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By Root 1097 0

and put on that man anyhow? Shit, give me some of that. Let me whip it on my man.” They were together the whole summer into the fall of 1960, discreet; she was very respectful of his wife, never left her fancy underwear around the office, like she’d heard some women did. Then one night, a big night, Mr. John had just gotten the deal to be the closing agent on the abandoned bread factory, could net him thousands in commissions if he could move it, they celebrated so hard at a suite at the Warwick, he’d gulped down water glass after water glass of Johnnie Walker Red, couldn’t do anything but lie back and squeeze Ramona’s finely pressed hair against his chest, talking drunk talk, slurring his words, getting raunchy, too raunchy, so raunchy that Ramona wanted to tell him to shut up because she knew he was about to say something that would turn her insides to ice from then on whenever she looked at him. He did too. Told her she was the best piece he’d ever had, and he’d had some good ass, he said. She was even better than that drooping-eyed Mae.

She looked away from the Johns and tilted the microphone down and slightly away from her mouth so the sounds of her breathing wouldn’t be amplified. At least she didn’t have to vomit now when she thought about it, the way she’d vomited for a solid week after that night. Couldn’t look at Mae for a time either. Not that she was jealous; she knew Mae would spread herself in a flash to negotiate payment of a debt, no difference to Mae between doing that and going under her bra to pull out a ten-dollar bill. It was just the knowledge that she and her very own mother had shared in the one thing that mothers and daughters should never share, even if her time with Mr. John had been spaced years from Mae’s. For a while after that she couldn’t even be with anyone she felt so dented and rusty inside. Like a silver-toned can that’s dropped from up high so many times until even the dents turn a burnt-orange shade of roughness.

Now Mr. John was smiling, blew her a subtle kiss. She rolled her eyes and looked away. Looked instead at the pianist choir director, who was finishing up his prelude to the song; his graceful fingers flittered around the keys in a buildup that was not only gospel but classical, blues, and jazz. He nodded at Ramona, a nod filled with assurances that what was to come was very good indeed. Beanie reached over and tugged the generous pleat in Ramona’s robe sleeve, an encouraging tug. Someone up in the balcony called out, “All right now, Ramona.” And now Ramona felt propped up, protected, ensconced like she rarely did.

She listened for the spaces in the piano keys. Then she closed her eyes, closed her eyes on all her wrongdoing: on Mr. John and every other man she’d been with whom she had no rights to; on the profanity that slid off her tongue like butter; on the hatred she had for her own mother; the meanness she showed the children; the misdirected anger that had made her slap Victoria’s innocent face. She closed her eyes and started to sing about, no, beg for peace.

She was midway through her song about a ship caught in a storm, had sung about the tempest raging, the billows tossing high, no shelter, and no help. And then those wavy lines that she always felt in her chest when she sang this song were moving through her chest. And she was at the part in the song when she was asking the Lord doesn’t he care that she might perish. And the lines in her chest were trying to rise to the top and break through that block of granite that always came up too, sure as those lines did when she sang this song. When she was trying to get peace, whether she was trying finally to leave Mae’s or let herself know honest love, that obstruction would come up, and her insides would go dark, all but obliterating those lines that were wavy and green like fresh-cut grass or a sapling of a girl child trying to live. Then she threw her head back, raised her hands toward the rafters, and in a voice so clouded with emotion that it was as if a fog had settled over the church and turned everything a silvery