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Show Go Love/181 turning And here's O.W., my adoptive father, his tietack straight now, a dead serious look on his face, only merged with something I can't quite get right in my head. Mama lorded over him for thirty years. She'd been boss, all through it all, the divorces, separations, and even that night when she screamed out for help. He was the one that came out with his cheek laid open from one of her fingernails. "Never be like him," she told me the day after, him gone to drive a truck full of chilled feeder pigs. Before the last operation, the one they both believed would kill her, she'd picked out this fierce blue suit for her funeral. Out of dozens, this's the one she'd settled on. She chose the dress she's wearing this instant, chilled in the white casket that rocks gently toward us Only, the operation didn't kill her She got better. And the money came through. And they'd planned it all out, down to the shade of her lipstick and the socks he was wearing She'd come to her senses, known she'd need the money for care, maybe even planned to move out Mama'd cut O.W off, and he took that as a betrayal-pure and simple And what on earth, a man photographed in red underwear? Mama was in charge, just like she'd finally been with Buddy Wash Just like she took charge of her part in the campaign that brought us together for the inauguration in DC, where Shawn Lord had turned his back on me before the swearing-in ceremony Jamaica and Ocho Rios and who knows where else were documented by her studied eye back in the briefcase, with its flimsy latch that any dipshit with a fingernail file could pop. Nothing is simple. Nothing. What I can tell you is this: when your mother dies, even if she's been sick for a long time, even if you fear something awful's been done to her, even if she told you that she was going to die and you agreed to deliver the eulogy at her funeral service, even if |