Lonely dogs roam empty streets everywhere now, even in this town where all of us once had a home—a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a place. This boy who hides his face under a hood: No one will take him in or stop to ask how things are going. Never before did kids like this, young ones with no connections, show up on these streets where, this summer, flowers burn in the sun. On sidewalks everywhere, small brown petals are scattered.
In Madison, in the oldest part of the cemetery where my father and all the Bakers are buried, the names on the tombstones are impossible to distinguish. Mammy always took flowers to a boy who died very young who was buried there. He was either an orphan or his parents passed quickly after he did. I think he was taken by diphtheria, or whatever was in the air, or maybe in an accident, far out in the fields, where no doctor could come in time. Mammy knew the family. She never let the place where he was buried go unadorned. Bill knew the place too. He and June always took flowers after Mammy died.
. . .
At home, I check Facebook where a woman I know has written: “I don’t need to be home alone all day with nothing but my little Havanese and my ferret to keep me company only to be subjected to someone’s being a prick when he gets home.” I like the ring of the line. The dog, I imagine, is really missing me.
“You remember Bob Thompson, don’t you?” Betty asks me after a little while. She seems to have forgotten our earlier conversation. “I thought Bob was dead,” she goes on, “he thought I was too. I told him we both ought to be. He says Jay Nixon’s father, who was my boyfriend when I was trying to finish up college, has written a book. He says, right in the book, that I was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”
“Why didn’t you marry him? Why won’t you tell me?”
She pays absolutely no attention, begins to sort through the bills on the coffee table, and then, when I think I am going to learn nothing, she begins and I am taken aback.
“We were just out of college. He was going to law school. I would have had to support him and Mammy said no woman should do that.
‘Men,” she assures me, “always leave women who get them through school. That’s what Mammy thought. And I, well, I wanted to do what she said. She had worked so hard to get me through college. She worked all the time and had a lot to do already. She said she wanted me to see the world.
“I went to William Woods that first semester, but I had to come home. We didn’t have the money. But Mammy got busy and got me into the university. I went stop and start, when we could afford it, but she was determined. She got me through, eventually. She didn’t want me to be ignorant.”
“How did she make the money?”
“She sold milk.”
“You had a cow?”
“I guess so. I know she sold milk and vegetables from the garden and in the summer she wouldn’t let up. She grew what we needed and she grew stuff to sell. She really worked. I had to do what she wanted.
“She said he’d just leave me, and then what would I have?”
“Did she not like him?”
“She never met him.”
“Never?”
“I never brought him home. She never laid eyes on him. It wouldn’t have mattered.”
“So she had no way of knowing if he was nice?”
“I told you,” she says. “I never brought him home.”
“Why?”
“I was ashamed.”
“Why? Why were you ashamed to have your boyfriend come home with you?” I ask my mother.
“I was ashamed,” she says, her eyes falling to her lap.
For a while we do not speak, and then I brave it, I go in: “What were you ashamed of?”
She does not speak, just keeps eyeing the bill on her lap. She has scrawled words on the back of it: Lisbon, Portugal, Scottsdale. Finally, she admits it.
“We didn’t have an indoor toilet. We had an outhouse. I didn’t want him to know.”
“You didn’t have indoor plumbing?”
“My father was so careful. We didn’t have a spare nickel. He hated to spend money. We were some of the last people in the city limits of Madison to have an indoor toilet. When we got one, Mammy wouldn’t let anybody put paper in. She thought it would break. Winnie put paper in the toilet once and it overflowed.”
“Did you want to marry him?”
She says nothing until, moments later, “What is the capital of Portugal?”
“Lisbon.”
“I would like to get away one last time,” she adds, “but it’s too late. I know. My walking’s not that good. After I’m gone you can travel.”
“Probably to Mayos.” I like the name of this hospital. It sounds like a destination in the Caribbean. “Two tickets for Turks and Mayos, please, and do not stick me by an emergency door.”
“What is the capital of Portugal?” she begins again, determined now not to let the words slip away.
“Lesbian.”
Mammy sold milk to get Betty through college. I have never before taken in that they had so little to spare when they were growing up. As a very old lady, Mammy wandered our house, turning off the lights to save on the electric bill even if I was reading or my father was working with his house plans.
“Turn off the light!”