I’m not going to tell you everything. Sylvia washed the frying pan and stacked it in the drain with the three or four other dishes and a few utensils. So much of it doesn’t matter anyway. Sylvia rearranged the dishes on the counter so they wouldn’t collapse to the floor in the middle of the night. I should say that Ava’s pregnant again. We’re hoping. I didn’t want her to keep at it, but what can I say? When I was pregnant with you, I saw the doctor two times. That’s it! And one of them was when you were born. I probably told you that old story a hundred times. Sylvia dried the dishes and put them away in the cabinets, wiped down the stove and counters, and quickly ran over the floor with the lazy woman’s spray mop her mother would have rolled her eyes to see. How many times had she done that set of motions, fired up the neurons in that groove of her brain? She could be twenty, forty, fifty-eight. Eternity lived in those well-worn grooves. When I was coming up all your mama had to do was keep you alive. Keep a roof and keep you breathing until your eighteenth birthday. Life was harder then. People didn’t have time like they do now. I thought I was so much better than them.
After Ava’s doctor’s appointment, Sylvia had gone to her apartment, but there was no chance she could be comfortable there. She had come back to her home to eat and maybe get some sleep if she was lucky. Sylvia found the remote and sat on the sofa, slowly changed the channels. The closed captioning could be a source of entertainment, the misspellings, sometimes the captioning for one show got put on another one. Gilligan mouthing the words to The Price Is Right.
What’s left? Sylvia wiped her hands and got as comfortable as she could on the couch. She watched first the KitchenAid mixer infomercial with the beautiful mixers in rainbow colors lined up like cars in a showroom, couples and families, happy people churning ice cream with one attachment and making zucchini spaghetti with another. Their smiling happiness contagious. I always figured it would be you and me, Devon. What do we do now?
Though she hadn’t believed it possible, the combination of dinner and the lull of the television, the warmth and stressful day had all conspired against her. By the time the phone rang, she had been in a dead sleep for hours. She had dreamed of being alone in an empty white room the light in it yellow and warming on her skin. The readout on the phone said Burkson County Corrections. She almost didn’t answer. “Marcus?”
“Hold please,” a voice announced.
“Sylvia. Are you there?”
“I can’t talk right now, Marcus. I’ve got too much going on.”
“Sylvia, Sylvia, wait, wait, please don’t hang up.”
“Marcus,” Sylvia said as she sat upright on the couch. “I have to go. You don’t know what kind of mess I’m dealing with right now. I’m going to hang up, honey. I can’t do it.”
“Wait, wait, please. Get a message to my daughter.”
“I’m not going to do that, Marcus.” Sylvia sighed. “You’re going to have to get somebody else.”
“Tell Charlotte to come and bring Dena. You tell them, Sylvia. They’ll listen to you.” Marcus paused, searched for the right words. “Tell them it just seems like a long time, but it’s only the days that are long, just over a year. That’s nothing, Sylvia,” Marcus said, his voice broken. “Sylvia? Sylvia? Are you listening?”
“Marcus. You don’t know what’s going on here. I’m tired.”
“Please Sylvia, tell them I am a changed man. No don’t say that. Tell them I’ve learned. Please Sylvia, please tell them not to forget me. I can make it if they don’t forget me. Can you tell them? Will you?”
“Marcus,” Sylvia began. She wouldn’t tell him that she had tried to see Charlotte but couldn’t make herself walk into that woman’s life, like she had a right, any right to be there. She couldn’t tell him that. She wanted to tell Marcus that his family could not keep waiting for him to come back. They have to get on with their lives. She should say. Think about what is best for them. Sylvia wanted to say that they can’t get too close to him, white-hot when they could spend a minute with him, icy death hoping for him to return. She wanted to say that only an idiot would take the word of a man unlucky enough, miserable enough, to land himself in a cage. Wouldn’t that man make any promise? But Sylvia heard the small voice of failure again whispering to her like it did, reminding her that she was the last person to be telling somebody else to get on with it, reminding her that she had never known a single true thing.
“I can’t get involved in that, Marcus. I’m going to go now.” Sylvia was at her house, alone at last, the life her mother had feared, the life she’d feared. She’d gone to the grocery store and bought real food to cook for herself. The moment of eating had felt sustaining, but never lasted, never helped for long. The cleaned-out shell of her sweet potato, vacant like an abandoned snakeskin. The Y-shaped bone from the pork chop was gray and left over on her plate like the remains of a dinosaur. She’d even chewed the gross spongy fat of the meat for punishment. She should never eat anything recognizable from an animal’s body. All the time, with every bite, she contemplated the mistakes she’d made, the nasty ones she knew about, and the sad ones she hadn’t understood at the time.
“Sylvia, Sylvia? You’ve been good to me. Please don’t leave me now. Please. Sylvia?”
“I can’t do it. I can’t handle another thing. Everything has gone to hell, Marcus. I can’t do anything.”
Neither Sylvia nor Marcus spoke. When Sylvia was much younger if she remained quiet on the telephone line she could hear the sadnesses, the rantings, the soft love professions of other people in conversation on party lines. Most of the time she could make out just a few words, but the timbre of the voices, the cadences, made the intentions clear. She’d felt a secret thrill at being witness to all those feelings right along with those strange voices as unknown to her as ghosts.
Now the line was silent. Sylvia had not planned to say good-bye to Marcus, but that was exactly what she was doing. “I’m sorry, baby. I am.”
“You said you helped me because of Devon. You know he’d want you to help me. He understands about being a black man. Please. I know you don’t have to, but please.”
“Devon is dead.”
“I don’t know what you mean? What are you talking about, Sylvia?
Sylvia thought that she had never said those words before. “I can’t say it again, Marcus. I’m not going to. Devon doesn’t want anything anymore. Just like me. Neither one of us wants a thing.”
Sylvia could hear Marcus’s breathing. For the first time since they began their relationship, their conversation would be over before the line went dead.
“I can’t believe you,” Marcus said. “I don’t believe you.”