Sylvia walked outside her house. She had moved the few boxes and suitcases of her belongings and dismal wardrobe back to her home and turned in the key to her apartment. She would never have to see the stark white of the anonymous walls again. She would stay in the house she had loved from the moment she saw it. There is a blessing in that.
Her neighbor’s music was obnoxious and full of bass. He knows he’s too old for all that mess, Sylvia thought. Forrest, the music man, was not a teenager who could be forgiven or at least assumed unknowing, but a fifty-eight-year-old doing some lazy man’s gardening pulling weeds from his seated position in his lawn chair.
“Sylvia, how you living,” Forrest called out.
“I’m okay, Forrest. Are you?”
“I can’t complain. Doing a little yard work. Mostly sitting. You let me know if you need me,” he said. Sylvia was sure Forrest’s comment was more for the man walking up her driveway’s benefit than hers.
Frank approached Sylvia with his arm outstretched to shake her hand, hurried to meet her in the middle of the driveway.
“How you doing, ma’am? You must be Mrs. Ross. I’m Frank Ferguson. They told me I could find JJ Ferguson here.”
“You’re his daddy?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The man smiled, he might have four teeth still remaining.
“He left. I don’t think he’s even in town anymore.”
“I went by his house. Any idea where he is?”
Sylvia knew that JJ had driven to the beach for a few days, but she didn’t want to tell Frank that. “He’s selling his house. That’s about all I know.”
“Never thought one of mine could do something like that.” Frank rubbed his face. He needed a shave, which made him look down on his luck, poor.
“Do something like what?” Sylvia asked.
“Anything really.” Frank laughed. “You always get told the apple don’t fall far. You pray that’s not true, you know it?”
Sylvia paused. She wasn’t prepared to feel badly for Frank. She wasn’t going to. “He’s a good boy. You would be proud of him.”
“I am proud.”
“I can give him your phone number when he calls.”
“Oh, no, ma’am. I don’t have no phone, ma’am.”
“Do you have an address?”
“Not really. Not a permanent one.”
“Well, I’ll get him a message if you tell me how.” Sylvia said this but was not sure she was telling him the truth.
“Ma’am, I know you must know the worst things about me, but I’m not the same man JJ knew.”
Sylvia looked at him, tried to keep the disgust off her face. “None of us is the same,” she said. Frank looked like JJ, if JJ had been tossed in an industrial clothes dryer, set to burn. She would not feel sorry for him, but a pitiful sight provokes an involuntary response. She was trying her best to stop feeling. Some lives are built and some get made, she thought. You get what you deserve if you make a disaster of your life. But only a body that hasn’t lived long enough to see anything would believe that. “He’s selling the house. There’s nothing for anyone to get.”
Frank chuckled, rubbed the gray naps on his chin. “I am long past wanting anything. Nothing would be enough. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
Sylvia did not want to be in league with Frank and she resented the association. “There’s nothing to want. He even sold the refrigerator.”
“I don’t have anywhere to put a refrigerator anyway.” Frank hesitated, like something was being decided. “Well, I’ll be around here for a good long time until I get some more money to go back home. I’d appreciate you telling him I came by.”
Sylvia nodded and turned to go back inside the house. Her neighbor had his side to them, concentrated on the same spot of ground, pretended not to eavesdrop.
“All right then, you take care of yourself, ma’am.”
“You too.”
Frank opened the door to his car. “You know just before I got out I heard James Brown on the oldies station. I didn’t mean to sit in your driveway, but I couldn’t turn off the car until I heard that song. Remember we used to listen to James Brown? He was something else.”
Sylvia felt her face soften. She turned all the way around to look directly at Frank.
“Not you and me. I don’t mean that. All of us back then. We loved that rusty Negro. Me and JJ’s mother waited all day long to get tickets one time. Long time ago now.”
“Yeah, we loved him. No doubt about that. We sure did.”
“He used to sing that please, please, please.” Frank shook his head, scraped the bowl of his memory.
“You can’t forget that,” Sylvia said.
“That was exactly right.”
“What was right? What do you mean?”
“We all thought so at the time. Remember?”
“What was right? I don’t know what you mean,” Sylvia asked.
“What else can you say? If there’s something else I don’t know it. Is there anything else? There’s nothing just please, please. That’s all you can say.”
“It doesn’t make any difference does it?” Sylvia said.
Frank chuckled little snorting sounds that didn’t sound like there had ever been a happy thought. “Oh, it makes a difference. No doubt about that.”
“There’s no please. There’s no getting beyond some things.”
“No difference?” Frank said, genuine surprise in his voice. “Oh shit. That can’t be true.”
“Why not?” Sylvia asked. “Because you don’t want it to be true?”
“Of course it does.” Frank had an incredulous look, his almost toothless face a Greek mask of exaggerated sadness. “Every word makes a difference. Please makes a difference. It does. All the difference in the world.”
42
Sylvia had poured the buttermilk over the washed chicken early in the morning and left the meat in the refrigerator to marinate. In the late afternoon she prepared the egg wash and flour for dredging. Some people liked to shake the chicken in a cleaned out bread bag or later a Ziploc bag but Sylvia dredged hers through the flour like her mother had done, piece by piece, into the egg wash, into the flour, that was dusted with salt and pepper and a little red pepper. When it was time she put almost two inches of vegetable oil in the large cast-iron skillet, always cast-iron, to properly distribute the heat, and turned the stove on medium high. Vegetable oil not lard was her concession to modernity. When a few drops of water flicked from her fingers sizzled on contact with the oil, it was ready. Don’t crowd your chicken. The temptation will be to put as many pieces as possible into the pan, get the cooking over with as quickly. But cook a few pieces at a time, stand and turn them, get them done on all sides. The oil will pop like a bee sting on your fingers, on your arms, even toward your face. The process will take time. It will take your attention. You fry chicken for the people you love.