From the start Lawan felt he understood them. As a child, he had a speech impediment, remembers sitting at the kitchen table with Gloria, watching her narrow lips, the color of raw salmon. Your bottom teeth have to bite your lip, she’d say, then she’d puff. Fuh, fuh, fuh… Something about it made him feel she was always on the verge of hurting him.
At each house, he pulls into the driveway, straps the chair to the ramp, then lowers the ramp to the ground. By then a mother or grandmother, rarely a dad, is already coming out. Some of them will take over at the curb, some need help getting the chair up the house ramp and through the door. If it’s grandma, Lawan always waves her back inside. When he goes to leave, he whisks the blanket off like a magician revealing a rabbit and says, “I present to you, the Great Hotdogini!” The kids who can laugh always do.
Tyler is the last stop on the route. After Lawan helps Tricia get him inside, instead of going back to his apartment to pack a few things or returning to Gloria’s, he goes to see Lawsandra.
It turned out to be easy enough to find her. Just ask around the right neighborhoods, spelling her name carefully so people don’t confuse it with “LaSondra,” of which there are several. But there is only one Lawsandra, and she is his mother. Lawan wasn’t convinced of this until he asked, “So what’s my birthday?”
She thought a second. “May twenty-second. You was born at ten fifteen at night, and I was up on my feet by eleven, sneaking a hit in the bathroom under the fan.” She laughed. “They caught me and took my stash away and wouldn’t let me see you till the next day. They afraid I was too high to hold you right.”
Gloria and the rest know nothing about his finding Lawsandra. It’s simple enough to keep a secret, Lawan the only overlap between the two worlds. Every month or two he hangs out with his mother and her boyfriend Booker, who works at a tire store. Lawsandra claims she’s gotten clean, except for pot, which Lawan doesn’t think counts anyway, and she works part-time at KFC. She hates it, is trying to find something better, so Lawan gave her a few lessons in Microsoft Word and Excel, but even though she’s a fast learner, she doesn’t have the patience — or maybe the interest — and he can’t picture her in an office anyway, with her long gold nails and the way she oils her hair into the shape of a fan, like a chicken’s tail across the back of her head.
Their duplex slouches on a mud-soft lot east of Collingwood, dirty white aluminum siding, spongy porch boards and the ghost outline of long-gone shutters. Lawsandra seems happy to see him.
“You want a beer? I got some chips and stuff. We having people over. You want to hang out?”
He tells her he can’t for long, then ends up staying two hours, playing a game of blinding darts with Booker and the three guys who show up. You lie on your back, and throw the dart toward the ceiling, trying to land it in the old plaster, which is harder than drywall. If you fail, and they mostly do, you have to dodge the falling dart. One time a dart lands right on some guy’s cheek, missing his eye by an inch. Everyone, including Lawan, laughs. When the moment passes, he puts on his coat and, without saying goodbye, heads back to Gloria’s.
At first, he cleans. The house has been empty for over a month, except for the cats, whose crusted plastic bowls he tries soaking, but ends up pitching. Kevin was feeding them and apparently washing the bowls wasn’t on his list. Lawan vacuums the cats’ long, silky hairs from the furniture, washes all the towels and sheets and scrubs the bathroom, from whose dry drains wafts the faint odor of dead skin. Gloria insists it’s unnecessary, but it is. Even before the fall she wasn’t keeping the place very clean. Not that he blames her. She tires easily and some days relied on canes just to walk. That she had tried to go down the stairs carrying his laundry was ridiculous, except she’d been carrying her own laundry up and down those stairs, so who could blame him?
Lawan wants to leave the place better off than he found it so no one can say he didn’t do his duty. He’d leave Gloria better off, and if she got worse later, after he enlisted, well then the others would have to deal with that because the Marines are not a part-time, come-and-go kind of thing.
On day four he finishes scrubbing, yet the smell remains, so Lawan empties the cupboards, convinced a mouse is decaying behind a stack of old Tupperware. Instead, he finds a bag of what, judging from the deli sticker, used to be roast beef. The fetid meat has decayed into a purple-brown gelatin whose enzymes have eaten through the plastic bag and started on the shelf’s yellow paint.
“Why in the hell is there meat in the cupboard?” Lawan asks, suspending the bag for Gloria’s inspection. It drips onto the plate in his other hand.
She looks upset at first, her bony, freckled face scowling from forehead to chin, then laughs. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
This isn’t the first odd thing she’s done. Gloria’s been reading the Chinese farmer book for hours every day, but her bookmark looks to be in the same place, and the day before while he was mopping the back hallway, she told him the “roof” didn’t need cleaning.
He asks, “Are you feeling okay? I mean, do you have a headache or something?”
Gloria admits to feeling “a little muddied,” and Lawan thinks stroke or seizures. Either one would settle it. Assisted living, no question.
“Does Karen know about this?”
“She’d try to make me go somewhere and I don’t want to. I want to stick it out here, until I can’t, then…” Gloria pauses. “I was thinking of Dad.”
Lawan’s cheeks grow hot. They have never talked about what happened with Frank. Dennis and Karen were away at school, Kevin on a hiking trip, when Frank had a heart attack and his car ran off the road into a park, where a bike rack stopped it. The next day, Lawan and Gloria sat alone in the hospital cafeteria trying to make sense of what the doctors said about his chances. He was on a breathing tube and there was talk of organ damage, questions about how long he’d been gone before the EMS people revived him. Gloria looked at Lawan as if he would know. “What do you think Dad would want?”
Lawan wanted to say he wasn’t his dad. They should wait for the real kids. He didn’t, and by the time Kevin, Dennis, and Karen made it home, Frank was at the undertakers’ and Lawan felt like he’d killed him, though he couldn’t even remember what he said to Gloria that day.
A new stab of guilt shoots through him. She’d clothed and tutored him and come to baseball games and student conferences. All the things a real mother would do.
“I want to die quickly,” Gloria says. “I want to go with dignity. You know, not hold on for nature to do it.”
Lawan takes a long moment to register her meaning, then pretends not to. He drops the leaking bag into the garbage. “Life’s a crapshoot. What are you gonna do?”
Lawan always avoided calling Gloria and Frank “Mom” and “Dad” at home, where the terms took on an ingratiating phoniness. In public, though, he used to look for reasons to say it, and watch people’s expressions, trying to guess their thoughts. He remembers this when he takes Gloria to IHOP and the hostess mistakes him for her driver. Would she have made that mistake if he were white? It might have been the van, parked outside the big picture window, but he didn’t think so. And so what? Why blame the woman for a commonsense assumption?
Gloria corrects her in the vehement, offended tone she’s always used at such moments. A tone that makes Lawan feel like a scruffy dog being reclaimed at the pound.
After breakfast he tries to keep himself busy around the house so he won’t have to watch Gloria flog away at that Chinese farmer book or discuss her death anymore. She’d brought up the subject again at the restaurant, him trapped in the booth waiting for pancakes. He’d agreed, vaguely, to help her, knowing that if all went according to plan, by the time she’s lying in the hospital hooked up to the machines they hooked Frank up to — the one that beeped every thirty seconds, and the one that sounded like an obscene phone caller’s breathing — he’d be on some ship anchored in the Arabian Sea and someone else would have to do the dirty work.