Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [53]
So she played cards to pay her bills: bid whisk, pinochle, spades, poker, five hundred gin rummy, tunk; she’d play anything that had a wager attached. And though she was winning handsomely, card playing too had its drawbacks. She had to go all the way downtown to Clara Jane’s to play, and sometimes people paid her her winnings in ways that were not immediately negotiable: a handmade lace tablecloth; a bond that couldn’t be redeemed for two more years; a free hack for a month to take her to and from grocery shopping. Then one night, perched at the card table downtown in Clara Jane’s basement, tired and low, her lazy eye drooping so much that she couldn’t hold on to her good poker face, the game so intense people had even stopped talking stuff about each other’s mommas, a child came up on Mae from behind and wiped her sticky fingers on her neck. It shocked Mae because she knew Clara Jane was childless. “Lord have mercy, Clara Jane, where in the hell this child come from, scaring the mess outta me like this, got me almost ready to expose my hand?” Then Clara Jane told Mae that was her foster; child had been turned over to the state because her mother couldn’t do for her. She got monthly upkeep money for the child, plus a little extra payment for her own time and bother. “Just go on down to City Hall and put your name on the list,” Clara Jane told Mae. “And it will sure help if you know someone who’ll skip over the names in front of yours in order to get to your name first.”
So Mae went down to City Hall the first thing Monday morning, getting her name put on the list. And last thing Monday night she was up at the ward headquarters, in the back office, rocking back and forth on the lap of the ward leader, making sure some worker would get the directive to skip over all the names in front of hers even though she was a single head of household, in order to get to her name first.
Near the end of her first year in that house, after a half dozen foster children had come and gone and helped her keep her mortgage up-to-date, and she gave out pamphlets and sample ballots for her ward leader on election day to make sure her name stayed on the top of that list, her pregnant sister, Martha, came to stay, just until Martha’s husband was done his stint in the army. And then Martha’s husband, Albert, came. And he stayed, just until he could get his work situation together. Then the baby came, right on the living-room floor before the yellow cab could get there, or even the red car. The baby came, and Mae helped birth him, and she named him Addison for the street.
And Addison was always her favorite child because whenever she looked at him and his sly little grin, she’d think about his father, Albert, and his sly grin, and the way Albert’s sly grin would come up at night, after a couple of beers, after Martha was asleep, after Mae would come down in the shed kitchen, where Albert had taken to sleeping after Martha had gotten so outrageously large with that baby in her womb. “Oops,” Mae would say, and blush through her cheeks and quickly cup her hands over the sheerest part of her negligee, even though the hand cupping exposed more than the negligee did. “I’d forgotten you’d taken to sleeping down here in this old cramped little shed. I had the taste for some cling peaches, and I believe I have a can of split ripe ones in heavy syrup right thereabouts on that shelf, right above that nail where you done hung your pants.”
And Albert would look at her with her hands cupped, pushing up her womanhood like she was offering it up to nurse a newborn, and the sly grin would come up, and he’d figure since there was no newborn to oblige, he might as well, and later they’d share split cling peaches in heavy syrup from the can.
So Mae had to bring Addison back to Philly to save his life, her favorite child in all the world, born to her sister in the living room of Mae’s dream