“Whose baby is that?”
I’m startled by the sound of her voice, raspy from the healthy cigarettes. I haven’t heard it in some time.
“Mo’s.”
“He shouldn’t be in here.”
I feel a tingle in my chest. What is that? Anger? “Why not?” I ask, holding him close to my chest.
She glares at me from her cloud of smoke. “He doesn’t live here.”
“But I do,” I say. “And if you can have guests, so can I.”
I don’t know where that came from. But life has already made Mo feel unwelcome; I’m not going to let her do it, too. I carry him to the sofa in the living room, without checking her reaction, and lay him down. My mother follows behind me.
“What are you doing?”
This is the most she’s said to me in months. I don’t look at her when I say, “Changing his diaper.” If I look at her, I’ll lose my resolve. She’ll bully me into leaving, and right now I just want to get this baby out of his piss-wet clothes. She leans over the back of the couch to look at him. I can smell the vanilla perfume she uses; it mingles with the stale smell of cigarette smoke.
“That baby isn’t right,” she says after a minute of staring at him. “I’ll bet you anything that bitch of a girlfriend Mo has was using when she was pregnant.” I don’t know how my mother knows about Mo’s bitch of a girlfriend, or that he even has a girlfriend. For someone who never sees the light of day, she appears to be well informed.
“There’s nothing wrong with him,” I say. He’s kicking his legs contentedly, happy to be free of his diaper.
“No, of course not,” she says. “And he doesn’t have the worst case of diaper rash I’ve ever seen either.”
She’s right. His skin is inflamed. The worst part is, he’s not even crying. My mother disappears from the room, and I think she’s gone up to her bedroom when she strolls back in, her red robe billowing around her legs. She hands me a tube of A&D ointment. “Wash him over the sink. Don’t use wipes. Dry him and leave his butt bare for a while.”
She floats back to her cave, and I hold the A&D in my hand for a long time before I do what she says. No one comes to get Mo. I feed him one of the bottles I found in the stroller, and when it starts to get dark, I carry him home, dragging the wonky-wheeled stroller behind me. When adult Mo answers the door, he looks annoyed.
“Oh shit,” he says when he sees the baby in my arms. “I forgot.”
He reaches for him, but I steer my hip left so the baby is out of his reach.
“He has diaper rash. It’s bad.” I hand him the A&D. “Leave him without a diaper for a while so it can clear up.”
Mo looks annoyed that I’m telling him what to do. I want to add, And stop cooking crack in your basement before you blow him up. But that’s the type of shit that gets you in trouble around here.
“Where’s Vola?” I ask, hoping Little Mo’s mother is somewhere around to take care of him. Mo’s eyes glaze over at the mention of her name.
“That buckwild bitch. Hell should I know?” Ah, so they’re fighting again. I want to tell him that he can leave Mo with me until she comes back, but he’s already slammed the door in my face.
I start to walk home, but I don’t want to be there. She will find a way to punish me for bringing the baby inside—both her and the house. Judah is with his dad tonight, wherever that is. Somewhere better than here, I think. I walk up the street, then back down again. Mother Mary, who is sitting in a rocking chair on her stoop, waves at me. I wave back. The bad people house is throbbing with music, although none of the usual glassy-eyed inhabitants are outside tonight. Past the eating house there is a small path that leads through the trees and into the woods. It’s overgrown now because nobody goes back there, but when I was little, and my mom left the house, we’d walk the path every day. My mom would say, “The leaves have varicose veins, Margo. Looky…”
I head there now, picking my way through the blackberry bushes, only half aware of the thorns nipping at my bare arms. I used to think these woods were mine, that they belonged to the eating house and whoever owned it. Now I know its part of the city. Protected wetlands, and trees, and birds.
Carpet growing up trees. Logs furred with moss. Leaves furled on the edges, burned brown by the sun. Most importantly there are flowers growing everywhere. Why don’t I come here more often?
I walk for a long time. I’m heading west toward the water. If I keep walking, I’ll come to the place where they found Nevaeh’s body. I don’t want to do that, so I head east. A little over a mile later I walk right into a wooden shack. It’s a storage shack, just large enough for a lawnmower and some tools. What it’s doing out here, I don’t know. The door is unhinged, and it’s mostly covered in moss. I step inside, brushing away cobwebs and the egg sacs that insects have left behind. It’s empty, aside from a rusted shovel and a box of generic, unopened garbage bags that sit on a stool in the center. The box is so faded I can barely make out the writing. It’s a place you could come to do secret things. It’s a wonder the high schoolers haven’t found it. They are always looking for a new place to smoke pot in peace. I pull the door closed and head back home, mentally making note of the fastest way to get to the shack. You never know when you’ll need to use something like that.
MY FAT IS GONE AND NONE OF MY CLOTHES FIT. I don’t care because they suck anyway, but you have to have shit to cover your flesh, because people will stare if you walk around fat and naked. My mother keeps a box of her fat clothes in the attic. I don’t know when my mother was ever fat, but I go scrounging around up there for something to wear. She wore a lot of high-waisted, cut-off jean shorts, with the edges fraying and tangled, cut so short the pockets peek out the bottom. There are half a dozen flannel shirts in there, too, and a pair of bright blue Doc Martens. She said that after she had me her feet grew a full size, and she had to throw away all of her old shoes. I carry my spoils back to my bedroom and spread them out on my mattress.
“What were you doing up there?” My mother stands in my doorway, arms folded across her chest like she’s cold.
“Up where?” I shake out the clothes and hold them up to get a good look. I’m shaken by the fact that she’s talking to me, but I don’t let it show. I don’t hate her presence, just her lack of it.
“I heard you,” she says. “In the attic…”
I ignore her, spreading, holding things up to my chest to check the size. If she looked closely, she’d be able to see the tremor in my hands.
“What is that?” She steps around me and looks down at the pile. Shock registers on her face, the lines that tell her age cut deeper as she frowns.
“Put that back,” she says.
I spin around.
“Then give me money to buy clothes…” I hold out my hand like I expect her to palm me a fifty, but she’s looking at the Docs like they’re a ghost.
“You shouldn’t wear things like that,” she says, pulling her robe tighter around her shoulders. “Men will get the wrong idea. Even if you’re not pretty, they’ll think…”
“What are you talking about?” I’m holding up a T-shirt to get a good look at it. Nirvana. It still has the knot tied into the bottom. I glance over at her face and put down the shirt. My mother is the type who is always looking for a reason to be angry. She tsssked and huffed and stomped around the eating house over the slightest thing. Now she is angry I pulled her old clothes out of retirement. Like she could wear them anyway. She is a toothpick human, all bone and sharp edges, always buried beneath that robe.
“I was … my daddy, he—”
I lay the shirt down.
“He what?”
She shakes her head. “You shouldn’t wear clothes like that,” she reiterates. But I don’t want to let it go. She was going to tell me something before she decided against it, and I want to know what.
“Did he do something to you?” I press. I try not to look intense; I don’t want to scare her off. But my eyes are drilling into her.
“That’s none of your business,” she says.
“Who is my father?” I swear to God, this is the first time I’ve verbalized the question that plagues every child who has no memories of a father. The first time I care to know.
“That’s none of your business,” she says again, but this time she’s slowly backing out of the room.
“It’s my business,” I say urgently. “It is. Because I have a right to know who he is…” I follow her—a step for a step. She shakes her head. I’m becoming more panicky. I feel my palms grow damp, the increased lub-dub of my heart. This is my one chance to get answers. I am eighteen. There are but a few breaths left in our relationship.
“Tell me, goddammit!” I grit between my teeth. I don’t want to yell, but I’m not above it. My mother hates loud noises.
“Don’t speak to me like that. I’m your moth—”
“You aren’t a mother,” I say quickly. “You hung my childhood by a noose. You don’t even care, do you? Of course not. You don’t care that I graduated from high school with honors, or that I got a job, or that the best kind of man likes to spend time with me. You’re just an ugly, self-involved, guilt-ridden whore who refuses to even speak to the child you brought into this world. I can’t even find the strength to hate you, because I don’t even care anymore.”
Her hand meets my cheek. It’s an epic slap if I’ve ever seen one, and growing up in the Bone you see no less than half a dozen greatly administered slaps in a year. My cheek begins to sting before her hand even leaves it. My skin mars easily, so I can almost see the etchings of her fingers on my face. I begin to lift a hand to touch the spot where she struck me, but I don’t want to give her the satisfaction. I drop my hand, curling it into a fist.
“Who was my father?” I ask again. This time my voice sounds more like me—flat and calm. The slap, the declaration of my ruined childhood makes it official. We will talk tonight, probably not ever again, but tonight is for answers. The kind people aren’t usually willing to give.
My mother casts her bruised eyes to the scarred wooden floor. Her red robe is open, and her right breast has slipped from the material. The sight of it revolts me; the men whose hands have fondled it are on a carousel in my mind. Was one of them my father? I know it before she says it—the man who drives the restored mustang, the one with the LWMN license plate and the watch I’d now come to understand is a Rolex.
“His name is Howard Delafonte,” she says. “Come downstairs. I need a smoke.”
I follow her down the narrow stairs of the eating house and sit at the kitchen table while she lights a cigarette and pours a finger of scotch into a dusty tumbler she finds in a cabinet. She’s doing things: pouring, lighting, sipping. I haven’t seen her do anything but float from room to room in a long time. The movement looks odd on her, like a ghost mimicking flesh. When she sits on the only other chair across from me, she sighs.
“Poor me,” she says. “I got knocked up by the mayor, but that was before he was the mayor, of course. He would have been much more careful. He was just a lawyer back then. At Markobs and Jacob. He left my first month there, but not before we had already slept together. He liked me, brought me gifts.”
I think of the wrapping paper I find in her trashcan and wonder if he brings her those trinkets.
“Even after he left, he’d take me out. Wine and dine if I’d ever seen it.” She takes a deep drag of her cigarette and drains her scotch before she’s even blown out her smoke. “He had a family of course. Same old bullshit. Wife made him miserable. I saw her once—fat, cow-faced. She nagged the hell out of him.” She stubs out her cigarette on the bare table, then uses the tip of her finger to play with the ash.
“I made him happy. He was going to leave her, but then she got sick. Said he couldn’t do it.”
I want to ask her what the fat, cow-faced wife of the mayor got sick with, but I know it doesn’t matter. I need the end of this story.
“Howard kept seeing me, of course. Eventually the partners at the firm caught wind of it; someone saw us at the movies. Go figure,” she says. Her tongue absently snakes up and rubs at her crooked tooth while she thinks. “By that time he was already running for mayor, and I was pregnant with you.”
“Why does he still come?” I ask. “After all these years.” Or maybe I should ask why Daddy doesn’t talk to his daughter. Small talk even. So what do you like to do with your free time? Haven’t you ever wished you had a TV?
Then it hits me. My mother had a television; she threw it out when I was little, told me it broke and that we didn’t have money for a new one. And all these years there has been no new television. Not because we couldn’t afford one with the piles of money she has lying beneath the floorboards, but because they haven’t wanted me to see my father on TV. The mayor of Harbor Bone in his cherry red Mustang. I wonder what he really drives, probably a new Mercedes or BMW, something with dark, official-looking tints that smells inside of his cigars and cedar wood cologne. The mustang is his weekend plaything. He keeps it in his garage and drives it here because no one will recognize it. Hey Dad, cool midlife crisis.
“He loves me,” she says.
“What about me? Does he love me?” I spit.
“It’s not like that. He didn’t want me to have you. He wanted me to have an abortion, but I wouldn’t do it.”
“So now he pretends that I don’t exist? God. And you’re okay with that because you do that same thing.”
The eating house rattles around us, the panes on the windows humming from the pressure within. It agrees with me. The eating house knows what a corrupt deadness my mother has become. The insipid wasteland of a woman who gave her best years to a man who treated her youth like it was a weekend at the casino. It’s seen her invite other men in while leaving her only child out. I feel a camaraderie with the eating house just then—a oneness instead of an oppression. My mother flinches away from the question. She glances at the rattling windows, probably wondering if I can hear it too. So, I pretend that I can’t, allowing my eyes to bore into her sallow skin, making her fidget and squirm in her seat. Let her think she’s going mad, I think. Let her think she’s the only one who can hear the eating house.
“I have half brothers and sisters?”
“Yes.”
“And my father is the mayor?”
“Not anymore. He’s retired now.” Her tongue reaches up to touch her tooth.
“And his … children … he’s close with them?”
I want her to say no. That he’s estranged from those children as well. That he didn’t go to their baseball games, and ballet recitals, and sit around the breakfast table staring into their sleep-crusted eyes every morning.
“Yes,” she says. And that yes is her last and final word on the matter. She stands up, and she looks a hundred years old. She’s to the stairs when I call after her.
“If he comes here again, there will be no more silence from me,” I say. “Let him know.”
I hear the creaking of the stairs as she climbs back to her room. Slowly … slowly.
IT’S SATURDAY, and I don’t know what to do with myself. I cleaned the bathroom, then called work to see if they had a shift for me to cover. Sandy told me to stay home and live a little, but Judah is spending the weekend with his dad, and life feels dry when he isn’t here. I study the peeling plaster in the living room for what seems like hours before I decide to cook a real meal. My mother has old cookbooks on top of the fridge. I pull them down and flip through the pages, sneezing when the dust crawls up my nose. I find a recipe I like and pull out my mother’s notepad
to make a list of the things I’ll need. I’ve never cooked before, but there are a lot of things I’m doing lately that I’m new to. Judah, for example.
“Yo,” I say to the stove. “You alive in there?” I kick the door of the oven with the toe of my boot and hear a crash. I have the eerie feeling that someone is watching me. But my mother is sleeping; I can hear her soft snores from upstairs. I shiver as I lower myself to my haunches and open the oven door. Inside is what looks like a metal box, sitting on a collapsed rack; the rack depresses me. I look over my shoulder just to see if she’s there before pulling it out. Something is behind me; I can feel it. The box is heavy. I carry it to the table, my plans of cooking forgotten. Something shifts inside it—rough and smooth grating together—and suddenly the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.
Why would my mother put a box in the oven? And how long has it been there? I try to remember the last time I saw her cooking. Was it right after she lost her job and stopped leaving the house? I sit with both hands on top of the box and my eyes closed. Put it back. Put it back. Put it back. I want to. Hidden things should stay hidden. There are hinges and a latch. I lift the latch. My hands are shaking. My reaction is pathetic, like my body already knows what’s inside of this thing, but it doesn’t. At least not that I can remember. I push back the lid. Everything after that happens to someone who isn’t me.
Bones. Tiny human bones. I am frozen. My hands claw the air above the box. I don’t know how much time goes by with me looking into the coffin. I’ve seen this before. Haven’t I? It feels familiar—the panic, the disgust, the slow numbing. All of it. Even as I close the lid and walk stiffly back to the oven, I have an eerie sense of deja vu. What am I supposed to do? Confront my mother? Call the police? I stare down at the oven door, the tomb to this tiny human. The box is heavy; I rest it on my hip and feel the bones slide around. I quickly adjust the box, instead cradling it in my arms like a baby. The doorbell rings, and all of a sudden I’m shaking.
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