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Show Go Love/172 wouldn't be seen dead with him wearing, he'll tell me. Everybody's in the living room, my stupid Senior picture with my blow-dried hair up on the hall wall, Jimmy's grinning beside me, blue Trace. "Why aren't you hurting, Joey Say son?" Mean tilts her head. "Don't a son hurt for it's mama?" "Shut up, Mean," Trace says out of the blue from the kitchen table. In walks Dora with a yellow squash casserole. "I brought this Jo loved this. She'd want me to make it for the family." She reaches a Pyrex dish out for me to take. A country woman who hangs snakes from her fruit trees to bring rain, I see her muscling the tree into the hole dug between houses She smells like cedar. O.W. says, "Come back here, Joey." I pass Renee Dora's squash. "Now," he says. Renee, my wife, I haven't spoken to her for a long time, she's looking at me, gaging me Lara's eating a donut. Who talks with their four year old about what's inside a casket? She'll never know my people now. "Joey." O.W. says. He motions with his eyes Dora's eyelids narrow. "You hang tough," she tells me. I follow him down the hall, toward Mama's bedroom, Traceleen's abandoned room on the opposite side of the hall of the master room where O W sleeps when he's not out on the recliner The hall's lined with the framed high points of our lives together, weddings, candles being blown out at birthday parties, Jimmy smiling in a top hat and white tuxedo at Senior Prom-the good |