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Show Go Love/171 opened. "Fine," he says. "Come on in." The living room is dim, though some light's filtering through Mama's bay window. On the couch sits sullen-faced Aunt Mean, Grandpa Stepwell's sister who any second, I can tell, is about to say something awful. Her middle aged son sits beside her, holding one of his wife's white hands, so they've got the whole wall locked up. A pale man thumbs a black bible. Overhead, the eternal cargo planes from the Jacksonville base, their cross-shaped shadows hurtling neighborhoods from Gunter's paradise to here. "How you doing?" I ask. "Me?" Means says I say, "Yes mam." For the first time in maybe twenty years, the television is turned off, though when I look, it's just that the sound's turned down on the Praise Channel. Jimmy Swaggart singing a duet with a woman in blue chiffon "Your mama's in heaven now. She's walking with her dead baby this second. Her hurt's all gone you know," Mean says. I picture Mama and Jimmy on streets of gold. When they took me to his wrecked car, I fished a senior ring out of head blood pooled in the driver's side floorboard "Thank you, Aunt Mean" Tough Man runs out the open door, down Willy Ray, just goes off running. Uncle Bold and Aunt Judy almost clip it when they turn in the drive. They're black dressed for a funeral My clothes are a mismatch I'll try to cover with one of O.W.'s Sunday coats, one Mama'd said she |