JJ was startled, like he wasn’t sure what was happening, but his face recovered quickly. “Mrs. Sylvia,” he said and rushed to her on the patio.
Sylvia held JJ in a loose embrace, patted his back like an acquaintance. “My good god, JJ. You look like you’ve been gone fifteen minutes, not fifteen years,” Sylva said, but as she looked closely at his face she knew he was a grown man. Somehow we can tell the young from old, even if they are slim and stylish not-young. People change as they move into their age. How that happened Sylvia was not sure, but the difference is real, a heaviness, not fat but weight and gravity less visible than girth or flab but no less perceptible. JJ’s back was warm, no doubt from standing in the sun. How many days had she imagined him standing in her yard with his back to her ready to turn around like in a melodramatic movie, the span of time blowing away between them, numbers flying off the calendar like leaves in a storm. The thing you want is never the way you think. Sylvia kept her arms open her hands on his shoulders. She did not envelop him or squeeze. She had no muscle memory of holding JJ, or resting her face on the side of his. No memory of touching him at all. She wondered what he thought, what he really thought of her aging face. She must look like an old, old woman to him. She let him go.
“It’s all me. Just more of me.” He laughed, holding on to his slight belly.
When Ava brought this boy to her house, she thought JJ was Devon sitting on the floor with her daughter. “Mama, this is JJ,” Ava had said. JJ had looked up at her, nervous, goofy, and smiling, looking not so very different from how he did at this moment.
“Look at you,” Sylvia said, careful not to rest her gaze at his thinning though not yet balding head to his expensive shoes, which had a resemblance to sneakers that had gotten above their raisings.
“Look at me.” JJ grinned. “You look good, Mrs. Sylvia.”
“I guess I do,” Sylvia said and they both laughed. “What are you doing here? Trespassing is what it looks like.”
“I didn’t mean to be. Can you believe I remembered just how to get here after all this time?”
That wasn’t what she wanted to ask JJ, not at all, but they could start there. “What are you doing here?”
“I had to see the house. I had to. Besides I didn’t think anybody was home.” JJ laughed.
“Does it look the same?”
“Not really. Yeah. Maybe some things.” JJ pointed to the edge of her yard. “There’s your birdbath.” Her homemade crooked little birdbath made from the rocks she collected from the lawn and a bag of quick mix concrete adorned the back corner; the nubby texture had broken only a little and had not fallen apart in hunks as they had all predicted.
“You remember that thing?”
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
“I don’t know about that. I was crafty back then. I got old. Sit down, sit down.”
JJ moved to the table and took a seat. His frame made the chair look small. He sat the way men do, with his legs spread apart, his arms on the rests of the chair, as large in the space as possible. “Last time I sat here, I was still in my twenties. I wasn’t even twenty-one yet, I don’t think.”
“Long time ago, honey,” Sylvia said.
JJ was so close Sylvia could smell his strong scented soap. He must have showered just before he came to the house.
“You don’t look much different, Mrs. Sylvia, you really don’t.”
“Well I am. Don’t you know anything about how to talk to a woman?”
JJ laughed behind his hand. “You look just the same. That’s what I meant to say.”
“Did you walk all the way down here?”
“My car is around the corner. I didn’t want to block the drive.”
Sylvia knew he didn’t want to be seen. If she hadn’t shown up he probably would never have admitted he was even there.
“Well, since you caught me”—JJ grinned—“I want to invite you to my place.” JJ pointed up, like his place hovered in the sky.
“Your big fancy place. What took you so long?”
“I know, I know.” JJ looked down like he was embarrassed. “I’m slow. But I wanted you to see it all done first.”
“I couldn’t get rid of you a long time ago.” Sylvia spread her hands across the surface of the glass table, and yellow dandruff of pollen floated around them and away. “You know I’m joking, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“You heard that Mrs. Graham died?”
“I heard.” JJ’s face took on the intensity she remembered, his eyebrows crinkled in a concentration and seriousness that worried her years ago but finally fit on the face of this older man. Her son’s seriousness scared her too. Barely out of diapers, he’d put his head on her knee, “I’m a bad boy, a bad boy.” He’d say it until she’d coo and hold him to stillness. Sylvia had often heard mothers of teenagers long for the early years of their children’s lives when their babies’ hurts were slight and frivolous, easily forgotten. Devon had never had those days.
“I go by Jay now. I haven’t heard JJ in years.”
“I hope you know I’ll never call you anything but JJ. You know that, don’t you?”
JJ laughed. “You don’t change do you?”
Sylvia knew that Mrs. Graham wasn’t none of his grandmother, that he had only pretended she was. Would they all ever be old enough to speak the truth? It used to be the custom to lie about every unpleasantness. They’d all done it at some point for somebody. The most common one was a generation ago some mother tried to pawn off the new addition in the house as her change-of-life baby. We all saw the fourteen-year-old daughter swelling up like a balloon, but we pretended anyway. JJ had been a foster child whose father had shot his mother to death. The story came out in drips. They say his father was still in the yard, found crying when the police arrived, they say he shot her at such close range she could not be recognized. The girl was sent to live with a great-aunt, so precious little was known about her, but about the quiet boy, there was rampant speculation about what he had seen and heard. We do not know what the children saw. Sylvia had never asked JJ and he never volunteered any information. The most he’d ever said was that his mother was dead. He never mentioned his father to her at all. Before JJ had been in town a year, everybody knew some version of the terrible details.
“That woman never did like me. You know what, Mrs. Sylvia? I’m been trying to forget her for years.” JJ smiled at Sylvia. “I’m laughing but I’m not joking.”