House of Cotton by Monica Brashears

Author:Monica Brashears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

14

At breakfast, I still got nerves ticking my heart over Cigarette Sammy. Only thing I can think to do is call Sugar Foot. Rent is due next week anyway. Call and play nice. I don’t want to hear that grime in his voice, that rusted saxophone talk he think is so smooth. And him, making some confession to Pastor Wooly, talking about sorrys.

Eden and I share two pieces of burnt toast scraped with grape jelly, oatmeal dusted with cinnamon sugar.

“I’m off to the mountains,” Eden-as-Diane-Keaton says.

But, first, I got to go to Mama Brown’s one more time just to see, and Cigarette Sammy will probably be there, and I’ll fill his belly and know he’s okay. “I’m going for a walk,” I say.

My feet hit the sidewalk; Mama Brown choir steps behind me. She belts in a voice louder than the passing traffic. Gritty, sweet: “Goin’ down the road feelin’ bad. Honey, babe, Lord. Goin’ down the road feelin’ bad.”

My feet match her rhythm.

“You remember that song?” she asks. I don’t turn to face her—keep my eyes on the long stretch of sidewalk ahead. “We used to sing that when we’d go on our little walks. You remember?”

I put my phone to my ear so the passing cars won’t think I’m crazy. “I remember.”

“You good at tapping into memory when you want to.” She coughs, sounds like she been smoking a cigar.

“When’d you get that cough, Mama?” My pace’s down to a trickle, let her catch up.

“It could be last Christmas or two seconds ago, shit. It all feels the same.”

We pass a plaza with a smoke shop, a Big Lots, a beauty supply. “Eden’s been frying my hair.”

“I didn’t want to say nothing, but you looking a little crispy.”

I keep my phone pressed to my ear and laugh with her. “Let me see your nails.”

Mama shoves her hands behind her back like I told her I can palm read and her future is littered with broken things.

“Please.”

Her right hand is fine, her left hand: fingernails gone, pinky dislocated, curved into a shepherd’s crook. “You said you’d think about it,” she says.

“What happened to your pinky?”

“I saw Cricket.” She tries to pop her pinky back in place—it falls to the sidewalk, rolls light as an empty coin wrapper to the gutter.

“Creepy Bible dude?” That stops my legs. “No, you imagining things.”

“Says you to the ghost.” She scratches her arm with the no-fingernail hand, don’t seem to remember they ain’t there to take away her itch. “He wasn’t nothing but a flash, like when you close your eyes after looking at the sun and can still see the shape just floating behind your eyelids.”

“That’s just old fears coming back,” I say. When I was little, if I was acting up, she’d wait until my back was turned and knock on the wall with her knuckle. She’d say: Magnolia, that woodpecker coming for you. And that always made me stop. Here she is now, trying to scare me into behaving, into seeing that unformed child.

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