Two or Three Things I Know for Sure - Dorothy Allison [6]
She stopped and looked around as if the change in the light had finally registered on her, too. “I’m cold,” she said. “You cold?”
She left him the furniture, the truck, and the house on a quarter acre of scrub oak. On the worked-pine dining room table his parents had given them, she left him the reason she was leaving—the hospital bill for their stillborn daughter, the one he had insisted didn’t matter. “It wasn’t like it was a boy.”
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
“I got a problem, you know, same old same old.” She laughed a familiar bitter laugh and looked at me sideways. “But I been clean a week now, and I’m doing good. It an’t easy like people pretend, changing your life this late in. An’t easy at all.”
She laughed again, smoothing the fabric of her loose trousers. “Hell, though, nothing is, is it?” And I laughed with her, not reminding her of last month or the month before. Every time I run into her we have the same conversation, how she’s getting clean—working at it, anyway—and doing good, doing good until she isn’t. Then she gets drunk again and sings to the trees.
When Lucy drinks she plays records and swears if she’d just had the chance she too could have been a country star. Maybe so. Sometimes when I hear her voice in the distance, I believe her, that contralto drifting up into the redwood trees as pure and clean as her rage ever was.
Maybe we are related. Among my mama’s photos there was one woman with a face similar to Lucy’s, another handsome woman with a dark cloud of hair, one of my mama’s aunts, I think. But Lucy’s drawl is Barstow, not Greenville. She spent five years in Bakersfield. Now she roasts turkey stuffed with jalapeño peppers, deep-fries artichoke hearts, and loves to make a salad of sliced pineapple and avocado.
“Where’d you learn to cook like this?” I asked her one afternoon.
“Family talent,” she tells me. “Just picked it up as I went along.” And she tries to get me to put a little whiskey in my fruit juice or at least have a beer to keep her company. The stories she tells then take me back three decades and would scare me sober if I let her make me drink.
My mama never told me stories. She might repeat something someone had said at work that day, or something she had said—lessons in how to talk back, stand up for myself, and tell someone off. But behind her blunt account of the day’s conversation was a mystery: the rest of her life.
Mostly my aunts respected Mama’s sense of propriety. They wouldn’t tell stories she didn’t want them to tell, nothing of my father or the husband she had loved and lost. Only my grandmother was shameless.
Mattie Lee Gibson would tell people anything. Sometimes she even told the truth. She was the one told me I had an uncle who killed his wife, but said she didn’t know if she believed his story about it, how he’d walked in on the woman in bed with another man. She was the one told me my mama had been married three times. My mama worked forty years as a waitress, teasing quarters out of truckers, and dimes out of hairdressers, pouring extra coffee for a nickel, or telling an almost true story for half a dollar.
“Get them talking,” she told me when she took me to work with her. “Or just smiling. Get them to remember who you are. People who recognize you will think twice before walking away and leaving nothing by the plate.”
Mama was never confused about who she was or what she was offering across that counter. “It’s just a job. People need their lunch served with a smile and a quick hand. Don’t need to know your business—if you’re tired or sick or didn’t get any sleep