“I can’t help you with that. No one can.” He flopped into a lanky heap of string on the wingback chair. “But I could say you a poem? I’ve been working on one for you, for this exact occasion.”
“No, thank you,” I said primly.
“It’s really good,” Walcott said. He cleared his throat, putting on a faux beat-poet reading voice, really boomy and pretentious. “Alas! The Jew of Lumpkin County, exiled once more. Like Moses—”
“Poem me no poems, Walcott. I know what you use those things for.” Before he got hooked up kinda serious with CeeCee, his signature move was to quote hot lines from John Donne or Shakespeare to mildly drunken girls in the Math Department.
“They work, though,” he said. “I used to get a lot of play, for a skinny English major with a big nose.”
“Bah! It’s a noble nose.”
“It’s overnoble. It’s noble plus plus. Lucky for me, chicks dig iambic pentameter. But this poem? It’s not for seduction. It’s free verse and quite brilliant. You wander forty days and forty nights in Piedmont Park, following the smoke from a crack pipe by day and a flaming tranny hooker in the night.”
“You’re a goof,” I said, but as always, he’d made me feel better. “Stop it. I have to pacify The Mimmy. Maybe we could crawl to the kitchen with fruit? Throw a virgin into her volcano?”
“Now where are you and I going to find a virgin?” he asked, droll.
I started for the kitchen, then paused under the painting. The new Jesus, with his salon-fresh highlights, had those kind of Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to track after me.
Walcott followed my gaze, craning his head back to look. “Holy crap! Where is Praying Hands Jesus?”
I shrugged. “I know, right?”
“Shandi, that’s your mother in a beard.”
“Yeah. Super unnerving. I don’t expect Jesus to be that . . .”
“Hot,” Walcott said, but he was looking toward the kitchen now, where my mom was. I scooped up one of Natty’s stuffies from the closest laundry basket and chucked it at him. He caught it, laughing. “Aw, don’t throw Yellow Friend!” He tucked this most important blue patchwork rabbit gently back in Natty’s things. “I know she’s your mom. But come on.”
I couldn’t blame him. My mother was forty-four, but she looked ten years younger, and she was nowhere near ready to recover from being beautiful. If I’d been born with a lush mouth and crazy-razor cheekbones, instead of round-faced and regulation cute, I’m not sure I’d recover, either.
“Lunch,” Mimmy called, and we went through to the kitchen table. Natty was there already, perched in the booster so his nose cleared the surface of the high wooden table. Most of his face was hidden by his Big Book of Bugs, but I could tell the move was worrying him. All his Matchbox police and EMS vehicles were lined up in front of his plate, and he had big chunks of three of his bravest costumes on: fireman’s yellow slicker, astronaut’s white jumpsuit, airplane pilot’s hat.
“Goodness, Captain Space Fireman, have you seen my kid?”
Natty said, “I am me.”
Walcott said, “Weird. How did a Pilot Space Fireman turn into a Natty Bumppo?”
My tiny literalist lowered the thick volume to give Walcott a grave stare. “These are costumes, Walcott. I was me the whole time.”
I took the seat by him and said, “Oh good, because you are my favorite.”
Walcott sat down across from me.
“Mimmy made cobbler,” Natty told me in his solemn Natty voice.
I nodded, taking it very seriously. “Excellent.”
“Mimmy says I must eat peas,” Natty said next, same tone, but I could tell he believed this to be an injustice.
“Mimmy is very right,” I said.
All our plates were filled and sitting centered on the tatted lace mats. My mother took her place at the head of the table, and we all bowed our heads.
Looking down at my plate while my mother had a cozy premeal chat with Jesus, I realized I’d clocked her mood wrong. She wasn’t sad or wrecked. She’d made chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and peas and fresh biscuits, then swamped the plate in her velvety-fat gravy.
She only cooked for me like this when she was furious. She thought the meanest thing you could do to a woman was to give her a fudge basket; she lived on green salad and broiled chicken, and Mimmy would have still fit into her wedding dress if she hadn’t set it on fire in the middle of the living room when I was Natty’s age. Then she packed me up and moved back here, where she’d grown up.
My angry mother prayed a litany of thanks for food and health and family and put in a word for the Bulldogs approaching fall season. She didn’t go off-book, didn’t exhort the Lord to bring her wayward daughter to a better understanding of His will. In the past, God’s will had so often matched up exactly with my mother’s that she found it worth mentioning. But she closed after the football with a sweet “Amen,” and I upgraded her from merely furious to livid.
Natty amen-ed and then started zooming one of his cop cars back and forth. Walcott dug in, moaning with pleasure at the first bite. He’d eat everything on his plate and then probably finish mine, and I had no idea where it would go. He was six feet tall and built like a Twizzler.
“Eat up, baby,” I told Natty.
“I will. I have to consider the peas,” he said, and I grinned at his little-old-man vocabulary.
My mother had served herself a big old portion as well, and she whacked off a huge bite of fried meat and swabbed it through the potatoes, then put the whole thing directly into her mouth. My eyes widened. I think the last time my mother ate a starch was three years back, when Dad paid my tuition at GSU in full.
I always knew he would, but Mimmy worried he’d cut me off once court-ordered child support for me ended. I wasn’t eligible for most scholarships, even though I’d been an honor student in high school. I’d spent my senior year at home, baking Natty and studying for the GED. When Dad’s check came, she’d gone to the ancient box of Girl Scout Thin Mints in the freezer and had two, which was for her a caloric orgy. She’d purchased those cookies at least four years ago, and she hadn’t so much as worked her way into the second sleeve.
Now she sat quiet, chewing what had to be the best bite to enter her mouth this decade, but it was like she wasn’t even tasting it. She tried to swallow, then stopped. Her face changed and cracked, like she’d been told she was eating the thigh meat of her dearest friend. She spat the wad into a napkin and stood abruptly, chair scraping against the old hardwood floor.
Natty kept right on zooming his cop car across the tabletop, but I saw his eyes cut after her as she hurried from the room.
“Mimmy is fine,” I said to him.
“Mimmy is fine,” Natty repeated, zooming his car back and forth to a mournful inner rhythm. “It’s only because we are going far away for all eternity.”
I was already getting up to go talk to my mother, but I paused. “Natty! We aren’t going far, and we can visit anytime we like.”
Natty said, “Not far, we can visit,” with absolutely no conviction.
“It’s going to be fun, living in Atlanta. We’ll get to hang with Walcott tons once school starts, and you can go to preschool and make nice friends.” I met Walcott’s eyes across the table, because he knew all my reasons for moving. Up where we lived, everyone knew about Natty’s geniushood, probably mere seconds after I did. It had reopened all the worm-can speculation about who Natty’s dad might be. Natty, who picked up on so much more than your average three-year-old, was starting to ask questions. Up until this year, his baby understanding of biology had allowed me to tell him the simplest truth: He didn’t have one.
How do you explain to a preschooler, even one as bright as Natty, that his mother was a virgin until a solid year after he was born? A virgin in every sense, because when I finally di
d have sex, I learned my hymen had survived the C-section. How could I tell my son that his existence was the only miracle I’d ever believed in?
If neighbors or acquaintances were pushy enough to ask, I told them the dad was “None O’YourBeeswax,” that randy Irish fellow who had fathered a host of babies all across the country. But I owed Natty more than that. Maybe a good made-up story? Something about star-crossed true love, probably war, a convenient death. I hadn’t made it up yet, mostly because I didn’t want to lie to him. And yet the truth was so impossible.
Telling the truth also meant that I’d have to explain how sex worked normally, while Natty was still quite happy with “A daddy gives a sperm and a mommy gives an egg, and bingo-bango-bongo, it makes a baby.” He wasn’t interested in exactly how the sperm and egg would meet. Much less how they might meet inside a girl before she’d ever once gone past second base.
But Natty had an entirely different question for me. “Is Mimmy going to die?”
“No!” I said. “Where did you get that idea?”
“I heard her tell the phone that she would die, just die, just die when we are gone,” Natty said. I could hear my mother’s inflections coming out of him on the die, just die, just die parts.
“Mimmy will outlive us all,” I said and added sotto voce to Walcott, “If I don’t kill her.”
Walcott made a smile for Natty and said, “Yup. Mimmy will outlive every single one of us and look hot at our funerals.”
“We’ll come back and visit Mimmy lots, and she won’t die,” I said, shooting Walcott a quelling look. “Let me go get her, and she can tell you herself.”
I left Natty with Walcott, who, saint that he was, was asking if Natty would like to hear a dramatic recitation of a poem called “Jabberwocky.”
I went back to my mother’s amber-rose confection of a bedroom. I’d done it as part of my portfolio to get in GSU’s competitive interior design program. It was ultrafeminine without being fluffy, and the faint blush of pink in the eggshell walls suited her coloring. She sat in it like a jewel in its proper setting, but just now, she was in a mood much too heavy for the delicate curtains.
“Not cool, Mims,” I said. “Not cool at all. You need to rein it in.”
I had more to say, but as she turned to me, her mouth crumpled up and fat tears began falling out of her eyes. She lunged at me and hugged me. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!”
I patted at her, thoroughly disarmed, and said, “Momma . . .” My own name for her, now mostly replaced by Natty’s.
“That was completely out of line, in front of Nathan. Completely.” She spoke in a vehement whisper, tears splashing down. “I’m an awful thing. Just slimy with pure awful, but, oh, Shandi, I can hardly bear it. He’ll forget his Mimmy and be all cozied up and close with that man, that man, that dreadful man! Worse, he’ll forget who he is!”
I breathed through the dig at Dad and said, “He won’t. I won’t let him.”
We sank down to sit together on the bed, her hands still clutching my arms. She firmed her chin at me bravely.
“I want you to put something in the condo, Shandi,” She waved one hand past me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw her favorite picture, from last summer at Myrtle Beach. It showed Mimmy hand in hand with two-year-old Natty, the ocean swirling up around their ankles. She’d blown it up to a nine-by-fourteen, framed it, and hung it in her room. Now it was perched on her bedside table, leaning against the wall. “I want him to remember me. More than that. I want Nathan to never, never forget for a second who he is.”
“Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how Dad would feel about me hanging a big-ass picture of his ex-wife rocking a red bikini. I was positive how Bethany would feel. “I can probably do that.”
“No. No ‘probably.’ Say you will,” my mother said.
I sighed, but Natty had never spent more than a weekend away from Mimmy. He might need the picture. I could hang it in Natty’s room so Dad wouldn’t have to look at it. And Bethany never came south of the rich people’s mall in Buckhead. If she did drop by for some unfathomable reason, I could stuff it under the bed.
“Fine. I’ll hang it.”
Mimmy shook her head, fierce. “I need you to swear. Swear by something you hold absolutely holy that you will hang that at the condo, no matter what.” Her fingers dug into my arms.
I thought for a second. I’d grown up between religions, at the center of a culture war, each side snipping away at the other’s icons until I was numb to much of it. There were not many things I held as holy.
Finally, I said, “I swear on the grave of my good dog Boscoe, and all the parts of Walcott, and—I won’t swear anything on Natty proper, but I could maybe swear this on his eyelashes. Those are the holiest things I know.”
My mother smiled, instantly glorious, her big eyes shiny from the tears and her nose unswollen. She even cried pretty.
“Good,” she said. “Good.”
She stood and dusted her hands off and stretched, then walked past me to the bedside table. I pivoted to watch, but she didn’t pick up the beach picture. Instead, she reached past it, to a much larger rectangle, wrapped and ready to go in brown butcher paper. It was behind the table, but it was tall enough to have been visible.
“I already wrapped Him up.”
I knew what the package was, of course, by size and shape. The Myrtle Beach pic had been a decoy, with the real picture she wanted hung at Dad’s place hiding in plain sight behind it. And she wasn’t angry at all; I should have known that when she didn’t swallow the bite, but I’d missed it. Damn, she was good, and in her arms she cradled Praying Hands Jesus, the Jesus who had hung over my mother’s sofa for as long as I could remember. Man, oh man, had I been played.
My mother dashed her last tears away and added, smiling, “I also pulled down this picture of me and Natty. He asked if he could take it.”
With that she picked both up and left the room, practically skipping as she went to add the weight of Jesus and herself to the pile of things that I was taking to my father’s house.
After lunch, Mimmy had to get to work. She owned the Olde Timey Fudge Shoppe in a nearby mountain village that was surrounded by rent-a-cabins and vacation homes. The village had a picturesque downtown with an independent bookstore, some “antique” marts, local wine-tasting rooms, and half a dozen Southern-themed restaurants. She drifted, mournful, to her car, looking prettier in the sherbet-colored sash-dress uniform than all the little high school and college girls who worked for her. I’d been one of them myself, until last week.
After a hundred hugs from Natty and a thousand promises from me to visit soon, she drove off to hand-dip the chocolates she would never sample. Walcott and I finished loading and got on the road.
Less than two hours’ worth of kudzu-soaked rural highway separated us from the city condo, even with the detour to bounce by Bethany’s Stately Manor to pick up the keys. Still, it wasn’t like The Fridge was going to invite us in for kosher crumpets and a heart-to-heart. I figured I’d be unloaded and moved before sunset. When everything you own will go into a VW Beetle, along with your three-year-old and your best friend hanging his bare feet out the side window, how long can moving take?
We drove along singing, then I told tall tales for a bit. Natty loved Paul Bunyan and Babe the Big Blue Ox, and I had learned the art of packing these tales with filthy double entendres for Walcott. When that got old, Walcott recited poetry, until he got to Emily Dickinson and started freaking Natty right the hell out, what with the corpses hearing the flies buzzing and capital D Death himself pulling up in a carriage. So we canned it, and Walcott plugged his iPod into my port and blasted his Natty playlist, heavy on the They Might Be Giants, as my car ate the miles. We were listening to “Mammal” when I noticed that the kind of quiet that Natty was being had changed.
?
??You okay, baby?” I called, glancing in the rearview. His skin looked like milk that was just going off.
“Yes,” he said. But he added, “My throat feels tickle-y.”
I shot Walcott a panicky glance. We both knew “tickle-y throated” was Natty-speak for “thirty seconds from puking.” We were in the last few miles of kudzu and wilderness. In another ten minutes, the exits would change from having a single ancient Shell station into fast-food meccas. A few exits after that, we’d be able to find a Starbucks, and then we’d officially be in the wealthy North Atlanta suburbs.
But for now, there was no safe direction I could aim him. Most of his toys were piled high in a laundry basket under his feet, and the thought of cleaning puke out of the crevices of that many Star Wars action figures and Matchbox cars gave me a wave of sympathy nausea. The passenger seat beside him was full of our hanging clothes. Walcott began searching frantically for a bag, and I rolled down every window and hit the gas. A better mother would have realized this move would be spooky for Natty; he got motion sick if he was worried.
An exit appeared, mercifully, magically close, and I yelled, “Hold on, baby!” as we sailed down the ramp. It ended in a two-lane road with a defunct Hardee’s with boarded-up windows on one side and a Circle K on the other. I swung into the Hardee’s parking lot and stopped. Walcott wedged his top body between the front seats and unbuckled Natty, while I popped my door open and leapt out so I could shove the driver’s side seat forward. Natty leaned out and released his lunch, mercifully, onto the blacktop.
“Oh, good job, Natty,” Walcott crowed, patting his back while I dug in my purse for some wet wipes. “Bingo! Bull’s-eye!”
When Natty stopped heaving, I passed the wipes to Walcott and said, “Everyone out!”
Walcott lifted Natty out and cleaned his face, carrying him across the quiet road to the Circle K lot. I moved the car across, too. Walcott set Natty down and the three of us marched around in the sunshine. After a couple of minutes, Natty’s wobblety walk had turned into storm-trooper marching. He started making the DUN DUN DUN music of Darth Vader’s first entrance, and Walcott and I leaned side by side on the Bug and watched him.