I almost broke down, apologized, and begged forgiveness for everything I’d done. It never crossed my mind how Rasheed’s momma would suffer without him. I didn’t kill him, but I may as well have for getting him locked up. Her nightgown was stained and frayed around the edges and her hair was haloed around her head in a short salt-and-pepper afro. Momma had always kept at least three fancy wigs with a special one for church. Without Rah paying for her medications and her bills, and left to live off the system, she looked the worse for wear. My ass should have been sending her something, even if it was anonymously.
Unfortunately, this was the only game plan I could come up with. It was a long shot. A pitch-black, blindfolded, “with no wind to guide me” type of shot but I was taking it. Virginia wasn’t even on my list of relocation options but that meant it would also be the last place anyone would ever think to look for us. If anyone did come looking, Rasheed’s Momma wasn’t one of the first people they’d question, and I highly doubted Honey would even risk the trip. She was, after all, a wanted woman.
For every mile I put between myself and Florida a new question formed concerning Towanna. Things just weren’t adding up, like why she’d wait over a year of establishing a fake friendship if she was after Rah’s money. After I’d shot her there’d been no news on the radio; I hadn’t gotten any phone calls. I should have checked her body. Trey needed to be in school and my business couldn’t run itself. I could probably home-school him. And strangle him in the process. It wouldn’t take long to find an acting manager to run my real estate company. I could hold web conferences to manage and check in on the manager once I got one in place. I just needed to keep my head down until I could find Honey and get her locked up again or taken out for good.
“Child, you gonna stand there and stare me down or you and my grandbaby . . . wait, you had another one?” She was staring down at Lataya, who’d just woken up in her car seat sitting near my feet.
“No. Well, I mean Rasheed did. Just not with me.”
“That little red heffa ain’t come from my son. Yella an’ cocoa, yella an’ yella, hell yella an’ pitch black don’t make no red baby. Was the heffa a white girl?” She furled her face up and I almost laughed out loud.
I chuckled. “Her momma is a little reddish yellow if I recall correctly.”
“That ain’t Rasheed baby. I know what a White look like. Done birthed, burped, an’ outlived ’em. She ain’t got the White nose or the ears.” She sighed heavily before continuing, “Come on in anyhow. Wit’ your imposter crumb snatcher.” That last part was a grumpy mumble under her breath.
“Um, Momma? Why is that rotten cantaloupe on your porch over there? You want me to throw it away for you?” I couldn’t help offering; flies were buzzing around the thing and it was stinking up the entire corner where it sat.
“Hell no. It showed up one day. Don’t know where it came from because I damn sure ain’t ask for it. I ain’t touchin’ it, and don’t you go touchin’ it neither.” She leaned in so close I could see the gray rings around her cataracts as she whispered, “I think it’s a body snatcher.”
All I could do was stare at her, waiting for a laugh or the punch line but she just turned and hobbled inside ahead of us. She was dead-ass serious.
The carpet was so worn down I could barely tell the difference from being outdoors to stepping inside. It was as if I’d stepped into a Dumpster with ambient lighting. I sidestepped empty soda cartons, stacks of newspapers, and piles of old lottery scratchers and empty bingo markers.
Trey tugged at my leg, put his hand around his mouth, and whispered, “Mommy, is this Oscar the Grouch’s house?” His little face was all scrunched up in confusion.
I couldn’t even get mad; that was a better description than what I was thinking. At least he’d asked quietly. Aside from the old newspapers and cardboard there was the overwhelming smell of cigarette butts. It was a wonder the woman didn’t have a Newport 100s testing facility in her kitchen. Something along the lines of “there was an old woman who lived in an ashtray” came to mind from how strong the place smelled.
She closed the door behind us, whispering, “Child, I don’t know if it’s safe. Ever since they told me my baby passed I been sensing things. Hearin’ folk creepin’ around outside. They are tryin’ to get in my house. You saw it. They leavin’ pods out there, hoping one’ll snatch me up. Body snatchers and peepin’ Toms. The Illustration been watchin’ me.”
I needed a damn minute. Here I was worried about real people and real-life threats and Momma was worried about...
“Wait. Momma White, are you talkin’ about the Illuminati?” Our situation was bewildering enough as it was. I needed to get this craziness nipped in the bud, fast.
“Shhh. You know that pod can hear you, girl. That’s exactly who I’m talkin’ about.”
She waddled her way through the clutter and sat down in the only clear spot on the couch. I couldn’t figure out where to set Lataya’s car seat and I for damn sure wasn’t about to take her out of it. It was hard enough keepin’ an eye on Trey’s busy little fingers.
“Now, lemme see the baby toes. All the White babies have stubby, fat, li’l Flintstone-looking feet wit’ a baby-dick second toe,” she said matter-of-factly, crossing her arms across her chest.
Trey gasped. It was too late to cover his ears and I seriously debated sending him off to explore.
No, that wouldn’t turn out well; who knows what this woman has where up in here? Trey is liable to wander off and come back with a cat that’s been dead up in here for five years and she’d probably say he killed it.
Shaking my head at him, my eyes silently said, “Boy, you’d bet’ not repeat that.” He’d better not add any of this to his already-colorful vocabulary. We’d have to get a child-friendly filter on Momma White’s mouth and soon. I was sure I’d heard her and scared to ask for clarification.
I cleared my suddenly dry throat and asked, “A . . . a what for a second toe?”
She snorted in irritation. “A baby dick, like a monkey finger, a damn cobra-clutch grabbits long as hell second toe,” Momma White responded and with an attitude on top of that.
She even added terms for toes that I’d never even heard used in reference to a toe in all my adult life, as if they were medically defined terms I should know.
“Mommy, do I have monkey fingers?” Trey questioned.
Shit, he definitely had a long as hell second toe but I wasn’t about to give him a complex about it. Rasheed was always funny about his own feet. Kids teased him so much about his toes when he was younger that he rarely walked around barefoot even with me. I ran my fingers across my eyebrows, mentally wiping away all this toe business.
“Okay, yes, Momma, she has a long toe. Now, how about we get you away from the Illustration, and go to a nice hotel? I’ll let you hold Lataya and you can examine her for yourself all you want.”
“No. I ain’t goin’ anywhere. Mona be done came up in here and took all my shit. Shit I worked for. I’ve got to be a vigilante.”
I sighed, wondering what on earth I’d walked into. “Vigilant, Momma?”
“And that too,” she replied, twisting her mouth up at me.
Lord, please build up my patient side because I’m sure there ain’t nothin’ right about chokin’ out an old woman.
Chapter 10
Shot at and Missed, Shit at and Hit
Me and the kids spent the night at the Hilton. I’d been doing all kinds of mental gymnastics trying to come up with ways to get Rah’s momma up out the house. Aside from setting fire to it or flooding it, she wasn’t budging. The least I could do was get off my bourgeois-ass and pitch in with cleaning it up. There was no way I could leave her with it like that. She’d have these hacking painful sounding coughing fits that would leave her doubled over wheezing for air. It was probably from years of smoking and I’m pretty sure there were all kinds of dust mites and mold spores making it worse. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, my own momma sounded
somethin’ like that when the doctors said they couldn’t do anything more for her. They just sent her home telling my Daddy to make her as comfy as possible.
“Michelle, you’re ten now that means you can be a big girl and help out around here okay?” My father was sitting on the edge of the bed. I stood in the doorway of my parent’s bedroom staring down at my red Jellies and nodded. The sound of my name made me look up as my momma weakly tried to call me over. The action sent her into coughing spasms that shook her entire body. I stared at sallow grayish-brown skin covering a skeleton with sunken in hollow eyes; she didn’t look anything like my momma.
I felt bad because as much as I loved her, I was a little bit scared of her. My nose wrinkled as the room filled with the smell of shit and I covered my face with my sleeve.
“Go get the nurse, and stop acting like that. She cleaned your little ass for years. Be respectful,” my dad scolded me.
My mother withered away in her bedroom and as bad as it sounds I tried to spend as little time in there as possible. It was hard seeing her leave for the hospital kissing me and telling me she’d be fine and then coming back with the scent of death all over her. My daddy started looking for comfort in the bottom of liquor bottles and he only came home after the bars closed. I didn’t care for Nurse Faye at all. She wore too much perfume and popped her gum all the time. She kept her hair gelled up in a bun on top of her head, and stayed digging up in it with a rat tail comb.
I’d left school early one day because I’d started my first period in the middle of class. The school nurse calmed me down assuring me I wouldn’t bleed to death before sending me home with some extra pads. Nurse Faye was in the den watching the soaps and rubbin’ her feet. She stopped and jabbed herself in the head with that damn comb before digging her hand all in my box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I knew it was disappearing fast as hell, nasty ass heffa.
I went straight to momma, she was medicated and in a deep sleep. I checked the padding underneath her to make sure she didn’t have an accident before scooting it over so I could snuggle up next to her. I pulled the covers over my head and dozed off with my face buried into her side wishing I could make her better.
“Ahhh, right there. You are so, so bad Mr. Roberts.”
“Shhh you’ll wake her up.”
“She ain’t waking up no time soon. She had her morphine shot early, now hurry up before Michelle gets out of school.”
Still groggy I could hear my daddy and the nurse talking in hushed tones. Momma’s door was wide open and I peeked out from under the cover. He was standing in between the nurses legs with his pants around his ankles and she was sitting up on the kitchen counter naked from the waist down. He took a chug from a bottle and then went back to grinding into her. They went on like that for I don’t know how long moaning and sighing. I shook my head into momma’s side as angry hurt tears fell into her gown.
“He a man baby don’t be mad at him, he still got needs.”
The sound of my momma’s low whisper made me jump.
“But it’s not right momma.”
She sighed, or at least I thought it was a sigh. Her chest made a rattling sound and the alarm beside her bed went off as her heart stopped.
The timer on the oven went off and I opened it to see the oven cleaner eating through all the black crud on the racks. I’d nearly asphyxiated myself with bleach and scrubbed through a whole box of Brillo Pads. I don’t know what I was thinking when I’d decided to tackle this cleaning job by myself. Momma White needed Molly-maid, Super-nanny, and an extraction team up in here. We could finally see a hairline of a dent in all of the filth she’d accumulated. For every spot I’d managed to clean, she’d be right behind me, taking something out of the trash or pulling an item or two back out of boxes.
It took a carton of Newports and a bottle of Merlot but I’d managed to bribe her into letting me clear one of the bedrooms for me and the kids. All we really ended up doing was shuffling items from that room to other parts of the house. The woman was a bona fide hoarder of empty cigarette cartons, cup noodle cases, and little else. There were no pictures from when she was growing up or when Rah was little. Nothing was left of value because her sister had squandered all of that for heroin or whatever else.
This particular morning I found Momma staring out of the kitchen window.
“Momma White? What are you doing?”
She was so still she could have been a wax sculpture. I’d have named it Rebellious Domestication. Momma White was holding her coffee mug full of wine with a lit cigarette perched carefully between her fingers. The ash hanging off the end looked almost as long as the cigarette itself. She was staring intently at the trees in the backyard. Thankfully the kids were still asleep, but I wanted to get to the sink and wash dishes before they were up and all in my way. She didn’t seem to be paying me or the dishes any mind.
“Momma? Are you all right? Is something wrong?” I gently tapped her shoulder.
“Shush, girl. He gonna hear your loud ass, and then we all gonna be dead.”
My pulse raced as a memory of my last night at Towanna’s created a massive pileup of emotion in my throat. I swallowed past the lump. “Who are you talking about? Who’s gonna hear me?” I whispered cooperatively.
She gave me an annoyed glance, briefly curling her lip in disgust before pointing at a tree closest to the house. “Right there in the corner. He got that shit turned on though, guess he call himself hidin’. Damn Predator sitting right there. I see him. Camouflage don’t fool me. See the leaves movin’?”
I followed her withered finger through the smoke burning my eyes and stared at the few remaining Reese’s Pieces–colored leaves that were barely hanging on the tree branch. I was looking and thinking, you know, hunter, apex predator, and then my shoulders slumped. I rubbed my eyes in aggravation and looked at Momma White, who was still staring, fascinated with this tree.
“You mean Predator, like on TV?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“He obviously ain’t on the TV if he in my damn tree spying,” she snapped back, taking a sip from her mug.
Left with nowhere to go and stuck with my ex’s bat-shit crazy momma.
This had to be God’s way of punishing me for all the fucked-up shit I’d done in my past. I’d have pointed out the fact that it was just a squirrel but that would turn into another one of her “Illustration” arguments and I wasn’t even in the mood for it right now. On more than one occasion I’d started to ask her if she was on something. I was thinking maybe Mona wasn’t the only one doing “the hard stuff.” The house would be dead silent and Momma would start yelling for everyone to shut up. She even had Trey convinced the walls melted every day when the sun came up. He’d sit on her lap and they’d whisper about where they thought the drywall came from when it grew back at night and what color it might be.
I noticed a trickle of blood down the back of her leg.
“Momma, did you cut yourself?” I asked her.
“Hmm? Oh no girl. It’s a boil. Put fatback on it and a few home remedies. It’s fine.”
“Oh, okay. Well, let me have a look then, you don’t want it to get infected.”
I’d already figured it was infected because it was the leg she’d been limping on. She reluctantly walked over and slightly lifted her house dress. She had a huge mean looking hole on the back of her thigh about the size of a soda bottle cap. I’d gotten a rag and some peroxide to clean it with.
“Momma, you’ve got to go to the doctor. Um . . .”
“Spit it out child.”
“You have maggots, in your leg Momma.”
“Oh, girl tell me something I don’t know. They only eat the bad parts. They making it healthy. How you think they got there. That’s why I let you look. Do you think they done yet? You gonna need some tweezers to take ‘em out, some of them little buzzards’ll latch on good and won’t wash out.”
There weren’t too many options since I wasn’t exactly her kin. Momma wasn
’t going to be happy with me but hopefully she’d thank me one day.
The hospital wasn’t exactly what I expected for a mental institution. After seeing Trey and Lataya settled into a quiet, guarded play area on the main floor I checked in and went to see how Momma was handling herself. You’d have thought we were sentencing her to life in prison when they came by the house to speak with her and diagnose her condition. Her stay in here was completely contingent upon her cooperation. Turned out she was schizophrenic and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I’d already agreed to take care of her once she agreed to get with the program. I’d found a ton of unopened Risperdal prescription bottles littered around the house. At some point she’d decided to start boycotting her meds. It made me wonder if that mess was a dominant or recessive trait in the gene pool. I’d need to start watching Trey and Lataya’s asses because shit like that always skipped generations.
I was escorted through at least five different checkpoints by a well-mannered, broad-shouldered guard. My cell, keys, and belongings were left at check-in, as nothing could be taken inside. Hate to say it, but it was all very reminiscent of visiting Rah in prison. There was a rundown of do’s and do not’s. Such as “do not leave the visiting area, do sit quietly, and do not be alarmed if other patients randomly join your conversation.” Oh, and “do not stare.”
All the visitors were corralled into a large dining area with bare ocean-blue walls. A row of barred windows let in sunlight, greeting us with a view of the concrete walls. They surrounded the entire building.
Well, isn’t that a cozy sight to see. They could at least put up some shrubs or rose bushes; these folk already depressed enough as it is.
Momma wasn’t at the stage in treatment yet where she could have unsupervised visits in her room. That would come later. I sat down at a long cafeteria-style table and waited. A few patients were already seated in the area. It wasn’t like on TV where you’d see people wandering around in raggedy hospital gowns. I was instructed to pack warm, comfy clothes for Momma, and to be sure not to put any belts, razors, or mouthwash in her suitcase. All the patients wore brightly colored hospital bands and clothes of their own choosing.
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