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Show Blue Run/8 "O.W ?" "I got bad news. Mama's gone home." "Home?" Renee whispers no. "She died this afternoon. Drowned. Of a heart attack." Renee intuits. Her sob is a moan, one mournful note. Like a dove. I sit on a bed beside a window near the ocean, the cold phone against my face. My wife's beside me. One mournful note I hear Cap's feet swish away over the big tile floor "Mama drowned of a heart attack?" "Yea?" "What?" His voice is wrong. Once when I was a kid, he kicked his way into Mama's bedroom and she screamed for me to get help, that he was killing her. I picture him big as a barn, sitting at the glass kitchen table piled with her medical bills, maybe a stray love-letter from that California flake. The television's on, I can hear it, taped golf. The players set their mouths, swing sand wedges. "She drowned in her hot tub. From a heart attack. I tried to call her from Rocky Mount but nobody answered. I've always dreaded that" His voice is high and strange, like a preacher trying to cry. "Traceleen found her." "How'd you know I was here?" "She wrote it down," he says. "O.W?" "I'm locking the house up til tomorrow." |