Boyfriend love is the light on a bug’s back end, flicking on and off across a lawn. It begins with lies and kissing. It devolves into fighting and boredom. It ends with hasty packing and sometimes robbery. It is easily replaced by fresher love.
Me and Kai were always more than that. Me and Kai have been a single unit, made out of only us. I liked it fine, until Asheville. I had a life there, separate from hers, the way she had a separate life with Hervé. When Hervé called me a little shit, my heart sank because I knew his days were numbered. Within a month, it had cost him his girlfriend, his pill stash, his old Mazda, and all the cash in the house.
Here, Kai has us, and she also has Dwayne. I have us, and a school where I am Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. I get that we’ve burned Asheville, but I can’t stay here, in this place. I told her so. I tried, at least, but all she did was tell me a Ganesha tale. Now I am sick with waiting. My body is a twisted ball of rubber bands, each pulled tight and straining against the others. The deer that might not be a deer moves in the kudzu, and he has friends now. I sense them more than see them, a gathering of motion in the darkened woods around us.
“There’s a—” Kai pauses, mid-song. “I forget what’s on the frog.”
“Wart!” says Dwayne, cheerful and definitive and dead wrong.
Kai shakes her head no at him and looks to me. “What’s on the frog?”
It’s a fly. But I stay silent, hunched up, sitting as stiff as a person can sit in a saggy beanbag chair. I peer into the darkness, seeking movement in the kudzu. Wind or deer or my deliverance?
“Wart! Wart! Warrrrrr!” Dwayne barks, wolf style, losing the final t on the end howl. He’s been drinking room-temp beer all afternoon, and he didn’t eat any of the hot dogs.
“Okay, weirdo,” Kai says, laughing, and starts up again, giving a wart the fly’s rightful place in the order of things. She leans her head back as she sings, and her deadfall of dark hair spills over the tall arm of the sofa. I stop studying the kudzu to look at her. Her body is a ribbon made of elegant muscle, small breasted, with a richly curved back end. Her bare legs stretch and flex across Dwayne’s lap, the skin as pale and smooth as porcelain.
I slump lower. I am shaggy-headed and squashy. Fatty-Fatty Ass-Fat. I take my globby stomach in my hands and squeeze. Kai sees me doing it as she finishes the verse. She sets the mandolin aside and smiles and sighs at the same time.
“Quit worrying at your puppy tummy. I had one exactly like it when I was your age. Very soon, you’re going to use that tum to make yourself some cute little boobies and a girl butt. You’ll like that puppy fat, as soon as it moves to the right places.” I scowl and let go of my gut, wrapping my arms around it instead. She’s clued in I’m unhappy, but she has the reason wrong. She didn’t listen. “Oh, the puppy’s mad because I talked about it getting boobies!” Kai says. She stands and holds her arms out to me. “Come here, Puppy-puppy.”
Her smile is stoned and kind and warm. Maybe the weaving motion in the kudzu is only deer. With my pretty mother smiling at me, holding out her hands, I want it to be deer. Mostly.
I go to her, and she tucks me close, enveloping me in her familiar scent, but the tension wrapping my bones does not uncoil. I keep my shoulders hunched against her hug, keep my arms wrapped around my own soft middle. I told her not to send me back. I told her.
She feels the stiffness in my body and drops a kiss onto my hair. “Grumpy puppy. There’s fun parts to growing older. Come inside and pick a color, and I’ll paint you on some grown-up lady toes, for practice.” She starts to sing again as we stand up, but not the campfire song. “Jai Kali, Jai Kalika!” Her smoky voice, singing my old baby name, is warm and sweet against my ear.
Here in the West, Kai has told me many times, we think of Kali as a dark goddess. But the name I gave you—Kali Jai—it literally means “Hail to the Mother.”
I let her tow me toward the door as she sings my theme song in her fat, low voice, and it occurs to me that even if I discount the blue skin and the long red tongue, the skirt of human hands and all the weaponry, it’s still a strange damn name to give your baby. Hail to the Mother?
Kai is the mother. The translation of my given name is actually something close to “Yay for Kai.”
I glance over my shoulder as Kai fumbles open the back door. The deer in the kudzu have wound themselves all the way around us. The movement in the leaves is now enough to draw Dwayne’s attention.
“Hey, hush there a sec, babe,” he says. He is too late.