Lousiana Hotshot

us.”
    “Both of us?”
    Her mother nodded. “Corey too. But one thing— the man
only
good quality— he love his chirren. He did love his chirren. I wouldn’t try to stop him from seein’ y’all, no matter how much I want to.”
    I love this,
Talba thought.
She sent us over there to be beaten.
But that was unfair, and she knew it. Her mother had done what she thought best. That was all that could be said about it.
    “Women? Wooo, he had women. But one in particular. One he live with.” She looked down again. “One he have a baby with.”
    “A baby? You mean I’ve got a sister?”
    “’Nother brother, maybe. I don’t remember.”
    “A
baby?”
    Miz Clara moved right away from that one. “We had some real hard times with yo’ daddy gone.” She looked so sad Talba patted her.
    “I know, Mama.”
    “And maybe I say some things I shouldn’t.” Her eyes filled up. “Baby, you was always such a
good
little girl.”
    “What? What, Mama?”
    “Nothin’, honey. Nothin’ at all. You was a good little girl. Yo’ daddy was a bad man. Tha’s the whole story in a nutshell. He hang out with the criminal element and he carry a gun sometime. I know. I find it once or twice. Baby, precious…” Tears were spilling out of her eyes. “…you find it too.”
    “I found it?”
    “You weren’t but five, darlin’. You weren’t but five. What kinda man leave a gun lyin’ aroun’ where a five-year-old could find it? You answer me that? What kind of man do that?”
    Until now, Talba hadn’t entirely trusted the story, had thought Miz Clara was still trying to soften the blow. But the movie was playing again. The man who picked her up, the one who tried to comfort her, was the man in the photo she’d found. Was unquestionably her father.
    Unless my memory’s playing tricks again.
    “Was my father there when it happened?”
    “Ohhhhh, yes. Yes, ma’am, he certainly was. He’d left the gun on the coffee table. On the
coffee table!
Can you feature a thing like that?” Her voice was shrill with outrage. “He left his gun on the coffee table!”
    “Well, what happened?”
    “You was playin’ with the gun and it went off. Tha’s what happened. The woman died, your life ruined. Or could have been. Could have been ruined.
    “Honey, we tried
so
hard to protect you. All in the world we was doing was tryin’ to keep you from knowin’ somethin’ ugly like that.”
    She was crying in earnest now, and Talba felt her own tears ball up in a big clot at the back of her throat— they weren’t going to melt out of her for a while. She knew how it worked— she was going to have to feel lower than a worm until the crying worked its way to the surface, and there was nothing she could do to hasten the process. Nothing but lie down and stare at the ceiling.
    “I know, Mama,” she said. “I know.”
    She wondered if she should try to embrace her mother, but she thought not. This was a private grief.
    “But why would I shoot the woman?” she said.
    Her mother looked at her squarely. “I ain’t know, precious. The good Lord the only one know the answer to that. The good Lord the only one.”
    Later, during the three subsequent days she stared at the ceiling, another movie took shape in her head: Corey spilling milk on the kitchen floor, Miz Clara screaming in frustration and despair. “Look what you done now! We ain’ got no money to buy more! Ain’t got enough for a quart of milk. And your daddy don’t even care, livin’ with that woman, neglectin’ his own two chirren— oh,
Lord,
I wish that woman was dead!”
    Talba asked her mama if she’d ever had a kind of paisley overblouse, a sort of blue-and-gold print, that she wore over jeans, and Miz Clara said, “Girl, how come you remember a thing like that?”
    Talba said, “I remember Corey spilling some milk and you were wearing it.”
    Miz Clara’s face closed down as if Saran-wrapped. “I don’t remember no such thing.”
    There was another memory she tried to tease out. So far she hadn’t succeeded, and there was comfort in that. In her worst moments, she had the sick, scary feeling that she’d said something like: “I thought you wanted me to, Mama. I thought you wanted her to die.” But if she had, it was staying buried, at least for now, and she could only pray it would forever.
    She hoped to God Miz Clara hadn’t had to live with that.

Chapter 27
    Once during her lying-in period, someone other than Darryl and family had tried to