“I keep on forgetting that there’s no sugar in anything around here. Don’t even think about a Sweet’n Low.” Sylvia chuckled to herself. “When I was having my babies you didn’t even know you were pregnant until about the baby had cooked for two or three months. The doctor wouldn’t even see you until then. Half the women I knew smoked, drank, did what they wanted. Did I ever tell you I smoked?”
“You? I can’t even see that.”
“I did. When I learned the babies were coming I quit, but I smoked like a choo choo for a few years. Now they tell you no nothing, no sugar, no flour, no plastics. Of course most people I knew had babies at seventeen or eighteen. That makes a difference I’m sure.” Sylvia paused. JJ should know that Ava had moved on, had a life with jagged edges, but she had not meant to be the one who told him. “Don’t tell Ava I told you that. I don’t talk about that to anybody.”
“I won’t mention it.”
“I know you won’t, but she will. She’ll tell you herself, I feel certain. I really don’t tell Ava’s business. Not usually.” Sylvia laughed.
“Life goes on. I know it has to. But that other life that we already went through, it might come back. Remember that old jam ‘Second time around. Do it one more time.’”
“What are you talking about?” Sylvia laughed.
“I don’t know myself. All I’m saying is we only know about the past. Why not redo it?” JJ looked about as young as he sounded.
Sylvia laughed. “How did you get optimistic? You’re going to redo the past, are you? You went away from here and lost your mind,” Sylvia said, but the fact that JJ believed or even pretended to believe in the power of reinvention (in the redo, the most childish of all rules in any game), made her momentarily buoyant. “Well if it happens I want you to let me know.” Sylvia said.
“I will. Just wait.” JJ grinned at her.
“Where are your babies? You have any?” JJ’s life hadn’t paused in nearly seventeen years since she’d seen him. He might have nearly grown children, of course he might, big boys and girls looking him dead in the eye when they talked to him. “That’s not my business. You don’t have to tell me, JJ.”
“No kids. I’ve never been married and no kids. Lucky or unlucky, I guess. Just been me all these years.” JJ started to say something but seemed to change his mind.
“No kids. Are you sure?” Sylvia asked.
“I’m sure, Mrs. Sylvia.”
“I know you’ve had plenty of girlfriends. If you’re not crazy there’s a line of women for any man these days. Even if you are crazy there’s a line, tell the truth.” Sylvia laughed.
“I don’t mean I haven’t had friends. But you know what, most of them older than twenty-five.”
“You stop that. What if somebody heard you saying some mess like that?” Sylvia pursed her lips, attempted her best disapproving face. She fooled no one. “There’s time if that’s what you want. You’re still young. You know that don’t you?”
“Not that young. But that’s okay. There’s so much time. I believe it,” JJ sat up straighter, excited about what he was thinking. “I was nervous time was running out, at least my time, but since I got back here I feel okay. You know what I mean? I feel like I can reboot. Start again, you know?” JJ asked.
Sylvia smiled. She missed this sweet, silly boy. She never believed that a move could shift everything into clear and brilliant focus. But she saw every day poor women that did. In they’d come to Social Services needing help to move town or sometimes even a couple of streets away, searching for that place that fit. Of course they would infect their children with their wanderlust, always looking for the perfect houses, apartments, the town that once and for all ticked all the boxes. She waited for JJ to continue describing his life on the giddy lip of midlife hysteria. Stay on that funny edge as long as you can, she thought.
“I started to think too much has happened in my life. I started to feel it.” JJ touched his chest like what he felt was there and he might get it out if he just knew how. “I thought maybe I couldn’t get past it. But you know, Mrs. Sylvia, I can.”
“Well, you’re doing the right thing. Build you a house. Make yourself as happy as you can. Get some things you want. This is it. You realize that, don’t you? One go-around. Listen to me, trying to tell you something and my fun for the week is a couple of trips to Food Lion. Don’t pay any attention to me.”
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m trying.”
“Anyway as soon as I can I’m getting my Barack plate up. Remember they used to say Clinton was the black president? You remember that or are you too young?”
“I remember. I was a kid, but I remember.”
“You know, I think the black people around here were more excited when Clinton was in.”
“People are going to think you voted for Mitt.” JJ grinned, waited for her reaction.
“What would I look like?” Sylvia laughed.
“Romney thought it was about being rich. Nobody cared if he was rich. Hell, we all want money. We love rich people. He just wasn’t for real. You know what I mean? Authentic, that’s the word.”
Sylvia nodded, but she wasn’t sure what being an authentic human being meant or if she’d ever been one. “That’s harder than it looks, honey.”
“Remember when he was talking to those kids and started saying who let the dogs out? He’s never heard that song in his life. You know it. I know it. He’s an old rich white man. Just be that. Nothing wrong with it. Unless you don’t want to rule the world.”
“Look at you. You’re still young. Old people don’t get excited about nothing. Not one thing. You hear me? You need to trust me on that.”
JJ shook his head. “Like what I think matters. He’s still a millionaire. I’m still not.”
“You must have something. That big house up there didn’t just make itself.” It had been an unusually dry spring. A house that should have taken several months, as long as a year with contractors’ rain delays and juggling job delays, was moving right along, ahead of schedule. A forest became a clearing that became a recognizable structure in no time, like it had been raised up then supported from the back like a picture frame—the house no more substantial than a prop in an old west movie, but there it was.
JJ shrugged. “I’ve got one house money. One.” JJ grinned. “Did you watch the election results?”
“Both times, honey.”
“I was in the car when I heard about the first election. I thought about you.”
Sylvia swirled the remaining tea in the tall glass.
“I thought about how Barack must be wanting his mother.”
Sylvia drained the glass, hoped she hid her face, her emotions too complicated to have to try to explain. “Probably was.”
“I wanted my mother and they weren’t making me the president.” JJ laughed.
“My phone number has been the same.” Sylvia tried to sound harsh or at least firm, she sounded sad.