Summary:
Chris began to question the wisdom of this trip. The familiar crunching sound of tires on the gravel driveway gave away her surprise arrival. She had planned to arrive undetected, take a look around at her former life, and if necessary, leave undetected. As she pulled up to the once-white, house with the slanted front porch and broken screen door, she was at once joyfully nostalgic and severely repulsed.
Before Chris could turn off the engine and step out onto the gravel and oil driveway, Ma was already waving from the window in the big bedroom upstairs. Chris shook her head when she notice Ma wearing the same faded red, pansy-printed house dress she was wearing exactly one year before on Easter Sunday and likely every other Sunday for the last thirty years or more. The hem of this dress must have been re-sewn by Ma’s plump hands a hundred times or more and the buttons were a mere rumor, replaced by multi-colored diaper pins. Even without seeing it now, Chris could describe each frayed piece of the fabric, not only because she seen it in her mind whenever she pictured Ma, but because she’d spent so much time as a child, hiding from the world on underneath it.
They met inside the house, at the bottom of the stairs and greeted one another the way they always had. No “I love you,” or “good to see you.” No touching moment and definitely no embracing, just right to the business at hand – avoidance.
“Lawd chile, I ain’t know who dat was pullin’ in my driveway all fast.” Ma said, barely stopping at the foot of the staircase.
“Uhn, uhn, uhn. What you doin’ wit’ ya hair now?” “All that money, - cant you pay somebody to do something with that hair?”
Chris sighed. “It’s called the natural look Ma, and I did pay somebody to do this.”
Uhn, we’ll you done thrown dat money away. Look like a natural mess to me. I’ put a pressin comb on it fo’ ya fo’ free.” Ma laughed.
“Lawd have mercy, now I got to go upstairs an’ put some clean sheets on dat bed. Go on out back and say somethin’ to Dad.”
Chris walked through the old house, through the dog’s room on the back porch and out into the back yard where Dad sat atop his ancient, red, riding mower, mowing and drinking what was almost surely corn liquor, wrapped in a brown paper bag.
“Hey there, Lil Bit, what you doin’ here? Dad slurred.
“You done drove all the way from New York City to help me cut all this grass.”
All morning, Chris sat in the kitchen with Ma snapping peas, peeling potatoes and soaking greens.
“You listen here girl, now I ain’t gonna have none of that mess you pull last year at my Easter table, you hear me?” Ma warned.
“What’s past is past.”
“Now, ya Mama an’ them comin.’”
“Again, Ma, she is not my Mama” Chris said.
“Well, she carried ya ‘round in her fo’ nine mont’s di’nt she?” Ma exclaimed.
Chris started, “Ma, but she never did nothing for me….” At this, Chris was immediately shocked by her improper language, and how easily it came back to her.
“She my daughter, and yo’ mama, an’ this is my house and I say she’ comin’ here to have Easter dinner wit’ us, now you just keep ya mouth shut if ya aint got nothing nice to say, hear.”
‘Ma, if she brings him again, I can’t sit at the table and act like everything is ok.” Chris explained.
Ma fidgeted. “Don’t you say it.”
Suddenly, Chris felt possessed. “What, Ma, that he raped me and my Mama was too high to do anything?”
Ma looked around for something to hold on to and settled on a bag of flour on the.
Ma said, “Don’t ya talk with dat nasty mouth in my house girl, now, I jus’ ain’t gon’ have it.”
Brushing flour off her dress, Ma quietly demanded, “Now make yourself useful and go set the table.”
Chapters:
