“I know. You’ve never thanked me. That’s why I’m firing you. Because even I gave my parents a goddamn thanks every now and then.”
I wanted to yell that he wasn’t my real father, but we both knew that wasn’t true. In every way that counted Nicky had guided me through the last fifteen years, and he was right: I had never thanked him for his extraordinary kindness. But still, the Cora in me made me say, “If I let you fuck me, would you still be my daddy? And could I keep my job?”
Nicky checked something off on his clipboard. Probably “Fire Davie.” He then got up and opened his office door for me. “I’ll see you when rent’s due next month.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit him. But mostly I wanted my father back.
I stood up and walked past him, out of his office. Sullen as all get-out.
. . .
Mama Jane was waiting for me upstairs. Her eyes followed me as I walked in without a word and got back into bed.
“The trip I’m about to go on is taking me through Glass,” she said behind me. “You could come with me.”
I thought of not answering her, but she had already coaxed me out of one catatonic state, and it seemed unfair to make her do it again. “I have to get a job.”
“It’ll only take a week round trip.”
“Mama Jane . . .” I turned over to say no. But she looked so dear and worried in her boxer shorts and tank top. And I no longer had a job. “Okay, I’ll go with you.”
Mama Jane smiled, and for the first time in five days, I suddenly felt a little good. Good enough to get out of bed on my own and say, “Let me pack my bag.”
. . .
The somewhat good feeling evaporated three days later, though, about an hour outside of Columbus. That’s when it occurred to me that I didn’t quite know why I had come back to Mississippi.
“I’d think you’d want to visit your mama,” Mama Jane said to me, after I suggested she drop me off at a coffee shop in Columbus, then pick me up when she finished dropping off whatever she was dropping off; I hadn’t asked about the details of her trip.
I didn’t want to visit Cora. I had just learned the hard way that life was not a movie. So now that I had hit bottom, I did not want to confront my mother or face my demons or do any of that stuff that made eighties movies so cliché and predictable.
“I haven’t spoken to her since I ran away,” I said. “I don’t even know if she’s living in the same place.”
“But you don’t know she ain’t living there, either. You should at least go by and check. And if she ain’t there, you can ask the people that live there now where she moved to.”
I had never heard an idea more repugnant than actually seeking Cora out. “I really don’t want to see her,” I told Mama Jane flat-out.
“You really didn’t want to lose your job at Nicky’s, either. Sometimes it ain’t all about what you want.”
I folded my arms and pouted. “It’s never about what I want.”
Mama Jane just laughed. “You always so quick to tell me what to do when I’m nosing around some new woman, but the minute I try to get you to do anything, you get all upset.”
We went back and forth like this for the next hour and a half. But I couldn’t stop Mama Jane from dropping me off in Glass. Believe me, I tried. At one point, I even brought out the rarely resorted to Screaming Child Davie. But in the end, the eighteen-wheeler pulled into Glass and I climbed out in my black jeans and Strokes T-shirt.
Mama Jane took off as soon as my red Converses hit the pavement.
I looked around. It still looked like Glass, but with a modern overlay. Johnson’s Gas was now a BP, and I could see that Greeley’s Mini-Mart was now a 7-Eleven. Old Mr. Greeley was probably dead by now. Hunh.