I also saw for the first time Mamaw’s love of children, not as an object of her affection but as an observer of it. She often babysat for Lindsay’s or Aunt Wee’s young kids. One day she had both of Aunt Wee’s girls for the day and Aunt Wee’s dog in the backyard. When the dog barked, Mamaw screamed, “Shut up, you son of a bitch.” My cousin Bonnie Rose ran to the back door and began screaming over and over, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!” Mamaw hobbled over to Bonnie Rose and scooped her up in her arms. “Shhh! You can’t say that or you’ll get me in trouble.” But she was laughing so hard that she could barely get the words out. A few weeks later, I got home from school and asked Mamaw how her day had gone. She told me that she’d had a great day because she’d been watching Lindsay’s son Kameron. “He asked me if he could say ‘fuck’ like I do. I told him yes, but only at my house.” Then she chuckled quietly to herself. Regardless of how she felt, whether her emphysema made it difficult to breathe or her hip hurt so badly that she could barely walk, she never turned down an opportunity to “spend time with those babies,” as she put it. Mamaw loved them, and I began to understand why she had always dreamed of becoming a lawyer for abused and neglected children.
At some point, Mamaw underwent major back surgery to help with the pain that made walking difficult. She landed in a nursing home for a few months to recover, forcing me to live alone, an experience that happily didn’t last long. Every night she called Lindsay, Aunt Wee, or me and made the same request: “I hate the damned food here. Can you go to Taco Bell and get me a bean burrito?” Indeed, Mamaw hated everything about the nursing home and once asked me to promise that if she ever faced a permanent stay, I’d take her .44 Magnum and put a bullet in her head. “Mamaw, you can’t ask me to do that. I’d go to jail for the rest of my life.” “Well,” she said, pausing for a moment to reflect, “then get your hands on some arsenic. That way no one will know.” Her back surgery, it turned out, was completely unnecessary. She had a broken hip, and as soon as a surgeon repaired it, she was back on her feet, though she used a walker or cane from then on. Now that I’m a lawyer, I marvel that we never considered a medical malpractice suit against the doctor who operated unnecessarily on her back. But Mamaw wouldn’t have allowed it: She didn’t believe in using the legal system until you had to.
Sometimes I’d see Mom every few days, and sometimes I’d go a couple of weeks without hearing from her at all. After one breakup, she spent a few months on Mamaw’s couch, and we both enjoyed her company. Mom tried, in her own way: When she was working, she’d always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford. For reasons I never quite understood, Mom equated money with affection. Perhaps she felt that I would never appreciate that she loved me unless she offered a wad of spending money. But I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy.
Not even my closest friends knew that I lived in my grandma’s house. I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with. I didn’t wear clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle unless I’d received them for Christmas. When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt—with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip. When people asked, I lied and told them that I lived with my mom, that she and I took care of my ailing grandmother. Even today, I still regret that far too many high school friends and acquaintances never knew Mamaw was the best thing that ever happened to me.
My junior year, I tested into the honors Advanced Math class—a hybrid of trigonometry, advanced algebra, and precalculus. The class’s instructor, Ron Selby, enjoyed legendary status among the students for his brilliance and high demands. In twenty years, he had never missed a day of school. According to Middletown High School legend, a student called in a bomb threat during one of Selby’s exams, hiding the explosive device in a bag in his locker. With the entire school evacuated outside, Selby marched into the school, retrieved the contents of the kid’s locker, marched outside, and threw those contents into a trash can. “I’ve had that kid in class; he’s not smart enough to make a functioning bomb,” Selby told the police officers gathered at the school. “Now let my students go back to class to finish their exams.”
Mamaw loved stories like this, and though she never met Selby, she admired him and encouraged me to follow his lead. Selby encouraged (but didn’t require) his students to obtain advanced graphing calculators—the Texas Instruments model 89 was the latest and greatest. We didn’t have cell phones, and we didn’t have nice clothes, but Mamaw made sure that I had one of those graphing calculators. This taught me an important lesson about Mamaw’s values, and it forced me to engage with school in a way I never had before. If Mamaw could drop $180 on a graphing calculator—she insisted that I spend none of my own money—then I had better take schoolwork more seriously. I owed it to her, and she reminded me of it constantly. “Have you finished your work for that Selby teacher?” “No, Mamaw, not yet.” “You damn well better start. I didn’t spend every penny I had on that little computer so you could fuck around all day.”
Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me. I didn’t notice the causality of the change, how living with her turned my life around. I didn’t notice that my grades began to improve immediately after I moved in. And I couldn’t have known that I was making lifelong friends.
During that time, Mamaw and I started to talk about the problems in our community. Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.
Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list. Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce. The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps. After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.
As my job taught me a little more about America’s class divide, it also imbued me with a bit of resentment, directed toward both the wealthy and my own kind. The owners of Dillman’s were old-fashioned, so they allowed people with good credit to run grocery tabs, some of which surpassed a thousand dollars. I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own damned tab.