They don’t know, Darlene said.
It didn’t cross Eddie’s mind until several days later that she could have meant more than one group of people by the word they. By then, the subject had disappeared. He kept trying to figure out what she’d meant, but during the rest of the year, all through second grade, he couldn’t find a gentle path to bring her back to talking about his father’s death and discover what she’d had in mind. First of all, whom she’d meant by they. The police? The people in town? She’d said it like she meant the detectives who had failed to get enough evidence to convict the suspects, but she’d also said it scornfully, as if she didn’t believe that the detectives didn’t know. Or did his mother mean that she knew, but nobody would listen? His eight-year-old brain tried to unscramble the mystery, until a final possibility emerged like a poisonous toad from a bog, shaking mud off, and this option proved ugly enough to weigh as much as the truth. That they knew, but pretended not to know. That one of them might have helped or covered up the evidence.
That summer, right before he died of pancreatic cancer, Sparkplug told him how they killed somebody they wanted to stay dead. Darlene and Eddie had traveled to the closest hospital, in Delhi, Louisiana, to pay their last respects.
You bind his hands behind his back with twine, Sparkplug confided while Darlene used the bathroom. You break his legs. You bash him in the mouth with a tire iron so that he swallows the majority of his teeth and the fragments scatter. You stab him eighteen times. You set his body on fire in his own store. You shoot him with his own gun. I’m telling you this because you ought to know, he wheezed. And bless her heart, your mama ain’t gonna say.
Eddie was too stunned to believe what this guy, a known oddball he hardly remembered, told him—it would take another five years to sink in.
Sparkplug passed away, and that November Darlene and Eddie moved to Texas, into a small apartment in the Fifth Ward. Eddie had screamed and wept that they would have to leave his father there, and everything associated with him, including the Mount Hope Grocery, but his mother explained, holding in her own tears, that they could come back anytime, and they’d also leave behind many painful memories. The store’s just an empty lot now, she said.
When they moved into the new place, she called to him from the vacant living room before her friend arrived with the rental truck full of their possessions. This will be better, she said, her voice reverberating through the space. We’ll be closer to family, I’ll be further away from temptation.
It was not better.
Temptation came with them. A few months after he and Darlene moved to Houston, creditors started calling. His mother, often some combination of drugged, absent, and sleeping, could not usually answer, and Eddie learned to recognize the calls whenever he heard several seconds of dead air after picking up. Or a machine would say, Please hold. The calls started coming several times a day; he’d hear their robot voices on the answering machine when he came back from school, or they would call in the evening. If he picked up, he would try to sound younger. Sometimes a utility would get shut off. He took to boiling water on the electric stove to wash himself. He would open the oven for warmth during that string of chilly nights in January and February that passed for winter in Texas, do his homework by the range light.
Talking to his mother stopped working. She no longer paid attention to the world or to time. She acted like someone wrapped in a gauze of happiness, but a fake happiness that to Eddie suggested that she didn’t care about him. A year later, Aunt Bethella came over for Thanksgiving dinner, but she turned around and left. Eddie didn’t think she would have liked the dry, donated turkey or the generic cranberry sauce anyway. They couldn’t eat the sweet potato pie she’d brought, and he was angrier at his aunt for hurling the pie down on the stoop in her fury at Darlene than for leaving.
He decided not to go to school some days, choosing instead to wander around the perimeter, seeing his friends at video arcades on their lunch breaks. He borrowed what he considered a lot of money; other times he slipped coins and bills out of his mother’s purse in order to support his diet of one-dollar tacos and Bubble Yum. On days when he did go to school, he’d do stupid things like perform a mocking impression of his science teacher to her face or pick a fight with a dirty kid who had dark circles under his eyes. Each time Eddie landed in detention he thought that they would bring his mother into school. Darlene did show up a few times, only to deny her drug use to the administrators, who acted like they believed her more than they seemed to actually believe her, but eventually his mother stopped showing up altogether. The school nurse told Eddie that she had addicts in her family too, and to remember that no matter how much he misbehaved, he would never divert his mother’s attention away from the drugs. Don’t take it personally, she said. It’s a disease. Sometimes she would give him five or ten dollars. It made a difference.
One October night, Darlene put on one of her late husband’s hats, a fedora that seemed new, and sat at the table across from Eddie, maybe pretending to be a businessman. He had taken to shutting her out, because making eye contact would provoke a confrontation or make an upsetting episode worse. But when he didn’t acknowledge her this time, she dropped her head to the table, despite the clutter there, and peeped at him from under the hat brim, making owl noises. She tried other animals. Cats, goats. Then she saluted him, raised her voice, insisted they were somewhere else—on a boat, it seemed.