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Show Go Love/167 I heard it on the day we finally had it out over Buddy Washer Renee and I'd flown Mama to Salt Lake that June, and she'd arrived in a freak snow. This was the year the light hurt her eyes, and she wore those wacky wrap-around sunglasses for old people. Lara was five months-a hazel-eyed star of a baby, and Mama took her into her arms, walked out and sat down under the pear in green grass and tried to make an impression that would last beyond the grave. They lay cooing to one another while I hoed a row of bolted spinach, listening to Mama tell Lara the story of her life That night, she sat with me on the back patio where we could see the white frame bungalow house across our street. Mormons owned it, rented for next to nothing to newly married LDS couples who'd move in and fuck like badgers and promptly conceive a child, give birth and move up to better. The house was entirely whitewashed-bright white-and the streetlight shone on the south wall which glows the way a pale hand would in deep water. "You look like Buddy," Mama said out of the blue. "He had the best teeth." Then, for a while we followed familiar paths, me asking how on earth she could run off with a man like him. She said how she got me out of the deal, and that only a person capable of loving deeply and despite human frailties could ever expect to be happy in this world "Did he ever hurt you? My daddy?" Mama looked at the sad lit house and made a sound like a sigh She was pretty, even swollen with lupus, and we'd always been on the same track Her voice-I've read how the unborn hear their mother's voices through the womb, and it resonates inside them forever and ever. "He took me and his brother Davey out to this canyon. We went barefoot down this deer trail. There were other times." "Why are you telling me this?" |