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Show Go Love/151 After Jimmy died, me and O.W. got close. Having a brother made me part of him, in Jimmy our blood mixed-he was our bridge Jimmy was drinking beer when he missed the dark turn out on 319. Traceleen's prom was the night after, in the picture, the day's last light shows golden on her face. The photographer's shadow-an arm? a shoulder?-darkens to an edge. My mother and my father behind there somewhere, stricken. We were a family, a fucked up one, but a family. What would he make of this, Jimmy, Mama drowning in a hottub in his bedroom? Was his ghost witness? His clothes still hang in the closet and the plaque from governor's school is crooked on the wall. Mama'd been sick a long time, real sick, heartbreak sick since the car wreck. With the exception of the Clinton campaigns and the Ocho Rios thing, she'd been sick to the bone with systemic lupus. Her body devoured itself She'd prepared to meet God, made arrangements, asked me to deliver the eulogy. Then she lived. Jimmy'd been spared the midnight phone call with O W.'s voice straining on the other end. He'd never had to hear that his mother was dead, that she'd had a heart attack that no coroner would ever corroborate, that she been scalded after half-a-day in 105 degree water, that there'd be no lakeside cabin vacation to Blue Clouds, that Mama'd cut O.W. off from her insurance settlement-just up and taken his name off the account after he'd spent a quarter of the money on four wheelers and false teeth. Jimmy'd never attend a viewing and he'd never, never, ever hear Shurl talk about what happens to a human body after four days dead. He'd never puzzle the word cosmetized and he'd never smoke dope with a man resembling a howler monkey outside a cigarette butt strewn funeral home. He wouldn't know that they could make ybu smile forever. He'd never confuse a wedding with a funeral, and he'd never get Cain and Abled by Brother Dell or drive inside the Stepwell cemetery and sleep there on his |