Mae was the one close to his age, and besides that he’d known her all his life. At one time that familiarity would have repelled him, but the unknown and exotic had just about lost its appeal. Don even liked the weave that stretched Mae’s neat little Afro to silky black hair beyond Mae’s shoulders. Hair everybody in town knew had recently belonged to some Korean woman. Hair that everyone knew stood in for the hair Mae pulled out herself the second she discovered her beloved mother would never wake up from her last dream. At the funeral Mae didn’t even bother to hide the bald patch but let the world see on her own body a piece of what had happened to her heart. At the end of the service, as she tried to pass by the coffin the pallbearers set up at the door, Mae saw her lying like she had all the time in the world, patiently, like she never was in her real life, and Mae couldn’t stop screaming, for minutes that seemed like hours that had everyone teary in the middle of their own private losses. Reverend Johnson, Mae’s own daughter, her longtime boyfriend, everybody tried to console her, but she knew that the luster had flaked away from her life, like leaded paint. People felt sorry, but they talked: she didn’t need to do all that and she should have got hold of herself, for the children, but Don admired her for it. When else do you get to rail and plead with God, beg him for a last chance, another day? When his time came, Don used to want none of that uncivilized mess, but the idea that somebody, anybody would say NO! made him less afraid.
Though Don wasn’t searching for a woman, one found him. “What you need, Mr. Don?” Jonnie said to him. “You had all you want, Mr. Don?” Just like that every time he stepped foot in the tiny restaurant, until she finally dropped the mister altogether. Don knew what Jonnie was doing, feeling out her power, seeing if she could make an old man light up just because she wanted him to.
Friday was fried fish day, good croakers with crisp cornmeal overcoats on their itty-bitty bodies and black rubbery skin. Mae and Jonnie sold sandwiches every Friday, and the line ran out the door and into the yard. Men and women, but mostly men, crunching and spitting little bones all up and down the pitted road. Don was eating at Sisters like usual, standing in the yard when the Martin sisters, real sisters, less than a year apart, started to sing two-part harmony, “His eye is on the sparrow, I know he watches me.” Generations of Martins sang in churches, soul bands, and then back to churches, but how unusual for them to break into song just like that. Don loved the combination of their high rich voices, their almost identical faces, and their sweet bow-lipped mouths opening at the same time. He had nothing against the Martins. Not really. James had spent too much time with Sylvia. Don was almost grateful to James for being Sylvia’s friend, for loving her in ways Don didn’t know how to. He pretended he knew nothing about Sylvia and James’s relationship, if you want to call it that. He wouldn’t give Sylvia the gift of revenge. He wasn’t a saint.
Don listened while he ate the hot sauce-soaked white bread with the greasy fishy taste of the fresh catch. Jonnie told him later how she watched his face that day. How sad and unloved he seemed, she said. If Don’s face looked sad, he couldn’t help it. Don wanted to tell her that people take the insides of themselves, put it on someone else’s face, but it wouldn’t do any good to tell her that. There are things you learn from words and gestures, the sad human mistakes of others, and there are things you can only get through the bitter taste on your own smooth tongue. “What were you thinking,” she asked him later. “Nothing,” he said, which was true, but she believed that she and Don had shared their first secret moment.
Later that same day, Don took Jonnie to his home, a tiny rented trailer in the back of Sammie Park’s yard. They were both shy. Don had been with girls since he was fourteen and women not long after that. He knew sex wasn’t what you think. Women are all afraid they’ll look bad, have people laughing and shaking their heads because they put themselves on the line, body and all, to believe in something. The idea that they might get ill-used made them crazy. Even a mild woman will break every dish in the house if she whiffs betrayal. Don had seen it too many times. But Jonnie didn’t want to know any better than to believe.
Jonnie sat cross-legged on Don’s ancient couch. Don thought she looked like a spider with all those spindly arms and legs, in her tiny T-shirt, shorts creeping up her high tail. He felt dirty looking at her slight body and tried to watch her mouth, concentrate on what she was saying. But Don couldn’t shake that Jonnie looked like a child. He’d never hurt a child, a fact even his wife, who mostly hated him, wouldn’t deny. Did people see him with Jonnie and think he was leeching the life out of her? He was just another old man hooked up with a young woman foolish enough or low enough to say yes?
“How old are you?” Don said with as much tenderness as he could, but he realized he sounded harsh.
Jonnie laughed, but she sensed that inside this innocuous question was a test she couldn’t pass. “Old enough.” She said, trying to sound playful, but ending up sounding like a pouty child.
Don wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear or what age would stop the magic, fix the image so they had to stop exactly where they were. There was nothing wrong with sitting with a young woman, even a beautiful one, even one he desired. Nothing in the world had happened that couldn’t be backed down from, explained away as a moment of silly weakness. “No, baby, how old?”
Jonnie hesitated, played at cleaning her fingernails. “Twenty-four if you need to know.”
Don thought of Devon and what a nice match this girl would have been for him. He imagined Devon bringing her home. He imagined himself jealous and maybe proud of that beautiful body his son would roll over to every night. Devon and Jonnie in this very room, Devon’s hand on her warm brown belly. Jonnie smiling at him with all her teeth. Good God this girl was too young for his son. The thought almost made Don shudder. “Go on home.”
Jonnie laughed but looked scared. Don was a grown man with grown children and she had the power to frighten him. Love is tenacious, the crabgrass of emotions, it will grow anywhere, hold on in the smallest crack of desire. Even Jonnie knew that, but she wanted Don to be full up with her, consume his thinking, his desires, so much so that he couldn’t remember to be wary and sad.
Jonnie rolled the T-shirt up and over her head, slowly tried not to think about a striptease, tried to forget about her body being nearly flat everywhere except for an inexplicable roll of fat below her bra. She stood to wriggle out of her tiny shorts, tried not to notice that Don had modestly turned his head. Jonnie wanted to show Don that she was confident, not somebody’s piss-ass child at all, but she wished she had hips to show him, big legs and a full backside, a body that would make him sure about anything.
“Want to see my birthmark?” Jonnie turned her leg, her inner thigh pointed in Don’s direction, to a dark amoeba-shaped mark the size of a silver dollar that looked like a splat of used chewing tobacco or spilled acid on her otherwise slick amber skin.
“Ugly, ain’t it?” Don said.
Jonnie looked around for her shoes. Don laughed, but he wasn’t sure what to do. He never meant to hurt her feelings. Young women often don’t know when a thing is hurtful or just laughably true, nothing to be done about it.
“It is ugly but you’re not supposed to say that.” Jonnie smiled. She slid her feet into run-over sneakers and turned the corner to the kitchen.
Jonnie’s behind eased out of her high-leg underwear as she walked. She pulled the elastic leg hole from one of her cheeks, like she and Don had known each other all their lives. “You want a drink,” she calls, her head hanging out of the refrigerator.
“No, baby,” he said. The common domestic gesture, Jonnie’s eager face questioning, eased his mind some. “Yeah, bring me one.”
She seemed to be staying.
But like most things, Jonnie didn’t just change Don’s everything all at once. She came into his life and his trailer not in a whirlwind but by degrees. Every day bringing clothes, a lamp, shabby cotton curtains to replace the blue velvet dust catchers in the li
ving room and other small items and knickknacks to mark the place as hers. Don was embarrassed that he didn’t have any of the trappings of a real home, that all of his furniture in the trailer put together wasn’t worth the effort to throw it out. Jonnie didn’t seem to notice, or if she did, she didn’t care a great deal. Don knew he was being unkind, but he thought worse of Jonnie for that acceptance, for being so young and not wanting more.
After a few days, she brought her little girl to visit, Sasha, a sweet little thing with curly hair the color of sand. Don had seen Sasha before at the restaurant, but she always stayed close to her grandmother and never let Mae get more than an arm’s reach from her sight. If Jonnie came to stay for good, Don wasn’t sure where Sasha would end up. You’d have to kill Mae to get that little girl away from her, and Don had no desire to fight. Jonnie might. You never knew what a mother would do to keep her child. Don didn’t want to think about how Jonnie would react if it came to all that. If Don were being honest, he’d tell Jonnie that he didn’t want the girl. His babies were all grown and it had been a long time since he’d had to talk to children, entertain them, or pretend to be interested in their tiny triumphs. Now he wasn’t sure how much he could fake.
But that wasn’t it. Don knew he shouldn’t blame Sasha but couldn’t quite get over that her daddy was a white man from the Love Valley Church Jonnie belonged to for a short time. The child couldn’t help who her daddy was, Don knew that. She had no say at all over who brought her into the world. But every time he looked at her soft hazel eyes he felt something close to betrayal, a sickly uneasiness that went with anything associated with white people.
It didn’t help that Jonnie met the man at an Eternal Enlighted Masters meeting. That’s what they called themselves. Don, of course, called them other things. A whole group of them lived together not in one house, but by spells. Two of them, then three, then switch up. Every week they’d met in the leader’s basement and talked and shared food. Jonnie missed the talking with people who seemed to be interested in her life problems and her daily struggles to be good. Religion shouldn’t smell musty, Don told her again and again about her basement church. But she missed it. Especially the dancing. Everyone in the flock was taught to waltz. Dancing is what brought Sasha’s father into Jonnie’s arms, and his smooth flowing rhythm, his careful way of finessing her into turns, his small, dainty little dips. The day he found out that Jonnie was pregnant, he waltzed out of that basement, out of the county, and by the time Jonnie heard tell of him, she couldn’t really remember anything but the dancing that she liked about him. Turns out there’s not that much enlightenment in the world. But even that love gone wrong wasn’t enough to totally sour Jonnie on the Eternal Masters. She loved the idea of good country people, black and white, mostly white, in their bare feet, spinning on someone’s old shag carpet like members of the royal family.
Jonnie even taught Don to waltz. He didn’t want to at first and briefly considered letting that be the first time that he told Jonnie no, but he finally decided to wait until he had something more important to protest. As it turned out, he liked it. He thought about loving it but wouldn’t commit to loving a new thing, not at this late date, but he couldn’t deny that the oompah-pah music, the swishing across the floor, holding a woman lightly but with precision like holding a tool, took him out of his head like nothing he’d done in a long time.
Don had to get up early to get Jonnie to the restaurant. Mae and Jonnie had hours of preparation work to do to get the lunches and dinners carryout ready.
“You coming by for dinner?”
“I’ll be by to pick you up, but I’m not sure about dinner.”
“Be here by seven, okay? I’ll miss you.”
Don gripped the steering wheel tighter, hoping Jonnie wouldn’t notice. “I’ll be here, baby.” Jonnie got out of the car, wiggle-walked for Don’s benefit on the concrete path to the restaurant. She turned to make sure that he saw her performance. Don hadn’t moved but watched Jonnie play her game. Framed by the picnic tables on one side, the thick yellow grass on the other, and on both sides low-reaching poplar branches’ spring green leaves highlighting Jonnie in the center, her chin just over her bare shoulder, her face expectant and bright. “I’m a lucky man,” Don yelled. But even as he said it, he realized that this was the first time he was telling Jonnie what he knew she wanted to hear.
After work Don waited just as Jay had the day before on Sylvia’s patio. She might stay in that apartment to get her clothes and to sleep, but Don knew if she could, she’d be messing around in her own yard. He wouldn’t have to wait long. Don took a seat at the table and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see any more of Sylvia’s industry, her flowerbeds cleaned and neat, already prepared for summer growth. Sylvia never kept a neat house, but her yard was another story altogether.
Used to be when Sylvia and Don lived together at the trailer in Millers Creek, she’d had little pots, terra-cotta, plastic ones, pots all over the place that she’d bought at garage sales and thrift stores, all full of tiny little seedlings bursting out of the red clay soil she’d scraped up from the yard. This tacky mess grown on a few dimes would in the summer become Sylvia’s lush garden with great masses of old-fashioned color in a jungle all over: bleeding heart, sweet peas, purple coneflower, coreopsis, even some showy annuals as long as she could grow them from seed. When they were very poor and not just ordinary poor, years ago, Sylvia would find birdseed and plant giant sunflowers around their trailer. Don loved their great brown faces and, though he never told her, thought Sylvia a little magical for willing them into being. Don searched the pots for the Magic Marker shorthand only Sylvia understood. He liked her simple printing, a man’s way of writing, bold and unadorned.
A few years ago Sylvia wouldn’t speak to him at all. She peeled potatoes at the sink. Water steaming hot as she stroked a brush across the speckled potato bodies. The water sang into the silver sink, making Don content to be with her. Sylvia looked to have forgotten he was there and concentrated on the sweet-looking potatoes, not soft or mealy-looking, but plump just the size to fit nicely in a fist. Don arranged the junk in his pockets, gum, receipts, a cigarette stub he’d fished out of Sylvia’s garden.
“You gonna wash them all day,” he said not particularly hateful, but he could tell that he took Sylvia’s moment and ruined it. Before she had time to really think about it, Sylvia threw the knife into Don’s leg, propped on the chair in front of him.
“Sylvia!” Don watched the blood rush through his white sock onto his fingers. It was a good shot, but hardly fatal, a little more than a scratch really, anyone could see that. Still Sylvia wanted to feel something, rush to Don with genuine concern. All she could manage to do was pull another knife out of the drawer and continue washing the potatoes.
But they were beyond all that now. They’d had all their arguments many times. Now there was little else left to be said.
Sylvia rolled her car into the driveway, parked, and waited just a minute, trying to pretend she didn’t see Don’s car. She grabbed the canvas tote bag she was using for a purse and considered looking at herself in the rearview mirror, get some idea what Don was about to see. No reason, she thought. Might as well get it over with.
Don appeared in the backyard. “Don, what are you doing here?” Sylvia opened the car’s back hatch, grabbed a grocery bag, motioned for Don to pick up the other one.
“Nothing. Just come to talk to you.”
“Well, you better talk quick, I’m getting ready to go to sleep.” Sylvia hoisted the bag to her hip fiddled for her keys.
“You’re not asleep now,” Don said.
Don was always saying something stupid, Sylvia thought, always tried to get her off her guard. If he said something dumb enough it was like a smack in the middle of the forehead, stunning you into silence, and he could keep on doing what he wanted. You don’t spend nearly forty years messing around with a man and not learn at least a few of his tricks.
“Come on then. P
ut the food in the refrigerator.”
Don put the damp packages of fruit and vegetables from the plastic bags and stacked them in the refrigerator. He would have liked a little more to do, keep his hands busy and moving, let Sylvia see him working. She always liked him in motion, doing a chore, sweating, proving he had a plan. His luck, he was in the middle of a break when she decided to check on him, either leaning on a hoe, resting his eyes, or in a just-took-off-my-shoe-to-remove-a-stone position, the exhibit A to her belief that he was of little use and couldn’t be trusted.
Don eased into the tweedy den chair and felt into the dark sides for a remote control.
Sylvia fished from the mound of towels in a plastic laundry basket at her feet. She folded the pile of towels in a mound at the end of the couch. She popped the cotton, smoothed each with the side of her hand. Don watched her pop and fold a few while the lint flew in the already stiff air around them. Don tried to latch onto one piece of lint and follow it to the ground, but the mote kept disappearing before his eyes.
“If you’re just going to sit there, you could fold some. How long you staying anyway?” Sylvia threw a pile of towels to Don on the recliner. He tried to imitate Sylvia’s actions, but he was slow; Sylvia folded three towels to his one.
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