“A fifties whore? Do you even hear yourself?”
“You know what I mean. Places today can’t look nasty, but back then we just made do. Reused everything. Somebody would hand you a chipped plate in a minute. Can you imagine if you went to a restaurant today and got a chipped anything?”
“How did I get this started?”
“You know I’m right,” Lana said. “But you know what? They don’t want me and I don’t want them. I know it was a long time ago, but I don’t go where I’m not wanted.”
Sylvia laughed, “That doesn’t leave you many places does it?”
“You know I’m right,” Lana chuckled.
“I have to agree or die so I agree.”
“Don’t be right, heifer. That’s up to you,” Lana said.
“End of an era. But you know what they say? You can love a crippled mule if it stays around long enough.”
“Nobody says that but you, Sylvia.”
The past had started erasing behind Sylvia like in a cartoon. Her life as a girl; the lives of her parents; her son; all disappearing as if they had never been. Giving up the pain and exclusion and meant also losing years of her life. The trick was cutting out the bad like a tumor, hoping the nasty had not spread into the rest of your thinking. Cutting it out, but somehow managing to survive. Isn’t that always the trick? “Mama used to love Simmy’s. You remember that. She wanted one of those big burgers when she was dying, but I don’t think she took more than a bite or two. I’m the one had to go get it.” In a small town your dead mother haunts nearly every corner, turning up in a thousand places you don’t expect. At first she scared you, her face, her smell, a memory of her at the laundromat, at the post office. But soon you delighted in her presence. You remembered her kind moments and her happiness. But in time, as the years progressed you recalled her in the meat of her life, in her ordinary days, the ways she normally existed. You remembered her anger, every-ready, that she gripped like a lifeline. You remembered her ability to ignore you, her pleading child, ignore you and your pain completely.
“Nobody ever said she was easy,” Lana said.
“I’d hate to meet that liar. I’m going to the bathroom.” Sylvia closed the door to the bathroom that doubled as a storeroom. Lana had a knack for decorating, but you wouldn’t know it from this one area of the shop. Stacks of toilet paper, paper towels, and white drying towels for hair and beauty supplies lined the walls. A big gap of flowery wallpaper curled and buckled open in the seam eye level from the toilet seat. Sylvia thought for the hundredth time that Lana should fix the loose toilet that wobbled when a body, even a child’s body, sat on it. She would quickly forget or decide she didn’t care enough to mention when she came back out.
Lana stood by the window with the broom. The last thing she did at night was to sweep hair (always more than it looked like) from the old linoleum floor. Old people used to say to never let anyone have your hair or you could be controlled, cursed with a single stolen strand and the right combination of words.
“You ought to do something about that bathroom,” Sylvia said.
“What for? You need a view?”
Sylvia sucked her teeth, the state of the toilet already evaporated from her mind.
“What do you think Mama ever saw in Daddy, Lana?”
“Don’t start talking about them. I mean it. He was available, had a job, was breathing, hadn’t been to jail, and his people didn’t screw each other or at least didn’t advertise it.” Lana stopped sweeping. “When you get like this you always start talking about Mama and Daddy. They did what they did. That’s all there is to it.”
“Daddy wasn’t that bad. I’d have killed him but he wasn’t that bad,” Sylvia said. Their father had a thick country accent, a slow smile, a stillness their mother must have found mysterious at first, but infuriating once she learned him and realized he wasn’t a puzzle to figure out, since there was nothing more to him at all.
“Oh, you don’t think so? You remember that time I wrecked the car? Remember that? I told Daddy there was something wrong with the brakes, but he sent me out anyway. I hit a tree. Remember? Broke my arm, cut my face. When I got back home from the hospital, you know what he said to me? ‘You disgust me,’ he said. I don’t even know what that means! Let me tell you right now, we did good, honey. We did good just to be here.”
“I never heard that story.”
“Yes you have. You said that the last time I told it,” Lana said.
“Well I don’t remember it,” Sylvia insisted but something about the story did seem familiar. “I can’t keep all the old stuff straight.”
“You need to talk to Ava, Syl. I’m being serious with you.”
“What do you know?”
“Did you talk to her? You’ve got to talk to her,” Lana said.
“She’s up there with JJ Ferguson. How am I supposed to talk to her?”
“What do you mean, up there?”
“Just what I said. She’s with JJ. I wish he’d stayed back wherever he was.”
“No you don’t, you missed him.”
“I didn’t want this.” Sylvia stood up to see out into the street. “I thought Ava would set him straight. I never saw this coming.” The storefronts across from Lana’s were completely dark. The only shallow light of the evening came from the blue glow of the streetlamp in the square. A memorial to the Confederate dead jutted phallically from the town center. In all the years she’d lived in Pinewood she’d never walked around downtown or stopped to read the plaque at the monument or spent any time on the street. What had she done all that time?
“JJ is a man. He can do what he wants with his life. You should see that house. It hurt me to see it. I’m ashamed to say.”
“You ought to be ashamed. A black man gets something and even his people can’t leave him alone,” Lana said.
“Don’t start with me.”
“I’m just joking. That place hurts me and I wasn’t even there.” Lana laughed. “What do you hear from Henry?”
“Tell me what’s going on, Lana. You keep asking questions and saying nothing.”
“You have to talk to Ava. She’s hurting.”
“I know she’s hurting. Don’t you think I know that? Tell me what you know, Lana.”
“Henry has another woman.” Lana whispered. “That’s all I’m going to say. I shouldn’t have even said that.”
Sylvia stared at Lana hoped she’d misunderstood what she’d just heard. Lana’s face verified that there had been no mistake.
“Who told you that?”
“Ava found out, Syl.”
“I should have known.” Sylvia held together her shaking hands. She should have seen something. Why didn’t she see it? A hollow place formed in her chest, a yawning gap that would overtake her. She wanted to scream. “Even the weak ones find somebody weaker. Who is it?”