My mother had baked three small butter-basted chickens with white and wild rice stuffing. She quartered the chickens and served them with broccoli spears and canned cranberry sauce. There were three apple-pear pies on the side table for dessert and multicolored pitchers of ice water sweating on the windowsill.
The house I grew up in was small but always seemed large. Even that dining room gave the sense of being a bigger space. It was crowded in there. Along with the people from church there was Winston (who was five), twelve-year-old Margaret, and a baby named James. These three brown children belonged to Yolanda, Cornell’s wife. Their father, I was told by Delilah, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.
Yolanda was beautiful in a rough kind of way and looked somewhat familiar.
The sensations of that room cut a deep and wide swath into my memory. The baby crying and Edison’s laughter, Newland’s perpetual innocence, and my mother’s sense of order and decorum. The smells and sounds, even the air on my skin were reminders of a life I once loved, then hated, and finally forgot for a while in a haze of drugs, sex, and glitter.
“Where’d you and Mi Lin meet?” I asked Newland.
He and his bride were seated across the table from me. On my left side sat my son and on my right was my mother.
“Online,” Newland said.
“Really?”
“Lin is from Hong Kong,” Newland explained.
Newland was dark and skinny with a round head like my son’s. His expression, since he was a baby, was always one of wonder and surprise. He never had trouble with the gangs or the police. No one wanted to hurt Newly, and he was always willing to help you if he could.
“And you were online pen pals?”
“One night I found this Web site about women from other countries lookin’ to be American wives,” my brother said.
“You should know something about that,” Cornell said to me. With that he smiled for the first time I’d seen that day.
“Anyway,” Newland continued, “I send ’em a picture of myself and my house and Spider, my dog. I told ’em that I worked for the post office and that I was a sorter.
“Then for a long time I forgot about it—it was almost a year before Mi Lin send me a e-mail.”
“I told him,” Mi Lin said with a pronounced and yet understandable accent, “that I like what he says more than all the other men, that his pictures were about a real man who lives a real life. His house looks big to me and I like a dog. I work in toy factory and save two thousand dollars. I tell him that if he pay eight thousand I will send him my two for the rest.”
“We were all so worried that it was some kinda scam,” my mother said. “We told him not to do it.”
“But I could tell that she was for real,” my brother argued. “You could see it in her pictures and in the way she said what she said. I wrote her back and said that I wasn’t rich and that I didn’t even have enough to keep her without her gettin’ a job, and she wrote back that she liked to work. Boy, you know I hit the credit union the next mornin’. I lied and said I was improvin’ my house, but you know I was rentin’ then.”
“So it all worked out?”
“There was some trouble here and there, but you bettah believe that Mi Lin come here and I married her aftah only three weeks.”
“I’m very happy,” Mi Lin said.
She grinned at me and I felt a brief surge of amazement. I realized that my little brother, the silly kid asking the same questions over and over in our backyard, had turned into the kind of man whom this woman could love and I could respect—that he had entered life with a steady gaze and even step.
Newland had surpassed me and that made me smile.
“So what about you, Sandra?” Cornell asked.
“What about me?” There was no love lost between me and my older brother, because there was no love to lose.
“What trouble brings you to this house?”
“My husband died.”
“And why are you here?”
“Why am I where, Cornell?”
The question threw him. This was a game we had played since we were children. I’d make fun of him and then he’d beat me up.
“Sitting at this table,” he said at last.
“Is this your table?” I replied, the playful, willful child in my tone.
“It’s our family table.”
It came back to me why I had left home. My father was dead and Cornell, for whatever reason, had decided that he was the man of the house. My mother was a helpless wreck and so I received the brunt of my brother’s misguided attempts to keep his world from flying apart.
“Cornell,” my mother said in a commanding tone I hadn’t heard since I was ten.
My brother looked but did not speak.
“This my house,” Asha Peel said firmly. “Not yours. You and your family are guests in here. And if you cannot accept and respect your sister on the Lord’s day in my house, you don’t have to stay.”
The silence at that table went way down inside of me. If I had not already decided to give up the adult film world I would have at that moment because of my mother’s words.
“I was just sayin’ that she don’t have a free pass back from the kinda life she been livin’, Mama,” Cornell said, grasping onto the frayed fabric of a lifetime feeling that he ran our family.
“She has a free pass with me, Cornell. This is my daughter and I will love her no matter what. And if you can’t respect her then you show me the same disregard.”
“But, Mama …”
“That’s all, Cornell. You have run roughshod over Newly and Sandy long enough. I am the elder in this house. Respect me or get out.”
Cornell cast a spiteful eye on me. We might as well have been children. He hated me for having a share in our family, and I dared him, for all his superior size and strength, to try to drive me out.
His adopted children sat around Yolanda, their mouths agape, their eyes trying to make out the new patterns of power in the room.
“Why you have to come back, Sandy?” Cornell asked.
My mother got up from her chair and walked out of the room. I followed her.
In her wake I realized how dangerous my brother had been after our father died. It didn’t feel like an excuse for the kind of life I’d lived—not even an explanation. It was more like a sudden comprehension of the lay of the land, an aerial view of a terrain I’d always lived in but never really knew.
My mother went to the kitchen door to look out on the overgrown grass of the backyard. She’d already changed out of her maroon Sunday suit into a blue-and-white dress with a complex floral pattern running through it.
“Mama,” I said to the back of her graying head.
She turned, I remember, and hugged me fiercely. She was shaking but not actually crying, groaning a low note of remorse.
She leaned away again as she did in the church parking lot, holding me by the wrists. When I looked into her face I saw nothing of me. My mother had a broad, generous look, where I had inherited the long and lean visage of my father.
“I should have told him that a long time ago,” my mother said. “I should have stood up for you and Newland when you were still under my roof.”
“You were just too hurt when Daddy died like that, Mama. It hurt all of us so bad that none of us knew what to do.” I embraced her again.
“But I lost my way,” she said. “I lost sight’a my children and they got away from me.”
“Not Newland,” I said into her lilac-scented hair.
“No,” she agreed. “Newly was always my baby. But Corn turnt into a bully and you might as well have been in China.”
I cherished those few words between us. There was no conflict or disagreement, no anger or need for resolution. My mother had been blindsided by the death of the man she loved, and her babies scattered into that darkness like frightened mice running from a sudden, unfamiliar growl.
“You got a cigarette in that li’l bag?” my mother asked.
“You still smoke?”
“So little that you can hardly call it smokin’. It’s more like I take a puff now and then.”
“Yeah, I got a couple.”
At the far end of the backyard, under the clothesline, my mother kept two folding pine chairs. We sat there and I took the nearly empty box of English Ovals from my purse. I brought the handbag with me because of the pistol it contained and the children in the house.
My mother took a drag off the odd-shaped cigarette and sighed.
“That taste good. You still smokin’, baby?”
“I haven’t had one in days,” I said truthfully. “I usually carried them around for Theon. He was always tryin’ to quit and then goin’ crazy when he found himself without.”
“What happened? How’d he die?”
“He got electrocuted. It was an accident.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He was a troubled man,” I said. “Now those troubles are over.”
I breathed in the smoke. It was a warm Sunday and there were no words I needed to say.
“What you gonna do now, Sandy?”
“First I’ll bury Theon and then I’ll get on with my life.”
“Are you still gonna make them movies?”
“No. I’m done with that. It’s not that I think it’s wrong. I mean, it ain’t wrong to work in a coal mine for a dollar a ton … it just ain’t worth it.”
My mother grinned at the phrase my father used to explain his life in the street.
I kissed her on the mouth.
“I missed you, baby,” Asha Peel said to me.
“It’s been a long time,” I agreed.
When we returned to the house Cornell and his family were gone. Delilah had made lemonade for her and Eddie, Mi Lin and Newland. They were sitting in the TV room on the mismatched chairs and sofa there.
Eddie climbed up on my lap and Newland began talking, telling stories as he always did when he had a captive audience.
He regaled us with the minutiae of the huge post office on Central and Florence.
“… and, and, and our supervisor, Nia, is what you call a performance poet,” he was saying, “and Jack, her boss, collects guns. We got two musicians, three ex-schoolteachers, and just about every race and religion under the sun. It’s not like they say—we’re not all crazy and antisocial, but you better believe that no two people in that whole buildin’ see a glass’a water an’ think the same thing.”
“You think I could get a job there?” I asked him.
“I think you could do better than that, sis.”
“You work there, Newly.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But only while Mi Lin at school studyin’ to be a dental assistant. After she get a job I’ma go to school too.”
“And study what?”
“I wanna be an architect. I wanna build houses.”
I thought about Rash but didn’t mention him. It all seemed too perfect: that I would have met a man who could help my brother—maybe. It was almost a miracle that my mother had stood up and defended me when no one, except my dead father and maybe Theon, ever had.
It was hard leaving Edison that evening. He cried and wanted to come with me. Delilah held him up and kissed us both.
Newland walked me to my car.
“What do you think it will do to Delilah if I take Eddie away?” I asked my brother.
“She always told him that she was just holdin’ him for you while you got some stuff together. He expects it and so does she.”
“It just doesn’t feel right.”
“Nuthin’ felt right since Daddy died, sis. But we got to keep on movin’ though, got to.”
Theon came to me on the ride from South-Central back to my Pasadena home—not a ghost or apparition, not a hallucination or even a vision. I couldn’t see him and I knew he was dead, but still, he was in that car with me giving me the only thing he had in abundance: fear of life and suspicion of potential danger.
“Family seems like a good thing but in the end it’s always the family that brings you down,” he said, a repetition of a platitude he’d mouthed many times in life.
“My mother loves me,” I’d told him once.
“Many men have told you they loved you,” he’d said. “They thought they really meant it too.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“They say it,” he said, holding up one finger, “they mean it”—he produced another large digit—“but in the end they will cheat on you, lie to you, and rob you blind. And that’s just the momentary kind of love, where there’s no blood involved.”
“Some man think he love me ’cause he want my ass,” I said, disdaining the made-up lover and the remembered husband. “My mother love my soul.”
“So did your father,” Theon had once said. He’d been drinking and, as always when he was high, he went too far.
“Don’t you talk about my father, Theon Pinkney.”
“It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery,” Theon said, instead of backing down like he should have done. I remember being surprised that he even knew how to use the word treachery. “The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.”
I felt the pain in that car the same as I had felt when Theon first said those words.
My daddy was always supposed to be there. Why was he out that night instead of at home with us? Why did he have to catch that bullet, live that life, make it so that my mother cried for an entire year?
“Love makes you blind to your own survival,” Theon went on when I was too hurt to fight him. “And if it doesn’t then it’s not love at all.”
I pulled into my driveway after returning from the bosom of my mother’s home. I should have been happy about the love of my son, but instead Theon’s words were in my head.
The man grabbed me when I was closing the door to my car. As I was being slammed against the garage door I wondered if Theon was trying to warn me on the drive. Was he trying to tell me that the love of my family might blind me to danger?
“Bitch,” Coco Manetti said. “You think you could disrespect me like that?”
He hit me in the midsection and I threw up the butter-basted chicken and canned cranberries.
“Fuck!” he shouted when the vomit hit the left knee of his trousers.
As the backhand slap connected with my face I tried to figure out where my handbag had gone. I was no longer holding it.
“Mothahfuckin’ bitch,” the white mobster said, mouthing words he’d learned from the part of town I’d just come from.
I took a breath but he hit me in the stomach again and so I lost it. I fell to the concrete and rolled up into a ball. He kicked me and I inhaled while looking around for my purse. He kicked me again and I saw the bag but it was well beyond my reach.
Then Coco Manetti made a mistake. Instead of kicking me more he reached down to lift me up by my arm. I don’t know why he did that. Maybe he wasn’t getting enough satisfaction from kicking my legs and sides.
I didn’t resist the pull.
One thing about my business was that we had to stay in good shape. Our thighs and calves, butts and abdominals had to be strong to keep up those pulsing, derricklike beats hour after hour.
I kicked Coco in the knee and hollered for all I was worth.
Someone shouted, “Who’s out there?”
Coco’s fist slammed into the side of my head. There was a very bright light in my eyes as a murmuring of fear whispered in the air around my head.
“Over here,” a voice called. It was a familiar voice—the one that cried out when I screamed.
Time skipped forward then. I suppose I went unconscious but it didn’t feel like that in my head. I thought I had fallen to the ground, heard the various sounds and calls, and almost immediately opened my eyes. But instead of being on the driveway pavement I was lying on a couch in an all-white room with people moving around me. I was in the
middle of a conversation with someone but had no idea what we were talking about as I came to awareness within a kind of semiconsciousness.
“Was this the man who attacked you?” Lieutenant Perry Mendelson was asking.
It was hard to concentrate on the kindhearted cop. My vision wasn’t blurred but fragmented, like looking through a broken crystal. I turned in the direction that the policeman was pointing. There I saw two discrete images of Jude Lyon standing with his hands bound behind his back.
“Jude?” I said.
“Hey, Deb.”
“Is this the man?” Perry asked again.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at the guy but he was much taller and … I know Jude. I’d know if it was him.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“We have him in custody, Mrs. Pinkney. He can’t hurt you now.”
I was reminded of the cops trying to reassure Theon’s mother about me.
I forced myself to sit up. There was the smell of vomit rising from my ruined Sunday dress suit.
Four paramedics and three uniformed policemen were moving around the polar bear room. One cop released Jude, who came immediately to my side. I was embarrassed by the way I smelled but grateful to be alive and comparatively unharmed.
“What happened?” Jude asked. His countenance was serious and very masculine. Usually Jude was shy and withdrawn, sometimes petulant, but at that moment he was protective and even a little aggressive.
“Some dude,” I said. “He grabbed me from behind and started whalin’ on me. I couldn’t really see his face.”
“Did you hear him saying anything?” Jude asked. “Did you know his voice?”
“No.”
“Move aside,” Perry Mendelson said to my dead husband’s friend.
Jude looked up in anger and defiance. Even in my fractured state of mind I was surprised by his strength and courage in the face of the police.
Finally, after a full five-second stare-down, Jude rose and moved to a sheepskin chair across from the couch.
“Same question, Mrs. Pinkney,” Perry said. “Did you recognize anything about your attacker?”
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