“If you say so, hon.”
Lyda sets a pot of water on the stove and the topic dies. The three awaiting the burner to light is like the commencement of some other deep ritual, each silent and respectful of the abeyant silence. It’s Lyda who breaks it, telling Shady she should check the rehab clinic if she’s serious about picking up a job. “I still have friends there”—now it’s Cole’s turn to snort, but she ignores him—“they’re always hiring clerks and orderlies. Turnover’s high, you can imagine.”
Cole does imagine, or more precisely, remembers. He had visited the clinic many times as a kid. He remembers blood on tile floors, trembling hands and grinding jaws, zombie-shuffles down antiseptic hallways. A population of strange adults somehow absent from themselves, their feet wrapped in paper. Slow-healing, self-inflicted wounds on skin the color of lime pulp.
“Didn’t you say you were studying pre-med, anyway?”
“Biology. But yeah, med school’s in the Beck family plan. More and more school as far as a girl can see.”
“Better than being out there on minimum wage far as you can see. You’re too young to understand how important opportunities are. How rare they are.”
“Cole seems fine without it, without school I mean,” Shady answers in a way that betrays the effort to keep her voice playful.
“Oh honey we don’t want to go
there
, do we, Cole?”
“What?” Cole says. He hadn’t been paying attention, lost on the shivers of blue flame trembling from the stove jets.
Lyda sighs. “I wish you boys would’ve took a chance at college. Your daddy’s brother could’ve helped there. Not that either of you was any good at school. All I could do to get them to even go.”
The thought amuses her and her smile predicts a laugh that does not quite arrive while she dumps out spoonfuls of coffee into the filter taken from the broken percolator. She sets it above the mouth of a teapot made of the same speckled tin as the cups. It’s not a memory Cole can find, Lyda hurrying the boys off to any school bus.
“That a new dress, Momma?”
The laugh breaks forth, then. She dismisses him with a wave. “This little thing? A gift from my new suitor! The girls look pretty good in this, don’t they?”
She sways her hips back and forth, a move she calls ‘ringing the bell.’ “
Ding, ding. Ring a ding ding.”
She laughs again and Shady joins her. “I’m not so far gone I don’t know my son, you two. She already telling you what to say, sugar?”
Shady denies advising anything even as Cole insists it’s still a nice dress. Lyda flicks at the hem above her knee, slumps one hip against the stove.
“Oh, he’ll do for now. They always mean well at first.” She pours the rest of the boiled water into the filter and sets down the pot. “Honestly I’d rather hear me a story. What’s this adventure you all got into the other night? Shady was telling me.”
His mouth falls open; blood heats his neck. He turns at Shady in dismay, smacking into what rushes off her tongue before he can find words of his own:
The transformer,
she says.
“Oh. Yeah,” Cole says. He slumps into the table and sets a foot on a chair. He presses hand to forehead, gathers warm sweat in his palm. “Yeah, that was something to see.”
“What is it with you two?” Lyda asks, squinting at both.
“What?” Cole asks.
“Nothing,” Shady says at the same time.
His mother studies their faces with sporting suspicion, a rusty streak of hair falling from its nest and framing the curve of her jaw.
She tucks the lock behind her ear. “Don’t either of you think I don’t know when something’s up. You two are acting tighter than a cat in a bread basket. You’re up to something.”
“What are we up to?”
“Running around like vandals tearing up statues, from what I hear. Lawrence Greuel, that man must be near sixty and you’d think he’d have bigger things to do than make delinquents out of good kids.”
“That was Spunk. You know Spunk. Mister Greuel wanted us to scare up Fleece.”
“I could’ve saved you both the trouble and told you you wouldn’t have found him. Lawrence Greuel could’ve told you the same.”
She gets a new cigarette going and makes a show of looking for an ashtray. Not finding one, she ashes into her hand, and then her tin cup, as her eyes sweep her son’s.
“His dogs are running the place now,” Cole speaks wearily into his hands. “Fleece was out.”
“Out.”
He doesn’t know what to add. He joins the silence into which Shady has retreated. Faded pink and black linoleum squares make up the kitchen floor, some with rotted edges curling, one square gone completely and displaying the gray slab of the sub-floor. They sit silent until Lyda breaks to serve Cole the coffee, telling him he can add milk himself. But I take my coffee black, he reminds her. Her hair falls again, mostly over her face, the remnants of the bun fully collapsed. She shakes her head, slowly, handing over a cup separate from her set, some object found cheap at one of her Saturday flea markets, probably picked up from between glass candle holders and clear-plastic plates, the solid ceramic blue striking her as better quality than the flimsy surround of knickknacks she didn’t need. The coffee’s aroma, made from old grounds, fills the room with a sour smell.
“Shady dear, you ever have boys all I can tell you is hang on and hope for the best. The big worries don’t start till they’re old enough to be taking care of themselves.”
“I’ve never met a boy who can take care of himself. Except maybe Cole here,” Shady says.
“Not Cole I’m talking about,” Lyda says into the trash can, emptying the dirty coffee filter. “Not that he’s an angel. He could sure learn a lesson on how families look after their own. You wouldn’t think he was a native of right here.”
“I know where I’m from.”
He brings the coffee to his mouth, feels its great heat before his lips, blows on the brew once, and then returns the cup to the table without drinking. Oil-slick patterns swirl on the coffee’s surface, his face distorted in their purple mirrors.
“You know something on Fleece I don’t, James Cole Prather.”
He raises his eyes to find hers look ready to gouge. It’s like this with her sometimes—a shadow self from an array of possible selves shifts to center, like a card snapped from the bottom of the deck of an entirely different set, a self suddenly before you and wildly far from the one you were speaking to just before.
“What’s it today, Ma? Tranqs? Sopes? You seem anxious.”
Her eyes slip to Shady, who flinches as if anticipating a slap to the face. Something’s coming.
“Let me ask you, little girl. What would you do if somebody killed, let’s just say,
your father
. And you knew who it was what done it. What would you do?”
“Well that’s not even a question. You go to the police. I mean what else would you?”
She has hardly caught up to her thoughts before Lyda is waving her answer away, those smooth-skinned hands, small marvels of a girl a third her age, fluttering in the air as she makes a face of ridiculous hyper-disbelief.
“No no now, square law has no dog in a laker fight.”
“Oh,” Shady says. The challenge of trying to keep step with whatever Lyda wants works at her face. “I don’t think I understand what you’re asking, then.”
“I’m not asking, I’m telling. I am a old lady teaching history. This is how the world works in real life. You take care of what you need to take care of. When you got history, two families, one thinks they own the other, it’s an old story. You weren’t even a tadpole swimming in your daddy’s balls yet.”
Cole watches Shady try and fail to recover, aswim in this turn his mother has taken—yet he keeps himself from interrupting, perversely enjoying the hint of Shady’s discomfort.
“I don’t know about that,” she ventures.
“Y’all can say what kind of mother I been, but I’m all either one of these boys got. And Fleece, he
knows
this, he would never up and abandon me, abandon
us
—”
Her chair screeches against the floor and she’s on her feet now, spinning from them with nimble hands clawing at the air, her ropy arms tense in imaginary struggle. And then just as suddenly the fit passes, and her arms collapse to her sides. She turns back to Cole.
“Lawrence Greuel owes this family. He owes me!”
“He was asking about you the other night,” Shady says. “He asked how you were doing.”
“Greuel was? Well. He wants to know how I’m doing? Well now. I don’t like the sound of that right there. For starters.”
“I told him if he wanted to know he should just call you himself,” Shady says, warming to information she has a handle on, as if detailing an accomplishment she had surprised herself by getting right.
“Little girl I don’t want that man calling my house. You don’t even know what we’re talking about. You come from another world.”
“I grew up ten minutes from here, Lyda!”
“Honey you grew up in Hindustan where we’re concerned. You don’t know that, what business do you have even talking?”
Shady retreats into herself like a small child rebuked. Her face at that instant—blots of color bursting to her soft cheeks, brow pale, her mouth a round
O
of concession—moves Cole desperately, his perverse satisfaction in her discomfort forgotten, replaced now by a noble urge to defend her from an opponent she has no chance against. It
is
true; she doesn’t understand.
“Hell, Ma,
I
don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
“We are talking about your brother. And Mister Lawrence Greuel. We are talking about a man who believes he has the run of this family ever since that blue lackey Arley Noe walked in and scooped up my first-born like Abraham taking Isaac down from the mountain. How you think your brother got into that life? You think Greuel just took a
liking to him? Honey I may love my forget-me pills but I didn’t raise you stupid. I’d remember
that
.”
“What about Fleece and Mister Greuel?” Shady asks, determined to find footing here.
Lyda has eyes only for Cole. “He said he was going to quit. He told me, he said it like it was done already.”
“He never said that.” This is most likely true. For Lyda, however, that’s not enough from him. “I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m as clueless as you are,” he adds. This feels close enough to the truth to count. “If he said it to you then maybe he did get out, and that’s why no one knows where he is. It’s not like you turn in two weeks’ notice and then hail farewell.”
Lyda repeats that Fleece had
told
her, she was
sure
of it, he said he was
out
and she was proud of him—and a little scared for herself, too, truth-be-told, she didn’t like to keep hunting up doctors who might fall for her each and every ailment, there’s a lot of information to memorize, prepare, express—and but yet
no way
her boy would
abandon
her without word, no word near five weeks now not even a phone call? All this recited to the burning cigarette turned inward over her palm. She looks up. She says Lawrence Greuel thinks of her firstborn as an investment he would be unhappy to lose. She says she doesn’t see the sense in what she’s saying anymore. She balances the cigarette across the mouth of her cup, pushes from the table, swivels to the counter, and fans the gathered smoke with a single hand. “Neither of you understand a goddamn thing. Neither one of you. Go dig up Bethel Skaggs. Ask
him
what Lawrence Greuel can get his mind to, James Cole.”
A great weariness wrings him. He clutches the back of his neck in one hand and gently rolls his head. He had begun to check out on Lyda, his mind turning already to other concerns as she declaimed her familiar litany of grievances, such as how he might get his cousin Sheldon off his back for the three hundred he owes. Now his mother’s words fix into place the memory of that childhood summer day, and the blur of faces on the slope locks into faces of adults he can remember. Had it been Greuel with the gun, Greuel’s sweat-shined crown gleaming bald among that wispy hair? And the woman bent over
Bethel’s body, who had ministered to his unfeeling hands—could that have been Greuel’s sainted wife (to hear him speak of her), Spunk’s mother? She’d died of lupus when they were teenagers. He wants Lyda to confirm as much, but he won’t ask. His family embarrasses him; its history feels shameful against the charmed family he believes Shady comes from. Or maybe he feels this information is knowledge he has possessed always, or at least suspected.
“Why am I always the last one to know what’s going on?” he asks.
“Who says you know what’s going on,” Lyda says, her voice taking a sullen turn. “My own son. You shouldn’t have come back. You’re not from around here anymore.”
She’s at the counter with her back to them now, presenting the full mess of her hair, its lower tresses reaching the deep curve at the small of her back. Cole knows by the assertion of her shoulders, as though they have reset themselves for preparation of an entirely separate endeavor, his mother has closed this conversation and he had missed his chance. If he pushed now she would be happy to continue talking but would circle and parry the subject without ever diving to the heart of it.
From a cabinet overhead Lyda takes down a ziplock and a cloudy souvenir Derby shot glass. From the bag she selects two large pills, one blue, the other white. From the freezer she pulls a tray and places a single ice cube atop the shot glass—the cube too large to fit inside—and then makes a slow pour of a little more than a mouthful of mulled applejack over the ice until it shrinks and settles into the warm tones of the liquor. She returns to the table with the pills in one hand and the drink in the other and waits for the ice to disappear completely, warming the pills in her fist like a gambler wishing luck on her dice.
Once she’s ready, they watch Lyda wash down the pills with no grimace at the alcohol’s bite as she swallows, eyes closed. Finished, she sets the glass down and gazes into it, slumped forward on slender forearms, her lips baring her bottom teeth, staring into the empty glass as if all anyone needed to know could be uncoded there and she sits alone before the promise of it. After another moment a shiver slithers its way from the base of her spine up to her skull and she straightens, pulls back from the table, relaxing into the chair with a satisfied smile.