Thrown-away Child

skipping double-Dutch routines. They were all singing out some rhythmic jumping song, which we could not hear at the moment because of a car with a broken muffler rounding the corner from Milton Street. Ruby spotted the girls, too.
    “I used to do that,” Ruby said. I pictured Ruby with no hips yet, wearing plaid shorts and a T-shirt and tennis shoes. “I used to make up jumping songs, too.”
    “Let’s hear one.”
    “Cinderella, dressed in yella, went downtown to meet her fella... How many kisses did she get? One, two, three, four…”
    The car finally passed us by.
    And now we heard the four girls across the way singing:
     
“Jill, Jill
forgot to take her pill
How many babies did she have?
One, two, three, four ...”
     
    “Time marches on,” I said.
    Ruby began to cry. She turned from me, embarrassed for some reason. She wiped at tears with the backs of her hands.
    “Huggy Louper and his late wife... Ruby said, the halting start of an explanation. She turned and faced me. “That story of his upset me. I don’t know why.“
    “Well, it was disturbing.”
    Ruby took my hand and we walked toward the front door of her mother’s house. Along the way, she said, “The thing is, I can’t remember a family gathering that didn’t involve death.”
    In that moment, as Ruby spoke from pain somewhere in her heart, I came to my first understanding of the other thing that spooks the land of dreams. And in the days ahead, I would see its many levels: jazzy New Orleans, city of dead markers; a polished brass funeral urn set atop a flowered grave, under which a box is rotting.
     

ELEVEN

    The screen door flew open, and there stood Ruby’s mother, arms held wide from her sides. Her head was joyfully tossed back. Her hazel eyes looked much younger than they were, free of care and time’s wreck age, at least briefly. But then Violet Flagg trembled some, and I recognized the brave Christmas smile Ruby had told me about.
    I wondered what lay behind the tremble and the brave smile at this occasion of family reunion. This is my nature. I have been a cop for too many years to be able to ever go off the clock.
    As I wondered, Violet Flagg called to the daughter she had not seen in so many years, “Come on up here and give us some sunshine, little one of mine.”
    Ruby’s hand had been hooked in my arm. But now she slipped away. She took a tentative step past me, paused, and then galloped to the porch and her mother’s embrace, as if she were a gangly twelve-year-old again. The two women stood clasped together, quietly and tearfully; all mother-daughter grievances seemed forgiven. I believe anyone passing by at that moment would have had a hard time saying who was Violet and who was Ruby. I have noticed that at a certain point, no matter their ages or relationships, women become mothers to one another.
    “La, we been waiting on you all day, Ruby,” Violet said, breaking from her daughter, brushing at her eyes. She gave me a quick up-and-down appraisal as I reached the porch myself. Then she looked back to Ruby, and added, “Waiting for the both of y’all, I should say.”
    I set down our bags and stuck out my hand. “Hello, Mrs. Flagg,” I said.
    Mrs. Flagg stared at my hand and screwed up her face, as if I was showing her something dead. “What’s wrong with you, boy?” Her own hands were spread flat on her hips now. “Don’t I look sweet enough to kiss?”
    A vision of my own mother came to me: her auburn hair gone early to gray, her work-lined face, hands chapped raw from dousing glasses in scalding water every day of her barmaid’s life, the beer and cigarette smell of the pub clinging to her like a shroud. My mother, who always turned her face away from a kiss, in the chaste Irish way.
    Or did my mother think of herself as unalluring, unworthy of a kiss? I have been told that once, in Ireland, Mairead Fitzgerald Hockaday was a great beauty. I myself have no memory of her that way. Anyone in Hell’s Kitchen who would remember her as such is now long gone.
    My mother was neither angry nor wistful about her loss of fair looks. Nor did she begrudge physical beauty in others. She had a ready and extravagant compliment for handsome women, always the same one. Hearing the echo of my mother, I said her own words to Ruby’s.
    “Mrs. Flagg, you’re lovely as spring’s first blooms along the cool, blue streams of Galty.”
    I then took my mother-in-law’s shoulders, drew her to me, and kissed a warm