by Amy Gustine
The automatic doors part, sending a burst of hospital-scented air at his face. In the far corner, Gloria sits reading. That morning, when she called to verify what time he’d be there, she said what she always says: “It’s Gloria, your mom.” He doesn’t think she ever identifies herself like this with the others.
Before she even looks up, Lawan offers his alibi. “Long morning.”
The kids release him from the weight of time. If he’s late, teachers and therapists assume one of them was sick or had a meltdown. Which is sometimes true. Every week or two he has to pull over and get in the back, hold somebody’s hand or stroke their hair. Once in a while, he sings. You can do stuff like that and nobody’s embarrassed, or tells on you afterward. They all just smile. The ones that can anyway.
Still, he feels a shit for blaming the kids. What the fuck, though. They don’t know.
Gloria tucks her book, something about Chinese farmers judging from the cover, into her bag. “No worries, honey, no worries. I was perfectly content.”
“I’ll get the bags and come back for you.”
Lawan turns and there’s Tricia, looking especially hot in a tight pair of red jeans. She introduces herself as Lawan’s friend and gets behind Gloria’s chair, popping its wheels free and maneuvering around the lobby furniture. Her son, Tyler, who has cerebral palsy, is on Lawan’s route.
Once they’re underway, Gloria in back secured to the bars, Tricia and she shout out get-to-know-you questions over the engine noise until it becomes too awkward and they fall silent. Lawan tunes to public radio because he’s used to classical music. It soothes the kids better than the stuff with words.
At the house, they’re all standing on the front porch—Dennis in his lawyer suit, Karen with her white doctor’s coat peeking out below her jacket, and Kevin wearing his standard khakis and spike-soled bicycling shoes, their gleaming white and green plastic surface freshly buffed. Lawan figures they’re out there just to make a point about how late he is. Otherwise, why not go in the house and sit down? It’s only fifty degrees, a damp May day that can’t make up its mind, and they have keys, of course. They all used to live here.
They appear to be arguing, but that doesn’t worry him. They argue a lot because Frank and Gloria always promoted opinions as if they mattered.
Getting out, Lawan hitches up his jeans, rebuckling to the next belt hole, and tries to look a little harried, remind them all that he might be late, but he’s the one who brought her. He pushes Gloria’s chair with Tricia trailing and as they reach the porch, everyone looks at her a second too long before saying hello.
“Tricia,” Lawan points. “Kevin, Dennis, Karen.” He thumbs toward the house. “So what’s the plan? How are we getting her inside?”
Everybody glances at each other and Lawan can tell they hadn’t thought about that. “Never going to be able to do these stairs.”
The house, a brick colonial with rotting porch columns, has five steps up to the front door. Lawan watches Karen squirm. She’s the doctor. Should have seen this problem coming. Finally he says, “I think I can get her around back and take her in through the patio door.”
The house sits on a hill, so the basement is a walkout, but it’s been a few years since Gloria was strong enough to garden and maneuvering her chair down the weed-choked incline proves difficult. Lawan manages, though, and keeps her pitched back on rear wheels across the choppy patio, its bricks sunken and heaved because Frank didn’t dig the base deep enough. He’s dead now, and the next owner will have to deal with it.
Inside, they all realize Lawan has only changed the problem. This is the basement, with a pool table from the 1970s, an old couch on which he lost his virginity to a homely girl named Reisha and, in the other room, the furnace, water heater, and laundry. Between the rooms a narrow, steep staircase leads to the main floor.
“Well, how the hell are we going to get her upstairs?” Dennis says.
“Can you sit on the stairs,” Tricia asks, “and scoot up backward?”
Karen looks at her with a suspicious, even hostile, glance, but Gloria deems it an excellent idea.
“I’ll go up on my ass just like I came down.”
She makes a move to stand and Lawan hustles forward, offering his arm. When she leans on it, he realizes she’s lost weight, and she didn’t have much to spare. Gloria has always been tall and bony, like one of those funny birds that can’t fly.
“I’ll just carry you.”
Before she can object, he’s swung her up and she’s easier to lift than most of the kids, who flop or freeze or otherwise work against the whole process. At the top of the stairs, Gloria pumps her fist in the air. “Ha, ha! I’m not dead yet.”
Lawan began life an only child. When he was eight, his sisters were born, Lawkaya and Lawnita. Soon after, a social worker took the three of them from their mother, Lawsandra, and sent them to live with a Mexican woman and her half-black, half-white husband, last name Miller. The Millers wanted to adopt the twins and one day a very tall, skinny white woman with red hair came to explain to Lawan that his sisters were “easy” because they were babies, but they wouldn’t be easy forever, and didn’t he want them to go to a good home? The Millers moved away and Lawan was forwarded to the home of Gloria and Frank Schmidt. Gloria was also a very tall, skinny white woman, and for some reason Lawan assumed she was the other white woman’s sister, until one day he asked and she laughed. “No, we’re not related at all.”
He stayed in his old school for the rest of that year, then Gloria and Frank sat him down and asked if he wanted to be adopted. Lawan nodded. He knew he wasn’t easy anymore.
Gloria switched him to the Catholic school Kevin, Dennis, and Karen attended. It was all white, if you counted the Hispanics as white, which he did. By then he’d figured out “Lawan” was what they called “a black name,” so he introduced himself as Wan, the name that Kevin and Dennis used, hoping this was whiter because it had been bestowed by white kids. With the Hispanics around everyone assumed his name was “Juan,” so he started spelling it that way on his papers, and for a while got away with it, until his birthday, when the vice principal came on the announcements.
“We’d like to wish a happy birthday to Lawan Schmidt. Have a great day, Lawan!”
The other boys slapped him on the back the rest of the day, exaggerating his name in two drawn-out syllables, “Laaaa-waaan.”
He stopped cutting his hair that year. By the middle of the next teachers began asking when he might be “trimming” it. Kids wanted to know if he could hide stuff in there, like candy or the answers to the history test. Dennis suggested he join the Village People, and Kevin said he looked like he’d touched a power line. His hair became so tall they didn’t know what to do with him for the spring concert. His face should be in row four, but his hair would be best in row eight. The music teacher solved the problem by putting him on the end of row four, with no one behind him. In the yearbook he protruded like an inked thumbprint at the edge of the page.
While Tricia helps Dennis carry the wheelchair up, Karen yells from the kitchen, “It smells in here! I told you to clean out the fridge, Kevin!”
“I did!”
They walk around looking for the source, find nothing.
“Maybe the place just needs a good airing.” Dennis opens windows to the thick, wet air of spring.
Tricia and Karen run out to the grocery store and by the time they come back they’re talking like old friends. Karen has given Tricia a bunch of medical advice on Tyler. Lawan isn’t proud of it, but it occurs to him this could be good. If they all think he’s busy with a girlfriend and her disabled son, maybe they won’t be so quick to think he can take care of Gloria. Won’t be so mad when they find out he’s already halfway gone.
For lunch they’ve bought a bunch of Arab stuff. A paste the color of a drop cloth and two salads, one made of cucumbers, tomatoes, and a crunchy bread, the other dwarf lettuce wilted in sour dressing.
“Could I have the t
abouli?” Tricia asks, winking at him to indicate what? She already seems to know his family better than he does.
“So do you have your stuff here?” Kevin asks.
The time has come. For a second Lawan pretends not to be aware that Kevin is talking to him, then he widens his eyes. “What stuff?”
“Your stuff. To move back in?”
“Your brother doesn’t have to move in,” Gloria says. “I’m fine alone.”
“That’s how we got into this mess,” Karen says.
“We?” Gloria says. “I think I’m the one with the pins in my ankle.” She fell down the basement stairs, shattering her leg, because Gloria has multiple sclerosis. Living in a two-story house with all the bedrooms and the only shower upstairs makes no sense, but if anyone suggests moving, she gets angry.
“I could have done those stairs on my ass. Lawan didn’t have to carry me.”
“Somebody’s going to have to get your wheelchair up, unless you’re going to strap it to your head,” Dennis says.
“I can use my walker up there.”
A five-minute debate about whether or not Gloria is strong enough for the walker ensues. What if she has an attack? That’s what they call the sudden spike in MS symptoms that come unpredictably, sometimes not for years at a time, sometimes only months apart.
“You could have died falling down those stairs,” Kevin says. “It was pure luck Wan was here.” Kevin is six inches shorter than Lawan. He has to reach up to knuckle his hair, still two inches thick.
Lawan heard the thumping sound of Gloria’s head hitting the wall and the cracking as her legs caught between balusters because it was his laundry she’d been carrying downstairs. He’d stopped by to do it and while he was rummaging through the freezer, she snatched it up. Lawan was pretty sure Gloria hadn’t told anyone this part of the story.
That day he’d waited for the ambulance outside, feeling safer in the fresh air. When they pulled in he said right away, “My mother fell,” to be sure they knew he belonged here. He had to remind himself these were experienced people. Surely they’d seen a black man with a white mother before. For all they knew, Frank had looked like Shaquille O’Neal.
“Lawan is moving in,” Karen says. “There’s no other option.”
“I have to drive my route.”
“That’s no problem. I think Mom can swing a few hours alone.”
Karen proceeds to list the things he should do before leaving. Food. Medicines. Bathroom. Phone. Glass of water.
Now is the time to bring up the Marines. He passed the test and it was only Gloria’s fall that stopped his enlisting. Instead, he asks, “Long-term, though, what’s the plan?”
They all shoot him a warning glance. Even Tricia looks uncomfortable.
“One day at a time,” Karen says. “That’s always what you say. Right, Mom?”
“That’s right. Tomorrow might never come. Why waste today preparing for it?”
This had always been Gloria’s mantra, and the older Lawan grew the dumber he thought it was. Every day kept coming at you, like a slap across the face. Better get your hand up.
At two o’clock he manages to slip away. “Gotta go get the kids.”
Tricia sits beside him quietly for the first several minutes and he wonders what she thought of everyone, but doesn’t want to ask. As they’re pulling up to the first school, sliding in line behind a bus that picks up the regular kids, she says, “I take it you don’t want to move in?”
For a second he thinks she means with her, then realizes she’s talking about Gloria. “I don’t know. I’m not sure she wants me to.”
“Oh yeah, she does. She’s just too proud to ask. Mothers don’t like to be a burden.”
Lawan would like to ask Tricia if Tyler is a burden, but he knows that’s mean. If the answer is yes, she wouldn’t want to say it out loud.
On days like this, blustery and cold, he takes a blanket inside and tucks it around the kids in their chairs. The first time he did it a kid got scared and he said, “It’s okay. You’re just going to be a hot dog, all wrapped up tight in your bun.” The kid laughed and said, “Hot dog time,” so that’s what he calls it now and all the kids think it’s hilarious.
From the start Lawan felt he understood them. As a child, he had a speech impediment, remembers sitting at the kitchen table with Gloria, watching her narrow lips, the color of raw salmon. Your bottom teeth have to bite your lip, she’d say, then she’d puff. Fuh, fuh, fuh… Something about it made him feel she was always on the verge of hurting him.
At each house, he pulls into the driveway, straps the chair to the ramp, then lowers the ramp to the ground. By then a mother or grandmother, rarely a dad, is already coming out. Some of them will take over at the curb, some need help getting the chair up the house ramp and through the door. If it’s grandma, Lawan always waves her back inside. When he goes to leave, he whisks the blanket off like a magician revealing a rabbit and says, “I present to you, the Great Hotdogini!” The kids who can laugh always do.
Tyler is the last stop on the route. After Lawan helps Tricia get him inside, instead of going back to his apartment to pack a few things or returning to Gloria’s, he goes to see Lawsandra.
It turned out to be easy enough to find her. Just ask around the right neighborhoods, spelling her name carefully so people don’t confuse it with “LaSondra,” of which there are several. But there is only one Lawsandra, and she is his mother. Lawan wasn’t convinced of this until he asked, “So what’s my birthday?”
She thought a second. “May twenty-second. You was born at ten fifteen at night, and I was up on my feet by eleven, sneaking a hit in the bathroom under the fan.” She laughed. “They caught me and took my stash away and wouldn’t let me see you till the next day. They afraid I was too high to hold you right.”
Gloria and the rest know nothing about his finding Lawsandra. It’s simple enough to keep a secret, Lawan the only overlap between the two worlds. Every month or two he hangs out with his mother and her boyfriend Booker, who works at a tire store. Lawsandra claims she’s gotten clean, except for pot, which Lawan doesn’t think counts anyway, and she works part-time at KFC. She hates it, is trying to find something better, so Lawan gave her a few lessons in Microsoft Word and Excel, but even though she’s a fast learner, she doesn’t have the patience—or maybe the interest—and he can’t picture her in an office anyway, with her long gold nails and the way she oils her hair into the shape of a fan, like a chicken’s tail across the back of her head.
Their duplex slouches on a mud-soft lot east of Collingwood, dirty white aluminum siding, spongy porch boards and the ghost outline of long-gone shutters. Lawsandra seems happy to see him.
“You want a beer? I got some chips and stuff. We having people over. You want to hang out?”
He tells her he can’t for long, then ends up staying two hours, playing a game of blinding darts with Booker and the three guys who show up. You lie on your back, and throw the dart toward the ceiling, trying to land it in the old plaster, which is harder than drywall. If you fail, and they mostly do, you have to dodge the falling dart. One time a dart lands right on some guy’s cheek, missing his eye by an inch. Everyone, including Lawan, laughs. When the moment passes, he puts on his coat and, without saying goodbye, heads back to Gloria’s.
At first, he cleans. The house has been empty for over a month, except for the cats, whose crusted plastic bowls he tries soaking, but ends up pitching. Kevin was feeding them and apparently washing the bowls wasn’t on his list. Lawan vacuums the cats’ long, silky hairs from the furniture, washes all the towels and sheets and scrubs the bathroom, from whose dry drains wafts the faint odor of dead skin. Gloria insists it’s unnecessary, but it is. Even before the fall she wasn’t keeping the place very clean. Not that he blames her. She tires easily and some days relied on canes just to walk. That she had tried to go down the stairs carrying his laundry was ridiculous, except she’d been carrying her own laundry up and down those stair
s, so who could blame him?
Lawan wants to leave the place better off than he found it so no one can say he didn’t do his duty. He’d leave Gloria better off, and if she got worse later, after he enlisted, well then the others would have to deal with that because the Marines are not a part-time, come-and-go kind of thing.
On day four he finishes scrubbing, yet the smell remains, so Lawan empties the cupboards, convinced a mouse is decaying behind a stack of old Tupperware. Instead, he finds a bag of what, judging from the deli sticker, used to be roast beef. The fetid meat has decayed into a purple-brown gelatin whose enzymes have eaten through the plastic bag and started on the shelf’s yellow paint.
“Why in the hell is there meat in the cupboard?” Lawan asks, suspending the bag for Gloria’s inspection. It drips onto the plate in his other hand.
She looks upset at first, her bony, freckled face scowling from forehead to chin, then laughs. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.”
This isn’t the first odd thing she’s done. Gloria’s been reading the Chinese farmer book for hours every day, but her bookmark looks to be in the same place, and the day before while he was mopping the back hallway, she told him the “roof” didn’t need cleaning.
He asks, “Are you feeling okay? I mean, do you have a headache or something?”
Gloria admits to feeling “a little muddied,” and Lawan thinks stroke or seizures. Either one would settle it. Assisted living, no question.
“Does Karen know about this?”
“She’d try to make me go somewhere and I don’t want to. I want to stick it out here, until I can’t, then…” Gloria pauses. “I was thinking of Dad.”
Lawan’s cheeks grow hot. They have never talked about what happened with Frank. Dennis and Karen were away at school, Kevin on a hiking trip, when Frank had a heart attack and his car ran off the road into a park, where a bike rack stopped it. The next day, Lawan and Gloria sat alone in the hospital cafeteria trying to make sense of what the doctors said about his chances. He was on a breathing tube and there was talk of organ damage, questions about how long he’d been gone before the EMS people revived him. Gloria looked at Lawan as if he would know. “What do you think Dad would want?”