My Aunt June’s face beneath the bright yellow hood of her raincoat was like the center of a flower, the place where bees go to get what they need, a place made to be touched, but I couldn’t touch it.
“Let’s go, honey,” Aunt June said.
I went with her, back to the car, out of the rain, and the dry beige inside of her clean red Honda car wadn’t no solace, nor were the cool turquoise lights of the dash. They were the same no solace as other people laughing when you got cramps. Same no solace as a sunny day on television when you’re cold and soaking wet and can’t remember your nose not running, your bones not aching, can’t remember sleeping through the night.
Twenty-two years old.
I said, “What the fuck, Aunt June?”
She looked at me for a second, stared out the windshield a lot longer. “It’s a good question,” she said, and started the car. June said, “Is Willett’s mother having a bunch of people over for the 4th?”
I said, “Just us I guess. You want to come?”
“No,” June said. “I need to get this class figured out.”
I said, “Well.”
Willett’s mother’s house was his father’s too, but his father was so sick and his mother was such a force that it was easy to say it that way—Willett’s mother’s house. The fall before, I finally got Willett to move out of his mother’s house. I did all right in town, but it was good to get out, get a place of our own, a place where things weren’t so fixed up, a place where you could walk down the road without worrying about being accused of doing something, of taking somebody’s something, of tearing up somebody’s something.
Willett’s mother would fix too much. There would be enough meat for twenty people and she would just cram whatever was left in the refrigerator or the freezer and it would stay there until it was no good.
June turned off the highway and headed up on Long Trail, where Mamaw lived, about a mile past where my daddy’s people lived in a gob of jacked-up houses against two hillsides and down in a bottom, close enough for constant spying and tormenting of one another. Mamaw lived off by herself, above everything.
We pulled in the carport next to Mamaw’s Escort. She came out on the patio, which she did more and more. Ever since I’d gone to Tennessee, Mamaw swore off housekeeping. She ate at the sink, let everything pile up where it fell.
“Have you got Tricia straightened out yet?” Mamaw thought my aunt June too ambitious in her plans to get my mother off dope.
“Mom, you want to come into town and eat, or go to the store?” June said. “You won’t have a vehicle until Dawn gets back.”
“I don’t need it,” Mamaw said.
June looked at Mamaw like she was a page of math problems. “Are you sure?” she said.
Mamaw put the key in my hand. “Be careful,” she said. “I love you.”
I said, “I love you too, Mamaw.”
“June,” Mamaw said, “You might as well be careful, too.”
“I love you, Mom,” June said.
Then me and June each got in our vehicles. I went and got Nicolette from the High-Rise and went to Kingsport. June went back to the house in town. And Mamaw went back inside her Mama Bear Wallow.
GENE
Next morning, me and Brother knocked at That Woman’s about eight. It was a minute before she come down. When she did, she was pulling a shirt on over another shirt.
I said, “I think we found your door.”
“Oh,” That Woman said, looking at the big door Brother held in front of him. “Do you think it will fit?”
“Well,” I said, “We’re thinking it’s your door.”
The door was the same color as the frame, but the glass knocked out.
“Oh,” That Woman said. “Where did you find it?”
Brother said, “At the river.”
That Woman said, “What was it doing at the river?”
I said, “Just laying there.”
That Woman didn’t have no shoes on, said, “Well, Let’s take it out in the yard,” pointed out towards the side of the house. Then she went back in.
Brother said, “She’s a odd one.”
Me and Brother took the door out in the side yard. That Woman went down to her vehicle and got out a hose and packed it up the steps. I run to help her, causing the door to slip out of Brother’s hands and go sliding down the hill, but me and That Woman and Brother was able to catch it before it run out in the street. We got the door washed and dried off mostly, and it didn’t take long to hang since it hadn’t been out there by the river but a little while. A little hammering and banging, and we was done.
That Woman said, “What do I owe you?”
Brother just stood there. That Woman looked at me. I said, “Whatever you think.”
She got her billfold out and give us eighty dollars, said, “Is that enough?”
We’d of been tickled with half that. Brother started down the steps. We’d told a man we’d help him tear the roof off his mother’s house, and I knew Brother was wanting me to help him get it done so he could go to wrestling at the Armory that evening, but That Woman stood there, her hand on that door, looking at the holes where the glass had been. The bugs was flying over the high grass in her yard and I said to Brother, “You go on. I’m gonna finish this yard.”
Brother give me a look, but he went on, so it must not have bothered him too bad.
I went to mowing. I was about finished, out in the side yard that evening when Belinda Coates pulled up in front of That Woman’s house in her pink Camaro. I was hoping maybe when I got done, me and That Woman would get a chance to talk—talk about how hot it was or how I got one of my injuries. Just whatever she wanted to talk about.
She had the quietest ways, That Woman did. She only wore colors you’d see in the woods, and when she moved her hands, it was like watching birds settle on a phone wire. I liked how there wadn’t no ruckus to her, so I was hoping Belinda Coates would leave her alone.
Belinda Coates was short and solid and would have been nice-looking if she wadn’t such a terror. You’d probably recognize her from the paper or the detention center website. She didn’t have no mother nor father, not that I ever heard of, and she mostly stayed with her uncle Sidney, who kept his name out of the paper fairly well, but we all knew was pretty much behind everything bad they ever put in the paper. And a fair amount of other bad as well.
Belinda sat in that gaudy mess of a car she drove, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and checking her mirrors. I knew That Woman was in the house, but they wadn’t no way I would tell Belinda Coates that. I thought about mowing so the grass would throw on Belinda Coates’s vehicle. I thought that might make her leave, but more likely she’d start something up with me, which I didn’t have no interest in. I’d done my share of arguing and making a horse’s behind of myself, and I was trying my level best to steer clear of such.
I was weedeating under a weeping cherry tree. Belinda Coates started blowing her car horn and That Woman and her yellow dog come out on the screened-in porch to see what was going on.
I knew That Woman thought highly of me because when I stopped to drink a pop she had asked me would I be interested in feeding that