Jem waited a moment. Sav held his arms up for a carry, but she ignored him. Her face felt very hot now. Her armpits felt hot and tingly. She waited for it to all fall through, for there to be a telling off, though Gran never told her off. Her heart was clapping, quite fast, as if it were applauding the brave performance. Mostly you didn’t feel your heart, only after sprinting or when you were afraid. Gran turned the page of the newspaper. Bye then, Jem said. Bye, love, said Gran.
Sav wailed as she walked away. Jem got to the front door and opened it. She went outside. She walked down the street, past Deborah’s house, past the dog and the pub. When you were sensible, you were trusted to do things. You could look after your little brother alone in the house. You were allowed to find the hospital on the bus, even though you didn’t know exactly where you were going. She had 50p in her pocket. She didn’t have her coat. Gran hadn’t even made her take her coat.
A bus was coming in the right direction. She half ran to the stop. The sandwiches bumped about in the margarine tub. She might have to stick them back together again for Mumm-Ra. She waved, and the bus stopped. Jem got on. The driver had smeary jam-jar glasses and didn’t seem to care who she was. I have to get off at the hospital, she told him, Ashton Road. He nodded. She waited for him to say how much the fare was, but all he said was, Sit down then, Cuddles. The bus moved and jerked her forward as she walked down the aisle. There were no passengers except for a couple of women in brown cashier smocks and a man in a hat who was asleep against the window. Jem sat near the front, though the back seat was empty and she never got to sit on the back seat going to school, like Deborah did. She sat with the sandwich box balanced carefully on her knees. She could see a purple wrapper in one corner through the plastic. A biscuit. A fruit Club, probably. They were Mumm-Ra’s favorite.
It took ten minutes to get to the hospital. She kept looking at her watch, the big hand ticking round. The town was dark silver in the rain, like pencil lead. The bus went past the prison and the castle, up the one-way system. People were already going into the pubs. A few umbrellas bobbed along. The streetlights were on.
She’d been to the hospital once before, not to visit Mumm-Ra, Mumm-Ra wasn’t working there then, but to have a bean-shaped growth removed from her chest. She’d lain on a table covered with white paper and they’d given her a stinging injection to numb the patch and she hadn’t felt them cut. She’d looked at the ceiling the whole time and a nurse had held her hand. She’d had eight proper stitches afterward, with thin black string because they couldn’t use paper ones. She’d pulled the stitches out early because they were itchy and the hole had gaped open. There was a silky white scar on her chest now, a bit like a spider’s sac, which her T-shirt covered. They’d done tests on the bean but it was harmless.
Jem got off the bus at Ashton Road. The driver didn’t tell her where it was but she could see the hospital looming. She walked across the crossing. Ambulances were parked in a bay outside and as she walked toward the main doors one of them turned on its siren and whirling light and blared off. In front of the main doors, under the dripping porch, were a huge pregnant woman and an old man in a wheelchair with a metal stand next to him. A clear bag hung from the stand with a tube snaking down. It was rude to stare but Jem couldn’t help it. The man didn’t even look like a person. He was slumped over in the wheelchair. His bare shins poked out under his gown and his feet were purple and lumpy, like bruised vegetables. The gown was the same as the one Jem had worn, white with little blue diamonds.
Some patients died here, some died on the way here, and some were dead when they arrived. It didn’t matter to Mumm-Ra, though maybe the ones who were dead or died coming were harder. They would have bad injuries, like motorbike smashes, and the baby attacked by the dog. They might be in pieces. Decapitated. Jem tried to stop looking at the man in the wheelchair. He would be going to the mortuary soon. The rain was very light again now; she could just about feel it on her nose, as if the rain were only thinking about what it was supposed to do. Most people thought working with dead people was a man’s job, according to Gran. When the job had been advertised Mumm-Ra had interviewed and got it. She had the right disposition, Gran said. She’s always been like that, your mother.
The Royal Infirmary was old, several stories high, with an even taller tower, but also new bits built on the sides. Hospitals had to keep getting bigger, because more and more people needed them and there were new cancers all the time. It was hard to picture Mumm-Ra anywhere, touching cold hands and faces, talking to relatives with orange baby food staining her back. She would probably have new scrubs on. Jem could picture her at home, on the sofa, tired, her head leaning on her hand, eyes closed, or staring at something on the other side of the room that wasn’t really there. Mumm-Ra’s staring always made Jem nervous.
The signpost of departments outside the main doors didn’t list the mortuary. Jem could ask at reception. She could even leave the sandwiches at reception and someone might take them to the mortuary and Jem could go home. Probably they wouldn’t even let her go to the mortuary, you might have to be eighteen, like for pubs and some fairground rides. She looked at her watch again. If a bus came in a few minutes, she could be back home by six o’clock, to Gran’s cauliflower cheese, to Sav throwing water out of the bath and screaming when his hair was shampooed, to watching telly until later than normal because it was Saturday.
The woman on reception didn’t seem concerned when Jem asked where the mortuary was. She pointed to a door on the other side of the building, described the way through the hospital, and then let Jem go, just like Gran had. Follow the blue line, the receptionist said, until you get to pathology, then turn right. Pathology sounded like a joke that actually was funny, though Jem felt too wobbly to laugh. She walked down a corridor, past several wards. A dinner trolley was going round. There were lots of old lopsided ladies. There was lots of coughing. She remembered the hospital smell from when she’d had the bean off; it wasn’t as bad as everyone said. It was sort of aniseedy. A couple of doctors walked past and looked at her. One smiled. He had on a paper hat and a kind of paper apron, like a man who worked at a meat counter. Maybe he thought she was a patient. Maybe he knew Mumm-Ra, Jem looked more like Mumm-Ra than Sav did. People said they had the same eyes, hazel, which wasn’t brown, and wasn’t green, but was both mixed up. Gran said quite often that Mumm-Ra should marry a doctor. Not my type, Mumm-Ra always said. Exactly, Caroline, exactly my point.
Jem followed the blue line. She didn’t get lost. The Royal Infirmary wasn’t very big really. She went down some steps, then up some steps, out a back door, and past a few prefab huts until she got to a small plain building with a sign on the door. MORTUARY. Jem stood outside. The doors opened and a woman came out and she also smiled at Jem as she walked past. The woman didn’t look like she’d been crying. Maybe she was a secretary. The door swung closed. MORTUARY. The building looked like a building where nothing important happened, like one of the humanities huts at school. She’d expected something frightening, tall, sooty, with ivy or broken windows, like a haunted house. This wasn’t that.
Something caught her eye and she looked to the side. Next to the mortuary was a small car park with yellow lines painted on the concrete, which meant cars couldn’t park there. Parked on the yellow lines was a long black car with an oblong window: a hearse. It was right there. She could see in. You were supposed to see in. On the back shelf was a coffin. It was made of dark, very shiny wood. Someone had polished and polished the wood. There were brass screws and handles and there was a smooth brass plaque with nothing engraved on it. No name. No birthday. Nothing. There were no flowers around it, like when hearses went to the church and made other cars drive slowly.
Another ambulance siren wailed in the distance. Jem stood outside the mortuary.
There was a rush around her, a feeling like jumping off a wall, like before throwing up. She wanted to sit down. She wanted to run
back along the blue line, all the way to the bus stop, all the way home. It wasn’t raining at all now. The rain had stopped. It was almost evening, almost six o’clock, the end of the day. But Mumm-Ra was working. She was inside the building, with the bodies of people who didn’t exist anymore. She might be holding the little dead baby, carefully, combing its hair, buckling a tiny shoe strap, doing some makeup to blush its cheeks, or she might be holding the hand of a relative, the man who owned the dog, the man’s girlfriend who people had said didn’t care. Her mother would never die, because she couldn’t, though all of this, all this, would be taking its toll.
Jem stood outside the door and held the box of sandwiches. She wanted Mumm-Ra to see her through the window and come out and put a hand on Jem’s head, even if she was cross, and Jem couldn’t really tell her why she had come here. Not the sandwiches. She wasn’t even sure what the sandwiches were. Cheese? Fish paste? Egg? She didn’t know. She lifted the lid and smelled inside the box. Egg.
Bryan Washington
610 North, 610 West
1
FOR A WHILE our father kept this other woman in the Heights. It was tough luck seeing him most nights at best. He’d snatch his keys from the counter, nod at all of us at once, spit something about how he had business to handle, and of course he never thought to tell us what it could be but we figured it out. We adjusted accordingly.
This was back when Ma’s sisters still checked on her weekly: phone calls after dinner, drop-ins on Sunday. Before they finally cut her off for hooking up with a spic. And those first few weeks she waited up for our father, because she didn’t want to see it, and you know how that goes—kept Javi and Jan and I starving while she cleaned the place solo, wiping and mopping and washing the linoleum. Counting tips by the register. Refilling baskets of silverware. Then the four of us sat around bowls full of whatever’d been left in the kitchen—pots of chicken and chorizo and beans on the burners—and we’d stare at the plastic with our hands in our laps like they’d show us whoever kept Ma’s man out in the world.
She’s gotta be white, said Javi. He’s already got a niggar. Otherwise, there’s no fucking point.
She could be Chinese, I said. Or mixed. She could be like us.
My brother waved that away. He didn’t even look up.
We spent whole days guessing. At what she looked like, where she stayed. Javi swore our father’s puta was a model. Or an actress. But for the longest time I held out for something more domestic.
I painted her as a hairdresser. Maybe a dentist. A vet, although a year ago our father’d drowned the dog. These conversations usually ended up with Javi’s smacking me down, pinching the fat on my ribs. Wondering how I could be so stupid.
Whenever summer hit, Ma kept us in the restaurant. Her usual staff begged off, blaming the lack of AC. Houston’s sun had them out drinking 40s on Navigation, which left Javi and I sweeping, killing roaches, stomping the tile lining the doorway. Sometimes Ma just stood at the register, squinting, watching the two of us, and I’d wonder whether she saw her sons or replicas of her husband. But it only lasted a minute before her brow completely settled, and she’d point toward some invisible spot we’d missed right under the table.
Why the fuck would he be tripping over a mutt, said Javi, and when I didn’t have an answer for that he chalked it up to dumbness.
She’s definitely white, said Javi. She’s definitely pale all over.
And she’s probably got a fat ass too, said Javi.
* * *
—
Eventually Ma spoke up. Called our father a bastard. A wetback. And the one night my brother finally opened his mouth over breakfast, asking Ma why she didn’t just drop him already, our mother reared back her elbow, crashed her palm into his cheek, before she settled her fingers right back onto the cutlery.
Javi slumped across the wood, crying into his knuckles. I sat beside him, kicking at the chair.
It was the last time Ma ever hit him. The one time I’d see him cry. But when our father saw the bruise in the morning, Javi told him he’d had a scrap.
We were prepping in the back. Ma was still in bed. We’d heard the shouts when he made it home, the fists smacking against the wall.
After enough time had passed that I’d forgotten about the lie, our father asked Javi if he’d won.
My brother curled his lips, testing the wound with his tongue.
Of course, he said. No doubt.
And our father cracked his wrists, staring into the sink.
Let me tell you a secret, he said. That’s all that really matters.
2
Nowadays you wouldn’t take her for one of those women who dupe themselves, but back then Ma wore it all on her face. That was the worst thing. You could spot it across the block. And not because he left us—that shit could happen to anyone—but for the years she thought she’d be the one to reel him back in.
My father was a handsome man. Wore his skin like a sunburned peach. He was someone who could sing, who actually had a voice worth listening to. He’d pace around the restaurant, beating his stomach like a drum, humming the corridos he’d never taught us way back when. He’d flip me over his shoulder if he found me at the sink, convinced that it was the last place a boy needed to be.
Es sólo para los mujeres y los maricones, he said, because the real men of the kitchen were out killing pigs or whatever.
But you, he said, you’re like your old man. Un hierba mala.
Then he’d flip me back to my toes, kicking my ass with the flat of his foot.
Ma said that kind of wildness put boys on the streets. But then our father’d grab her, too, snatching her up behind the knees. And back when things were still good you wouldn’t catch them again for hours, which left Javi and I up front, tending to the customers, counting receipts.
* * *
—
But the funny thing is, Ma actually had options—I can’t even tell you how many men coasted through the doors.
Bald and young and old and hooded and thick and loose and hard, they’d whistle me to their tables. Offer me tips if I reeled her over. Once Ma found out, she told me to always, always agree—free money didn’t get any easier. Sometimes she even slipped me a bill. Then she’d walk their way, beaming, asking if they’d enjoyed their ackee. Maybe setting a palm on a shoulder. Maybe laughing at a joke. And when the conversation turned toward her, and how she was doing, and how was my father, she’d wrap a hand across her chest, bringing the conversation to an end.
Ma shot all of them down. But never irreparably. Just enough to have them thinking they were always in striking distance. And if they’d paid me any more, I could’ve told them it wasn’t worth it—but tell someone they want an impossible thing and they’ll act like you’ve put out the sun.
3
Most weekends back then we caught the first bus to the market.
Javi slept in. Jan stayed out. Ma and I rode through East End, past Wayside, over Main, until we hit 610 headed straight toward Airline. You never saw any other blacks on the line—hair aside, I usually passed. But Ma looked like the thing that didn’t belong. All the poblanos stared like we’d touched down from Mars.
One time this guy in an Astros cap actually grabbed her shoulder, told her the route downtown was the other way, pointing back toward Fannin.
In case you mistake, he said, smiling. His teeth were yellow, chipped around the cheeks.
He clearly meant well. Ma returned the smile. She wrapped her fingers around his hand, squeezing at the wrist.
Sí claro, she said, pero no tienen lo que estoy buscando.
And the man’s face folded. He sat back down. The rest of the bus shut the fuck up along with him.
The market’d been around for decades, tucked way out in the Northside, where motherfuckers were born, lived, and d
ied without coughing a word of English. The whole place smelled like rotten bananas and smog, and you couldn’t stretch your hands without brushing somebody’s junk. But through the elbows in our noses and the sandals stomping our toes, Ma wore a different face. The one she faked for her suitors.
Only now it was genuine. She really meant that shit. Whenever we hit the first tents, and the humidity kissed our cheeks, I felt her shoulders drop beside me like this weight that’d just slid off her.
She’d flirt with the little man hawking avocados. She cooed her peasant Spanish at the homeless kids guiding her along. We watched sons chop chickens in the shacks behind the tents, allowing the birds to pirouette before they finally snapped their necks, and the women at the bakery eventually called her doña, growing warmer once they decided we’d be regulars.
Mariachis shouted choruses to stragglers in the plaza. My father would’ve groaned, but Ma nodded along. Like she was the one who’d grown up with it. Bouncing in her flip-flops. Slapping at her thighs. And, once, this kid actually gave her his hand, and Ma’d smiled slowly, widely, before she reached out and took it—and then all of a sudden they were dancing, swaying, slipping and dipping across the sanded patio.
When her laughter finally came, it drenched the crowd. Some vendors on break clapped along with the bass. I sat on the clay, waiting for her to look back, and when the song came to an end she did.
* * *
—
We rode the bus home with the boxes of vegetables between our legs. Ma stared out the window while I slept in the aisle. The lights downtown glowed way beyond the highway, and the traffic clogging Shepherd blinked in and out like fireflies.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 26