Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [85]
“Cuz,” he says.
Randall almost drops the twenty-fourth egg he holds.
“Shit,” Randall says and turns.
“Sorry.” Manny’s shoulders. I loved his shoulders and his neck most of all. I want to open my mouth on his neck just once. He is the lightest thing in the clearing. I want to have him blazing over me again, just once. But he looks at Randall, and he half grins. It is only then that I can see the scar on his face, the skin pulling wrong. He has not come here for me. “We talk?”
Randall bends, places the last egg in the pot, puts the pot in my arms, and talks to Manny but looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “Can you start these?” They walk outside together, stop at the foot of the back steps.
I stand with the pot. The eggs wobble against one another, sound like rocks at the bottom of a dry creek, rolling from a foot.
“Junior, go play,” Randall calls through the door. Junior shoots away, freed from his chores. He is all bald head and blurred arms and legs. I run water into the pot in the sink until it covers the eggs.
“Skeetah ain’t here?”
“Think he somewhere off in the woods running China.”
“She’s a beast.”
“Yeah.”
I sprinkle salt into the water, but there is more rice than salt in the shaker.
“Coach called you about the game?”
“Said they was paying for Bodean to go to camp.”
“I didn’t know.”
I light the stove with a match and set it to boil. I stand a few feet away from the door in the dark of the kitchen so they can’t see me, and I squint through the screen.
“I’m sorry,” Manny says.
“Well.” Randall sighs.
“I don’t know what happened.”
“My best friend got into a fight with my brother is what happened.”
“I had other shit on my mind. Wasn’t nothing against Skeet.”
“He don’t think that. He think you made him poison his dog.”
“I wouldn’t do no bullshit like that. You know me.”
Randall has nothing in his hands. Manny fans his face like he’s waving away gnats.
“He also think you dogging my sister.”
“Randall, come on, man.”
“What you want?”
“We like family.”
Manny shoves his hands into his pockets and bends in like he’s curling for a blow, as if he’s ashamed to say what he’s said.
“Rico your family. I ain’t blood.”
“Like blood.”
“That’s the problem.” Randall shakes his head like a horse trying to fling off reins. “I’m the only one.”
“That ain’t true.”
“Yeah it is.”
“I done watched Junior grow up with all of y’all. That’s real.”
“What about Esch and Skeet?”
“Them, too.”
“No,” Randall says. “It’s not the same.” Bubbles of air, tiny as those that rise up out of the mouths of fish in water, rise from the bottom of the pot, gather in the middle. Vapor mists from the center. “I got shit to do. I’ll see you later.”
Randall walks into the kitchen and I look up from the pot like I haven’t been standing on my tiptoes in the faint blue light of the burner’s fire, like I haven’t been listening.
“It’s going to take forever to boil. Leave it,” Randall says. He doesn’t look at me when he says it, tall and straight. He stalks past, closes the door to his room. I hear it shut, and I am out the screen door, running, still on my tiptoes, feet barely touching the ground. There he is, there, receding under the trees, a setting sun. I jump the ditch to the road.
“Wait!” I call. My voice is higher than I have ever heard it.
Manny stops, turning, and his face is a magnolia flower tossing in the wind, his eyes the bright yellow heart. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“What?” he says when I catch up to him. “Randall wanted something?”
Manny’s eyes slide past me to the ditch, to the road, up to the sky the color of a scoured pan.
“No,” I say. “Me.”
“I gotta go.” He turns, shows me the back of his head, his hair, his shoulders. Now I see it, now I don’t.
“I’m pregnant.”
He stops in profile. His nose is like a knife.
“And?”
His hair grows so fast it’s already starting to curl. Sweat beads at his hairline.
“It’s yours.”
“What?”
“Yours.”
Manny shakes his head. The knife cuts. The sweat rolls down his scar,