was four hydrangea bushes stretched out towards the kudzu that had took over the hillside behind That Woman’s house. Cora said again, “Look at them.”
I reckon what she was wanting me to look at was the wads of flowers, blue and purple at once. The shade of a big oak made the flowers look like something you’d see under the ocean on one of them coral reefs like I saw on TV in this motel one time in Newport when Sister and her husband took us to see the Cincinnati Reds play baseball. I’d never seen a TV that bright and clear. I’d never seen a coral reef neither and I couldn’t believe how all them bright colors was waving in the blue water, and how bright and striped and spotted the fish were, and how all that bright actually helped them hide amongst that coral. I wanted to understand it more, but Sister’s husband flipped the channel to try and find the UK football game.
That old woman said, “You got it?” I said I did and she said, “Well then, come over here.” She darted off behind a snowball bush on the other side of the yard where there wadn’t hardly no room to go.
I followed in after her. We come to the far side of the house. The air condition perched in an upstairs window dripped like a ice cream cone. That old woman had a walking stick painted with spots and stripes like a coral reef fish. She tapped me with it on my shins, said, “All that vine has got to go,” and waved her stick from the back end of the house to the front. They was vine all over a trellis by the front porch and they was vine running up the electric meter and they was vine running up on the satellite cables and they was vine running up the power line feeding the air condition. At the base of the house, they was junk bushes, all thick and tangly with vine, out of which all the rest of that vine was spewing like some vine volcano.
I said to that old woman, “That’s a mess of vine.”
She said, “We need rid of it. Can you handle it?”
I looked back over the whole thing, believing I could, and when I threw back my head, they was a woman standing at the very peak of the roof. I couldn’t make out much about her because the sun was behind her head, but I could hear a bird chirping and it was like a morning bird, a bird that had forgotten to wake up, which couldn’t be cause birds don’t forget to wake up.
That old woman hollered, “Patricia!” and it startled the woman against the sky and she threw her arms out to balance herself. The roof woman seemed thin and light, nothing but the center nub to her, which could have been a trick of the sunshine. She wobbled, one foot on either side of the peak, faced right straight out over us. She fell down on her knees, hanging on with both hands to the lip of the roof, looked down at us, said, “Smile, Momma. Don’t be so sour.”
DAWN
The upstairs of Momma’s house wadn’t no better than the down below. The air conditioner in the stair window roared like people on Fox News. All the other windows swung open on their hinges, waved in the wind like pothead beauty queens. A bird flapped through Momma’s bedroom, bashed his head against the wall, pooped her bed, flung himself out into the glare. One wall was half-painted green. Another half-painted gray. There was a mattress on the floor, ashtrays on either side, a knocked-over lamp, scattered clothes—some sparkly, some tie-dyed—little clothes, way littler than mine.
Out the window, Canard rolled out to a pointy-headed mountain at the other end of town. The town looked pretty laid out there in the valley. Things had been too jacked up in Canard for too long for anybody to have enough money to ruin its old-timey look. I wondered about the man who built this house, back in the 1920s. I wondered did he think Canard would go on forever. I wondered did he care.
There was a clatter on the roof. Momma come around the corner, walking on the mostly flat spot that covered the porch. Momma swept the shingle grit off herself. The knobs of her elbows and wrists were scraped. Her hair rustled like willow branches in the breeze. She pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it before she seen me.
When she did, she said, “What are you doing?” like she always did.
I said, “Come to wish you a happy birthday.”
She said, “It aint my birthday.”
I said, “I know it aint.”
Momma blew smoke at me.
I said, “Why you on the roof?”
She said, “Come out here.”
I said, “I aint.” My whole life felt like I was a bug crawling inside a coiled-up garden hose—smaller and smaller circles, slick-dark and rubber-smelling, the only hope of escape something likely to drown you as save you.
Momma raised her voice, said “Come out here, Dawn.”
I said, “I’m a mother now, Momma.”
“Well,” she said, “Who aint?”
The wind quit and Momma said, “Hubert’s mad at me.”
“How’s he mad at you?” I said. “I thought he was in jail.”
Momma said, “Come out here with me, Dawn.” She turned from me, not too fast, not too slow. She didn’t talk in a hurry. She seemed to be at normal speed, said, “Who’s that with Cora?”
She didn’t seem excited, didn’t get all tangled up on her words, seemed to be saying what she meant to say. All this to say, she didn’t seem high to me. But I didn’t always know about high, didn’t know about pain pills and what they did to you.
I knew Momma and Evie lived for them. Knew my brother Albert, my uncle Hubert, and a bunch of others sold them.
Pills were easier to stay away from in Tennessee. So was crazy. Easier married to Willett Bilson and his momma’s houseful of fragile things, her house full of quiet sleep.
I pulled up the window screen and stepped onto the radiator under the window. Swung my leg out and straddled the window frame. Momma stood at the roof’s edge amid loose siding and shingle scraps. Her shoulder blades come up out of her tank top like the oars of a boat, my name tattooed between them in cursive where she’d never see it. I got through the window and onto the roof without falling, but it was not a smooth exit. I am not a fireman nor a ballerina. I am big. I am an ox.
My mother sat down, her toes hanging over the gutter. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder, one leg straightened out, its foot out in the air. She patted the spot next to her with her cigarette hand.
I didn’t know to sit there or not. Smothery heat didn’t help me think. Two downpipes ran across the roof on either side of the window, framing the space where Momma sat. I guessed the shingles were hot and sticky.
I said, “How can you sit on that?”
“Used to it,” Momma said.
“Momma,” I said. “Are you high?”
Momma didn’t turn around. She said, “No.”
I said, “We seen a wreck on the Caneville Road.”
Momma said, “Anybody die?”
I said, “Probably.”
Smoke came out
