hardly ever visited her. He lived in Atlanta and was very busy. He was a traveling salesman for International Harvester. She couldn’t remember if he was married or not, or the name of his wife and children if he was. Her grandchildren. She couldn’t even remember her own grandchildren, or even if she had any. “I get older and stupider,” she would say to the boy. “You ain’t stupid,” the boy would say, “you’re eighty-three years old.”
“Am I?” she said.
“That’s what you said,” he answered her.
“When did I say that?”
“One day.”
“One day when?”
“Can I have some Kool-Aid?” he asked.
She had known the boy for years, since he was a little old bitty thing and she had watched him playing in her backyard and asked him to come up on the porch for some Kool-Aid. He had told her right off the bat that his mother had left, run off, leaving him with just his father. He was just a baby when she left, so he didn’t remember his mother. He was a good boy, strong and willing to work when he was not more than six years old. And he had grown into a strapping, good-looking young man at fourteen, who seemed to be able to do most anything he set his mind to. His daddy was the town drunk, and they lived in a battered little house on the next street down toward the river, near the city dump. He was at her house all the time. She gave him books to read, books that had belonged to her husband. The boy liked reading about the Greeks, the myths and legends and gods.
Mrs. McCrory was a big woman, not fat, tall with the figure of a much younger woman. Sinking breasts, a narrow waist, a widening behind that looked more like middle age than eighty-three. The skin of her face was smooth, with plump rounded cheeks and deep-set dark brown eyes. Her hair was completely gray, but curly and springy and thick. She was still a handsome woman, and sometimes when she caught sight of herself in a mirror she thought she was someone else. She watched the cat; it seemed to be searching in the grass for bugs, its ears cocked. It had forgotten the jay. Mrs. McCrory caught a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye at the top of a pine tree, then watched the jay dart down like a dive bomber and peck the cat on top of his head, then caterwaul off, wings flapping, squawking, while the cat hissed and rolled over and swatted at empty air with its paws. Mrs. McCrory cackled with glee. She laughed and laughed. “That’ll teach you, you mangy pussy,” she shouted at the cat, as the cat scrambled back across the yard and disappeared under Mrs. Wrinstine’s garage. The jay was preening, back in the top of the pine, pleased with itself.
Mrs. McCrory stood there a long time, gazing into the now empty backyard. She knew Orville was going to try to get her into a nursing home as soon as he could. An old folks’ home. He said that was best for her. He wanted the house, to sell it. She didn’t think it was worth very much. She remembered her Aunt Clara being in a nursing home in De Quincy Springs; she remembered the attendants asking her Aunt Clara if she “wanted to go potty.” Mrs. McCrory didn’t want to be anywhere where grown people asked other grown people if they “wanted to go potty.” That must have been what they did all the time at that nursing home, go potty, because the whole place smelled like one gigantic old person’s fart. Now who, exactly, was my Aunt Clara, Mrs. McCrory thought. What was her name, anyway?
Everything was suddenly gone from her mind, like the blue jay sweeping upward. Her thoughts were empty, a blank. Her head was like the inside of a child’s balloon. She tried to recall what she had been looking at in the backyard, but she couldn’t. She just stood there. She peered out at the world through gray eyes going blear. As though she were trying hard to see whatever she was looking at, even though she had no idea what it might be. She had been a widow for twenty years, but sometimes she thought it was only one or two years; sometimes she even talked to Winston, her husband, over the kitchen table or in the bed at night. She could feel the bed sagging when he got in and stretched his big frame out. No time had passed at all since she was a girl, being courted by the nice-looking young man she would marry, would spend thirty years with, would share everything with: their house, the many holidays, their triumphant days and their sad days, their son that neither one of them particularly liked as he grew up, Orville, with his sneaky eyes and greasy hair, and wherever in the world he got those eyes and that hair she did not know, could not imagine. She thought maybe that God had sent her this other boy, what was his name? Lester Ray. That God had sent her Lester Ray to make up for Orville, to be the son she should have had all along.
He was a good boy. She smelled beer on him sometimes, but it was many a good man’s failing. Winston drank, too. He drank a lot, for a long time: moonshine, bootleg, good dark whiskey in a sealed bottle, it didn’t matter to him. She didn’t know what Lester Ray drank, and she wasn’t going to ask him, all she knew was that he was a good boy. When she had showed Lester Ray the almost five thousand dollars she had saved out of her husband’s pension check and kept in a shoebox in the pantry, he had insisted that she put it in the bank where it would be safe. But she wouldn’t do that; she didn’t want anybody to know she had it, especially Orville. Lester Ray, for a while, had taken to sleeping on the glider on her back porch, to protect her, he said, from somebody breaking in and stealing her money. And maybe harming her. She made him come inside and sleep on the sun porch. Which he did for a while, until Orville found out and pitched a fit.
She remembered that day. Orville had been on the way to a sales meeting in Jacksonville and had stopped by to see her. She hadn’t known he was coming, and Lester Ray was asleep on the sun porch when he got there.
“Well, la do dah, what do we have here?” Orville said. His voice woke Lester Ray up and the boy sat straight up in the bed, a startled look on his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doin, boy?” Orville said.
“He’s my friend, son,” Mrs. McCrory said. She was standing in the doorway, looking around her son.
“Your friend? Whattaya mean, your friend?”
“I invited him to sleep here, Orville, is what I mean. It ain’t any of your business anyway.”
“Mama, you can’t be invitin every white trash boy that comes along into the house to sleep, for Christ’s sakes.”
“I can do whatever I want,” Mrs. McCrory said. She pushed her way into the sun porch.
“Your mind’s goin, Mama,” Orville said, a whine in his voice that had been there since he was a child. “If this don’t prove it I don’t know what would.” Though it was still fairly early in the morning, Orville’s white shirt was splotched with sweat, his tie loose and hanging onto his copious belly that strained the buttons in front. His hair was slicked back with Vitalis, the scent of it permeating the room.
“I don’t even know who you are, come bustin in here like this,” she said.
“There, you see?” He looked at Lester Ray as if for confirmation. “Don’t even know her own son.”
“You ain’t called me in three months,” she said. “Like I care.”
“I’ve tried, for Christ’s sakes,” he said, “your damn phone’s out of order.”
“I had it took out,” she said, “didn’t nobody else but you ever call me, so I figured it wasn’t worth the money.”
“Well fine, then, I can’t call you,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said, “who are you, anyhow?”
“Jesus, Mama,” he said.
“That’s
