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Show Go Love/166 "I want to see her, Dad." Renee moves to shield us from Mama's casket. I lift my daughter to my face, feel her good strong shoulders-swimmers shoulders, like her mother's. In the moments before we left the beach, the blue-cold Atlantic, the three of us sat on Third Avenue's board rails watching summer tanned teens surf out the high tide; we didn't speak, a lost world now. "Everything dies, sweetie." "You?" I say, "Me." "Me?" A guy on my Pony League team once hit me in the head with a number thirty-three aluminum bat during the ninth inning of a tied game with Knight's Knockers. I was on deck, batting cleanup, about to knock sweet Jesus out of anything pitched between numbers and knees. Ping, the bat went, heat lightning on a cloudless day Ping, I remember thinking. Ping "No Not you ever, sweetie." Between me and Mama, Renee searches faces. In her eyes, I see the moment it happens, the instant when our space and time shift gears. The room goes dead quiet. Blood drains out of faces. Casketside, O.W. glares down the corridor. Dora-Mama's friend from next door-has just walked in beside a squat bearded man, a dwarf or a husky midget. The whole place sees him stand on tip toes and sign Mama's book. Dora escorts the stranger into the room. Davey Washer, though I've never seen him outright, I know my blood uncle straight-away. Mama's told me the stories, sometimes on nights when thunder scared me to her room for the bedtime story of my lineage. |