“Why are you talking about him? Is that why you’re sad?”
“Don’t make everything mean something. I just got reminded of him. He was funny. If it wasn’t about you, he was funny.” Uncle Buddy made fun of everyone. Don’t have stuck-out ears or fat or a turned-out toe in front of Buddy. But he’d never found anything to say about Henry. With him he was gentle, like he sensed the soft center of Henry. “He fed us. He’d bring us barbecue from here long time ago.”
“What made you think of him?”
“I don’t know. He was a good old dude.”
“I was going to say maybe you need to see him. Maybe that would make you feel better?”
“I’m fine, Carrie.”
“I try not to worry about you, Henry.” Carrie hesitated and then let out a long dramatic sigh. “That’s the truth.” Carrie opened the door and put her apron back on. “I better get back.” Carrie blew a kiss to Henry. “I’ll see you later. Come before dark, okay? I’ll be there by four.”
Henry went through the drive-through and ate his fries, his greasy fingers marking up the steering wheel. After all these years the memory of Buddy was so strong. Buddy funked up his room when he spent the night with clothes he carried in a pillowcase that didn’t get washed very often. Years before, Buddy had picked up eleven-year-old Henry from school. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said. Buddy’s fingernails were just long enough to be unusual and were painted with clear polish. How had Henry never noticed his nails? Buddy tapped the steering wheel to every tune coming on from the white light rock station, baby, baby don’t get hooked on me, I remember when rock was young, take it to the limit one more time, he sang. Henry didn’t worry in the twenty minutes it took to get to Statesville or even the sixty or so miles they drove to Charlotte. “Welcome to the B side,” Uncle Buddy said and parked the car at a Denny’s just as they reached the city. Only when Buddy had gone inside leaving Henry in the car alone did Henry consider being afraid. Henry counted the few coins in his pocket and added it to the change in the car and called his mother from the phone booth in the parking lot.
“Did you call your mama?” Uncle Buddy asked when he returned.
“Yeah.” Henry nodded and admitted the act, but for some reason he felt ashamed.
“I would have done the same thing. I sure would have. You know,” Uncle Buddy began with his freckled face up close to Henry’s, “I never would have hurt you. You know that, don’t you?” Until that moment Henry had not considered himself in any danger. Henry wanted to ask Uncle Buddy so many things, but even as a child he knew the answers didn’t matter. The only question that meant anything was one Buddy probably couldn’t answer. Did you feel it when your mind slipped like a backbone, like a bad knee?
8
That night Ava had the dream again. The three of them are in their dirty kitchen. Ava is stacking dishes to make room in the sink and runs water into the breakfast pot. Their son is crying softly in the next room because he can’t understand that he can’t go pay, go pay at the park. But they must start the day. The man stirs the bubbling oatmeal as she pours the milk thick as cream into the fancy bottle proven to reduce gas bubbles in little bellies. A fortune in bottles and nipples, her husband says, her brother says, a man she does not recognize says, depending on the night. But she doesn’t need money, not at all. The baby drinks and the cat the baby wants is thankfully still imaginary with imaginary winding around and through their legs, begging in that sullen privileged way cats do.
“Can you please take out the trash please,” she says to him. But there is no please in her voice. Whining, whining, an unbroken record or do what you are supposed to in her tone. Not like he hears or has heard for a long time. He is turned from her. Her brother, her husband, the man she does not know hides his face. She thinks about the days they would dance on this very floor barefoot and light as children. There were times when the food was greasy and fried and they ate with their fingers and wiped them on already soiled jeans. But life is not compromised just because it is tiring, and a small body reaches out for them, calls out to them from other rooms. She will wake from this dream with a feeling like floating, a lightness she will wear for the rest of the day.
9
“I’m drawing you now,” Marcus said.
“You don’t know what I look like. Just don’t draw me ugly.”
“I won’t.” Marcus chuckled. “Do you draw? I know you said Devon does.”
“My hobbies are working and sleeping,” Sylvia said. She poked her tongue in the space where her right molar used to be. Did messing with her teeth count as a hobby? Her dentist said that eventually her teeth would shift away from each other, trying to make up for the hole in their ranks. That was too much for just the dumb movement of the body. If there is space something moves to fill it with no intention to it at all.
“You ever see one of those movies with painters lined up in Paris? They’re all outside and people are strolling by. Do you remember?”
“I think I do. I’ve probably seen one or two”
“I’m going to be one of them.”
“You going to wear a beret?” Sylvia chuckled.
“Everybody looks stupid in them, why not me,” Marcus said.
“Why not you?” Sylvia said. She sometimes thought that Marcus was in another country. When Sylvia was a girl, if a relative moved a state away you might not see them but once a year. If they moved across the country, you might not see them for years or you might never see them again. Your relationship with your people reduced to a few phone calls, hurry up, long-distance! Young people Ava’s age and younger wouldn’t stand for that. What Sylvia and her generation had accepted as obvious was ridiculous to them. Just get on a plane, get in the car, believe in all kinds of possibilities. But who could believe? Before long too many things weighed you down and left you hoping in nothing farther away than the reach of your hand. Sylvia didn’t want that kind of settling for Marcus. He was far too young to have all the doors shut and latched right in front of him.
“I never told anybody that,” Marcus said. “You know I’ve never been anywhere but one time to South Carolina in my life. I’ve never even been on an airplane.”
“You’ll get there. People like us go places every day,” Sylvia said.
“You start thinking about going. Going anywhere. Tay won’t shut up about it. Every single day. I wake up to him begging. I go to sleep to it. Everybody’s thinking the same thing.
“He’s the one to say it so you know he’s messed up.” Marcus laughed.
“Can you talk to him?”
“Nobody can,” Marcus said.
“You’ll be going before you know it. Flying, driving, whatever you want to do.”
“Where do you want to go, Sylvia?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere. As soon as I got there I’d just want to be home.”
“Don’t give up, Sylvia. Did you hear that? Did you hear me? Sylvia? Sylvia?”
10
Sylvia opened the back door of her house and the man stood with his back to her in the yard. Some people change dramatically with age. Pictures from their youth look like pictures of another person altogether. Though he was no longer a skinny boy, he looked exactly the same. Sylvia would know him instantly and anywhere. “Look at you.”
JJ was startled, like he wasn’t sure what was happening, but his face recovered quickly. “Mrs. Sylvia,” he said and rushed to her on the patio.
Sylvia held JJ in a loose embrace, patted his back like an acquaintance. “My good god, JJ. You look like you’ve been gone fifteen minutes, not fifteen years,” Sylva said, but as she looked closely at his face she knew he was a grown man. Somehow we can tell the young from old, even if they are slim and stylish not-young. People change as they move into their age. How that happened Sylvia was not sure, but the difference is real, a heaviness, not fat but weight and gravity less visible than girth or flab but no less perceptible. JJ’s back was warm, no doubt from standing in the sun. How many day
s had she imagined him standing in her yard with his back to her ready to turn around like in a melodramatic movie, the span of time blowing away between them, numbers flying off the calendar like leaves in a storm. The thing you want is never the way you think. Sylvia kept her arms open her hands on his shoulders. She did not envelop him or squeeze. She had no muscle memory of holding JJ, or resting her face on the side of his. No memory of touching him at all. She wondered what he thought, what he really thought of her aging face. She must look like an old, old woman to him. She let him go.
“It’s all me. Just more of me.” He laughed, holding on to his slight belly.
When Ava brought this boy to her house, she thought JJ was Devon sitting on the floor with her daughter. “Mama, this is JJ,” Ava had said. JJ had looked up at her, nervous, goofy, and smiling, looking not so very different from how he did at this moment.
“Look at you,” Sylvia said, careful not to rest her gaze at his thinning though not yet balding head to his expensive shoes, which had a resemblance to sneakers that had gotten above their raisings.
“Look at me.” JJ grinned. “You look good, Mrs. Sylvia.”
“I guess I do,” Sylvia said and they both laughed. “What are you doing here? Trespassing is what it looks like.”
“I didn’t mean to be. Can you believe I remembered just how to get here after all this time?”
That wasn’t what she wanted to ask JJ, not at all, but they could start there. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to see the house. I had to. Besides I didn’t think anybody was home.” JJ laughed.
“Does it look the same?”
“Not really. Yeah. Maybe some things.” JJ pointed to the edge of her yard. “There’s your birdbath.” Her homemade crooked little birdbath made from the rocks she collected from the lawn and a bag of quick mix concrete adorned the back corner; the nubby texture had broken only a little and had not fallen apart in hunks as they had all predicted.
“You remember that thing?”
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
“I don’t know about that. I was crafty back then. I got old. Sit down, sit down.”
JJ moved to the table and took a seat. His frame made the chair look small. He sat the way men do, with his legs spread apart, his arms on the rests of the chair, as large in the space as possible. “Last time I sat here, I was still in my twenties. I wasn’t even twenty-one yet, I don’t think.”
“Long time ago, honey,” Sylvia said.
JJ was so close Sylvia could smell his strong scented soap. He must have showered just before he came to the house.
“You don’t look much different, Mrs. Sylvia, you really don’t.”
“Well I am. Don’t you know anything about how to talk to a woman?”
JJ laughed behind his hand. “You look just the same. That’s what I meant to say.”
“Did you walk all the way down here?”
“My car is around the corner. I didn’t want to block the drive.”
Sylvia knew he didn’t want to be seen. If she hadn’t shown up he probably would never have admitted he was even there.
“Well, since you caught me”—JJ grinned—“I want to invite you to my place.” JJ pointed up, like his place hovered in the sky.
“Your big fancy place. What took you so long?”
“I know, I know.” JJ looked down like he was embarrassed. “I’m slow. But I wanted you to see it all done first.”
“I couldn’t get rid of you a long time ago.” Sylvia spread her hands across the surface of the glass table, and yellow dandruff of pollen floated around them and away. “You know I’m joking, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“You heard that Mrs. Graham died?”
“I heard.” JJ’s face took on the intensity she remembered, his eyebrows crinkled in a concentration and seriousness that worried her years ago but finally fit on the face of this older man. Her son’s seriousness scared her too. Barely out of diapers, he’d put his head on her knee, “I’m a bad boy, a bad boy.” He’d say it until she’d coo and hold him to stillness. Sylvia had often heard mothers of teenagers long for the early years of their children’s lives when their babies’ hurts were slight and frivolous, easily forgotten. Devon had never had those days.
“I go by Jay now. I haven’t heard JJ in years.”
“I hope you know I’ll never call you anything but JJ. You know that, don’t you?”
JJ laughed. “You don’t change do you?”
Sylvia knew that Mrs. Graham wasn’t none of his grandmother, that he had only pretended she was. Would they all ever be old enough to speak the truth? It used to be the custom to lie about every unpleasantness. They’d all done it at some point for somebody. The most common one was a generation ago some mother tried to pawn off the new addition in the house as her change-of-life baby. We all saw the fourteen-year-old daughter swelling up like a balloon, but we pretended anyway. JJ had been a foster child whose father had shot his mother to death. The story came out in drips. They say his father was still in the yard, found crying when the police arrived, they say he shot her at such close range she could not be recognized. The girl was sent to live with a great-aunt, so precious little was known about her, but about the quiet boy, there was rampant speculation about what he had seen and heard. We do not know what the children saw. Sylvia had never asked JJ and he never volunteered any information. The most he’d ever said was that his mother was dead. He never mentioned his father to her at all. Before JJ had been in town a year, everybody knew some version of the terrible details.
“That woman never did like me. You know what, Mrs. Sylvia? I’m been trying to forget her for years.” JJ smiled at Sylvia. “I’m laughing but I’m not joking.”
JJ didn’t need to explain. Sylvia never liked Alice Graham one bit. Alice had been a woman drifting alone, little family, few connections to the town. She looked through you when you saw her and wouldn’t even pretend to be interested in your life. Civilization runs on people pretending to be interested in your life. What a shock when she popped up one day with a grandson. She had to be the last person in the county you would expect to be taking care of children. A grandson my eye, a grandson my black ass, Sylvia thought. All JJ ever was to the woman was a five-hundred-dollar-a-month check.
“I couldn’t get back for her funeral. I thought about it. I really did. I know I owe her something. But I was in the middle of a house flip.” JJ hesitated, like he wasn’t sure of the story himself. “In California.”
“A flip huh? Is that what they call it?”
JJ raised his eyebrows unsure how to respond to Sylvia, the boy coming out in him all over his smooth broad face. “A flip is when you buy a house to sell and fix it up and wish you never started the damn thing in the first place.”
“I know what a house flip is. Believe it or not, we have television here.” Sylvia hesitated, to see if she’d hurt him, she might need to balm her words to keep them from stinging. She was once the kind of person people told their secrets to. She had a trusting face, she was told. Sylvia thought it was probably because she stayed still enough to listen. JJ was still smiling at her. She smiled back at him. “This is what you’ve been doing with yourself then?”
“Yeah, mostly.”
“Are you working now? Because you won’t find anything around here.”
“I’ve got a workshop set up at my house. I make parts for the military and businesses sometimes. When the old machines break, they call me.”
“So you’re a machinist?” Sylvia pictured JJ as the traveling man in a western, MR. FIX-IT or something like it on a handmade sign hanging from the wagon, soldering pots and pans, farm and kitchen tools, or taking the unsalvageable for scrap, his cart swaying like an elephant’s rear, jingling from the metal hitting together as he traveled.
“There’s money in that?”
“If you can get contracts there is. I’m doing okay.”
“A lot of machinists h
ere are out of work,” Sylvia said. “Whole factories of them. You must have noticed all the empty parking lots at the plants on the bypass?”
“I noticed. What are people doing?”
“Being poor, I guess,” Sylvia said.
“From what I remember people were always poor.”
“Being destitute then. That’s all I know,” Sylvia said, but she wanted to tell him about the grown men she’d seen in Dooleytown hugging the streets, smoking and hanging, trying to swagger their way out of no job, no money, no prospects.
“Are you doing okay, Sylvia? You working?”
“Same place for the past hundred years, but I am this far from retired.” Sylvia compassed her fingers in front of her face. “This much from the finish line,” Sylvia said. For nearly thirty years Sylvia had been an intake clerk at county social services office. She was the first face the elderly, but mostly young women registering for food stamps or rental assistance or help with the heating bills, saw. Somebody must have decided that a black face would set the right tone for the office. The girls that came in now looked just a few years older than the babies they wheeled in with strollers.
Sylvia nodded like she was accepting everything JJ said. “You’ve got a big place started up there.”
JJ looked up, like he might be able to see the house.
“What are you looking at? You can’t see it from here, can you?”
“I thought I just might be able to. I can see this house from my deck. The roof anyway.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that. This house? For sure?”
JJ nodded, but Sylvia could tell he was not entirely sure. “You know what, Mrs. Sylvia, turns out you don’t get over being poor.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Sylvia said.
“You know what I’m really excited to see? The ice maker. I’m getting an ice maker.” JJ rubbed his hands together like a cartoon bank robber.
She loved his face. Something was breaking up, unmooring in her chest, cracking and moving around like glacial ice. Being useful would settle the movement or at least keep her mind busy. “Let’s get something to eat. Ava ought to have something around here. What do you want?” Sylvia knew that Ava wouldn’t have much, but she had to let her hands act, keep her brain in gear. On the miserable last day of Uncle Monroe’s life he couldn’t wait to clean out the drawer in his bathroom. If you had fewer than twenty-four hours to live, would you waste time tossing slivers of soap, rubber bands his dead sister Lula used to trap her gray shoulder-length braids? Would you smooth with the wedge of your hand your kinky hair all of it into the plastic grocery bag you use for a trash liner? If you were dead in twenty-four hours would you clean out a drawer? Why not? Keep those hands moving, keep going. Sylvia understood.
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