me his green card.”
The grandmother snorted. “My Lord honey, you know as well as I do you can’t go by that! They make them things themselves so they can get jobs here and not have to go back where they came from. For all I know, his name ain’t even Oliver.”
“If that’s what you think, then you have no business letting him work here. You’re taking advantage of him.”
“I’m paying him, ain’t I? And just as much as I’d pay a real American. Don’t talk to me about taking advantage, when I was his age, I was getting less than a nickel for every oyster I’d bring into the Beaufort market from Core sound. Everything I do here with my Mexicans is on the up and up, not under the table like a lot of places around here…”
“Blah, blah, blah,” says Shelby. Her indignation seemed spent. The next question she asked was without judgment. “Are you paying Victor under the table?”
“’Course I am,” the grandmother winked at Victor. “He’s family. He ain’t going to turn me in. Are you, son?”
Victor smiled and shook his head.
Shelby rested her chin in her hands. “You don’t pay me under the table,” she said. “I’m family.”
“You’d turn me in,” the grandmother said, and lit another cigarette.
The three Flowers returned to a dark and silent house. Uncle Buzz had gone to bed, leaving vacant the living room sofa, which the grandmother immediately stripped of its cushions and tugged into the shape of a bed. This was to be Victor’s accommodation at night until the end of the week, when the bed Uncle Buzz was waiting for at the nursing facility would be available.
Although Victor dreaded the prospect of sleeping out in the open like this, he went immediately to sleep, and woke up early in the morning to the sound of a deep and persistent bark. A pale, pearly sunlight seeped in through the closed curtains of the living room and the doorway of the kitchen. Victor rose, padded down the hallway as quietly as he could to take a piss, and then let himself out the front door to sit on the concrete stoop and smoke the first cigarette of the day.
Though it was only just past dawn, the temperature outside was already swiftly rising, and Victor returned with relief to the cool darkness of the living room. He was torn between relishing this time to himself and wondering how soon it would end. He was afraid that turning on the television would disturb the women, so there was nothing to do but pad around the living room and look at things; the living room walls were covered with pictures and tiny shelves that held knick-knacks and samplers and such. There were framed photographs set atop a large white doily that draped over the top of the entertainment center shelves, and Victor crossed the room to look at these. The largest picture, a 5x7 school photograph of a chubby little girl was clearly Shelby at the age of about six or seven, recognizable from the tiny mole on her chin and the striking, yellow-green coloring of her eyes, but in all other respects the picture looked nothing like the person she was today; the little girls hair was parted severely and braided into two stiff pigtails that hung down to her chin, her glasses were missing, and her gap toothed smile was anxious, not at all like the present Shelby’s open grin. Beside this there was a larger color picture, this one a studio photograph, of a slightly younger version of his grandmother, her hair thicker and thoroughly dyed an unnatural chestnut color. She was posed beside a broad-shouldered, unsmiling man with iron gray, slicked back hair and formidable grooves in his face from the corner of his nose to the line of his jaw. Both his grandmother and the man, whom he assumed must be his dead grandfather, were dressed as if for church, his grandmother in a plain, light blue shapeless dress and the grandfather in a dark suit and tie. The only other photograph among this set was a snapshot, really, black-and white and framed in a cheap silver snapshot frame, of two towheaded boys, wearing only shorts or perhaps bathing suits, standing side by side against the background of a busy pier and holding a swordfish lengthwise against their chests. The taller boy grinned and the smaller boy squinted into the camera, and looked as if he was trying to say something. Victor was astonished at how little the taller boy, his father, had changed in the thirty or so years since the picture was taken. Only his hair was different, in the photograph the boy’s thick bangs swooped apart in a wide cowlick, whereas now Victor’s father had only a fringe of close cropped blondish hair that reached from ear to ear around the back of his head, and just a sparse remnant of hair on top. The smaller boy, though not as recognizable, was obviously uncle Buzz; the pictured boy’s expression of consternation had maintained itself, somehow, in the grown man’s countenance.
There were several other snapshots, mostly in color, of infants and smaller children that Victor didn’t recognize; these were mostly displayed, in their gift-shop plastic frames, on a plastic, faux driftwood shelf that hung on the wall to the left of the television. He was about to turn away from these when he realized that one of them was surely the picture of the baby his father’s new wife had given birth to just weeks before Victor left the hospital, a baby girl, with an odd name that Victor had forgotten, but which he remembered disliking as soon as he heard it, an unusual name, but fashionable these days, a name that sounded more like a man’s last name than a little girls name, he didn’t want to remember it, but it came to him anyway; Madison. Victor wondered if he would ever meet her. He had never met his father’s new wife, whom he imagined to be, as the wedding pictures that were sent to him in the hospital indicated, a blonde, far younger than his father.
He stepped away from these shelves and looked at the wall above the couch. There was a painting there, or at least a print, of a familiar image, two small children, a boy and a girl, crossing a bridge, oblivious to the presence of a diaphanous, smiling angel hovering above them. Next to this there was an oval framed picture, which upon close inspection proved to be a very old photograph, of a little girl in a checked dress and what looked like saddle shoes, standing between a very wizened old woman in a shapeless flower-print dress and a glowering old man with a handlebar mustache and a watch chain looped across the vest of his black suit. Victor found he could not take his eyes off the image of the old man, he, more so than the little girl or the old woman, seemed to suggest another time, a way of life lost to the world. The old man looked out of the picture as if defending the very spirit of the past that his image represented, while the old woman and the little girl looked out with merry smiles. His image radiated disapproval as manifestly as the old woman’s image radiated kindness and the little girl’s reflected innocence. Victor wasn’t sure how long he stood staring at that picture when the sound of footsteps behind him startled him. He turned to see his grandmother, in a ragged nightgown and strips of toilet paper clipped to her hairline, baring her bridgework at him.
“Morning, honey,” she said. “Did you sleep good?”
Victor nodded.
“You’re up mighty early. You hungry? I’ll have some breakfast in a little bit. Do you like grits?”
He nodded. His mother, being from the north, never made grits, but they often had them for breakfast in the hospital, where he developed a taste for them. “Thank you,” he remembered to say.
“It’ll be a little while,” his grandmother scratched a place on her nightgown just below her small, low slung breasts. “Just rest yourself some more, you worked hard last night. What have you been doing, looking around?”
“Yeah.”
His grandmother smiled and pointed at the oval picture. “You know who that little girl is?”
Victor shook his head. “You?” he said.
Her smile drew itself in and turned upside down in the peculiar way it had. “Yes
