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Show Go Love/132 around singing "I'm Hen-ery the eighth I am' I'm Hen-ery Hen-ery the eighth I am, I am," the starched napkin blooming white a frilly on his head To my left, a door leads to the garage, stuffed full of plastic bags full of garbage and nick-nack Mama was always collecting, I imagine the fake silk ribbons draped from the handlebars of a mini-bike that long ago leaked its oil onto the busted concrete-mother, father, son and brother, odd souvenirs from our family cemetery, along with untold wreathes and the hideous painting of ducks and flowers and bird-faced boys. Mama's white Towncar is parked in there-the one Renee'd borrowed while ours was in the shop. The power seats somehow got screwed up, so my wife'd had to drive all over creation with her chest forced up against the steering wheel, "so close the frigging horn honks," she'd said. As ever, the bolt gives when I put my shoulder to it. After Jimmy's wreck, I sat in here and read love letters from the girls who'd call him beer breathed in the middle of the night, talk him into a late night drive like the one that got him killed. When door opens inward and I see what no tongue could ever prophesy. Out Jimmy's window, beyond the confines of this room, Dora-Mama's best friend-she's digging. I once witnessed her kill a rattlesnake with a shovel blade. Right out in the backyard, she hung it with a garland of yellow ribbons from a tree limb, how country women call spirits for rain. In a dry year, snakes bloat from tree limbs all over the county This second she's wrestling a tree into a hole she's clearly just dug in her backyard. The sapling's bottom-heavy. Dirty Dora snaps it this way and it dawns on me that she's planting the tree immediately between me and her kitchen window, where I've often seen her face shining behind the glass. It's a pine, a stout six-footer already, one day to eclipse our whole house, the brown needles falling thirty feet into our |