He didn’t answer.
“I said, isn’t that right, Stephen?”
His grandmother jumped in. “Stephen, you hear your mama talking to you?”
He still didn’t answer.
His mother pushed her plate away from her and started to stand but thought better of it. “Stephen, I have had enough of this. Now I am going to ask you this question one last time and this time you are going to give me an answer. Were you out again with Kiki?” She watched him closely, skewering him under her glare.
He shifted in his seat, “Yeah, Ma.”
“I told you I don’t want you hanging around with that boy!”
“But Ma, he’s my boy. You can’t—”
She slapped him across the face, “I don’t want to hear another word! He’s not my boy, you are, and I don’t care what you say about him! You got another think coming if you expect me to put up with you disobeying me! And don’t even think of stepping one foot outside this house tonight or any other night until I say so. Take yourself to your room this very minute or else I’m not gonna be responsible for what might happen if you stay in my sight. Lord, give me strength. And I better not hear no tv on in there and no video games! You hear me?”
He rose sullenly and left the table, dragging his feet, his face stinging.
All of their bedroom doors were closed to each other. Stephen was lying on his bed and listening to the sounds in the other two bedrooms. The music that his grandmother called the blues was playing in her room as it always was whenever she was alone in her room. His mother was behind the door in her own room, crying.
He often made his mother cry. But he was always sorry. And he had never made her cry like this. This time her crying was louder than the music in his grandmother’s room. This time it sounded as if it would never stop. He opened her door and let a little bit of light slip through so that he could look at her. Lying across the bed on her stomach, she looked a C of sorrow with her back curved up and her face buried in her arms. He felt a little sick inside when he realized what he was doing to her. He felt as if he had eaten something bad and couldn’t get the taste of it out of his mouth.
Hurting her wasn’t something he did on purpose. It just seemed to always happen whenever he did the things he yearned to do. The two of them didn’t see eye to eye on anything. She saw the danger, the trouble, before she saw anything else. Sometimes he wondered what kind of man his father had been. If he was the kind of man who took chances and saw the possibilities instead of the problems. He wondered if his father had seen his mother with her short pixie hair and lips dark as grapes and seen all the possibilities with her only to find out that she saw only pitfalls to be avoided, that she kept her feet rooted firmly to the ground and would not pick up and follow him wherever, that she would rather hear him tell her that the bills were paid on time than say she was beautiful. Stephen wondered if there was any of his father in him, if that was the difference that made everything so hard, if it was his father in him that his mother saw and worried over.
He didn’t go to her. He let her cry. He had done this enough to know all the things that she would say:
These boys, they’ll kill you.
They’ll take everything you have.
They don’t want you to have nothing.
They see that you’re smart. That you’ve got a little something going for you. And they hate it. It makes them mad.
They’ll smile at you now, but when you try to do something for yourself, when they see you trying to have a little something to your credit and name, they’ll try and stop you.
Stephen, why you make it so hard?
If you could just listen sometimes. You’re my baby, and I’m just trying to keep you alive.
He closed her door, standing there with his hand on the doorknob. He gripped the knob tightly until he could see his brown knuckles lighten with the strain of it. He wouldn’t go in, but he listened long to the tears she was crying for him.
He went to his grandmother’s room and knocked lightly on her door.
“Can I come in, Gram?”
“Yes, baby. Come on in.” She was lost in thought, leaning out of her chair, bending over her record player. “Have a seat,” she said.
He sat down on the floor by her feet and rested his head on her lap, comforted by the scent of peppermint balls in the pockets of her housedress. Her lap was warm. Her hand came down to rest on top of his head. She stroked his hair lightly.
“How you feelin’, baby?”
“Okay, I guess.” He didn’t want to explain. He just wanted to sit there and feel the comfort of her old fingers slowly weaving in and out of his hair.
“You want me to rub your feet, Gram?” His grandmother was always complaining about having poor circulation in her legs and feet. Sometimes he had to help her put her knee socks and shoes on before her doctor’s visits. Sometimes he had to rub the life back into the soles of her feet.
He knelt before her and braced her feet up on his thighs. He began to rub lotion on the cracks and hard, dead skin of her heels. The music came to him softly as he rubbed.
There ain’t nothin I can do
Nothin I can say
That folks don’t criticize me.
After a few minutes, she sighed. “Thank you, baby, but you don’t need to be in here rubbing an old woman’s feet. These feet done more walking than you can ever imagine.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind, Gram. I know you’re tired.”
“Oh? Who told you?”
“I have my ways,” he said, thinking of Kiki and his cryptic answers. “Like right now I know you’re thinking about something.” When she looked at him curiously, he jerked his head to the record player in response. The music had stopped but the needle continued to play and move, making shushing sounds on the record’s edge.
“’Cause you letting your record getting scratched up. The song’s over.” He got up and took the needle off the record. “Want me to play it again?”
“No baby, take the one off the top of the stack.”
“But that one’s scratched worse than this one.”
“It’ll play,” she assured him.
He pulled the forty-five out of its paper sleeve and put it on. The needle scratched several times. Then it caught.
“Ah, now this is it.” She leaned back. He recognized Billie Holiday’s voice. His grandmother’s favorite singer. His mother liked her, too. He could never forget Lady Day’s voice. His mother said she and his father used to play Billie Holiday records to soothe him when he was teething and crying loud enough to wake the neighbors. He didn’t remember any of that, but sometimes it did seem that her voice called to him when he was listening, that sometimes it was reaching just for him. She always sounded to him as if she was aching. He thought she sang as if her heart was torn at the seams.
That voice surrounded the two of them in the room.
Them that’s got shall get
Them that’s not shall lose.
He saw that when his grandmother closed her eyes, the fine lines around her eyes disappeared. He pressed both thumbs hard against her heel and rubbed. She said, “Can’t for the life of me figure out why they wanna call this stuff jazz. Ain’t nothing about this jazzy. Don’t nothing in this music make you wanna get up, snap your fingers, put on a pretty dress and some red lipstick. Make you wanna be at home with your thoughts, know what I mean?”
So the Bible says
And it still is news.
“You know, your problem is you listen to the wrong people. You wanna be out there so bad, but it ain’t nothing out there. Why you gonna listen to your friends over your family? That boy ain’t done nothing to make you stay.” She spoke as if her feelings were hurt. Her voice, coming after a long period of silence, startled him, and her words and tone sparked the need in him to defend himself, but he couldn’t say anything without sounding fresh.
He wanted to pull down their way of life. To say that he didn’t want to live quietly like t
hey did, without a sound. To say that he needed someone like Kiki to keep him sane enough to live with them. But he knew better than to open his mouth and talk back. He held her leathery feet in the flesh of his hands and rubbed them back and forth, her toes cracking under the heels of his hands.
“Now that boy Kikuyu—”
“Kiki.”
“Whoever. Does he work to feed you?”
“No, Gram. You know that.”
“He save his dollars to buy you things, sneakers for your feet and food for your stomach? Money for all these fancy haircuts you always need, or these video games that’s like life and death to you?”
“No, Gram.”
“Then what is it? That boy don’t never come over here or call on the phone like decent folks. He’s always got to be sneaking around, hanging on street corners. What he do that you got to be out there all the time chasing after somebody that don’t do nothing for you? Must be something.”
Mama may have
Papa may have.
He couldn’t tell her what Kiki did for him; he wasn’t sure he understood it himself. Like today, Kiki did the things that he only thought of doing. Kiki made his thoughts real and put them into action. Kiki dared. And when he was with him, he dared, too.
“Well?” she prodded, but he knew better than to answer. She huffed in some air and told him to change the record.
“You just like your granddaddy,” she said. This made him look up. His grandfather was a subject wrapped in tissue paper. No matter how lightly you touched it, it would rustle.
“How come?” But she wasn’t listening. She was shaking her head in time to the music.
“He thought he knew everything there was to know ’bout life. Made me believe it, too. He got me to move up here to New York—did you know that?—just knowing it was gonna be different. But one place ain’t no different from no place else. People try and make it like everything’s new only to find that the devil done followed you wherever you move and all you can do is hold him off a little while whiles you catch your breath.
“People’ll tell you this used to be a nice block. Way back when. When we settled up here, there wasn’t as many of us as it is now, but ain’t nothing different. What we doing now, the Jews and Italians who moved off done already been through. It might’ve been different folk, but things don’t change. And he couldn’t realize that. Thought a place was gonna change something. But if something in you ain’t reconciled and you go somewhere else or be with somebody new, is it gonna be healed?”
This time she seemed to really want an answer. Her dark eyes held him in place, waiting. “No, ma’am,” he mumbled, “I guess not.”
He waited for her to pull out the lesson from her story, to tell him to heed his mother, expecting her to bring it all back somehow and make him feel guilty. But she just rocked to the record, and when it ended, he put the needle back to the beginning again. She began to sing with the record, her voice throaty, a low rasp.
But god bless the child that’s got his own
That’s got his own.
He set her feet down and shook his hands out. He got up from his chair and walked over to her small window. The shade was pulled all the way down. He knew he didn’t need to lift it to see what waited for him outside.
The old men lined the stoops, their long legs hanging over the blue, red, and orange crates and down a step or two. They wore their best slacks, with the creases ironed in, as if they were going to work. Their backs stooped and bent, their hands hung down in the space between their legs, thin brown fingers laced loosely together. Beneath their Sunday hats, their eyes were sad, and when they spoke quietly among themselves, their voices came out rusty.
His grandfather could have been any one of them if he had lived.
His father could have been any of them—one day—if he had stayed.
Stephen never wanted to be like those men. Just once, he wanted to pull that shade up and not see them sitting there like always. He wanted his mother not to have to worry about him, not to have to cry.
The record ended and his grandmother was still singing, her body bent and nodding toward the record player.
Part of him wanted to stay right there at his grandmother’s feet, to keep that window shade pulled all the way down so that not even a crack of light from the outside could show through. But another part wanted to tug the threaded cord quickly, sending the shade snapping up to the top, where it would roll on itself, flap, and break the silence. Because beyond his stoop, over the heads of the old men and past the edge of his block, the park was not empty. Kiki was still out there even though it had grown dark, shooting skyrockets that zipped and exploded into myriad colors in the night dark sky. He was setting off Moon Whistlers, which flared and pierced the heavy stagnant air; he was lighting and tossing Ashcans, which resounded like claps of thunder. Stephen moved to replace the needle and replay the record. He passed the window and lingered, straining to hear.
The Flannery O’Connor Award
for Short Fiction
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
Christopher McIlroy, All My Relations
Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing
Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer
C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido
Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life
Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love
Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry
Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag
Andy Plattner, Winter Money
Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory
Mary Clyde, Survival Rates
Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage
Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees
Robert Anderson, Ice Age
Bill Roorbach, Big Bend
Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down
Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall
Kellie Wells, Compression Scars
Eric Shade, Eyesores
Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love
Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway
Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You
Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl
David Crouse, Copy Cats
Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
Greg Downs, Spit Baths
Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him:
Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism
Anne Panning, Super America
Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement
Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter
Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons
Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis
Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World
Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots
Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back to Me
Amina Gautier, At-Risk
Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North
Amina Gautier, At-Risk
At-Risk Page 15