There were not many times he could remember feeling content, safe in his bones, with Ava, sure, with his mother, but only a few other times. When Jay was very young he’d felt that warm stillness too with his father. He’d loved the days his father decided to stay with them. Too few of them, too many day of ins and outs, starts and stops of his living with them., but how good they felt. Jay would be surprised and thrilled if his father stayed with them three full days in a row. But he liked the comings and goings too—his father’s reappearances full of the strangeness of a comet. His father a celebrity and not the trifling bum his mother said he was.
A few times Frank had taken JJ with him to his all-night poker games. The men sat at cafés and sheds in the woods, played cards into the morning hours, the smell of rotted wood in their noses—a smell that would call up his father in an instant. At those games the men lost small fortunes, at least to them, a few hundred dollars the difference between a good month and thirty whole days of an angry woman’s sideways glances, her hissed mutterings under her breath at the spells she’d have to work those last lean days before the next check. Frank had been the only one to bring a child, but nobody minded, JJ was no trouble. If he wasn’t sleeping he was sitting quietly in the corner or he was out in the car pretending to drive. JJ ate the food the men ate, pickled eggs, pig’s feet, chips, soda right from the bottle and not just a taste of it poured into a cup like his mother would give him. Sometimes the lovely sister of one of the men came with sandwiches to sell. JJ felt the air around the room thicken with her presence. Some of the men teased her, pretty thing, this your sister? She’s too pretty to be your sister. These men she shooed off like eager pups, but Frank was quiet. He liked her. It was clear that she liked him. Her attention to his father made JJ inexplicably proud.
“WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT, Jay?”
“Did I wake you up?” Jay sat up and leaned over her. “I’m sorry. I was trying not to move.”
“I sleep in fits these days. How are you feeling?” Ava rolled closer to Jay on the bed and pressed her body against him.
“I feel good. Your mother wanted to cuss me out, but I feel okay.”
Neither of them had wanted to talk about Sylvia’s leaving, but her departure hung on the air. Jay had fully expected Ava to leave with her mother. When she’d walked out of the bank earlier in the day (had it really been just one day?) she’d scanned the parking lot, searched for him though she couldn’t know his car. He couldn’t help but wonder if another possibility presented itself: Would she walk quickly and decidedly away?
“She’ll be fine,” Ava said, though she worried too. “I should go on home.”
“She knows where you are. Why don’t you bring your stuff later? I’ll help you.”
“Maybe in a few days, okay?” Ava asked.
Jay wrapped his arm around Ava’s back, his face a couple of inches from hers. Ava closed her eyes. She had a few tiny gray hairs at her temple that he could see even in the dull morning light. Otherwise she looked the same as he had always remembered. “What are you thinking, Jay?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you worried about Mama?”
Jay stretched and got up from the bed. “She’ll be fine. She’s just worried.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting a drink.”
“Jay, stay here.”
Jay stretched his arms above his head. “Be right back. Right back,” Jay said but he didn’t look in Ava’s direction.
ONCE FRANK WON A BIG HAND, a hand he wasn’t expecting. “JJ,” he said and motioned his son to the table. He pressed a twenty-dollar bill into JJ’s pants pocket. “You remember your daddy gave you your first twenty-dollar bill.” Frank dropped JJ off at home early the next morning. “Tell your mama, I’ll see her tomorrow,” Frank had said and drove away. JJ wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamed his father, the poker game, but the twenty was real.
Frank had not come back home the next day. Jay’s birthday passed, the whole summer too, and Frank did not return. Jay kept the twenty in his pocket, money he never told another soul he had. He fingered the once crisp bill to cure boredom, for luck, whenever a stray thought about his father came to him, when he was at loose ends about what to do with his hands. Until one day, even after the hundredth search of his pocket, his room, his house, his pocket again, he had to admit the twenty-dollar bill was long and forever gone.
28
Ava walked into her house to the sound of the television in the other room. “Mama? Where are you?” she yelled.
Sylvia was stretched out across the sofa. She had not bothered to get dressed. For good money she couldn’t have told you the last time she was still in pajamas at eleven o’clock in the morning. “Hey Mama nothing. What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Sylvia rolled her eyes at Ava.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Mama. I just want to sleep.”
“Oh, you don’t? Well, that’s too damn bad. Where’s Henry? Are you pregnant? Are you laying up with another man while you’re pregnant? Is that the best you know?” Sylvia glanced at Ava’s stomach, flat as ever. “You’re supposed to be smart. This is trashy.”
“Mama, calm down.”
“Don’t tell me,” Sylvia said. “Don’t tell me. I tell you.”
“Look, Mama, I don’t know and I don’t care about Henry.” Ava pressed her temples. The headache would be coming on any minute. “I was at Jay’s. I’m not laying up with anybody. Don’t make it sound disgusting.”
“Is that all you have to say to me?”
“Mama don’t do this.”
“No, I’m serious. That man doesn’t love you. You don’t love him. Can I say it plainer?” Sylvia fought the impulse to pull her own hair. “He’s another sad sack you can’t help. Listen to me, Ava, the hardest thing you’ll do is keep moving forward. Don’t keep looking back. What did that get you the first time? You think there’s nothing out there, but I guarantee you there’s nothing in the rearview.”
Ava fought the urge to remind her mother about Don’s sporadic presence in their lives. Not today. “Mama, I’m not going to let you bother me. You know what? I’m happy. I haven’t felt good in a long time. I feel okay. I almost forgot how that feels. I don’t want you to think about me anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about? So you don’t need me, is that right?”
“No, Mama, don’t get your feelings hurt. I’m sorry, you did a good job and I’m okay. I release you,” Ava said, throwing her arms in the air like she was blowing a kiss.
“You release me? Am I supposed to go back to the wilderness now?”
“I don’t know.” Ava closed her eyes.
“You been sick, Ava?”
“I’m fine, Mama.”
“Sickness or not?”
“I haven’t been sick. I’m going to sleep and then I’m going to Jay’s.”