She walked quickly down the street, thinking that she wouldn’t go fishing, but she’d work in the yard in case it did rain. She could loosen the dirt where she wanted the vegetable garden, so the water wouldn’t just run off. It would sparkle itself into the roots.
Only Mary was at home, sleepy-eyed from her night shift. Marietta said, “I just come to see if you husband want Carolanne’s season ticket for the home game? He and Roscoe like to come with me, you think?”
Mary said, “Well, I know James Sr. would.” That was Red Man’s real name. “But I better tell you, I don’t think Roscoe would go.” She put her hands across her chest to hold her shoulders, as if she were embarrassed. “I know you gettin to know him, but he don’t do too well with sports, cause of his boy, you know. Louis and him had that falling out over basketball. Roscoe don’t even go to the junior college games when James Sr. and Lanier and them go.”
Marietta thought quickly, remembering the hot sun, the beer, the knees, and she said, “You think your boys like to go sometime? I don’t go to all the game, sometime I like for watch on TV. Maybe Darnell and James Jr. can go with they daddy this weekend.”
“They would faint if you told em they could sit in your seats,” Mary said. “You sure you want to give that up?”
Marietta smiled and said, “I seen plenty football. Let em tell everybody they Nate and Calvin’s cousins.” When she heard the first drops of rain on the roof, she looked up.
“I didn’t really believe it gon rain,” Mary said. “Roscoe and James Sr. went to San Bernardino to check on some big tree-trimming job—I wonder if it rainin over there? They inside anyway, suppose to empty out a building, too.”
“I better run,” Marietta said. “I bring them ticket tomorrow.” She went out hurriedly and started back down the street, feeling the drops only a mist on her face now. She wanted to sit on the porch in the dripping.
I rather watch on TV, she thought. By myself, don’t have to listen for nobody ax me question, don’t have for feel nobody stare. Red Man and them go this time, maybe I go with him next. Roscoe ain’t need for be bother with none of it. She went inside to close all the windows, just in case this gentle dripping turned to real rain, and while she was in the bedroom, someone knocked. She went to the door cautiously—I know California people don’t go out in no rain. Roscoe working. Opening the door a crack, she looked down, expecting one of Red Man’s daughters, but she saw a thin stomach and a belt. Raising her eyes taller than herself, she saw the angular gold face and the boys’ thick eyebrows.
“Lord God,” she said. “Sinbad.”
“That’s my basket name.”
He came inside and she stood awkwardly away from him. He stopped by the door. “How you know where I live?” she said.
“Your picture. This dude at work was talking about these two football players all the time, and I never paid any attention. He’s a big 49er fan, and he hates the Rams. So then he brought this magazine to work and showed me your face. And the twins.” He said it strangely, of course. They not boy to he, not no men—he don’t know what for call em.
“Where you work?” she asked.
“At a hotel. San Francisco, I guess you can tell. I’m in the kitchen, but it’s a big kitchen and they pay big money.” Water glittered on his hair, but he didn’t move.
“You wife know you here?”
“I ain’t married. Divorced.”
“The boys don’t live here.”
“I know. My friend called the Rams, said he was your uncle or something like that to get their number.” He stopped. “I didn’t come to see them, or to bother you.”
She looked out the front window at the rain. “You drive all this far from San Francisco?”
“You remember—I love to drive.”
“What you got now?” she said, squinting at the car. “A new Ford what?”
“Hey, you didn’t use to know anything about cars,” he said.
“I know enough now. I got a Lincoln, from Nate and Calvin.”
“What are their basket names?”
She had to laugh. “They ain’t got basket name. But I do.”
“Yeah?”
“When we live in Charleston, I was Big Ma.”
He rubbed his fingers nervously when she said the names. “You don’t look like a Big Ma.”
“To you. But what I ever look like to you, huh?” She stood very still. The dirt outside was so hard she could hear each drop of water from the roof.
He moved his shoulders a little, stretching. “When I saw that picture, you looked exactly the same as you always did. Like somebody I was sort of scared to see.”
“I scare everybody,” she said, hard. “Blueblood. They afraid black rub off on em.”
“No,” he said, and she saw just a flash of his narrow, gap-toothed smile. “Nuh-uh. Scary because you knew too much. Looked right through me every day, didn’t listen to my rap.”
“I musta listen,” she said. “I had two baby.”
He smiled big then. “You know better.”
“How many lady you keep now?”
“I have somebody off and on. Not serious.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I have somebody, live close by. Maybe serious.” She was silent again, thinking of his breath, the feel of his back. “You ain’t gon sit?”
“I don’t know—you standing there like you don’t know if you really want me in the house. What you want me to do?”
“Stand.” She went close to him, holding her breath, and his hands on her back still made her shake a little, made her eyes hot. She felt his lips there, just below her hair, and then she stepped back and took his arm. “Come out here and sit,” she said, opening the door and leading him out to the porch.
“It’s cold out here,” he protested, but he sat. “I ain’t good enough to sit inside, huh?”
“No,” she said. “But I don’t know when it ever rain again here, and I like for see it come off the tree.” She watched him put his long feet up on the porch rail. “So where you read about?” she said. “Tell me all the place you been.”
After he’d gone, his car hissing down the street, she sat sheltered under the eaves, and the silver-gray water rushed from the pepper trees by the street and the plum tree in the side yard. The sky was very dark now, like the woods at home. Home—you gon still call that home? Still plan for run? Near forty—you best not run. You best stay. She thought she’d make some of the bacon Roscoe had brought. Real bacon—streak a fat, streak a lean, she thought. Not that yellow-tan flimsy stuff, like Carolanne call bacon, thin as ribbon and curl at the edge. Nothing but a crunch and then a dust a grease on you teeth.
The water already made puddles in the baked dirt. Close to the street, a long, wide wallow was filled with rain, and Roscoe had told her that every year a wide swath of sunflowers grew wild there, huge flowers nearly as tall as little trees.
About the Author
Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or b
y any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1992 by Susan Straight
Cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4804-1087-9
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots Page 43
