Slow Way Home (27 page)

After lunch at a cafeteria with chandeliers, Kane and me sat on the bench next to the fountain dotted with good luck pennies. We could see Mama inside the store filing through the clothes on the rack. Kane kept making faces at her until she finally stuck her tongue out, and we laughed.

He leaned back and rubbed my head until the last bit of laughter was released. “You know, we’re a family so I need to come clean about something. Yesterday you asked about my parents. Well, the truth is I hadn’t talked to them in a while.”

“They’re dead?”

“Just in my mind. They’ve got money and everything. You know, always thought I should act and do things they wanted me to. I was never much for school. Not smart like you.” Kane turned to look at me directly in the eyes. “Yeah, school’s important. You keep on making good grades. But it just wasn’t my thing. For a while I kept up with my mom. But then she didn’t like . . . she didn’t like some of the people I was messing with.”

Striding out of Sears, she swung her blonde hair as if to tell the world she was on the premises. They gripped bags in both hands and laughed real loud. With each step they came closer to the fountain.

The pug nose and frosted hair gave her away. It really was Aunt Loraine. Mary Madonna was looking up at her, talking and flapping her wrist around all at the same time. The once soothing fountain roared like a waterfall, and Kane’s words of a lost home clapped in thunder. If they walked by and heard him, they would forever write Kane off as the same trash that his mama and daddy thought he was.

Leaning down like Kane, I tucked my head and even tapped the tips
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of my fingers together. Maybe they would think that I was some little man. A midget talking to another old man about the weather and how women spent too much money on shopping.

The bags they carried ruffled against the legs of the people they passed. Aunt Loraine’s perfume of wildflowers drifted ahead of them as a warning scent. I tucked my head lower until it must have seemed that I had dropped something under the bench. The taps of their shoes were as loud as the marching of a thousand troops. A giggle, light and airy like the way Mary Madonna used to laugh whenever we ran through the woods, tempted me to look up.

“What you finding under there? Somebody drop some money or something?”

I ignored Kane and kept staring at a lipstick-scarred cigarette butt resting at the foot of the bench.

“Hey, what is it man?”

When I slowly looked up, a woman with white pants so tight you could see the outline of her underwear was standing in front of us. She was staring at the mannequin in the store window across from us.

Staring as if nothing at all had happened. Then the water from the small fountain behind us began to soften and the voices of the crowd grew lighter. “I just thought I saw something . . . something I lost.”

In the distance, Mary Madonna’s hair swung to the rhythm of the shopping bag that Aunt Loraine carried. I watched them grow farther away until they opened the big glass door and disappeared into the parking lot.

Sixteen

“A
ll your ass does is sit around talking about work.

Work, work, work. I get so sick and tired of hearing about that shit,” Mama said. She reached for a pack of cigarettes just as Kane tried to squeeze her shoulder.

Tony straddled the kitchen chair and used his index fingers to play a drumbeat on the table. “Quit your bitching, Sophie. Today we grow from two trucks to three. Hey, we’re a monopoly.”

Kane tried to laugh and looked at Tony and then at Mama. She rolled her eyes and stormed off towards the front door.

I tried to block it and pointed to the TV. “Remember tonight’s when Miss Kitty gets kidnapped on
Gunsmoke
.”

“Brandon, not now, okay. I just gotta breathe.”

The red tip of her cigarette led her like a tiny torch down to the duplex six doors away. Every time Mama went over to Cheyenne’s, she would come back laughing all night. Wacky weed is what Kane called it. One time I saw them sucking up smoke inside a long tube that looked like a gun barrel the pilgrims used to carry. The first time I asked her about it, she said it was genuine medicine that people used to help them calm down. That was when I got nervous. Anything that helped settle nerves always ended up making Mama worse.

Sitting in front of the TV, I first tried to ignore the conversation Kane and Tony were having. But when the screen kept showing the
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jail with the keys to the cells hanging on an iron ring, I soon lost interest. No matter how many times I turned to look away, the vision of Poppy and Nana standing behind those black bars confronted me.

Soon even loudmouth Tony was more appealing than the show.

“Man, we can do this, I’m telling you,” Tony said. He took a long drag off of his cigarette and blew smoke over Kane’s head. “We got the business. See, we get this truck and we’ll be playing with the big boys. No more bullshit stuff.”

Kane nodded and kept flipping through the bank papers. “If we get the loan.”

“Man, please. You said your brother told you he’d help. We’re set.

Now’s the time to hit him up.”

“I don’t know,” Kane said.

“What’s to know? He told you he’d help. Go ask him to co-sign.”

Tony took another drag and stared at Kane without even blinking.

Two commercials ran before either one of them spoke. Kane kept flipping through the papers like he might find the answer buried deep inside the loan application.

The day school let out for Christmas break, Mama came to pick me up with a Christmas tree tied to the top of the car. When she jumped out in her green uniform skirt, silver hair bow, and go-go boots, I felt proud. That moment, she looked just as good as the other mothers who circled the driveway to the school. Even the principal turned and looked.

As we drove away, I watched everyone stare as if we were secret agents. “How’d you get this tree on top of the car all by yourself?”

“Shug, when you got legs like mine, you can manage to get a man to do most anything. Besides, that little slow boy, you know the one who bags groceries, he’s always wanting to help.”

Her burst of energy did not end in the car. She ran around the duplex tossing silver strings like confetti. Icicles draped every piece of furniture we had, even the lamp and TV. There was a childlike innocence 194

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in the way she slung the strings in the air, and soon even I was tossing them at the tree. “Rock Around the Christmas Tree” blared from the speakers, and we both laughed when Mama hung icicles on the end of her silver hair bow.

She ripped open a new box of balls and handed me one to hang on the tree. “Hey, what about the lights?” I asked.

“You’re always worrying about details,” Mama said. “Let’s just be free.”

She reached inside a grocery bag and pulled out carvings for a na-tivity scene. “I got these down at the flea market. The man gave me these manger ornaments for only ten cents each.” She held the tip of Mary and tried to wipe away a black stain from the figurine’s face.

The past that I was trying hard to forget appeared as easy as the smudge on the Virgin Mary’s face. Various colored wise men lined up on the coffee table and could have just as well been at home on the roadside stand in front of Mama Rose’s house back in Abbeville.

Pulling ornaments out of the shopping bag, I saw a box of cards tucked in the very bottom. Mama was still dancing with icicles clinging to her miniskirt. Her smile was warm and inviting, just like the smiles of all the other mothers at school. I held up the box and approached her. “You got cards too.”

She never looked away from the tree and laughed. “We’re gonna do it up right this year.”

“Can I send some out?”

“Okay, go on over there and start working on your little cards. I’m gonna have this tree so covered in icicles that you’re gonna think you’re in the North Pole.”

Stacks of mail and icicles covered the dinette table. In my best penmanship I carefully wrote a happy note to Nana and Poppy. The beginning of the last line, “I want you to be home real fast,” was scratched out and rewritten. “We want you to be home real fast.”

Whether she knew it or not, I decided that Mama needed them too, but just hadn’t figured it out yet.

Addressing the envelope was the hard part, and in all the excite-Slow Way Home

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ment of tree decorating I let my guard down. “What prison is Poppy and Nana in?”

The happy music continued to fill the room, but the holiday spirit was sucked away. Mama stood with her back to me, holding an ornament. “Why?”

Trying to ignore her, I started working on the second card, a safe card, one to my teacher, Mrs. Joplin.

“Why, Brandon?”

Slipping down lower in the seat, I felt my heart begin to rev up.

“I just thought I . . . uhh . . . we . . . could, you know, send them a card.”

The sound of the ornament slamming into the wall caused me to sink lower. Pieces of red glass rested on the floor like a shattered eggshell. “Nothing’s ever good enough for you. I bust my ass trying to get to the store and make this a special Christmas and you don’t appreciate it.”

“Mama, I do.”

“No, you don’t neither. All you want to do is sit there and think how much better life would be without me. Stuck off God knows where in some dumpy camper. They probably wouldn’t even had room for a Christmas tree.” She paced circles around the tree, snatch-ing off icicles and ornaments. “Just forget the whole damn thing.”

I pulled at her sleeve, but she jerked away.

“No matter how hard I try, nothing is ever good enough for you.

Working my ass off to please you, but all you want is to be with them.

You hate my guts. No matter what I do that’ll never change. I’m just not gonna put up with this shit.”

Trying to wrap my arms around her back, I yelled the words as loud as I could. “Mama, I love you. I do. Really.”

“No, you don’t. Don’t nobody love me. You’re just like the rest.

I’m better off to just leave this place and never come back.”

Her words stung worse than the needles on the tree, and the reflex caused me to kneel and beg. The slick vinyl of her boot slipped through my hands, and the bedroom door slammed.

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The shag carpet brushed against my face. Lying on the floor, I looked down the hall and saw the gap between my Mama’s bedroom door and heard her cries. There were pieces of her behind that door that I wanted to fix, but could never reach. Instead, I tried to clean up what was right in front of me.

Carefully, I put the pieces of the broken Christmas ball into the dustpan. The icicles were returned to their proper places on the tree.

When I couldn’t reach any higher, I pulled the dinette chair over and stood on it. Eye to eye with the golden-winged angel, I wished that God would make me one too. An angel who could fly off with Jesus.

Maybe that was why He had come to see me to start with.

When Mama came out of the bedroom, her head was tucked and her makeup smeared in circles making her look like a spotted puppy.

The words were slow, as if she were learning a new language. “Do you love me?”

It was my cue, and before I knew it my arms were back wrapped around her waist. “Mama, please don’t go. I love you. Really now.”

She halfway laughed and squeezed me extra hard. Then with the back of her hands, she smeared the makeup even worse. Sifting through the stack of eight-tracks, she stuck one into the stereo. Al Green’s voice drifted across the room and she smiled again. Words from “Let’s Stay Together” rose out from the speakers, and she waved her arms as if to welcome them in. With eyes closed, my mama mouthed the words like ointment was being applied to the scorches on her soul. Then right in the middle of the icicles that still littered the floor she reached for my hand. “It’s about time your mama teaches you how to dance.”

Even through the black smudges, her eyes were the color of blue snow cones. They glistened in a way that drew me closer until her breath was warm against the top of my head. Her hand was sticky as she placed her fingers in mine. I stood on the tip of her boots, and she led me in circles until I laughed again. She spun us around until the Christmas tree became a blur of silvery green. We just laughed and laughed until the past had spun away for good.

Seventeen

T
he day after Christmas, Kane showed me the gift that would change everything. We stood outside the duplex next to the hot-water heater. Cold breezes clawed across our faces as Kane pulled the gold box from his coat pocket. Against the sun, the tiny diamond sparkled like a sliver of a star.

“You think she’ll like it?” Kane asked.

All I could do was stare. The only other time a man had given Mama a diamond ring, it turned out to be a fake. It was from Roger, the husband who worked construction and raced stock cars. After their first fight, Mama had tried to scrape it down his car window to see if it was real and ended up with buckle scrapes down her back.

“It looks like we’re going to have a double celebration New Year’s Eve,” Kane said. “Christening the new truck Tony and me got and giving Sophie this ring. I can tell this is going to be a good one.”

The day the new van appeared all white and shiny with black lettering that read K. T. Electronics was the same day Tony handed Kane a new work schedule. Jobs piled up and so did Kane’s hours. He would come home late and often leave before Mama had gotten up in the morning. Whenever Mama would complain, Kane would only mumble about having more bills to pay.

New Year’s Eve was the big day, and just as Kane was moving the furniture out of the living room to make room for a dance floor, the 198

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phone rang. A man down in the rich section of town said his TV was on the blink. The man told Kane that Guy Lombardo was a tradition with his wife and that if Kane would come fix it on a holiday, there would be more work down the road.