Miss Edna smiled a little bit and shook her head. She said when Rodney and Jenkins were around my age, they’d go at it and she’d have to pull them apart. Then she laughed and said that she beat both their behinds for acting like fools when they were supposed to be brothers. Then she wasn’t laughing anymore. Not even smiling. She said Jenkins never liked fighting. That in school he never got into fights and when him and Rodney fought, Jenkins always told her Rodney was the one who started it. But Rodney lives with us and he’s a really cool guy so I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even born yet.
Miss Edna stopped sewing again and told me about the day Jenkins found out he was going over there to the war. She said he just cried and cried. I told her I couldn’t believe he cried. Miss Edna looked at me like I was crazy. Then she told me that no matter how big you get, it’s still okay to cry if you need to because everybody’s got a right to their own tears. The thing about Miss Edna is, she has a way of sneaking a lecture into even the most calm conversation.
Miss Edna said Jenkins cried about having to go fight in the war and while he was crying, she held him real tight and told him everything was going to be okay.
I’ve never met Jenkins but there’s pictures of him all over the house. The one I like the best is the one where he’s about my age and he’s smiling in one of those dumb school pictures they be taking of us. Only thing is, he’s got his fingers sticking up behind his head, giving his own self bunny ears. I can’t believe they let him get away with that. But every time I look at that picture, I just start smiling and it makes me think—a kid like that would have been a good friend of mine.
I couldn’t imagine that bunny-ears guy fighting in a war and told Miss Edna I didn’t understand why Jenkins would even take a chance if he didn’t like fighting. She told me they came to his school offering lots of money for college if he signed up for the Army Reserve and it sounded like a good idea to him. The college he wanted to go to cost so much money, Miss Edna said, that without the army, Jenkins would be paying until he was gray-headed and walking on a cane.
“My mama was saving money for me and Lili to go to college,” I told her, and Miss Edna said, It’s still there. I said, I know. But Mama isn’t. Miss Edna didn’t say anything for a little while, just put the thread between her teeth and bit it. Then tied off the end that was sticking out the patch and held the pants up. Then she folded them and held them out to me. These go in your room, Lonnie, she said real soft.
I got up to take them there, but Miss Edna held my wrist.
Your mama and daddy always with you, Lonnie, she told me. Then she asked me if I believed her.
I nodded, then sat back down and leaned my head against Miss Edna’s arm. I hadn’t meant to get all choky. I could feel the warmth coming off her body and it felt real nice. She smelled good too—like coconut hair grease and lotion. We didn’t say anything. Just sat there. Outside, I could hear kids playing freeze tag in the rain. I heard my friend Clyde say No, y’all, I ain’t it. I was standing right by base.
Me and Miss Edna sat there talking and stuff until Rodney got home. I could hear his big feet on the stairs and him singing, “On top of Old Smoky, all covered with rutabagas.” He always sang the same song. “I dug a big hole and planted me some tomatas.” Then he was standing in the living room, grinning his big grin, taking off his wet jacket and chasing me into his room. Then he caught me and wrapped me up in it even though I was trying to hold on to the pants Miss Edna’d sewn and was screaming “Stop, Rodney!”
And in the living room I could hear Miss Edna saying, “You boys need to cut out that roughhousing before somebody gets hurt.”
Ever since Rodney moved back to Miss Edna’s house from upstate, he’s been calling me his little brother. I’ve never been somebody’s little brother before and it makes me feel good—like there’s somebody else out there looking out for me just like I’m looking out for you.
Miss Edna made my favorite things—baked chicken with macaroni and cheese and corn bread and salad. I ate two big plates of food. She made a chocolate cake too. On top of it she wrote Happy Birthday, Lonnie—Tomorrow. And me and her and Rodney laughed about that. Then Rodney put his arm around my shoulder.
“Well, Little Brother, you almost a man now,” he said.
And I smiled, thinking, Yeah, twelve is almost a man.
And then I said, “Yeah, Big Brother, I’m almost a man who could beat your behind!”
Rodney laughed and threw his arm around my neck. I can get out of his headlock real easy though. Then Miss Edna put the birthday candles on the cake and lit them and we stood in the small kitchen while her and Rodney sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I wish you could have been there, Lili. It still doesn’t feel right to be having a birthday celebration without you around. Well, while they sang, I closed my eyes and I’m sure you know exactly what I was wishing for.
I kept my eyes closed, trying to imagine it was you and Mama and Daddy singing, but then I got sad because I got a hurting of missing them and I got another hurting of missing Rodney and Miss Edna if they weren’t in my life anymore. And the two hurtings felt like one big hurt, so I thought about how I’m going to see you tomorrow—on my real birthday—and some of that hurting went away.
It’s real late now. Miss Edna said for me to go to bed after I finished my letter. She likes when I write to you. So I write you the letters and then I put them in my drawer. I have a big collection now. You’re gonna be surprised when you get all of them. You’re gonna be reading for days. For weeks. For years!
I’m sitting at the kitchen table. It still smells like baked chicken and that smell is making me hungry. After I finish this letter, maybe I’ll eat the wing off because I know Rodney and Miss Edna saved that piece for me. Outside, the rain is coming down and down and down.
Lili? Do you remember how much Mama loved the rain?
Love,
Your brother forever,
Lonnie
Dear Lili,
My birthday came and the rain stopped but it was still real cold outside. I’d put on my new suit and got my hair braided real nice. I’d even put lotion on and some of Rodney’s aftershave on my cheeks. It made them itch a little but I didn’t care. Me and Miss Edna took the bus downtown to Remsen Street and waited for your foster mama to bring you.
Miss Edna told me I looked real nice and I told her she looked nice too. She’d worn a church dress—the yellow-and-white one that she wears a lot when it’s warm outside.
Then we went back to sitting and waiting. Miss Edna and Rodney gave me a new watch for my birthday—it has a black leather strap and gold hands and numbers. I kept checking it but then Miss Edna told me to stop because her nerves were bad.
Miss Edna doesn’t usually have bad nerves, just when she has to be waiting or when she’s worrying about Jenkins fighting in the war. Some mornings, I see her sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and she’s busy chewing on her thumbnail and doing heavy sighs. Then I know she’s real worried.
I moved a little closer to Miss Edna, let my shoulder press against her arm. She put her arm around me, and then she did something she doesn’t usually do—she kissed me on the top of my head.
Then my social worker, Miss Jamison, came out of her office. Her face looked like it was trying to cover up some sadness. She put her hands behind her back and pulled her pretty lips straight in a line. Her skin’s real brown and sometimes when I look at her, she reminds me a little bit of Mama—the same brown skin, the same eyebrows going up when her face didn’t know what else to do. Miss Jamison’s eyebrows went up and she looked at me. She told me you weren’t coming. Then she told me she was real sorry.
I stared at her, watching her mouth move, listening to the words coming out of it. I’d heard those same words a lot of times before, but sitting there, hearing them with all those clouds and all that grayness outside and Miss Edna’s kiss still warm on my head, just made some tears push up out of me. I wiped them real fast but I know both
of them saw it because Miss Edna pulled me closer and Miss Jamison looked down at the floor.
I looked up at Miss Edna and saw this look go across her face. I’d seen that same look on Mama—the time that boy in the park pushed you down and you cut your hand. I wanted Miss Edna to do some kind of magic—snatch you from wherever you were and make you appear in the foster care office. I wanted her to start fussing and making all kinds of threats about how today wasn’t gonna be the day Lili didn’t show up. But she didn’t. Miss Edna’s never yelled and she wasn’t going to start yelling just because it was my birthday. Instead, she looked full at Miss Jamison and asked her if you’d be at the agency next week.
Miss Jamison said you’d be there even if she had to go get you herself.
Miss Edna nodded and said, Well, all right then. I guess me and Lonnie will be here bright and early next Saturday.
Later on, when we were back at Miss Edna’s house, I tried to think about a million other things so I wouldn’t be thinking about the one thing that was real big on my mind. I sat there not talking for a long time and then when I finally did start talking, I sounded like a really little kid. A kid who’d just dropped his ice cream cone. My voice didn’t even sound like it belonged to me. I told Miss Edna that this is the first time in my whole life that I didn’t get to see you on my birthday. But I couldn’t say what I was really scared of—that it might not be the last.
Lili, when things don’t go right in our house, Miss Edna says Sometimes the heart breaks so hard, Lonnie. That’s what I was feeling like. Like my heart was breaking—real hard.
And then she sat down on the couch and held out her arms. And even though I know I’m way too big, I sat on her lap, put my head on her shoulder and cried and cried and cried.
Missing you,
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
It’s almost October and it’s raining again. The rain’s been coming down since the middle of September, so people are getting their bulbs in the ground before it stops raining and the snow starts coming down. Miss Edna says when it’s finally time for the sun to shine and the flowers to start showing up, it’s gonna be something else. I don’t know about all that. Spring seems like a long time away. But some people are digging up the little piece of ground they got going on in their front yards, so maybe Miss Edna knows what she’s talking about. Her friend Miss Shore is out there every morning, down on her hands and knees, working that dirt like a crazy lady.
Today Clyde came over with his soccer ball and we were kicking it up and down the block. Clyde’s feet and legs are like magic when they get around a soccer ball. He can do all kinds of tricks and was trying to teach me how to dribble the ball from my foot to my knee to my head then back down to my foot again, but the ball doesn’t like me like it likes Clyde and he tried to show me about twenty times before both of us gave up and just kicked the ball around. Clyde kicked it real hard and it almost went into Miss Shore’s yard, and the next thing she was out there yelling at us that if just one of her flowers don’t come up because of our ball messing up her gardening, then we’d be fixing her garden all summer long. And don’t think I’ll be paying you for that fixing either, she said, all cranky sounding. After me and Clyde moved far away from her house and she took her crabby self back inside, Clyde said, She’s just trying to get someone to do her gardening for free. We both agreed that it wasn’t going to be us because neither one of us knows the first thing about any flowers. It doesn’t even make a little bit of sense to me that you could put a bulb in the ground in fall and it just sits there all winter long and then, boom, knows to come up when the spring comes. I don’t get why the bulbs don’t just freeze to death underground in that cold frozen dirt. Clyde stopped dribbling the ball. Isn’t it strange, he said, when you start thinking about all the hundreds of millions of things you don’t know. And I said yeah. Then we just kicked the ball around without talking, letting ourselves get all wet. When Miss Edna leaned out the window and saw us all soaking wet, she asked if we knew we could catch our death of cold from the rain. And me and Clyde looked at each other and smiled. Then both of us said at the same time, No, ma’am. We sure didn’t know that.
Love,
Locomotion
Dear Lili,
Today I sat in class watching the rain come down again. Ms. Cooper was making us write limericks but I couldn’t come up with any—maybe it’s because of what she said about me not being a poet and all that stuff. I wrote, There once was a kid named Joe, Who didn’t really like snow, In the springtime he was happy, In the winter he felt—But then I knew the word I was gonna write wasn’t a word Ms. Cooper would like, so I stopped writing and stared out the window. I thought about last summer when me and you went to Camp Kaufman and got to spend two weeks together like regular brothers and sisters do. I thought about how we got to eat breakfast and lunch and dinner together every day and how that one counselor would let me go say good night to you. And about how all the girls in your cabin would giggle when I came in. I know you said it was because they liked me, but I think it’s just because you had a cabin full of silly girls. Then Ms. Cooper told me the poem wasn’t outside the window. I think Ms. Cooper is the one that’s not a poet because poetry is everywhere. I went back to writing and here’s the limerick I came up with.
This morning with all of the rain
I started thinking Rain is a pain
But then out the window I saw
The summer before
And realized cold rain leads to summer again.
Love,
Lonnie
who is hoping you got to be
someplace warm and dry
Dear Lili,
Clyde came over and me and him watched cartoons until Miss Edna told us that was enough TV for the day. Then Clyde said, Your mama’s real strict. We had turned off the TV and were just sitting on the couch. I had found this old train in the back of my closet—I guess it had been Jenkins’s or Rodney’s when they were little kids. Miss Edna said it was okay to play with. I had the caboose in my hand, just kind of running it back and forth along the couch arm. Clyde had the other parts of it and he started running them along the back of the couch, then over the window, making some kind of fake train noise. At least, that’s what I guess it was supposed to be. I told Clyde for the hundred millionth time that Miss Edna wasn’t my real mama. Then Clyde stopped playing with the train and just sat there looking at me. He was wearing a Mets shirt and some real old-looking jeans. I didn’t care about the old jeans, just was glad he was wearing that Mets shirt since that’s my favorite team. I told him again that the reason I called her Miss Edna was because she was only a foster mama. Sometimes it was like he had amnesia or something. I didn’t say that part but I was thinking it real hard. Clyde just looked at me and asked if Miss Edna told me what I could be doing and what I couldn’t be doing. I said yeah and then Clyde said, She hug you sometimes? I nodded then. I was embarrassed because once Clyde saw Miss Edna give me a big hug right outside where all my friends was watching. She was real happy because she’d gotten a letter from Jenkins saying he was okay. So she just started dancing around and hugging me like a crazy lady. Then Clyde said, You got another mama? And even though he’s my best friend, I wanted to hit him hard. He knew the answer to that question. You know my mama died, man! I was starting to get mad. Clyde put his hand on my shoulder and told me that all he was trying to say was that Miss Edna was my mama now and I could call her whatever I wanted to be calling her but she was my for-real mama.
I looked at Clyde for a long time but didn’t say anything to him. He looked at me right back. He kept his hand on my shoulder and kept his voice real soft. There’s all kinds of mamas, he said. Then he told me that when he lived down south, his grandmamma was his mama and kids used to always ask him how come his mama is so old and he said he told them that she was old because she was old. When I asked Clyde how come his grandma didn’t come to New York with him, he took his hand off my shoulder and looked down at
his fingers. Then he told me she died and that’s why his mama brought him and his sister to New York.
Clyde looked at me again. When Miss Edna first met him, she said, “Well you must have the prettiest eyes of any boy I’ve ever seen in my life!” And Clyde had grinned. I guess he had okay eyes if you like eyes. I guess Miss Edna likes eyes because she tells me mine are nice too.
Clyde said his mama had people here in Brooklyn and that’s who him and his sister stay with but his mama stays in the Bronx. Miss Edna came in and brought us some peanut butter crackers and we both said thank you. When she went out of the room again, I asked Clyde how come his mama didn’t live with them.
“She just don’t,” Clyde said. “But that’s okay. Me and my sister like my aunt a whole lot. She’s like a new mama to us. She’s real kind.” When he said the word kind, it sounded real down south—taking a long time to disappear the way those down-south words be doing.
I told Clyde his aunt was nice. It’s true. Whenever I went to Clyde’s apartment, his aunt would give us fruit snacks and gum. Or Ritz crackers with peanut butter on them. Good stuff like that.
“Yeah,” Clyde said. Then he went back to running the train track and engine along the back of the couch. I crashed into it with my train car and we kept doing that, just running the trains and crashing them. Running the trains and crashing them.
Until Miss Edna said it was dinnertime.
Love,
Locomotion
Peace, Locomotion Page 2
