Before Mr. John started coming around, messing with me and my sister and buying Mama food, my mother actually had herself a real good man. Mama’s boyfriend Curtis first lived with us at the liquor house. On Sunday mornings while Mama was sleeping off her drunk, he would take me and Sweetie out to Grandma’s Biscuits for breakfast and let us order whatever we wanted. And when Mama was beating us too crazy with her leather belt, he was the one who would step in and tell her to take it easy. “C’mon now, Mildred,” he’d say. “They just being kids.”
Curtis worked out behind the Grey and White Auto Parts, fixing cars in the parking lot, under the shade of a big oak tree out behind the shop. He stood five foot four—his friends called him Shorty—and he had a receding hairline. If you squinted, he kinda looked like George Jefferson, if Mr. Jefferson dressed in grease-stained jeans and work boots instead of three-piece suits. Curtis wasn’t much to look at, but everybody at the liquor house knew he treated Mama right. Aunt Vanessa used to say, “You better hang on to that one, Mildred. You got a good one right there,” which meant Mama had a man willing to take care of a bunch of kids who weren’t even his.
After Granddaddy got locked up for shooting Miss Betty, Curtis moved Mama and all us kids into a little house across town, on Oliver Street, with three bedrooms and a yard out back where Mama planted vegetables and kept a little chicken coop. With Curtis, Mama didn’t have to worry about a thing. He paid the rent and took care of all the bills. He even bought Mama her very own car, a pale pink ‘69 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Mama called her ride the Pink Panther and drove it all over town playing B. B. King on the eight-track and singing at the top of her lungs, Rock me, baby, rock me all night long! But of all the things Curtis did for Mama, the best he ever did was getting her some brand new teeth
For as long as I’d known Mama, she never had any front teeth. Aunt Vanessa told me that when I was a little baby, my daddy had balled up his fists and knocked Mama’s teeth right out her mouth. “That’s when your uncle chased him off with a shotgun,” Aunt Vanessa said. Mama told me my father was a “no-good downtown clown” who never did anything for her except beat her ass and treat her like dirt.
Curtis was Mama’s chance to do things right.
The day Curtis brought Mama home from the dentist, all us kids gathered in the kitchen to stare at Mama’s mouth. She rested her elbows on the table in front of her and put her hands up to her face, fanning out her fingers and smiling wide.
“Oooooweeeee!” said Jeffro. “Mama got her front door fixed.”
“How I look?” she asked, excited. Then she answered her own question. “I look good!”
Actually, she looked crazy. Those dentures were too big for her face. Mama looked like she was wearing a set of donkey teeth. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to tell her she got the wrong size teeth. “Took Curtis six months to pay off the dentist!” she exclaimed. “Six months!”
She turned to Curtis: “You got a sister looking just like Diana Ross. I’m finna go down to the Grey and White and smile at all the mens!” She let out a giant laugh. That’s when her donkey teeth slid out of her mouth and fell on the table. “Oh!” she said, scooping them up and sticking them back in. “Guess I just gotta get used to them.”
Too bad for Mama, those dentures weren’t as easy to get used to as she thought. She’d wear them for a few hours and then they’d start to hurt, so she’d take them out to rest her mouth. I’d find them on the kitchen counter, or on top of the TV. Once, after they’d been missing for days, I found them in the back of the freezer. Still, Mama loved those teeth. She said they made her feel as sharp as Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless. I didn’t see the similarity, unless you count the fact that the two of them were both drunks. Katherine Chancellor sipped her liquor out of crystal glasses; Mama sucked her gin straight from the bottle.
As much as Mama liked her new look, something changed not long after she got her new teeth. It was like a switch flipped, and Mama got it in her head that the only reason Curtis was being nice to her was because he was up to no good. Suddenly she was angry all the time.
Curtis would come home from work, and she would meet him at the door with her hand on her hip and start interrogating him like she already knew he was guilty: “Where you been all day, Curtis? You think I don’t know what you up to?”
He’d look at her, confused. “I been at work, and you know that.”
But Mama wouldn’t let it go. The drunker she was, the worse it got.
Curtis came home one day looking dog tired and stinking of sweat and motor oil. Mama followed him into the bedroom, a half-empty pint of gin in one hand and a Winston hanging from her mouth.
“Where you been, you short-ass grease monkey?” she demanded. I noticed she was gripping the doorframe to steady herself. That was never a good sign. “I said, Where you muthafuckin’ been?”
Curtis sat down on the edge of the bed to pull off his work boots. He didn’t even look up. “Mildred, you know where I been,” he said wearily.
“Oh, I know where you been all right!” She pointed a finger at his chest. “Out fucking some hos!”
“No, Mildred. The only place I been is at the Grey and White. I put in a transmission, took me all gotdamn day.”
“You a muthafuckin’ lie!” Mama shrieked. “You ain’t nothin’ but a low-down sawed-off little nigga!”
It was hard not to feel sorry for Curtis. Even though he’d spent eight years in the military and could probably kill a man if he had to, he was the quiet type. Most times he didn’t even make a sound when he laughed. The only way you could tell he thought something was funny was by his shoulders shaking up and down. It was like his number one mission in life was not to get noticed. But Mama wouldn’t get out of his face.
“You gonna hit me, Curtis?” Mama hollered. “That what you gonna do? Try me, nigga! Just try me!”
Mama’s veins were popping out of her neck. Curtis looked up at her and let out a loud sigh. It was the kind of sigh that said, How the hell did I end up with this crazy-ass bitch? Then he lay back on the bed and pulled a pillow over his face. That’s what really set her off.
“Oh, hell nah!” she screamed. “Hell to the muthafuckin’ nah!”