Lousiana Hotshot

stay with a friend.”
    “Let me think about it.” But even then she knew she was going to break through it. It was probably the simple act of his backing away that did it. She wasn’t ready yet to say,
No, stay with me!
but she was pretty sure she was about to be.
    She thought about it for half an hour or so, and then she asked him to stay and she told him why she couldn’t even think about the shootout at Algiers Point. “It’s because every time I try, something weird in my mind takes over, and I’m back in that room again, with my father.”
    He started making “it’s-only-natural” noises, but she had to stop him. “No. The gun brought it all back— shooting Toes.” She choked over the words. “Darryl, I didn’t see someone shoot my father, I shot him.”
    “Oh, my God.” He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone, as if he’d suspected all along, but his handsome face was tragic. “Oh, my
God.”
He was barely whispering. “That’s what they were trying to protect you from.”
    She nodded. “Yeah. It all makes a crazy kind of sense when you know. If I saw it, then they just seem like a crazy, overprotective family, but if I
did
it, they’ve got a reason not to tell me. I almost agree with them.”
    “You do?”
    That was when the first tears came. “Darryl, I
do.
You don’t know how awful this is— to realize something like this!” She cried a long time, and then she told him all that she remembered and all that she didn’t. When they had hashed it over a thousand times, they went to bed, and when she awakened he was gone.
    Again, she got drunk and went back to bed. Sometime that afternoon, one or two o’clock, maybe, she was awakened by the smell of coffee brewing, and bacon cooking. It had to be Darryl, but how had he gotten off from school? She didn’t try to figure it out, just closed her eyes and went back to sleep. The person who shook her awake was Miz Clara.
    “Who you think you is? Queen of the May?”
    “Go away, Mama.”
    “Come on, girl. You got to eat.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “And brush your teeth. You smell like a brewery.”
    Talba closed her eyes. Miz Clara pulled the sheet off. And Talba got up and brushed her teeth.
    She went into the kitchen and drank coffee and ate eggs, bacon, and toast while her mother bustled around the kitchen swiping at surfaces, removing ancient fingerprints, doing what she did all day at white ladies’ houses and then again at home. Miz Clara talked too, all about Talba’s star turn on the news and about how good she looked and how proud she was of her.
    Very atypical talk for Miz Clara.
    Talba didn’t trust it, but her mother was in an unusual mood— she might answer a straight question if Talba asked it. “Did they show me… pulling the trigger?”
    “No, girl, they ain’ show that. They show
him
aimin’ at the camera.”
    “At his brother. He’d have killed his own brother.” And then she realized what she’d just said, how close to home it was, and her throat closed.
    Miz Clara sat down at the table. “Now listen up, girl. You didn’t kill your daddy.”
    She had said the “D” word. Even now, now that Talba
knew,
her mother’d do anything to keep her from knowing.
How goddam misguided,
she thought, overwhelmed by the wrongheadedness of it. But at the same time, she was touched by it. She laid her hand on her mother’s. “Mama, you don’t have to lie anymore. I remember it.”
    “You don’t remember nothin,’ Sandra. Not nothin.’
You didn’t kill your daddy.”
    Talba didn’t even answer, just closed her eyes and bowed her head in frustration.
    “You kill his woman.”
    Her head jerked up. “What?”
    Her mother spoke as softly as she ever had in Talba’s memory. “We didn’t want you to know, baby.”
    “Mama, tell me. Tell me now!”
    Her mother stroked Talba’s arm. “You just shush and listen. That’s what I’m here for.” She had on a bandanna, and Talba realized she’d taken off from work to come; she was losing half a day’s pay.
    Miz Clara took a breath. “He was a bad, bad man, your daddy. Denman La Rose Wallis. Umm ummm ummm. Rue the day I take
that
man’s name. Bad? Girl! He done it all— alcohol, drugs, women. The other thing, too.”
    Talba would have thought “the other thing” meant sex. But Miz Clara had just mentioned sex. “What other thing?” she said.
    Miz Clara bowed her head, something she only did in church so far as Talba knew. She raised it abruptly. “He hit