“Nothing for me, Mrs. Sylvia.”
“You don’t have to call me Mrs. anymore. It makes me feel old.” Sylvia opened the cabinet over the dishwasher. There had to be some crackers or something lurking in there. She would bring some tuna and peanut butter tomorrow at least. “I had to tell my friend that I would hang up on him if he called me anything but my name.” Only after about a month of phone calls did Marcus start calling her Sylvia. She had secretly liked that he was a nice boy with some home training.
“Did you say your friend?” JJ asked, a sly grin on his face.
“Yes, I did. Can’t I have a friend?
“Are you and Mr. Don split up?”
“Split up? That’s funny. When do you remember us together?” Sylvia asked. “What are you asking me? Do you mean Marcus?”
“No, ma’am, I was just wondering. You were talking about your new friend. I should just mind my own business. You don’t have to say.”
“Oh no, honey, he’s twenty-five years old.”
“Twenty-five! I was wrong, you have changed.”
“Lord, don’t even say that out loud. He’s just a boy I’ve been talking to on the phone. Nothing like that. He’s like a son to me, a friend.” Sylvia considered what she’d said. It had been a long time since she’d made a friend. She wasn’t sure about the boundaries of it anymore. “Are you crazy? I’ve got drawers older than him.”
JJ put his hands up like he was being arrested. “I don’t judge.” JJ nodded like he was giving serious advice.
“You better stop.” Sylvia laughed. “About time you came down here to see us. We’ve been waiting for you. Why’d you tease us like that?”
“I wanted to get the house done. I want you to see it.”
“Well welcome back anyway. I’m sure there’s some good news in this town, but I don’t know it.” Sylvia laughed. “This isn’t my house anymore. This is Ava’s house now. Ava and Henry, I should say.”
JJ blinked, not sure of what heard. “But I’ve seen your car.” JJ paused, like he’d revealed something he hadn’t meant to say.
“I’m here all the time. Too much of the time.”
“I never would have come if I’d known. I thought you lived here. Tasha told me you lived here.”
“Tasha Jenkins? Where did you see her? At the grocery store? She probably meant I still own it. People always think they know your business. Small town living. You remember all about that don’t you?”
“I could have got into trouble,” JJ said, but he seemed excited, not afraid of that prospect.
“Come into the kitchen with me, okay? I’m hungry.”
“I’m fine. Y’all got any government cheese?” JJ laughed. “You remember that? Some of it was always in Alice Graham’s refrigerator. I’d have died without that cheese.”
Sylvia shook her head. “I’m not eating that nasty mess.”
“Why did they send it in four-by-four blocks? Blast from the past.” JJ chuckled. “Just like me. I’m government cheese.”
“Yes you are. That’s exactly what you are.” Sylvia knew JJ was joking of course, but she didn’t like the comparison he made with the cheese. He was not unwanted, or just good enough for the hungry poor. She was not the hungry poor. What did the kids say? “Get over yourself.” She was trying. Not everything had to hurt.
“I know there’s some crackers in here,” she said as she searched the cabinets for any snack. She could eat. In fact, she found that she could eat any time. The craziest part was she even liked the weight. The only time she really liked her body in her life was when she was big-pregnant when she knew she looked like she was supposed to and was not unacceptable by mistake. She would never again be as fat as she’d been when she was young, but a few pounds comforted her, made her feel like herself.
“You know I’m going to ask you. You know that right?” Sylvia turned to stare at JJ.
JJ shrugged, like he couldn’t imagine what she was about to say.
“You think I don’t know why you came back?”
“I came to see you and Ava.”
“I know what you came to do. You got grown and you got your little nerve up. Ava’s married, JJ.”
“I heard. I know Henry. I knew Sean better.”
“Sean’s in prison. That beautiful boy. All those Bailey boys were beautiful. Nothing good has happened to a one of them, except Henry.” Sylvia paused, careful with Jay’s feelings. “He should be out or close to out by now.”
“How long?”
“Six years.”
“Damn. Sorry. What did he do?”
“What do they all do? Drugs. I’ve said it for years. Whatever you see going on with the very poor is just a few years away for everybody else. People think they outrun it in their little suburbs. You don’t outrun nothing for long.” Sylvia had moved to Development Drive running from a poor, dirty past. Even then she was grown enough to know she was only buying them all a few years’ time.
“Was it crack? Might be meth. There’s a lot of that out here in the woods.” JJ nodded. Back then in the least valuable neighborhoods in town, Jay remembered a line of young men and old boys on Sugar Hill, on the creek and West End, stationed every few yards, waited for you to slow down with your folded bill, no conversation necessary, a drive-through service for what you needed and in the background, run-down houses with poor people, poor families and old people in dark ugly rooms like the one he’d grown up in. Sean right there hustling with those boys, even then.
“What do you know about prison?”
JJ looked surprised but he wouldn’t look directly at Sylvia. “I just know that’s a long time to be locked up.”
“You get yourself caught up with the police, in the system anything can happen to you. You know that don’t you?”
“I know.”
“I’m telling you right now, you need to not worry about Ava. She’s got her mind on other things.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine, honey.” Sylvia put her back to JJ and opened the cabinet behind her, scanned jars of ingredients like edible food or some junk food (please Lord) might suddenly appear. “She’s okay, JJ. I don’t know what you expect, but she’s fine. She’s been working at Wells Fargo now. It used to be Wachovia, if you remember that. Anyway, she’d been there since she got out of school. They told her to come see them when she graduated and she did. She’s one of the chief loan officers. Can you believe that?” Sylvia had gone into that very same building years before in her best dress, with her pay stubs in her pocketbook, asking for a five-hundred-dollar loan that she didn’t get. It felt like a hundred years ago. “She’s okay. Nobody has everything they want,” Sylvia said.
“She always was smart.”
“She is still. At least she thinks so.” Sylvia smiled. “You can’t tell her nothing, but that’s not new.”
“Good to know some things are the same then,” JJ said.
“You should go by the bank and surprise her. She was just talking about you. We both were. She would be tickled.”
“I want to.” JJ paused. Sylvia could feel him trying to gather his thoughts. None of this was going to be easy for any of them. “I will soon.”
“You should see her when she’s working. You wouldn’t even know who she is. She’s mine and I take a double take when I see her in town. Well, wait until you see her. I can’t believe she came from me.”
“Is she happy?”
Sylvia wasn’t sure what to say. Whatever JJ wanted from her, from the town, from the house he spent the past few months building, was tied up with her child. What he needed from her and what her child needed probably did not connect. It would be a miracle if they did after all this time. Sylvia had not known if she’d ever met a black man who was a romantic. The ones she knew had too much harsh life, too much reality drilled into them from early on. But this man in front of her thought he could star in his own adventure, be the hero in his own story. Sylvia smiled at him, this strange creation.
&nb
sp; “What?” JJ said looking around. “What is it?”
Sylvia shook her head. If Sylvia were being honest she wasn’t entirely sure she knew the whole truth of how Ava was. She didn’t know that much about herself, much less about her child. “She’s as happy as anybody.”
“How are you, Sylvia, really?”
Sylvia thought she’d never again know happiness. The dead spaces in her now, the ones inured to feeling couldn’t connect her to that emotion. Of course she loved, a few people, some days, but never again could she access happy—a diamond ring down the drain she’d had to dismantle the whole works to get at. “I’m all right.”
JJ stared into her face with his naked face, his eyes scared to death. “I’m going to be happy, Mrs. Sylvia.”
“Honey.” Sylvia resisted cupping his face in her hands.
“She has feelings for me.”
“There is no way on this earth you can know that. Have you talked to her? You don’t even know her anymore.”
“I know it was way back.” JJ shrugged his shoulders. “Some feelings don’t go away. Maybe they aren’t supposed to.”
“She wants a baby, JJ. She’s on to another part of her life. That’s all she can handle right now.”
JJ nodded like he understood. “I’m not trying to make things difficult. I swear about that.”
“I need a drink of something.” Sylvia opened the vegetable drawer in the fridge. One lone shriveled lemon rolled in the fruit compartment. She picked up the dry fruit and smelled it.
“Am I driving you that crazy?” JJ said.
“Not that kind of drink. Tea. But I thought of it. Don’t think I didn’t.”
“I’m not just thinking about me, Mrs. Sylvia.”
Sylvia rolled the hard wrinkled lemon under her palm. She could already tell the meat would be juiceless and rigid inside.
“How’s Mr. Don?”
“Why do you keep asking about him? I don’t know. He still looks pretty much the same, which had never been all that good. He’s living with a child younger than you. Much younger,” Sylvia said. “You know me and Don used to go up Brushy Mountain just driving and looking around. A long time ago. You see I’ve got one good memory of him. I don’t see him much, which is fine with both of us.”
Sylvia had not thought about the driving trips in a long time. Don had said that the trips up the mountain made Sylvia sad and when she was sad she got angry, usually with him. She wasn’t angry at him; that was too easy. She hated him. The fact that Don didn’t understand that most fundamental fact of their relationship was just enough reason for her to lash out and remind him.
“I see you looking at all of Ava’s junk,” Sylvia said. She imagined the house as JJ must. What was better or worse, fixed or still lacking from the last time he saw it.
“This house feels the same. It really does,” JJ said, taking in the wall art and figurines of the small rooms. “You have a lot more decorations than I remember. Who loves owls?”
“You know I’ve never liked an animal,” Sylvia said. She wondered what JJ had expected from the house, bowls of stuck-together candy, a closed-in stale smell of old people and used shoes. “I did try one time to put up some velvet flocked wallpaper. I always did love the way that looked. Ava said it was for old ladies or whorehouses.” Sylvia had gone so far as to order a roll of red fleur-de-lis pattern special order from Lowe’s. That roll was probably somewhere in the attic in the bottom of a box. “You think you’ll work on your house every waking minute. You’ll see. Up there is your first house?”
JJ nodded yes.
“Well get as much done now as you can. If you don’t get your work done in the first couple of years, it is not going to happen. Believe me on that. I always meant to put a screened porch off the back.”
“What happened?”
“What did I just say? Everything starts to look fine to you. Your raggedy old couches and your mess look perfectly reasonable until one day something shakes you up and it doesn’t anymore. Nothing looks fine. You see all the nasty paint and scraped-up floors and all the ugly dark little rooms and you walk in the door and say, how the hell was I living like this?” Sylvia laughed. “That’s when the renovations start. You’ve got to make everything new. Before long you wonder why you ever started down that road either.”
“I’d never do a renovation. After this build, I’m done,” JJ said.
“I thought you flipped houses?”
“Oh, that’s different. I’ve flipped a few houses, but I wouldn’t live in them.”
“Anyway, my screened porch money went for groceries and lights.” Sylvia laughed. “Sometimes you can’t talk money into doing what you want.”
“Money won’t act right for long, that’s for sure.” JJ looked around the kitchen, like he was waiting to find something he recognized. “I don’t see any Barack plates on the wall.”
“You know I’ve got one. I might even have two. In one of them he’s smiling and the other one he’s looking off in the distance.”
“You know where he was looking don’t you? The future.”
“I know it,” Sylvia laughed. “I’ve got a little apartment near the community college and I don’t have a single picture or bric-a-brac or anything up yet. I keep thinking I’ll get around to it.”
“You’re going to get your black woman card revoked if you don’t get Barack on the wall.”
“You mean my old black woman card, don’t you?” In the refrigerator tofu in the meat storage looked more disgusting in its gray soup bath than usual. She wouldn’t offer that mess to somebody she liked. Other than condiments there was precious little else around. Sylvia found the natural sweetener and held up the bottle. “I can make you some tea with this mess. I’ve got crackers too. Want some?” She gestured to JJ with the sleeve of saltines.
“No, thanks. But you go ahead.”
Sylvia opened the crackers, put one of the stale crumbling squares in her mouth. “I didn’t know these went bad. Did you?” She said and kept on chewing.
“He came out of nowhere, didn’t he?” JJ said.
“Who? Barack? That’s a funny thing for you to say with your disappearing act.” Sylvia paused, wiped her mouth of crumbs. “I’m thinking about those plates, do you remember when all the barbershops used to have Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. pictures up? Is Barak up there with them now? He should be, I’d figure.”
“Some have him up.”
“I guess they do. Of course I haven’t been in a barbershop since Devon was a little boy. Oscar Michaux probably cut your hair when you were here, didn’t he? I think he’s still in business. He still has a shop anyway.”
“I mostly cut my own. I didn’t have the money. That seems to be the punchline of most of life. No money and for my next trick no money. Devon had clippers and I borrowed them a couple of times. He cut it for me one night.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, let’s just say it wasn’t his best. That what I get for getting my hair cut in the dark. It was pretty late and we came out here so we wouldn’t wake you up.”
“I can’t believe all that was going on with me right here. Do you remember when?”
“No, ma’am. It was pretty late. It might have been summer. I was over here like I always was. We wanted to go into town to get a hamburger but nothing was open and we were afraid we’d run out of gas. I don’t think we had two dollars between us. We sat out here for a long time at that picnic table you used to have. There wasn’t a floodlight out here back then. I needed my hair cut so Devon did it.”
“I didn’t even know that and I thought I knew everything that went on here.” Sylvia looked at JJ’s face to gauge his reaction.
“I’m sure you knew about everything important,” JJ said unable to keep the grin off his face.
“What are you grinning about?”
“Nothing, nothing, I just laugh when I get nervous. Though I’ve got no secrets,” JJ said with his hands up.
“Lik
e I believe that.” Sylvia poured tea from a glass pitcher and drank it without sweetener. She winced.
“Not good, huh?”
“I keep on forgetting that there’s no sugar in anything around here. Don’t even think about a Sweet’n Low.” Sylvia chuckled to herself. “When I was having my babies you didn’t even know you were pregnant until about the baby had cooked for two or three months. The doctor wouldn’t even see you until then. Half the women I knew smoked, drank, did what they wanted. Did I ever tell you I smoked?”
“You? I can’t even see that.”
“I did. When I learned the babies were coming I quit, but I smoked like a choo choo for a few years. Now they tell you no nothing, no sugar, no flour, no plastics. Of course most people I knew had babies at seventeen or eighteen. That makes a difference I’m sure.” Sylvia paused. JJ should know that Ava had moved on, had a life with jagged edges, but she had not meant to be the one who told him. “Don’t tell Ava I told you that. I don’t talk about that to anybody.”
“I won’t mention it.”
“I know you won’t, but she will. She’ll tell you herself, I feel certain. I really don’t tell Ava’s business. Not usually.” Sylvia laughed.
“Life goes on. I know it has to. But that other life that we already went through, it might come back. Remember that old jam ‘Second time around. Do it one more time.’”
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