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By Root 1645 0

” about his father’s death, because his father had actually died of pneumonia, not from the fall off a wagon. He told her how horrifying it had been to see his father slipping away in the hospital, and he blamed her and Etta Sue for always discussing Cousin Pete’s last moments when they talked about his father’s death. “Fact is, lightning impressed you more than simple pneumonia,” he wrote. He also thought they should have talked more to him about his father’s accomplishments. He thought they should have told about his father’s love for him. He made no mention of his sister Lilly, from whom he was estranged. He folded the note and put it under the saltshaker, and then he mixed himself a cup of instant cocoa and left, taking the mug he was drinking from.

Zalla was nervous. She thought he might have been drinking, though his breath didn’t smell of alcohol. He’d gone to the bathroom while he was there, so Zalla went into the bathroom to make sure everything was all right. It was, but she still had an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t until that evening, when she left for the hospital to escort my mother home, that she saw the black felt-pen graffiti on the wall in the downstairs hallway: stick people with corkscrew hair like Martians’ antennae, and a quickly scrawled SCREW YOU BLOWING THIS JOINT. She was horrified, and at first she thought she’d keep quiet about Little Thomas’s visit—just pretend it was all a mystery—but she knew that was wrong and she’d have to make a full disclosure.

By the time I heard the story, Zalla and my mother had agreed he was probably drunk—or, worse, on drugs—and that he was a coward to pretend to confront my mother, when all he did was write a note. He also hadn’t had the nerve to face his own mother, who was still living on Twentieth Street, and tell her that he was moving away. Zalla kept quiet about the thirty dollars, but the next morning she confessed that, too. In with the dishes he’d brought back were several strange, gold-bordered plates my mother had not given him; neither she nor Zalla knew exactly what to make of that. Both feared, irrationally, that someone would now come for the plates. They seemed to understand, though, that Little Thomas was gone and wouldn’t be heard from for some time, if ever. Zalla remained afraid of him, in the abstract. She said he’d crept around like a burglar. That gave my mother and me a good laugh, because he’d been sneaky all his life. Good that he spared Mother’s bathroom wall, I joked: bad enough that they’d had to call the management to apologize and to arrange to have the hallway repainted.

While Zalla watched Goldfinger, my mother led me into her bedroom and told me one of the Dark Secrets she’d never before revealed. It turned out she had always feared Little Thomas would do something really awful, because he had done something very bad as a child. My mother had been furious, but she had never told on him, because she was embarrassed at her own fury, and also because she felt that Little Thomas’s demons tortured him enough.

She asked whether I remembered the silhouettes. I did remember them, vaguely, though I had to be reminded that they’d once hung on a satin ribbon in Etta Sue’s living room. I remembered them from later on, when they’d hung below the light above the bed in my mother’s bedroom, attached to the same ribbon. There had also been one of Lilly, as a baby, and another of Punkin Puppy, in separate frames. The three framed silhouettes on the ribbon had been of Thomas Sr., Etta Sue, and the man who, Etta Sue told my mother, had cut the silhouettes. Etta Sue explained this somewhat humorous fact by saying that the silhouette cutter was going to throw his self-portrait away—he probably did it the way secretaries practice their typing, or something—and that she had rescued it from the trash. Little Thomas had destroyed his silhouette before it got into the frame, and though Etta Sue always meant to have another one cut, Little Thomas wouldn’t sit still a second time. My mother shook her head. She said that she supposed the silhouette cutter’s self-portrait