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Show Blue Run/79 You're a woodpussv. his eyes said. Woodpussv. it was written all over his face. I barely remember this other guy who proposed to Mama while O.W. was in jail, the one who bought a love seat and took me and Melody Dorty fishing down a road where signs kept saying Beware of Ice or Beware Ahead. Mama'd called me on the phone from Dr Conn's office. "He's asked me to marry him. Should I?" "No," I said "No, no, no " "Okey-dokey," Mama told me. "If you're so sure." "Mama," I said. "In the whole history of the universe, no mother's ever asked her son if she could get married." "Well I just did." "Well hell no," I said. How fucked up could things get? Up front, Shawn Terrence Lord gave me a sick feeling in the stomach How he turned his back to me and left Mama standing there by herself on Capitol Hill, just a skinny man with a shag haircut standing with his back to the camera, dumb seagulls landing on the frozen reflecting pool Mama kept pictures of him in the briefcase by her bed. I saw them once, on a quick trip to Lonoke after she'd taken to the couch with her lupus full flare. She'd summoned me and Renee from Utah, certain she was dying. We slept two nights back in her bedroom and the briefcase was sort of propped up on one end beside her night stand, threatening to pop open before I ever touched it. Josephine Stepwell Harvell, I remember thinking that's her name, Mama's, engraved on fake gold. Inside were pictures and letters, twenty-year-old corsages and a piece of Jimmy's umbilical cord in an envelope marked HOLY. An entire roll is Kodak-our royal paper behind your best memories-film is dedicated to |