Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

better than I’d imagined. She told me to fuck myself more than once, and said it with a smile on her face. It was quality time, as they say, which for Mona meant ranting and reminiscing and joking about Bill Clinton’s dick. Several years later, when those planes hit the Twin Towers, I remember thinking how shrewdly she had timed her exit. Her big wounded hippie heart would not have prospered in this cold new climate.
    She’d been gone for almost eight years, and her surviving parent wanted a cat.
    Someone to sit in the sun with me. Who doesn’t want to go anywhere.

15
    Word One
    O n Thursday morning Ben holed up at Inn Among the Flowers with his laptop and a backlog of furniture orders, so I could be alone with Mama before signing the papers. When I arrived at the Gospel Palms, she was propped up in bed watching Bill O’Reilly on a TV set bolted to the ceiling. Her makeup seemed fresh, so I figured Patreese had already made his rounds. I wondered if he’d talked about meeting me and Ben, and, if so, how free he’d been with the details. He was a hairdresser, after all.
    “Where’s your friend?” Mama asked, meaning Ben.
    I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor. “He’s my husband, Mama.”
    She scowled at me.
    “Irwin told you that, didn’t he? That we got married a few years ago.”
    A long, brooding silence and then: “Don’t be like that, Mikey.”
    All I could do was smile. Mama had been telling me not to be like that as long as I could remember. “All right. I won’t be like anything.”
    She fussed with the tiny blue curls around her temples. “What do you…ssss…want with a husband, anyway?”
    I laughed.
    “They’re nothin’ but heartache,” she added.
    I scoured my mother’s face for clues to her state of mind. In half a century of knowing this woman I’d never heard her speak a word against my father. I decided to be bold in return. “Why didn’t you leave him, Mama?”
    She recoiled visibly. “Watch your mouth, son.”
    “I mean it. Why didn’t you?”
    She fidgeted with the hem of the sheet. “I was going to, believe me.”
    “And?”
    She shrugged her shoulders. “He died.”
    I suppressed a smile; then I realized she found this funny herself.
    “I reckon he saw it comin’,” she added dryly.
    Papa had died of colon cancer in 1987—not that long ago in the general scheme of things. “You never considered it before then?” I asked.
    Her lower lip stiffened. “I did more than…ssss…consider it.”
    “You left him, you mean?”
    She grunted and looked up at the big white face of Bill O’Reilly, hovering above us like a hot-air balloon. I found his aura of white-guy entitlement especially intolerable at that moment, so I reached for Mama’s clicker and turned him off.
    “I was watchin’ that,” Mama said.
    “When did you leave Papa?” I asked.
    She sighed in the same put-upon way she used to sigh when I was twelve and asked her if she’d seen my neckerchief slide or knew where Irwin had left my bike. “Remember the summer…ssss…we drove you boys up to…ssss…Camp Hemlock?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I left him on the way home. After we dropped y’all off.”
    “ How? How did you leave him?”
    “On the side of the road.”
    “You’re shitting me.”
    Mama, I have to say, looked a wee bit proud of herself. “He stopped to get a Nehi soda…ssss…and I just drove off and left him.”
    I was grinning shamelessly. “I take it you went back for him.”
    “I did not,” she said, smoothing the sheets. “I went to the Baptist retreat…ssss…at Blowing Rock. I didn’t get home for ten days.”
    “Papa never told me this.”
    She twisted her lips into a small, triumphant smile. “He was a proud man.”
    “How did he get home?”
    She shrugged. “Never told me.”
    “Did he have to cook for himself?”
    “I reckon.”
    “Musta bought Moon Pies from ol’ Drool Rag.”
    She let that go without a smile. “I needed some private time with the Lord…ssss…and it never cost Papa a cent.”
    “How’d you manage that?”
    “Green Stamps,” she said proudly.
    “Green Stamps?”
    “From the…ssss…Piggly Wiggly.”
    Green Stamps were Mama’s personal currency back then. She’d sit in front of the TV at night with a wet sponge and fill up whole booklets with them, later redeeming them for toasters and curtains and, once, even an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. They offered her the illusion of wealth, since all she ever really bought