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Show Go Love/164 blues Dougie has Jimmy magic in him. Hold tight to that bov. She'd talk turkey to everybody about what it's like to be alive, how life has two big hands like a man, the sweet one gives you all the great gifts of a lifetime, and the other is a bone-breaking fist. In this world, who could expect to get one without the other. She'd say please, please, please don't be sad for me, and there'd be three exclamation marks after I love you!!! Mama'd join O W. at the head of her own casket She'd gaze down on herself, touch her cheek the way she did Papa Stepwell's. "I'm sorry, honey," she'd tell herself with all the tenderness of mother's and daughters. My mama'd weep real tears for herself, for us all. Then she'd console O.W., tell him all the good things that had happened between them. She'd touch the scar she'd once clawed into his cheek with the tip of her fingers, the way I'd seen her do so many times when he was ailing When she'd say Jimmy. O.W 'd break a little, and the two of them would embrace and the tears would come and they'd make peace with the difference between what was and what could have been. Flashed before my mother's and father's eyes would be the day they married, how the wide river stretched green and lush through Mom Dee's plate glass window high in the Himalaya House. For a moment I'd be best man again, a breathing link between them, about to say I do. Maybe it's not the worst thing to forgive, she'd say to O.W., this Can't we get past this? And, finally, the last words-I love you. Traceleen's picked out a lily spray so white it hurts here in Exquisite Farewell Room's directed lighting. People have written their names on the lines in the Josephine Harvell Memorial Guest Book. Treadways and Spences and Elliotts, some of them I know from way off like recognizing the scar on a middle knuckle of a finger you once doctored. Visit the Josephine Stepwell Harvell website for touching online memorials, we're instructed. Emanating from Mama, fourteen rows of chairs with a walkway down the middle. Some people sit, some people stand, |