“Yes ma’am,” Deuce said, chastened.
“Momma’s prob’ly gon’ get there around the same time as you, so she can keep her company. But someone needs to get Sheryl into the bath or shower, help her with that kind of thing.”
All morning he had sensed it. He had sensed that something wasn’t right and had ignored it, thinking that he would get over there in plenty of time, and that it wasn’t like his mother was on death’s door or anything. Except now, the way his aunt made it sound, maybe she might be.
“Deuce? You hear me? You need to go over there. Momma can’t be going up and down those stairs and fetchin’ and carryin’. And she can’t help Sheryl up and to the bathroom without you.”
“Okay. I’m leaving now.”
“And call me when you get there!” his aunt said just before he hung up.
He was stuffing his phone back in his pocket and turned away from the French doors to find his father standing a few feet away, watching him, his brows knitted.
“What’s all the yelling about?” he asked. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Ma. She needs … There’s no one over there with her, so I have to go. She can’t get out of bed, Aunt Stacey said.” Deuce swallowed hard. “So I gotta go. I gotta …” He gulped and tried to collect himself.
His father came toward him, placing a hand on his shoulder.
“Take a breath.”
Deuce shook his head and tried to shrug the hand off.
“Nah. I don’t have time for … I gotta go.”
“Deuce.” His father’s voice was firm. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to call a home healthcare service and get someone over there. You head over, and hopefully I’ll find a service that can get there shortly after you will. But … can you drive?”
Deuce looked at him, eyes narrowed. “What? Of course I can …”
“I’ll come with you,” his father said after studying him for a moment. “I’ll get someone else to find the healthcare service. Gimme a minute and let me tell Robyn what’s going on.”
Deuce nodded, relieved that he wasn’t going to have to face whatever awaited at his mother’s house, all alone.
~~~
“What’s happening now?”
Zora’s voice on the other end of the line was Deuce’s only respite since he had gotten to his mother’s house.
“They’re upstairs yellin’. So, it’s like old times at least,” he said dryly.
His father had driven with him and when they got there almost two hours earlier, they found Deuce’s grandmother in the kitchen, making vegetable broth. And upstairs, his mother was still in bed. The room was dark and bore the dank smell of urine and an unwashed body and Deuce struggled not to cry the moment he saw his her.
Lying atop the sheets on her side in pajamas, one of his mother’s legs was hanging over the edge of the bed, as though she was trying, slowly, to will herself to lower it to the floor to stand. The other leg of the pajama pants was shoved up, and bunched at her knee, exposing a thin calf and a fragile, bony foot.
When had she lost this much weight? He saw her at least once a week, so when had all this happened?
His father was shocked too, but Deuce only knew it by the way he paused at the door for a beat, staring as though he wasn’t sure the figure on the bed even was Sheryl. Her hair was a bird’s nest, her skin had a sickly pallor, and her eyes were sunken, as though she hadn’t slept in a long time.
“Get out!” she’d screamed at them both. “Get the hell outta my room!”
His father didn’t even flinch.
“Deuce, go on downstairs and help your grandmother,” he said, his tone even.
He turned, instinctively obeying. Glancing over his shoulder, he was just in time to see his father stride deliberately toward the bed and without hesitating, shove the sheets aside to scoop his mother up, flopping one of her unresisting arms over his shoulder and carrying her to the en suite bathroom.
Deuce helped his grandmother finish preparing and arranging a sad meal—broth, toast, tea—on a tray then carried it upstairs. He was just in time to see his father help his mother to her armchair where she slumped like a rag doll, her eyes vacant and devoid of fight. She was wearing a bathrobe, and her hair was damp. Deuce realized then that his father had probably helped her shower, or maybe even bathed her himself.
Standing there, he felt impotent thinking of all that needed to be done; all that he only now realized he might be ill-equipped to do.
“Set that tray down.” His father looked over his shoulder at Deuce as he began to strip the bed. “I need your help over here.”
They had just stripped the bed of its rancid sheets and the stained mattress cover, opened windows and then remade the bed when the home healthcare aide arrived. And that was when the shouting started.
“My mother doesn’t want a nurse,” Deuce explained to Zora now. “Says she isn’t an invalid.”
Except, maybe now she was, at least some of the time.
“So, now your dad …”
“Is arguing with her. It’s what they do best.”
“Is there anything I can …”
“Nah. But I’ma stay here,” Deuce said. “No point putting off the move any longer. May as well stay. I’ll have to get my stuff tomorrow, or next weekend, but I can’t leave tonight.”
“Is she like, incapacitated, or …?”
“Sort of. She’s on all these drugs, but basically, they’re just for pain. There’s …” He choked on the next words. “She wasn’t responding to treatment so there’s nothing else they can do at this point.”
“Babe …” Zora’s voice trailed off. “Is there anything …?”
“Honestly, Zee? I wouldn’t know what to ask you to do. I don’t know that there’s anything anyone can do.” His voice broke.
“I can … listen,” she suggested after a moment.
“Yeah. Well, if I think of anything to say, I’ll let you know.”
Then there was silence. Or almost silence. Deuce heard Zora, breathing softly on the other end of the line. He listened to that and it comforted him a little, until it seemed unfair to keep her there, sitting in silence listening to him breathe.
“Zee. Your brother’s home,” he said finally, gently. “Go hang out with your family. I’ll call if I need you.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“Yeah. I’m good. Thanks, baby.”
Moments after he hung up, he realized that the yelling upstairs had ceased. Deuce heard his father’s heavy tread making its way down the steps, and moments later, he appeared in the doorway to the sitting room where Deuce had been waiting for the fireworks to subside.
“You know any of your mother’s girlfriends?” he asked without preamble. “Anyone she’s close to, or at least doesn’t dislike?”
Deuce almost laughed. That was a very short list.
“Nah,” he said finally. “Why?”
“She’s refusing the nurse. And I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. Or have someone in her house she doesn’t want here.”
That much was true. His mother always had been one of very few people his father couldn’t intimidate.
“So, the only other option is someone she doesn’t mind having around to see … Someone she trusts.”
The only person Deuce could think of who fit that bill was his aunt, and of course, his grandmother who was already upstairs with his mom but would be of little help when she needed to be supported with more than toast, tea and veggie broth.
“I can ask Aunt Stacey if she knows anyone. I can always call Gayle.”
It was sad state that the only person he could think to call was a paid employee. His mother’s so-called friends were more like … good-time associates. Aging video vixens and celebrity hangers-on who had grown too old for the game but didn’t want to set aside their stilettos. Women who were “attractive for their age” instead of the stunning young things they had once been. They were not the kinds of friends w
ho would come to his mother’s rescue, enduring the scent of piss, shit and death just to help her into the shower.
“Do that. ‘Cause she’s not gonna want you doing what I had to do for her this afternoon.”
For the second time that day, Deuce felt guilty relief.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“Are you falling asleep on me?”
“Nah, baby. ‘Course not.” Deuce sat upright; his words slightly garbled.
Shaking his head to clear it of the cobwebs, he turned and smiled a sleepy smile at Zora, sitting next to him in shorts and a ripped t-shirt that used to be his. He didn’t know where she had unearthed it from but was touched that she hadn’t tossed it even though it was frayed around the neck and at the hem and had more than a few small tears.
Pulled back with a bandana, her hair was in an enormous Afro-puff at the crown of her head. She was most beautiful to him when she was like this, fully natural, comfortable and in a state that few people other than him ever saw her.
Running a hand along her thigh he let his head fall back again.
“Were you saying something? What’d I miss?” he asked, yawning.
“That maybe you should stay here tonight.”
“Wish I could.” His hand on her thigh teased the hem of her shorts.
It was sometime after seven in the evening—or it had been when last he was conscious of the time—and he was at Zora’s place, on her sofa. Most days after work, he tried to stop by before heading back upstate, and when he managed it, he was usually wiped out. The routine was wearing him down.
To get to SE as early as he needed to, Deuce was up at four every morning, so he could make the train that left just after six-thirty. Despite scoffing at it, he had adopted his father’s ridiculous schedule after all. He worked out as soon as he got out of bed, using the free weights from his high school football years, and his mother’s treadmill in the basement. Then he made himself a protein shake and took Metro North to the city like countless other corporate drones.
Except, while they read the Wall Street Journal in their dark suits, he slept for the short ride, until the noise and hubbub that preceded the ‘last stop, Grand Central Station’ announcement roused him from his slumber. The sleep he got on the train was shorter, but deeper than that he got at his mother’s house. There, he slept with an open ear, hypervigilant for the sound of her voice calling for him in the night.
It only happened once, but it scared the crap out of him. She sounded weaker than he’d ever heard her, but insistent. When he got to her bedside, she was awash in perspiration, and asked him to give her a bottle of pills from her bathroom and a cold glass of water. He had to help her sit up so she could take them, and her nightshirt was damp against his palm when he held her back.
Thank you, Christopher, she said afterward, collapsing right away against her pillows.
For one terrifying second, he wondered whether things had already gotten so bad, and she was so far gone that she thought he was his father.
“I don’t think Aunt Stacey’s stopping by tonight, so I have to be there,” he told Zora now. “But I wish I could sleep with you next to me though.”
He ran his hand further north, beneath the hem of her shorts to where he cupped her butt-cheek. Zora squirmed a little and batted his hand away.
“How you can even think about sex when last time …”
Last time was more than a week earlier when she’d gone to Bedford, and they got a little carried away in his childhood bedroom. When they finally emerged, and Zora had gone in to greet his mother, she had been decidedly cool and standoffish with her; for which Zora blamed him later.
How else would she be? she hissed at him. When she probably heard me humping her son two rooms down the hall?
And then she forbade him for ‘even getting anywhere near’ her while she was at the house next time. Like that was going to happen.
“Who said anything about sex? I said I want to sleep next to you. I sleep better when you’re close.”
“But you’re already half-asleep as it is. You’d better leave,” Zora said, holding him by the wrist when he tried to slide his hand up her shorts again. “Before it gets too late.”
“Seriously. Come up there with me.”
She was shaking her head before he even finished.
“I don’t think so, Deuce. It wouldn’t be right.”
“What wouldn’t be right about it? My mother’s not exactly conservative. If you come up there to stay with me, she ain’t gon’ care.”
“Last time …”
“Stop bringing that up,” he said hissing his teeth. “She only cared that time because we … did what we did before you came to speak to her.”
“That was your fault!”
“I know, but I’m jus’ sayin’. She doesn’t care if I have ‘girls in my room’. I’m a grown-ass man. And I want you with me.”
Her eyes dropped for a moment and she raked her teeth over her bottom lip, so Deuce knew she was considering it.
“I miss you, baby,” he said, laying a lot of weight on the word ‘miss.’
Zora’s shoulder sagged a little. “I just don’t want your mother to …”
“C’mon, Zee. I need you,” he tried instead.
She rolled her eyes. “Now you’re overdoing it.”
Smiling at her, Deuce ran his hand down her calf, gripping her foot at the instep and holding onto it.
“I do need you though. Because …” He shook his head and sighed.
Leaning in, she pressed her lips into his cheek.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.”
“She’s … just letting herself waste away,” he said, shrugging. “A little bit at a time. And I don’t … I don’t get it, y’know? Because what my father said to her was true, she fights. It’s who she is.”
“Maybe she’s tired of fighting,” Zora suggested softly.
“Or maybe she’s thinking about hair-loss and weight-loss and all that shallow bullshit,” he said sharply.
Sometimes, when his defenses were down, he was angry at his mother. Not just apprehensive about what the next day would bring, or scared of losing her, but pissed. For a good part of his early life, she was his only parent. He knew he had a father, but he was a distant and unreachable figure, someone he held in awe more than loved. Someone he feared more than he respected.
The love and the respect for his father had grown and developed over time, but his mother, and not his father, had been his constant. Messy as she sometimes was, there was never any doubt that she loved and was proud of him; that she would kill or be killed for him; and that she viewed him as the best thing she had ever done.
He felt his eyes grow a little hot and sat up abruptly, blinking hard a few times then taking a deep breath.
“Anyway, you’re right. I gotta …”
He tried to stand but Zora held his hand.
“Do you really need me to come?”
“Yeah, but maybe tonight’s not the night,” he admitted. “Because I’m up before dawn and out of there early. But this weekend. Could you come this weekend?”
She nodded. “Yes. This weekend I’ll come.”
“Tomorrow. For Friday, Saturday, Sunday?” he pressed.
“Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”
“Cool.” He kissed her fleetingly on the forehead. “Lemme get outta here before it gets too late.”
~~~
The smell was unmistakable. But once he made it past the front door and into the living room, Deuce’s suspicion was confirmed. His parents were sitting across from each other. His mother on the sofa partly reclining and his father in an overstuffed armchair.
And his mother was holding a smoldering, odiferous, and very fat blunt.
“It has medicinal properties,” his mother said before putting it to her lips and sucking in more of the smoke.
“For real, bruh?”
He looked at his father who grinned—a genuine, Cheshire cat showing-of-teeth. Was he h
igh, too?
“It was this or let her try to go get some herself.”
Deuce’s eyes opened wider.
“Wait. So, you brought her the weed?”
He shrugged.
“Tomorrow’s Friday,” his mother said, her voice distorted from her effort to hold in the smoke.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Deuce demanded. “It ain’t like you go to work.”
“That’s right,” she said, as though his pointing it out had only just made her realize that fact. Then she erupted in giggles. “Cool. So that means I can smoke any day of the week I want, in my own damn house, and my son can’t have shit to say about it.”
Shaking his head, Deuce turned away from them both.
“Look at him over there, judging us, the two people who made him,” his mother said to his retreating back. “I know that must’ve come from your side, Chris.”
His father laughed. “Why my side?”
“Because my mother was out in the street fightin’ one of my daddy’s side-bitches when she was six months pregnant with me, so we ain’t about … decorum, if you know what I mean.”
“Believe me. Decorum doesn’t come to mind when I think of your people,” his father returned.
And that comment, which just months ago would have resulted in a knock-down-drag-out fight had both his parents laughing like it was funniest thing ever said.
Deuce froze, then turned to look at them again. His father, head thrown back in laughter, was a sight so rare he almost didn’t know how to comprehend it. Even the sound of it was unfamiliar. But his father and mother, laughing together? Priceless.
Instead of leaving the room, he sat on the arm of the sofa and extended a hand to his mother, reaching for the blunt.
“Lemme have that,” he tried.
All laughter ceased, like the screeching of a needle on a record. Then his mother was shaking her head and looking him up and down.
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