‘I know. She had a stroke.’
When he stepped into the light, I realized how good-looking he was. Not in a conventional way, but pleasant to look at. Sort of elfin, with huge eyes. Very messy hair. Perfect teeth. Very nice hands. I wasn’t sure I’d ever noticed this many details in a boy before. ‘Sorry I yelled at you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I answered.
‘I thought you were someone else.’ A mosquito landed on his arm, but he made no gesture to swat it off. ‘They your relatives?’
‘Yes. I said that.’
‘They’re all right. Who’s your dad?’
‘Um, Richard? Davis?’ I wanted to add that he was in a car crash twenty-four years ago, but instantly realized how absurd that would sound.
He thought for a moment. ‘Don’t know him.’
‘Do you know Kay Mulvaney?’
‘Is that your mom?’
The word mom startled me. ‘No. My mom’s not from here. She’s from…Pennsylvania.’
‘This is Pennsylvania.’
‘I mean Philadelphia.’
He was quiet again. ‘Is her name Karen?’
‘No, Meredith.’
‘Meredith.’ He repeated it to himself with such familiarity that suddenly I wondered if he knew what my mother had done. Wasn’t that the thing about small towns? Didn’t everyone know everything about everyone else?
‘She decided not to come,’ I said loudly. It was a lie I hadn’t told in a while. Honestly, I hadn’t explained it much in any way at all.
He looked at me with understanding. ‘She doesn’t like funerals, huh?’
‘Not really.’
The boy nodded, then glanced back at his television, which was still flickering. ‘So, guilty or not guilty?’
At first, I thought he was talking about my mom. Guilty, I decided. And then, not guilty. Then I realized he meant OJ. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not guilty.’
He smirked. ‘Me too. But you’re the only white person in America who thinks that.’
It was strange that he said you’re, not we’re. He hadn’t included himself. I looked over his pale skin and dark eyebrows and nice, not-too-full but not-too-thin lips.
The boy held a finger up. ‘Hang on.’ He disappeared back inside the house. In seconds, I heard his footsteps again. A light beamed in my face. ‘Take this.’ He passed me a grayhandled flashlight. ‘You’ll need it. It gets dark on this road. Even during the day. All the trees.’
He was right-it was suddenly dark, as if someone had thrown a curtain over the sky. But with the flashlight, I saw all sorts of things on the walk back: two large eyes of a creature, probably a raccoon, huddling under the pickup truck. A big, spindly stick lying in the middle of the road. Someone had spray-painted Sand Niggers Go Home on a twenty-five mph speed limit sign. Did that word have to be everywhere here? I waved the beam of the flashlight back and forth across the road, then shut it off. Darkness seemed safer.
I thought about my mother. She wouldn’t have wanted to come to the funeral. She would’ve made excuses to get out of it-work, a party, a hair appointment. I used to imagine my mother in crazy places-Antarctica, Morocco, the moon. But lately, I was convinced she was still in New York. She was taking the same subways, seeing the same ridiculous subway ads and traveling around the same weekend trackwork schedules. Maybe she climbed aboard an uptown 2 train as the doors closed, just as I was passing through the turnstile, watching it pull away.