“Well, I’ll get him a message if you tell me how.” Sylvia said this but was not sure she was telling him the truth.
“Ma’am, I know you must know the worst things about me, but I’m not the same man JJ knew.”
Sylvia looked at him, tried to keep the disgust off her face. “None of us is the same,” she said. Frank looked like JJ, if JJ had been tossed in an industrial clothes dryer, set to burn. She would not feel sorry for him, but a pitiful sight provokes an involuntary response. She was trying her best to stop feeling. Some lives are built and some get made, she thought. You get what you deserve if you make a disaster of your life. But only a body that hasn’t lived long enough to see anything would believe that. “He’s selling the house. There’s nothing for anyone to get.”
Frank chuckled, rubbed the gray naps on his chin. “I am long past wanting anything. Nothing would be enough. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
Sylvia did not want to be in league with Frank and she resented the association. “There’s nothing to want. He even sold the refrigerator.”
“I don’t have anywhere to put a refrigerator anyway.” Frank hesitated, like something was being decided. “Well, I’ll be around here for a good long time until I get some more money to go back home. I’d appreciate you telling him I came by.”
Sylvia nodded and turned to go back inside the house. Her neighbor had his side to them, concentrated on the same spot of ground, pretended not to eavesdrop.
“All right then, you take care of yourself, ma’am.”
“You too.”
Frank opened the door to his car. “You know just before I got out I heard James Brown on the oldies station. I didn’t mean to sit in your driveway, but I couldn’t turn off the car until I heard that song. Remember we used to listen to James Brown? He was something else.”
Sylvia felt her face soften. She turned all the way around to look directly at Frank.
“Not you and me. I don’t mean that. All of us back then. We loved that rusty Negro. Me and JJ’s mother waited all day long to get tickets one time. Long time ago now.”
“Yeah, we loved him. No doubt about that. We sure did.”
“He used to sing that please, please, please.” Frank shook his head, scraped the bowl of his memory.
“You can’t forget that,” Sylvia said.
“That was exactly right.”
“What was right? What do you mean?”
“We all thought so at the time. Remember?”
“What was right? I don’t know what you mean,” Sylvia asked.
“What else can you say? If there’s something else I don’t know it. Is there anything else? There’s nothing just please, please. That’s all you can say.”
“It doesn’t make any difference does it?” Sylvia said.
Frank chuckled little snorting sounds that didn’t sound like there had ever been a happy thought. “Oh, it makes a difference. No doubt about that.”
“There’s no please. There’s no getting beyond some things.”
“No difference?” Frank said, genuine surprise in his voice. “Oh shit. That can’t be true.”
“Why not?” Sylvia asked. “Because you don’t want it to be true?”
“Of course it does.” Frank had an incredulous look, his almost toothless face a Greek mask of exaggerated sadness. “Every word makes a difference. Please makes a difference. It does. All the difference in the world.”
42
Sylvia had poured the buttermilk over the washed chicken early in the morning and left the meat in the refrigerator to marinate. In the late afternoon she prepared the egg wash and flour for dredging. Some people liked to shake the chicken in a cleaned out bread bag or later a Ziploc bag but Sylvia dredged hers through the flour like her mother had done, piece by piece, into the egg wash, into the flour, that was dusted with salt and pepper and a little red pepper. When it was time she put almost two inches of vegetable oil in the large cast-iron skillet, always cast-iron, to properly distribute the heat, and turned the stove on medium high. Vegetable oil not lard was her concession to modernity. When a few drops of water flicked from her fingers sizzled on contact with the oil, it was ready. Don’t crowd your chicken. The temptation will be to put as many pieces as possible into the pan, get the cooking over with as quickly. But cook a few pieces at a time, stand and turn them, get them done on all sides. The oil will pop like a bee sting on your fingers, on your arms, even toward your face. The process will take time. It will take your attention. You fry chicken for the people you love.
Sylvia had the children set the table. Children needed chores and obligations. Otherwise they were never family, just pampered guests. The cloth place mats, not plastic, one fork on the left, one spoon at the right at each place. Four places set around the small kitchen table. Sylvia fried chicken and mashed potatoes, made cabbage and black-eyed peas, banana pudding for dessert. She never could make passable biscuits or anything baked for that matter so those were store bought, but the rest was all from her own hands.
JJ ate until he hurt a little and still considered eating more. They’d waited as long as they could for Ava, but this was her training night at the bank and she might not join them for an hour or two yet. The children had been sent upstairs to clean their rooms. “Clean your room and you can watch SpongeBob,” she’d said. Sylvia had never bribed her own children. She’d threatened them sure, but negotiating was for lax parents, parents who wanted friends not children to raise. But the story is different for each generation, reimagined every time, and new times require new rules. Who wanted the only people in the world you threaten to be the people you love the most?
Decades ago, some of their people, close relatives, had packed their few belongings, closed up their shacks or gave away what they couldn’t carry, and set off for a northern state. They got as far as Washington, D.C., where the word was that jobs were plentiful there, even for a black body. The way they told it, a grown person could breathe, have a home, grow a family with a kind of independence and dignity only imagined in the South. Sylvia’s Aunt Dee and Uncle Fred had gone with their children to find out what they’d all been hearing. At first they got no word from them, but as the weeks progressed, the months, word trickled down that the family was living like kings, walking on gold-paved streets, frequenting clubs, shows, and restaurants, like high society, right there along with the bourgeoisie black people in fur coats and high-buttoned shoes, haughty expressions on their own faces just like the Negroes they’d rubbed shoulders with. Sylvia had ached to be one of them and had listened with rapt attention when they came home to visit every year with their stories of affluence and triumph.
Years would pass before her cousins revealed to them the particulars of their real lives in the city and the scrum of too many people in too little space. Living in thin-walled slums with a backbeat of constant angry noise and on the streets of seeker after seeker, fresher and newer black immigrants hell-bent on conquering another hostile world. Aunt Dee had cleaned for rich women, Paul had bowed and scraped. And on good days, they watched the final drops of amber liquor slide out of one bottle then another bottle. They, with their fellow displaced southern friends that they had glommed onto like life rafts, sat together in somebody’s too hot or too cold room and cried woeful tears about the vicious shithole of home they foolishly missed that they could not come back to without the permanent stain of defeat.
All of that came to Sylvia’s mind as she watched JJ eat, as they finished the dishes, as they talked only enough to be polite and moved in and out of each other’s orbits. She wanted him to know that he could come home, even if he was running. There was no shame in it. Twenty years ago JJ had been sprawled out on her couch, the sole object of the yellow light from the window streaming on his face, the dingy couch a canvas. He had not heard her enter the room that day or his feet would not have been up on her coffee table. Ava had been in the bathroom maybe, and Sylvia had time to look intently at JJ. In that light, she had thought she saw his face the
way it was supposed to be, young, unknowing, relaxed, even the crease he wore between his eyes smoothed out. She had wanted to put her hand on the smoothness of the forehead, lie to him and declare that everything would be fine someday.
“One time some of us integrated the Liberty Theater in town. Did I ever tell you that?” Jay shook his head no, though he was sure he’d heard Sylvia’s story before.
“I must have told you.” Sylvia laughed. “I walked into that theater with a crowd. We were all supposed to get there while the lights were still on and we would walk in together. I was scared—more than I’ve ever been. But we did it. It was an Elvis movie and it was packed in there. The only seats left were on the very first row. You should have seen us. Scared rabbits. But we did it. Not one person got harmed.” Sylvia laughed at herself. “Listen to me. Let me say this, not one person got hit. You think you can’t make it, but you do.”
“Maybe you do, Mrs. Sylvia.”
Sylvia had not wanted to talk to JJ about her difficult past. She wanted to tell him that he was no longer a boy. She would tell him now that he was living in a sweet time of his life, the best time. He was a grown-up but not yet old. He was too young for the past to be most of his conversation, the condition of the elderly or the hopeless. She wanted to say that amidst the chaos of days, the great detritus of living was your actual life. She wanted to say stop looking for it, honey, this is it. What she did say was, “You’ve got a house here, JJ. Live in it.”
But JJ was not going to live in the house for good. He would never buy furniture for it or plant a single tree or azalea bush. Plenty of people are interested, he’d said. It will sell, he’d said. He said he might go to the West Coast again or overseas. He said there were all kinds of opportunities for a youngish single man. Was he disappointed? To say he was disappointed is an understatement and also a lie. He was a gambler. He had known he was going to lose. Ava had asked him if he was lucky. Luck had nothing to do with it. Luck was beside the point when the outcome was determined.
“I still got some fight in me. I’ll let you know when I’m coming back. Don’t look at me like that. I will.”
That day coming home from the reservoir, Jay made a note of the landscape, the closed business now that was a general store, the gas station the old man with the goiter on his neck owned, the acres and acres of ruined industry, parking lots as open as ball fields. He took in as much as he could as he and Ava passed by in his car. Pinewood was a town he would always think of as home, but he memorized the landscape like he was seeing it for the last time. In the retelling, whenever that might be, he would want to know what he saw. He would want to remember how things were to tell the story true. In minutes, he and Ava were in sight of his house, a miracle in a muddy field. What he would give if his mother could get a glimpse of it, even for a moment. He’d opened his car door to get out and go inside, thought better of it and sat with the car turned off. He and Ava waited together. The feeling washed over him again that if they could just stay inside the car’s cocoon everything would turn out okay. They waited there for a sign or revelation that might change everything or at least point to everything. Jay’s mother had not appeared with Hale-Bopp. He had known that she wouldn’t, but the act of looking for her made him feel hopeful. The message his mother had for him had taken more than twenty years, but there it was. Survive, Jaybird. Get on with it.
“Listen to me. The kids will start screaming any minute, so let me say this quick. Don’t just disappear, JJ. Not again. I know you think you can’t stay here. But every person you see around here is walking around with a busted life story. Stay, honey.”
“I won’t leave for good. How about this, we’ll go to Vegas together. How about that?” Jay laughed in a nervous false way that fooled neither of them. He couldn’t stand it if Sylvia saw all over his face the fear that he felt.
“You teasing like that tells me you’re not coming back. Is that right?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“That’s the kind of joke you make when you never plan to see somebody again. Don’t do that to me or Ava either,” Sylvia said.
“I’m not joking.” Jay laughed. “I was joking a little bit, but I’m coming back.”
“I’ll help you see your sister. I know you need her. You must know that it is the rare family that doesn’t suffer. You understand?”
“Sylvia, nothing will keep me away from here for too long. It won’t be as long as it’s been.”
Sylvia got the dishcloth from the sink and wiped down the table for the second time. She poured herself coffee and sat down across from JJ.
“I was thinking about all this food we had here, JJ. When we was kids one night we had a blackberry pie for dinner. That’s all there was. I was a child, a couple of years older than May, but I knew a blackberry pie wasn’t dinner. But I could tell from how my mother was looking at us that I better not ask for more. I knew the pie was all there was. But more than that I knew asking would make Mama angry because she was poor and all in the world she could offer us was that small piece of blackberry pie and she knew it would never be enough. She was ashamed of that and worse of all ashamed in front of her children.” Sylvia sipped her coffee. She glanced up at JJ and caught his gaze. “I’m ashamed.” Sylvia felt her face and neck go hot.
JJ reached out for her hand. “Don’t say that.”
Sylvia squeezed JJ’s hand back and stared intently at his face. “You don’t either. You did everything you knew how. What else can you do?”
“I will see you next summer. I promise. I’m going to travel, but I’ll be back.”
Sylvia nodded. She’d never begged a man, even when her needs threatened to swallow her whole. She wasn’t begging now just asking for what she needed. Of course that would feel strange. “You can make a life. I’m here. I know I don’t know about what’s out there in the rest of the world. I know there’s a lot to find. Important things. Things I won’t ever get to see.”
“I need you to hear me, Mrs. Sylvia. I don’t kill that easy. See.” JJ pretended to open his shirt like Superman. “Stronger than a locomotive. I’m coming back.”
“But you need to come back. Don’t wait too long. Listen to me, if you wait too long, I won’t be here or anywhere else.”
“Sylvia, I’m not running,” JJ started but he wasn’t sure what else to say.
Sylvia held up his hand to stop him, though he’d said nothing else. “If you need your sister, go find her, baby. That’s worth it, but come back. None of us have long.”
43
The long corridor at the prison was cinder block like you might expect, but bright and open, more hospital than jail. Sylvia had announced herself to the woman behind the bulletproof glass. She was a Perkins, no doubt but Sylvia wasn’t sure if she’d known the woman once upon a time or if she knew some of her people. No flicker of true recognition had registered on the woman’s face. Sylvia waited for the woman to check her computer screen, and shuffle some papers. Lana had sent a cake. Don’t eat it all before you get there, heifer, Lana told her. The Perkins woman glanced up from her typing at Sylvia’s silly cake wrapped in foil. “Honey, you have to leave that in your car,” she said. Sylvia had seen so many shows about a file hidden for a prisoner she was surprised that this detail had turned out to be false.
The door to the visiting area buzzed open. The room was like the movies, small, windowless with metal chairs on either side of a transparent partition clear as glass.
A small, pretty man in a baggy orange jumpsuit appeared. A lovely face. He held his long fingers interlaced in front of him. He sat across from her without looking in her eyes. Sylvia’s hands sweated. She fumbled in her pocketbook, looked for a mint, a tissue, anything to hold on to. He looked at her face with no emotion on his. He had the patchy start of a beard on his smooth cheeks.
“Hello, Mr. Marcus,” Sylvia said and searched his face for his disapproval. “It’s me, Sylvia. Don’t fuss at me now, I can’t take it. I’m not going to hea
r it.” Sylvia arranged her purse on her lap. “I needed to see you. I’m sorry I didn’t come before now. I’m sorry about a lot of things. Tell me how you are. It won’t be long until you get to come home. Almost no time” Sylvia nervous laughed. She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have come.
Marcus hesitated for what felt like an intolerable amount of time, twice Sylvia had to shush herself to keep from bridging the silence with some kind of sound in the room. Sylvia thought he might get up from the chair, motion to the guard, or turn completely away and refuse to talk to her. Marcus hid his face with his hands, the glint of the cuffs on his wrists slid down on his forearms. Sylvia caught her breath at the metallic sound.
“I hope you’re getting along all right, Marcus. I have thought about you again and again.” Marcus looked at her face, pursed his lips. His face shadowed like he was in pain.
“I meant to tell you the truth about my son. I didn’t mean to deceive you. That was never my intention. I don’t know if you will ever be able to understand this. I don’t know if I do.” Sylvia hesitated, shuffled the thoughts around in her mind, not sure what to say next. “Talking to you made me think of him. I got to think about who he might have been or even little things he might have done. I’m ashamed of what I did.”
Marcus threw his head back and looked up at the ceiling. Sylvia couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or in pain. “You don’t have to talk about it,” Marcus said.
“I brought you a cake, but they wouldn’t let me bring it. My sister made it. She’s the cake maker.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” Marcus said.
“It wasn’t all about Devon. I need you to know that. I wanted good things. Sometimes you fall in a hole and you keep yelling until someone comes to get you, except nobody comes. You start to wonder if anybody’s coming. Sometimes they don’t.” Sylvia wasn’t sure what else she could say. If he had not forgiven her then they would part. They were not family and they could walk in different directions and never again look back. Do people ever really do that?
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