“Am I driving you that crazy?” JJ said.
“Not that kind of drink. Tea. But I thought of it. Don’t think I didn’t.”
“I’m not just thinking about me, Mrs. Sylvia.”
Sylvia rolled the hard wrinkled lemon under her palm. She could already tell the meat would be juiceless and rigid inside.
“How’s Mr. Don?”
“Why do you keep asking about him? I don’t know. He still looks pretty much the same, which had never been all that good. He’s living with a child younger than you. Much younger,” Sylvia said. “You know me and Don used to go up Brushy Mountain just driving and looking around. A long time ago. You see I’ve got one good memory of him. I don’t see him much, which is fine with both of us.”
Sylvia had not thought about the driving trips in a long time. Don had said that the trips up the mountain made Sylvia sad and when she was sad she got angry, usually with him. She wasn’t angry at him; that was too easy. She hated him. The fact that Don didn’t understand that most fundamental fact of their relationship was just enough reason for her to lash out and remind him.
“I see you looking at all of Ava’s junk,” Sylvia said. She imagined the house as JJ must. What was better or worse, fixed or still lacking from the last time he saw it.
“This house feels the same. It really does,” JJ said, taking in the wall art and figurines of the small rooms. “You have a lot more decorations than I remember. Who loves owls?”
“You know I’ve never liked an animal,” Sylvia said. She wondered what JJ had expected from the house, bowls of stuck-together candy, a closed-in stale smell of old people and used shoes. “I did try one time to put up some velvet flocked wallpaper. I always did love the way that looked. Ava said it was for old ladies or whorehouses.” Sylvia had gone so far as to order a roll of red fleur-de-lis pattern special order from Lowe’s. That roll was probably somewhere in the attic in the bottom of a box. “You think you’ll work on your house every waking minute. You’ll see. Up there is your first house?”
JJ nodded yes.
“Well get as much done now as you can. If you don’t get your work done in the first couple of years, it is not going to happen. Believe me on that. I always meant to put a screened porch off the back.”
“What happened?”
“What did I just say? Everything starts to look fine to you. Your raggedy old couches and your mess look perfectly reasonable until one day something shakes you up and it doesn’t anymore. Nothing looks fine. You see all the nasty paint and scraped-up floors and all the ugly dark little rooms and you walk in the door and say, how the hell was I living like this?” Sylvia laughed. “That’s when the renovations start. You’ve got to make everything new. Before long you wonder why you ever started down that road either.”
“I’d never do a renovation. After this build, I’m done,” JJ said.
“I thought you flipped houses?”
“Oh, that’s different. I’ve flipped a few houses, but I wouldn’t live in them.”
“Anyway, my screened porch money went for groceries and lights.” Sylvia laughed. “Sometimes you can’t talk money into doing what you want.”
“Money won’t act right for long, that’s for sure.” JJ looked around the kitchen, like he was waiting to find something he recognized. “I don’t see any Barack plates on the wall.”
“You know I’ve got one. I might even have two. In one of them he’s smiling and the other one he’s looking off in the distance.”
“You know where he was looking don’t you? The future.”
“I know it,” Sylvia laughed. “I’ve got a little apartment near the community college and I don’t have a single picture or bric-a-brac or anything up yet. I keep thinking I’ll get around to it.”
“You’re going to get your black woman card revoked if you don’t get Barack on the wall.”
“You mean my old black woman card, don’t you?” In the refrigerator tofu in the meat storage looked more disgusting in its gray soup bath than usual. She wouldn’t offer that mess to somebody she liked. Other than condiments there was precious little else around. Sylvia found the natural sweetener and held up the bottle. “I can make you some tea with this mess. I’ve got crackers too. Want some?” She gestured to JJ with the sleeve of saltines.
“No, thanks. But you go ahead.”
Sylvia opened the crackers, put one of the stale crumbling squares in her mouth. “I didn’t know these went bad. Did you?” She said and kept on chewing.
“He came out of nowhere, didn’t he?” JJ said.
“Who? Barack? That’s a funny thing for you to say with your disappearing act.” Sylvia paused, wiped her mouth of crumbs. “I’m thinking about those plates, do you remember when all the barbershops used to have Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. pictures up? Is Barak up there with them now? He should be, I’d figure.”
“Some have him up.”
“I guess they do. Of course I haven’t been in a barbershop since Devon was a little boy. Oscar Michaux probably cut your hair when you were here, didn’t he? I think he’s still in business. He still has a shop anyway.”
“I mostly cut my own. I didn’t have the money. That seems to be the punchline of most of life. No money and for my next trick no money. Devon had clippers and I borrowed them a couple of times. He cut it for me one night.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well, let’s just say it wasn’t his best. That what I get for getting my hair cut in the dark. It was pretty late and we came out here so we wouldn’t wake you up.”
“I can’t believe all that was going on with me right here. Do you remember when?”
“No, ma’am. It was pretty late. It might have been summer. I was over here like I always was. We wanted to go into town to get a hamburger but nothing was open and we were afraid we’d run out of gas. I don’t think we had two dollars between us. We sat out here for a long time at that picnic table you used to have. There wasn’t a floodlight out here back then. I needed my hair cut so Devon did it.”
“I didn’t even know that and I thought I knew everything that went on here.” Sylvia looked at JJ’s face to gauge his reaction.
“I’m sure you knew about everything important,” JJ said unable to keep the grin off his face.
“What are you grinning about?”
“Nothing, nothing, I just laugh when I get nervous. Though I’ve got no secrets,” JJ said with his hands up.
“Like I believe that.” Sylvia poured tea from a glass pitcher and drank it without sweetener. She winced.
“Not good, huh?”