“Joseph,” Maggie says, and she frowns at him and pushes his shoulder.
Big Joseph makes a sound in his throat and sways again, but then I realize Maggie is the wind. Big Joseph looks at me like he wants that gun across his lap, but he steps out of the doorway. They’ve talked about this: I can tell by the way Maggie said his name, the way a woman says the name of a man that she has long lived with, long loved. The way she says his name is enough. I know they have spoken about me, about Jojo, about Michaela. Maggie pushes open the screen door. She doesn’t say come in or welcome, just stands there, turned sideways. When I walk past her, she smells like lotion and soap and smoke, but not cigarette smoke: like fallen burnt oak leaves. She has Michael’s face. I startle when I walk past because it’s so strange to see his face on a woman: narrow jaw, strong nose, but the eyes are all wrong, hard as green marbles. In the house, we stand in a cluster, shying away from the furniture: a herd of nervous animals. Big Joseph and Maggie stand side by side, touching but not. She’s taller than the pictures, and he’s shorter.
“You going to introduce us?” Maggie’s looking at Michael when she says it and he nods his head, just barely: a wink of a nod.
“Yes, ma’am. This—”
“Jojo,” Jojo says. He hoists Michaela. “Kayla.” She looks at Maggie with her beautiful green eyes, and then I realize those are Maggie’s eyes, too, and I squeeze Michael’s hand, and my children seem strangers. Michaela a golden, clinging toddler, the tilt of her head and those clear eyes direct and merciless as an adult’s. And Jojo, tall as Michael, almost tall as Big Joseph, shoulders back, the line of his back a metal fence post. I have never seen him look so much like Pop as he does right now.
“Nice to meet you,” Maggie says, but she does not smile when she says it.
Jojo doesn’t even nod. Just looks at her and shifts Michaela to his other hip. Big Joseph shakes his head.
“I’m your grandmother,” she says.
There is a large wall clock in the kitchen, and the minute hand ticking its way around the face sounds loud in the uncomfortable silence, so loud I begin counting the seconds. My fingers squeeze tighter and tighter around Michael’s as his turn lax as he looks from his mother to his father, frowning. Jojo shrugs, and Michaela sticks her middle two fingers in her mouth and sucks hard. The house smells like lemon cleaner and fried potatoes.
Big Joseph falls into an armchair and wrenches it to the television.
“Figured they’d be rude,” he says.
“Daddy,” Michael says.
“Won’t even say hello to your mother.”
“They’re shy,” Michael says.
“It’s all right,” Maggie says. She bites the words short.
I must be sweating it out. A fire in my chest licks along my breasts. There’s rock in my stomach, at the base of the fire. I squeeze my legs. I don’t know whether I want to throw up or pee.
“Say hello,” I croak.
Jojo looks at me: mutinous. The corner of his mouth, frowning; his eyes almost closed. He bounces Michaela and steps backward toward the door. I don’t know why I said it. Michaela looks at me as if she has not heard; if nobody knew better, they’d think she was deaf.
“Raised by her, what you’d expect, Maggie?”
“Joseph,” Maggie says.
I would throw up everything. All of it out: food and bile and stomach and intestines and esophagus, organs all, bones and muscle, until all that was left was skin. And then maybe that could turn inside out, and I wouldn’t be nothing no more. Not this skin, not this body. Maybe Michael could step on my heart, stop its beating. Then burn everything to cinders.
“Hell, they half of her. Part of that boy Riv, too. All bad blood. Fuck the skin.” His voice is so high by the end of it that I can hardly hear him over the television, over an enthusiastic car salesman whose prices are miraculously dropping. Maggie’s mouth is a seam. Her hands worrying one another, and suddenly I hate her because she can walk and my mama can’t. And then I hate Joseph because he’s called my daddy a boy. I wonder what he knows of my daddy, how he could look at Pop and see every line of Pop’s face, every step Pop takes, every word out of Pop’s mouth, and see anything but a man. Pop’s at least twenty years older than Big Joseph; he was a grown man when Big Joseph was pissing his diapers. So how can Big Joseph see Pop, see how stonelike he is, like Pop’s taken all the hardship of the world into him and let it calcify him inch by inch till he’s like one of them petrified trees, and see anything but a man? Pop would whip his ass. And I can see Big Joseph in my mind’s eye, standing over Given, breathing down on him like he’s so much roadkill, how he would ignore the perfection of him: the long bow-drawing arm, the high forehead over the dead eyes.
“Goddamnit, Daddy!” Michael says.
Quick as he fell into the chair, Big Joseph is up, walking toward us but facing Michael.
“I told you they don’t belong here. Told you never to sleep with no nigger bitch!”
Michael head-butts Big Joseph. The crack of their skulls ricochets through the air, and Big Joseph’s nose is gushing blood, and then him and Michael are on the floor, but Michael isn’t punching him. They’re pushing against each other, each trying to pin the other down, rolling like children. Breathing hard. Sweating. Maybe crying. Michael saying over and over: “Goddamnit, Daddy, goddamnit, Daddy,” and Big Joseph saying nothing but wheezing so hard it sounds like sobbing.