegging, said about her and hers. Since I wanted to be strong too, I was Mom’s shadow, scouring the tub with ammonia, and hand-mopping the tiles till they were clean as our silverware. For this my mother treated me as a friend, told me secrets she never told Pat, roused me from sleep some nights to sit with her well after she’d sent him to bed.
The morning it happened, Mom kissed my eyes wide and told me to wake Pat and I hustled down the hall and up the steps to the attic, where my brother slept in a room that, no matter how bad Mom stayed on him to clean it, forever smelled like feet. To wake Pat you had to snatch the covers off him, which he knew but never liked. We headed downstairs to a breakfast of bacon, grits, eggs, and homemade biscuits. Mom was standing over the stove and Andrew was reading a paper, wearing a shirt Mom had stiffened crisp with homemade starch. My mother was wearing the same thing she wore each day: a nightgown, a black head scarf, and fall-apart house slippers. Mom fixed Andrew’s plate and hovered close while he took his first bite. She asked him if he was going to fix the blinds and he said that he would and that he didn’t need any more reminders. When he finished, Mom stalked him out of the kitchen and into the living room. We heard her ask again about the blinds, heard the door slam shut.
Pat and me were finishing our plates when she came back in and ran a tub of water and piled pots and pans and skillets in the sink. All you could hear was those dishes and Pat scraping the last bits of food off his plate. Pat swallowed his last mouthful and pushed away from the table and stood gazing at our mother.
Mom, he said. Is Daddy a good man?
Of course, she said.
Mom, he said. Do you love him?
What kind of question is that?
She snatched his plate off the table and grunted it back to the sink. Pat looked at me and I looked away.
Well, if you love Dad, Pat said, then why do you get mad and try to hurt him?
This sucked the color out Mom’s face. She dropped a plate and stared into the sink. You could count the words she spoke to us for the rest of the morning and that afternoon after school. She was more of herself later that night, letting me piece puzzles in the living room while she hummed along to her favorite 45s and waited for Andrew to come home.
He slugged in late and slumped on the couch. He kicked off his shoes, undid the throat of his shirt, propped his feet on the table, and lay his head back. My mother watched all this, waited till he was settled, and asked again about the blinds, asked if he planned to fix them that night as he had said he would. He said no, he’d do it the next night, said with all of his bother.
Mom stood and sighed. She sighed from a deep place and you knew it. She walked over and dragged a needle across her 45. She tied her scarf and smoothed her gown and sent me to my room, where I lay in my bed counting, counting, counting, how long it would take for her to erupt. It didn’t take long at all before the screaming began, before Andrew whisked past my door and up the steps to Pat’s room. Then I heard Mom in the kitchen. Then I heard Mom stomping up the steps. The boom of their voices coaxed me into the hall. That’s where I saw Mom and Andrew tangled at the top of the steps, saw light catch the blade of a long knife, saw Andrew push and my mother tumble down the steps. It hurt to look, so I didn’t look, not until she was at my feet, a blade in her chest, blood soaking through her gown. She died before I let her go.
I’m parked near the hydrant outside Andrew’s place, the house he bought with his wife. He’s got his front porch primed and his handrails sanded and his siding power-washed. You can see his wife — his sun, moon, stars — inside with a TV dancing grays across her face. She peeks up at me at the sound of the doorbell, then strolls into another room. She lolls out with Andrew behind her. He’s the one that answers. He jitters the handle to open the storm door. Grace, he says. To what do we owe this surprise?
Afternoon, I say
He steps aside to let me in. I say hello to his wife and she plays like she doesn’t hear it. Humph, I say, and follow Andrew into the kitchen. Out in the world this man is meticulous — shirts with creases in the sleeves, slacks with all the wrinkles knocked out, wing tips polished. But today he’s dressed in a T-shirt and un-pressed khakis with his belt unfastened.
Drink? he says.
No, thank you, I say.
He pours himself a vodka straight, no ice. He asks me what I’ve been up to. Says he hasn’t seen me in days.
Days, weeks, months, I say
So let me guess, you’re back in church, he says.
How would you know? I say.
It’s about the only time I see you, he says.
It’s the only time I can come, I say. The only time I can stand that woman, what you’ve done.
Which church? he says.
First Zion, I say.
That Baptist? he says.
Andrew’s a Catholic, attends St. Andrew’s hour-long Sunday masses, Wednesday night choir practices, takes minutes at meetings of the local archdiocese.
He’s right too. This isn’t the first. First Zion, First Baptist. St. Mark’s. Maranatha, Parkside Missionary, New Hope. I join and go a Sunday, go Sundays, steady until a weekend binge keeps me away for a week, for weeks at a time, for too many Sundays to brave the faces, to face the pastor, the first lady, a deacon; I join and attend until a choir member or an organist or an usher sees me wild and stumbling outside myself. The times that’s happened it’s been much easier to find a new place to pray.
How long, how long? When will you let it go? he says.
Lose a mother, and lose a father, get replaced, and all is well, I say. It’s just that easy, is it?
Grace, he says. Give me chance.
Chance? You have no clue, do you? You could never know how it feels to be left behind and cast back?
The wife sweeps in and stands over the stove. She asks Andrew when I’m leaving, if I might stay through dinner, says she didn’t fix enough for company. Andrew grabs prescription bottles off a carousel and shakes out pills and downs them with his vodka.
Is that safe? I say.
These old things? he says. He re-racks his meds. We’re Thomases. We’re built to last. The wife clears her throat and makes noise in a cabinet over the stove. She tramps out.