“Where you at, boy?”
It sounds like a caress, like Pop’s singing it.
*
“Michael’s getting out tomorrow.”
Mama pushes her palms down on the bed, shrugs her shoulders, and tries to raise her hips. She grimaces.
“He is, now?” Her voice is soft. Barely a breath.
“Yeah.”
She lets herself fall back against the bed again.
“Where’s your pop?”
“Out back with Jojo.”
“I need him.”
“I got to go to the store. I’ll get him on my way out.”
Mama scratches her scalp and lets out a breath. Her eyes close to seams.
“Who going get Michael?”
“Me.”
“And who else?”
“The kids.”
She’s looking at me again. I wish I could feel that sizzling lick, but I’ve come all the way down, and I’m left with a nothing feeling. Hollow and dry. Bereft.
“Your friend ain’t going with you?”
She’s talking about Misty. Our men are in the same penitentiary, so we ride up around once every four months. I hadn’t even thought to ask.
“I ain’t asked her.”
Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways: Mama’s feet look like water balloons set to burst under the cover.
“You should.”
I think Mama’s trying to roll on her side, because I can see the strain in her, but in the end all she does is roll her head to the side and look at the wall.
“Turn on the fan,” she says, so I scoot Pop’s chair back, and I switch on the box fan propped in the window. The air ululates through the room, and Mama turns back to face me.
“You wondering . . . ,” she says, and stops. Her lips thin. That’s the place I see it most. Her lips, which were always so full and soft, especially when I was a girl, when she kissed my temple. My elbow. My hand. Even sometimes, after I had a bath, my toes. Now they’re nothing but differently colored skin in the sunken topography of her face.
“. . . why I ain’t fussing.”
“A little,” I say. She’s looking at her toes.
“Pop stubborn. You stubborn.”
Her breath stutters, and I realize it’s a laugh. A weak laugh.
“Y’all always going to fuss,” she says.
She closes her eyes again. Her hair is so threadbare, I can see her scalp: pale and blue-veined, hollowed and dimpled, imperfect as a potter’s bowl.
“You full grown now,” she says.
I sit, cross my arms. It makes my breasts stick out a little. I remember the horror of them coming in, budding like little rocks, when I was ten. How those fleshy knots felt like a betrayal. Like someone had lied to me about what life would be. Like Mama hadn’t told me that I would grow up. Grow into her body. Grow into her.
“You love who you love. You do what you want.”
Mama looks at me, only her eyes looking full in that moment, round as they ever were, almost hazel if I lean in close enough, water gathering at the edges. The only thing time hasn’t eaten.
“You going to go,” she says.
I know it now. I know my mother is following Given, the son who came too late and left too early. I know that my mother is dying.
*
Given played football with single-minded purpose his senior year, the fall before he died. Recruiters from local community and state colleges came every weekend to see his games. He was tall and well muscled, and his feet didn’t touch the ground once he got the pigskin in his hand. Even though he was serious about football, he was still social when he wasn’t at practice or on the field. Once he told Pop his teammates, White and Black, were like brothers to him. That it was like the team went to war every Friday night, came together and became something more, something greater than themselves. Pop looked down at his shoes and spat a brown stream in the dirt. Given said he was going up to the Kill to party with his White teammates, and Pop cautioned him against it: They look at you and see difference, son. Don’t matter what you see. It’s about what they do, Pop had said, and then spit the whole mess of chew out. Given had rolled his eyes, leaned into the hood of the ’77 Nova they were fixing up for him to drive, and said: All right, Pop. Looked up at me and winked. I was just grateful Pop hadn’t sent me inside, glad I could hand them tools and fetch them water and watch them work because I didn’t want to go in the house just in case Mama decided to give me one of her plant lessons. Herbs and medicine, she’d told me when I turned seven, I can teach you. I was hoping somebody, Big Henry or one of the twins, would walk down the street, emerge whole out of the green, so we’d have somebody else to talk to.