“Who moved on?”
“JJ, Mama. You’re the one that changed the subject to him.” Ava tried at a lightheartedness she did not feel. JJ could have moved past them. He’d been away and seen different people and situations and it could be that they were part of a past he needed to lose. He hadn’t bothered to contact them for years and years, a fact that Ava could not have predicted and could not quite believe. When they were young Ava and JJ had wasted so much time together, in front of the television, riding around the downtown and on the bumpy dirt roads near the county line. All the harmless time wasters that most poor young people do in one-horse towns. All except for screwing the life out of each other. That they didn’t do. At least not until they left town. Ava had known even then that the stories that get told about you can spin wildly out of control without the buffer and framework of a known family history. The new kid drifting alone could be anyone and anything, while the town sniffed out clues, prosecuted the case of his life by his every stray comment, by his simple reactions to everyday events.
They had been nearly inseparable shortly after he arrived in town. All that time Ava pretended to be oblivious to JJ’s infatuation for her while he pretended that his feelings were simply lustful and incidental, easily contained, easily disposed like a used carton of Chinese food. Often in these infatuations, the pretty girl uses the boy as a playmate, like another girlfriend but one who reflects back to her proof of her beauty and desirableness. His gaze proprietary but not competitive, his inclination was to do whatever the girl wanted. A teenage girl lives for that power, so often the only taste of it she gets. In that situation, the boy waits patiently for any opening in her amorous attention, any suggestion that his being the confidant and best friend might lead to her love. Not just sex, but of course the boy wanted sex, but these sorts of boys are romantics, the ones that hear the same call to love that so many of the girls hear. Theirs, Ava’s and JJ’s, was not that story. They had been friends. She had made an important friend in a life that had not produced many.
Sylvia tried to sound confident but she worried he might not show up too. “He’ll be here. He so reminded me of Devon. Always did.” Sylvia couldn’t wait to see JJ. She thought how a face, his face, a body slicing through the air in a room, can crack the shell of your memory and erupt into your present. When that happens the past is not just ephemera or even pictures darting in and arresting your train of thought, but real in ways it can never be otherwise. The body makes the proof that you lived other than the moment of your last breath. JJ would materialize for them and it would be like they were all young and together again. The logic of it clear as day to Sylvia.
“I never thought he looked like Devon, Mama. I know you did.”
Sylvia tried to keep her face a stone. She knew Ava was tired of hearing about her problems with Devon. Everybody was. Some days she’d resort to chatting about him in the car or to a wheelbarrow full of topsoil, a dirty coffee cup or a drawer of sensible stretched-out panties.
Maybe Sylvia would go back to her own apartment to sleep and let the television be the only noise in the room. “We’ll be seeing JJ before too long. I hope he doesn’t need a job. He’ll be barking up the wrong tree around here.” Sylvia was glad for JJ that he could come rolling into town like Big Daddy Rich, money like a superpower at his fingertips. Vanity wasn’t vain if it wasn’t about you. Of course Sylvia realized JJ’s triumphant return had to be about her too. Someone like her, someone black, someone once poor, could come back to town and smash it underfoot. No, not smash it. That was wrong. He could be in control now and not tossed in any direction the wind blew. The cool of the ground, even the rocky places on the patio, felt good on Sylvia’s bare feet. She bent to pull some small weeds from between the pavers. She had never wanted Ava to have to hold her up or become her helper.
Ava stared intently at her mother’s face.
“What are you looking at?” Sylvia asked.
When a parent has trouble it can be very hard, maybe impossible not to make it into the child’s sadness. The child becomes a helper, a new creation. Not quite a spouse but no longer young enough. Some of that was inevitable of course, part of the unfairness life doles out.
“Don’t start talking to me about a pedicure again,” Sylvia said.
Ava tried to laugh, but she couldn’t get the sound out and into the air. Of course JJ’s absence had hurt her mother too. “You’re right, Mama. He’ll be here when the house is done.”
Sylvia hesitated. A look, a panic had flashed on Ava’s face and was just as quickly gone. She would mind her own business. When Ava wanted to tell her she would. No need to pry.
“Now, let’s talk about what’s wrong with you,” Sylvia said.
4