In the mornings he’d sometimes find her facedown on the couch in last night’s outfit, one leg drooping above the carpet, a crust of spit caking the throw pillow under her snoring mouth. She would have left the television on, and he’d hear people talking for a long time about some guy named Dow Jones who had fallen down a lot. His mother’s dress would have crept up to expose the crease where her thigh met her butt. No one else lived in the apartment, and to discover his mother’s rump displayed so crudely moments after he had woken up with an erection always produced a confused sensation in his head. To silence the feeling, he’d find a sheet, draw it over her body, and kiss her cheek gently, attempting not to rouse her. It occurred to him that he was doing her job, but he didn’t notice the cloud of resentment forming in his love for her, his hostility growing darker. I’m the son, he whispered to himself. The son can’t take care of the mother.
Other nights she didn’t come home at all, and instead her keys jangled in the lock at dawn, startling him into alertness. The front door would bang open against the drywall, followed by the twin thuds of her handbag on the carpet and her body on the squeaky couch. He would close his bedroom door so as not to disturb her. Quiet morning sounds from the outside would smooth everything over. Cheeping birds, car engines, a rooster someone kept, perhaps illegally, in a backyard, somewhere in the complex of dusty two-level brick buildings from the early 1970s. Through his mother’s arrival he’d attempt sleep—though after struggling into slumber he’d always doze more comfortably for another hour or two before getting up for school, knowing Darlene had again escaped the nameless dangers of the night world.
One Tuesday morning in June, on one of the last days of fifth grade, as he lay between unconscious dreams and waking fantasies, he pictured a time years earlier, when they had lived in Ovis with his father, before coming to Houston. (We’re moving to be nearer to Aunt Bethella, his mother had said, but even at nine years old, he suspected she had ulterior motives.) Before the move, they’d had a blond-brick ranch house with a backyard—a real yard—a limitless rectangle of parched crabgrass that grew larger and greener in his imagination the further time ran away with it. In the evenings, crowds of grackles would settle in a live oak in the corner by the chain-link fence. Their black iridescent feathers had a natural elegance, and the birds peered at him with mocking intelligence, like well-dressed rich folks encountering a vagrant on a red carpet. They didn’t want some of his food, it seemed, they meant to cheat him out of all of it. Their raspy noises sounded more like broken radios than birdcalls, and to make their cries they widened their beaks and puffed their feathers with so much force that it looked like they might explode. The way they strutted and sneered, Eddie decided that these birds had inside them the souls of angry black people from the olden days, ghosts come back to settle some ageless vendetta.
His father, Nat Hardison, who could now qualify as such an outraged spirit, had lived in that house with them, but Eddie, who turned six the month after his father died, couldn’t summon many clear memories of him—a bedtime story about a whale, the green marbled tackle box they took on a fishing trip, the scent of Old Spice aftershave. His mother kept a photo of Dad in his air force uniform on a shelf by her bed, facing away so that she wouldn’t see it while lying down. The sun had turned the picture mauve, but from that pinkish dreamworld, his dad glowed back, displaying his L-square jaw and high cheekbones, showing his teeth as he smiled.
Eddie remembered chasing the grackles in the old backyard, maybe because their menacing weirdness barged in on his need for order. In his fantasy, Eddie knew that if he could only clear all the birds from the backyard, his father would return—not the stiff, fading image, but the real, lanky man whose crossed leg he would ride like a horse into that unhad future. He found a horseshoe embedded in the grass and tossed it at the fence. As the iron clattered against the chain link, black wings fluttered everywhere around him; piercing cries rang out across the neighborhood. The sense of his father’s presence came on so powerfully that it woke him.
Daddy? he said.
Then came the realization that he was alone in Houston, a thought that ripened into terror.
Ma?
He did not find her on the sofa, or anywhere else. He searched for evidence that she’d come in and left, but he didn’t see the bag, the shoes, not even the clothes she would sometimes hang on doorknobs or abandon near the bed, clothes he would later fold and put away, arrange neatly in the hamper, or leave on the bed for her as the photo of his father watched, he hoped, approvingly.
When the school day was about to start and his mother hadn’t appeared, Eddie left early and ran to Mrs. Vernon’s bakery to tell her that his mother had vanished. Mrs. Vernon, solid in as many ways as one could think of, owned her home and ran the shop practically by herself. The bakery sold staples like loaves and rolls but also red velvet layer cakes, cookies, and coconut towers for weddings. The smells lured kids, made her place their first stop at the strip mall, even before the video-game arcade. Mrs. Vernon could always tell who had big problems in their lives. The neighbors called it a gift, but everybody had issues; Mrs. Vernon just happened to ask the right questions and didn’t mind getting involved. To a certain extent.
Once she understood Eddie’s troubles, Mrs. Vernon immediately called the police. He watched the hands on the big clock above the glass display cases inch closer to the start of school while Mrs. Vernon remained on hold, the receiver wedged between her cheek and shoulder, pulling the looped cord taut. Eddie admired Mrs. Vernon’s levelheaded attitude as she sold beignets and translucent coffee even while attending to his predicament. He entertained the fantasy that she would adopt him if Ma never got back. But this thought came too close to wishing his mother dead and he felt guilty for it. Instead of coveting Mrs. Vernon’s motherly ways, he occupied himself by pretending he had his choice of the different cookies in the display—green pistachio leaves, pink and brown checkerboards, squares buried in chocolate. He breathed in their almondy aroma.