“I need to go, Mama.”
“I hear your voice all the time. In my dreams. Everywhere I go. I saw a boy who looked like you in the office the other day. He was with his girlfriend and baby. He was so tall and straight-standing, so handsome. I told him I was sorry to stare but he looked so much like you. That’s what I told a stranger.”
The line ticked on the other end. Sylvia couldn’t even hear him breathe.
“Don’t call me, Mama.”
“I know, I know. But I knew you’d want to know that JJ is here. Back in town. I know you remember JJ. Ava’s friend? He told me you cut his hair. I didn’t know that. You don’t want to hear this, I know. I’m getting off the phone. But he’s back. After all this time. Can you believe it?”
The line was quiet, but if he would let her, she could listen as long as she could to the steady rhythm of his breathing. “I know you can’t forgive me. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. I’m sorry. I tried not to call you, but I thought you’d want to hear it. I know you have to go. I know, but Devon, don’t go. One minute. You don’t have to say anything. Please one more minute.”
13
A year ago maybe more, Don started going to a neighborhood restaurant called Sisters, a man’s place—spare and dirty—run by Mae and Jonnie Norwood. The name sounded good, but Mae and Jonnie were actually mother and daughter, separated by fifteen years. Sisters wasn’t a fine dining place, just somebody’s converted living room of an old house on Damascus Church Road, with three lightweight dirty tables and chairs bought for a couple of dollars from the recently closed up Chinese place called House of Chow. Mae and Jonnie covered the uncleanable tabletops with plastic cloths, set salt and pepper shakers and hot sauce in the middle of each like a bouquet. At first Mae kept napkins on the tables, but customers would use them like they were the last paper products on earth. Take five when the corner of one would have done fine. Use them to wipe fingers, noses, the tips of shoes, eyes, clean underarms, and save for panty liners. When they were sitting out like that, who wouldn’t assume that there was always more? Sisters wasn’t decorated except for a yard sale clock, but neither woman cared too much for fussing over things, creating some kind of room with the books just so, the pillows fluffed, no shoes or spilled toys to spoil the scene, neither cared for the fantasy decorating encouraged. Besides, Sisters was not the establishment to go to if you were looking for scenery, garnishes, or flourishes to please the eye, food piled in artful stacks, or for watching fancy people. The mission at Sisters is to get all you want to eat and go home full. That’s enough entertainment for anybody.
Mae was good-looking for a woman her age. That’s what people always added, a woman her age. She was skinny but carried herself like a big woman with her arms out to her sides like parenthesis, always straightening her top over her hips like she had something to hide, smoothing her clothes from the creases her imaginary rolls of fat made, habits probably picked up from years of watching her large mother negotiate the world. Mae would have been pretty except for her black-rimmed lips, which she tried to hide except when a big laugh made her forget. When she was a little younger the rumor was she’d open her legs for anybody, though like most things, it wasn’t all the way true. She’d been fooled a few times, standing and lying down, small and lonesome because somebody said on Saturday night that he’d be around on Monday, but who hasn’t felt some of that?
Don thought if he had been looking for a woman at all his first glance would have lighted on Mae. He wasn’t looking. He was never really looking, but somehow he had no trouble finding women. To analyze the way of a cheater is a losing game. They just do. They just will. Only death or the smell of it will stop them. Many people aren’t loved enough, have lousy parents, have too much responsibility, blah, blah. But most of those unfortunate people aren’t whores who will take anybody they please to bed. Don was not most people. The generous way to think about it was that beauty moved Don, spoke to him, coerced him to set aside what he might believe was good sense, right actions, the proper way. That beautiful face or body or (Lord have mercy) both reasoned to him that this time his body next to her body didn’t really count. Like candy bars in the middle of the night, like sex in prison. If nobody sees and if you don’t care, how can it count?
Mae was the one close to his age, and besides that he’d known her all his life. At one time that familiarity would have repelled him, but the unknown and exotic had just about lost its appeal. Don even liked the weave that stretched Mae’s neat little Afro to silky black hair beyond Mae’s shoulders. Hair everybody in town knew had recently belonged to some Korean woman. Hair that everyone knew stood in for the hair Mae pulled out herself the second she discovered her beloved mother would never wake up from her last dream. At the funeral Mae didn’t even bother to hide the bald patch but let the world see on her own body a piece of what had happened to her heart. At the end of the service, as she tried to pass by the coffin the pallbearers set up at the door, Mae saw her lying like she had all the time in the world, patiently, like she never was in her real life, and Mae couldn’t stop screaming, for minutes that seemed like hours that had everyone teary in the middle of their own private losses. Reverend Johnson, Mae’s own daughter, her longtime boyfriend, everybody tried to console her, but she knew that the luster had flaked away from her life, like leaded paint. People felt sorry, but they talked: she didn’t need to do all that and she should have got hold of herself, for the children, but Don admired her for it. When else do you get to rail and plead with God, beg him for a last chance, another day? When his time came, Don used to want none of that uncivilized mess, but the idea that somebody, anybody would say NO! made him less afraid.