The Warmest December

by Bernice L. McFadden

  I wonder now where Hy-Lo spent those nights. Six weeks of heavy dark twilights. We thought he was at work; I think now he must have been at the Blue Moon drinking away his shame, anger, and his life savings.

  If it wasn’t for the phone calls we would never have known.

  “May I speak to Mr. Hyman Lowe?”

  “Um, he’s not here right now. This is his wife, may I help?”

  “Mrs. Lowe, this is Mr. Hagerty from Pendant Mortgage Company and I’m calling to find out when you plan on sending in your past due payments—”

  “Past due payments?”

  “Yes. Three months past due.”

  “Are you sure you have the right Lowe? I mean my husband … three months past due?”

  “Yes, we will be starting foreclosure proceedings on your home in a matter of—”

  “I don’t understand, three months past due? Three months?”

  Delia confronted Hy-Lo. Quietly at first—she chose her words carefully and picked through her range of tones until finally settling on one that was soft and timid. “Hyman, the mortgage company called, they said that we’re behind on the payments … they said three months … three months past due … ?” She was speaking to his back as he rummaged through the top drawer of his dresser. “Hyman—” she began again after he continued to ignore her.

  “Shut up, Delia,” he said without turning around. He slammed the top drawer closed and snatched open the second one.

  Delia stood there for a while, waiting for him to find whatever it was he was searching for so frantically. He had opened and closed all five drawers of his bureau before finally turning around to face her.

  “Hyman, I want to know—” Delia started again and Hy-Lo cut her off again, visciously this time.

  “I said shut the fuck up, Delia!” he yelled and stormed past her. Their shoulders connected and she stumbled backward.

  She did not approach him again, not for at least two weeks, not until after she grew frustrated and tired of the bill collectors.

  She began to search, digging through his drawers at night when she thought he was at work. She found stacks of overdue bills, white and gray envelopes that held threatening pieces of paper with angry red letters stamped across them that screamed: FINAL NOTICE.

  She found them tucked beneath his neatly folded under–shirts and boxer shorts, the ones she had spent her Saturday mornings washing, starching, and pressing. Delia’s heart must have sunk and her hands must have shook as she moved to the next drawer and found more of the same. In the third drawer she found an unemployment check and in the fourth she found the letter that told her that her husband had been terminated from his job. Terminated.

  The apartment was hot and the heat fueled the anger my memories brought on. I laughed aloud, forgetting that Delia was in the back room.

  “What?” she called to me.

  “I was talking to myself,” I responded and sat down again on the sofa.

  I looked back at the Christmas tree; it had slumped to one side like a trampled old man, like Hy-Lo when his pride had become nothing more than backwash in the bottles he drank from.

  I got up and went to the kitchen to fill a glass with water to pour into the green and red tree stand. The apartment was hot and so I cracked the window and allowed the cold to filter in, giving the tree some air and a chance.

  If only that would have been enough for Hy-Lo. A glass of water and some air.

  “Ha,” another bitter laugh escaped, and I covered my mouth against the troop of laughter that piled up at the base of my throat. I swallowed hard and forced it back inside of me.

  I sat back down and leaned into the couch, flicking through the TV channels, faster and faster until the pictures moved across the screen in a blur. Finally my thumb tired and I settled on channel eleven. The news was on and I leaned my head back and closed my eyes while I listened.

  In today’s news Ellen Fable consults the president about black political America and where the African American community stands …

  I sat straight up and rubbed my eyes. Ellen Fable had been in quite a few of my classes at Marymount College.

  She was a large girl, at least a size twenty. The relaxers just didn’t seem to take to her hair and so she wore it pulled back into a puffed ponytail that attracted lint and dust like a magnet. She had one pair of shoes whose seams had split open to reveal the small bend of her pinky toe.

  Ellen Fable had nothing, less than nothing, and we pitied her behind her back as she moved through the halls like a great whale through the sea of students that made way for her. “She gets welfare, you know,” people said when Ellen was out of earshot. “She lives with her grandmother. She’s blind, you know, the grandmother.”

  “Where are her parents?” I asked one day.

  “They’re dead. Both of them.”

  “Oh my God. How awful. How?”

  “Drunk driver.”

  “Oh! A drunk driver hit them?”

  “No, her father was the drunk and he drove himself and her mother into the back of a gas truck. Ellen was eight years old.”

  Ellen Fable with her missing tooth and lazy left eye, Ellen Fable who had nothing, less than nothing, and still ended up having more than me.

  “Oh, shit,” I mumbled as I moved closer to the television. Ellen Fable smiled broadly while the cameramen took snapshot after snapshot.

  She had a mouth full of teeth now and the lazy eye was hidden behind a fashionable pair of lightly tinted glasses and Ellen Fable had slimmed down to a respectable size twelve.

  “Oh, shit,” I said again and moved back into the sofa as Ellen’s face was replaced by the drab features of the weatherman.

  Ellen Fable had come from nothing and had everything. I had come from Delia and Hy-Lo and had nothing.

  * * *

  I needed to walk. I was gone before Delia rose the following morning. Christmas was just a week away and the streets were filled with Saturday-morning Christmas shoppers. I mingled amongst them, trailing behind mothers and their children, coming up alongside whole families, trying to stand close enough to feel a part of something joyous.

  Some noticed and clutched their pocketbooks closer to them, others gave me dirty looks and walked quickly away, while a few smiled at me as if they knew that’s exactly what I needed.

  I ended up, as I did on most days now, at Hy-Lo’s bedside. He had not changed, he didn’t look worse and he didn’t look better. I had bought a Christmas card at a five-anddime store on my way there. It was flimsy and the ink was cheap. On the front was a brilliant Christmas tree, the colors faded in places and dark and bold in others. On the inside it read: Wishing you a Joyous Holiday and a Very Happy New Year!

  I sat the card down beside the poinsettia, the colorful side facing Hy-Lo. For some reason I needed this space to be full of something other than his sickness and my sadness. I moved my chair up a bit, just past his knees until I was parallel to his groin. I felt uncomfortable there and moved up a bit more to his stomach.

  The room was filled with visitors and I looked around at the faces in the beds and none of them was familiar to me. Change, it was a constant in that ward; whether it was for better or worse, things kept moving on. I pulled the curtain around us and blocked out the rest of the world.

  I had taken my jacket off and laid it across my lap. My gloves remained on my hands and my head remained covered by my hat. I was still cold, but it was nothing like the cold that had overwhelmed me during my earlier visits. This was more like the unbalanced chill of a late April evening, the kind where winter still claims the nights even though the tulips have pushed up through the earth and nests made by tiny brown birds dot the tree limbs and lampposts.

  It was that type of warmth and cold mixed up wrong that gripped that day they found Hy-Lo’s brother Charlie in a stall on a toilet in a halfway house, his head lolled to one side, foam seeping from his mouth, his pants down around his ankles, and a bottle of gin resting on his lap.

  I was
at his apartment when the call came. His wife placed the phone back in its cradle and said to no one in particular, “Charles is dead,” and went back to dusting the furniture. I could have sworn I heard her let go a sigh of relief as she moved the candy bowl and the imitation porcelain dogs to the side of the table that had already been dusted.

  His children, five of them, looked up from what they were doing and stared at each other. It seemed as if they were waiting for a cue. Some emotion from someone that they could imitate and build on. But it never came and they went back to what they were consumed by before they’d heard the news of their father’s death. I grabbed my coat and left.

  That had shaken Hy-Lo, but not enough for him to stop drinking, not enough for his eyes to mist with grief, just enough for his head to dip while the minister spoke over Charlie’s dead body.

  Gwenyth had taken it hard; after all, he was her child, even though they had not spoken to one another for more than three years. She pretended that the distance and the silence didn’t bother her, but we all knew it did because she clung even tighter to her youngest child, Randy. She would have turned to Hy-Lo, but he was like Teflon, so what would be the point in trying?

  A year later, as if on cue, the phone rang just as I was thinking about Charlie because his son had called from jail and wanted me to send him sneakers.

  No, I think I was thinking about the sneakers when the phone rang and I picked it up and almost said “Nike” instead of “Hello.”

  “Yes, may I speak to Hyman Lowe, please?” The voice sounded clinical.

  “He’s not here, this is his daughter, may I help you?”

  Hy-Lo was there, but he was passed out in his chair in the basement. I could hear his loud snores through the floorboards and I stomped my feet even though I knew he didn’t hear me.

  The voice paused and then cleared its throat. “Well, I suppose I can give you the message.” I rolled my eyes because I had just come in from my night job. I had only four hours left to sleep before I had to head back to the city to take my place behind the cosmetic counter at Bloomingdale’s. I stomped on the floor again, harder this time—because that is what Hy-Lo had made my life: harder.

  “Um, his mother,” the voice came again, “Gwenyth Lowe expired this morning at four-thirty.”

  The voice went dead and I took it as a gracious act in order to leave me a space to voice my grief. But I had none and so I said, “Do you need him to come in and identify the body or something?”

  Silence seeped into the room from the other end of the line.

  “Thank you for the information, I will let him know,” I said without giving the voice a chance to respond.

  Gwenyth had been admitted into a nursing home just six months after Charlie died. Her mind had snapped in two despite how close she kept Randy to her. Maybe if she’d had both of her sons to hold on to, her mind would only have bent against the loss she suffered instead of coming completely apart in the middle.

  Gwenyth’s life was reflected in the sparse number of people who attended her funeral: one or two people I didn’t know, five grandchildren, an old friend from her childhood, two daughters-in-law, her remaining sons, and Glenna. We felt ashamed of the emptiness in the small room of the funeral home the service was held in, and so we spread out, attempting to fill the lonely spaces and catch the echo of the minister’s words as they bounced from the dark wood walls.

  Glenna sat beside me, fidgeting and whispering apologies in my ear. “It’s okay, Glenna. It’s okay,” was all I could offer her. My mouth was like cotton and my insides were hard and cold like my grandmother’s body.

  Gwenyth lay before us, dressed in a smart burgundy wool suit, her hair a mass of tight silver curls, her makeup impeccably applied. She looked the same in death as she did in life: perfect.

  The preacher invited people to stand up and say a kind word about Gwenyth Lowe. There was a shuffling of programs and then the creaking of chairs as people eased themselves deeper into the aluminum frames. But no one stood or spoke. The preacher looked embarrassed. His mouth puckered in bewilderment and then he cleared his throat and once again invited someone to stand and speak. “Is there anyone who would like to say something? Anyone at all?”

  “I’d like to say something,” a voice called out from the bank of chairs on the left side of the room. Someone gasped in surprise and all heads turned toward the woman who stood up. It was Uncle Charlie’s first wife, Evelyn, the one we weren’t allowed to mention in the house. Evelyn was dressed in a red suit with a fur collar. There was a man sitting next to her, who I assumed was her new husband. Evelyn raised her hand and moved a perfectly curled lock of hair from her forehead. That’s when we all saw the ring—so disgustingly huge that it didn’t just sparkle, it glowed.

  Evelyn was rich now and she had taken the time to drive in from her home in the Hamptons to pay her former mother-in-law her last respects.

  “I’d like to say that Gwenyth was a bitch on wheels,” Evelyn said and smiled broadly. Someone chuckled and Delia pulled air between her teeth. “And I know a lot of you here agree with me, whether you care to admit it or not.” Evelyn’s eyes rolled over the faces that watched her. “She ruined my marriage to her son and for that I owe her a debt of thanks.” She smiled maliciously, nodded her head at the preacher, and sat back down.

  The room was reeling from her words. Even the preacher was speechless for a long time, he just kept looking down at his Bible and then back at Evelyn. “Any—uh—hum … anyone else have anything they’d like to say?” he asked cautiously.

  I searched within myself and found no bits of remorse or intimations of grief that would inspire me to speak over Gwenyth’s body. She had never really been a grandmother to me; she was always Hy-Lo’s mother, Mrs. Lowe.

  Hy-Lo’s head dipped lower at this loss and his chin rested on his chest throughout the service, but he did not cry and his shoulders did not heave. He handled the death of his mother as he did everything else in his life: he climbed deeper into his bottle.

  I sighed at the memory and felt a pang of pity for him. My hand moved up and rested lightly on the fragile skin of his arm. I expected my body to shake with disgust and my hand to recoil against the feel of his flesh against mine, but none of these things happened and so I left my hand there until the early-winter evening glowed purple through the window and I was confronted with a memory so blanched with time that it was almost unrecognizable to me.

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “C’mon, Kenzie.”

  “No.”

  “C’mon, please?”

  “I say no!”

  “Okay, if you come out I’ll buy you an ice cream.”

  “No, no, no! Chocolate?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sprinkles?”

  “Rainbow.”

  I must have been three years old, maybe younger. Hy-Lo was searching for me, yelling my name through the apartment. “Kenzie! Where are you? Kennnzzziiiee!”

  It was a game we played when my mother went out and left us alone. Before he moved from beer to vodka, before he stopped simply yelling and started slapping.

  I had hidden myself in Delia’s closet and placed my sneakers on the wrong feet and had horribly knotted the laces. My coat, an Easter lightweight that was pink with a white collar, covered my head and blocked out the blotchy darkness of the closet. I felt well hidden, but he found me anyway, pulling me from the closet and hoisting me up in his arms and then spinning me wildly through the air.

  We laughed together, father and daughter, and afterward I rested my head in the smooth curve of his neck and delighted in the feel of his rough whiskers as they brushed against my forehead. Chocolate ice cream danced in my mind and I felt safe wrapped in my father’s arms.

  The memory moved me to tears and my forefinger traced the length of his arm until it reached his wrist and finally the creased back of his hand.

  I waited, hoping that his hand would flinch and jerk until finally turning over an
d welcoming my fingers into his palm. I waited and watched his face for any change. I waited and realized that my hand had enclosed his and his fingers had bent to oblige.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I made the eight o’clock meeting on the second floor of a three-story building in a space Genie Carpets once occupied. It was a bright and airy location with floor-toceiling windows and whirling ceiling fans. Even in the early darkness the room made it seem more like early spring than the dead of winter.

  Bolts of carpet were stacked like colorful logs in the four corners of the room and Going Out of Business signs lay in neat heaps on the windowsills. Large fluffy pillows with mosaic designs had been strategically placed around the floor and the lingering scent of myrrh curled through the room. I smiled a bit and looked around at the flustered faces of some of the older women who were trying to figure out how they were going to sit on the floor without embarrassing themselves.

  I took my place in what I thought to be the coffee line, behind a large white woman with red hair and black eyebrows. She turned and offered me a smile; I returned it and then dropped my eyes. I didn’t need to make friends; I just needed to find some peace.

  The line moved past cookies, donuts, and brownies. “No coffee?” I asked as I stood at the table blinking at the clear water the woman behind the table had just poured into my cup. “No.” The woman laughed at the surprise in my voice. “Just herbal tea.” The meetings always had coffee. “And no smoking in the room,” the woman added and turned her teapot on to the next cup.

  “Oh, okay,” I remarked and made my way further down the table toward the multicolored boxes. Green tea, chamomile, Red Zinger. I was dazzled by the array but all I really wanted was coffee. I closed my eyes and stuck my hand into the first box my fingers found.

  This was a women-only meeting run by a lady named Fatima, who had been clean for nearly twenty years. She was almost sixty, but didn’t look a day over forty-five. “Welcome,” she said, and her Jamaican voice boomed across the room grabbing your attention by the chin. “Hello, my name is Fatima and I’m an alcoholic.”