Bell finally opened her mouth to speak, but it wasn’t her voice he heard.
It was Randie’s.
“She was here when I arrived.”
He turned to see the woman he loved standing at the mouth of the hallway that led to the three bedrooms, including the guest room where she might have already started unpacking her things. He couldn’t explain why she bothered with the pretense of it; she hadn’t slept in that room even once. She looked a little spooked, confused by the situation they all found themselves in. Until today, she’d never met his mother.
“I’ll let you two talk,” she said, turning and disappearing down the hallway, leaving behind her vanilla-bark scent, earthy and sweet. He hungered for her in a way that blotted out his other senses. He had a wild thought that he could simply follow her down the hall and recount the nightmare he was apparently having. His mother was in his house, and, weird, you were there too. They could laugh about it. And, later, after they’d made love, after he’d spent himself in the thick warmth of her body, the adoring tenderness of her gaze, she would gently poke him about where he thought the dream had come from. And why now? And she would say the words she had been laying out like a welcome mat for years now, a gentle invitation: Tell me about her.
Could he be dreaming?
There was so much about the world he no longer trusted at face value. Maybe this visit from his mother was just another part of the cosmic joke of the past three years, part of the funhouse sensation that life had turned into a rather good facsimile of itself, missing only a few key details, like gravity, like the sense that there were at least some hardwired principles we’d all agreed on that still carried weight. Instead, nothing felt nailed down anymore. The ever-present dread in Darren’s chest sank to a bass note.
Now that they were alone, his mother took her time gingerly putting the album back in its place on the shelf among his other records, sliding it into the slim, empty spot between two collections of original recordings from Don Robey’s Peacock Records in Houston, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Big Mama Thornton, the swinging blues of her childhood. She turned to face him again. Hands clasped before her, she looked like a patient and kind schoolteacher. It put a lump in his throat, his mind flashing to himself at six years old, when he’d liked to pretend his first-grade teacher, Miss Billings, was his mother instead of the absent woman his uncle Clayton always said wasn’t shit, wasn’t ever gon’ be shit, whenever Bell’s name came up in conversation.
“I’m sorry, son,” she said.
“For what this time?” He made no effort to keep his voice down, aware that he was being loud for Randie in the other room, that he wanted her to bear witness to Bell’s particular brand of ferity, and for that he needed volume to reach his real mother, not this country mouse before him. “Breaking into my house?”
“For one,” she said, her chin ducking slightly, her gaze drifting from the furor in his. She was having a hard time meeting his eye. “Lil’ Buckey’s boy down the way had a spare key. Buckey Robeson went to junior high with your uncle Petey, my oldest brother. You remember Petey, right? Used to come down from Nacogdoches when he had a little time off at the lumber plant where he worked.” Then, when it was clear this line of talk was doing nothing to thaw Darren’s icy demeanor, she said, “Well, maybe you don’t remember him. Clayton didn’t let you around my people much. It was just a janitorial job he had, but it was a good job back then, and we were proud of —”
“Mama!”
The word shot out like a bullet, his lips a loose, malfunctioning trigger, and it jolted him as if he’d shot an actual gun in the room. He wasn’t sure if the word was a weapon against her or himself. He’d only meant to stop her from running a prattling con, jamming him up with words. But the Mama had come out like a strangled cry. It was pain, naked and hot. But he heard the note of longing in it. She heard it too and pounced on it, seizing an opportunity. “I didn’t think you’d see me otherwise.”
That she spoke as if this were all quite reasonable, walking into his house uninvited, that she seemed to be waiting for him to embrace her with, if not forgiveness, then some measure of understanding, further made him feel his world was slightly off-kilter, the constant fear of never being sure if the person in front of you was operating from the same set of facts. “You blackmailed me!” he said. “Then gave the gun that shot Ronnie Malvo to the district attorney anyway —”
“I didn’t even know that gun killed that man. Least, I wasn’t sure.”
He thought he saw a flash of glee light her eyes, that she was enjoying this.
“Get out,” he said.
“I wiped that gun clean, Darren. I would never have passed that on to the district attorney without making sure first. I just threw them a bone without a scent.”
That she could not hear the lack of difference in that distinction caused him to physically recoil in her presence, to stagger back a few inches, to marvel at the fact that he could still stand, that he could, in fact, walk and talk at all, that he had ever stood a chance in this world with Bell Callis as his entrée. And yet he also felt oddly let down, disappointed by a confession that had all the righteous suspense of a tent revival, where everyone who walked in was saved. To hear her admit her crime so mundanely as to quibble over the degrees of betrayal wounded him anew. Somehow, she had managed to fail him again.
Or maybe she had truly freed him now that he was no longer burdened by What if or One day. They had finally met again, and she was the same mercurial, mean-streaked woman she’d always been, the one Clayton had warned him about. There was no mystery to Bell Callis, save for why he’d drawn the short stick for a mother and what his father, not even twenty when he died, ever saw in her; there was no more puzzle to solve here. Perhaps she had given him a gift. Brought a key not to break in so much as break him out of his lingering attachment to her. She had unlocked a final, irrefutable truth — wasn’t shit; wasn’t ever gon’ be shit — and he could be free of her now.
She seemed to sense she hadn’t gotten a good grip on him yet.
“Vaughn ain’t got nothing on you. I made sure of that. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It ain’t gon’ come to nothing. Even if they tried to get me to say something against you —”
“Oh,” Darren said as it hit him, why she was here.
It almost cut his tongue to say the words: “You’re testifying.” His lawyers had said Vaughn was serious this time. Was there a new grand jury already under way? Is that why she had darkened his doorstep? To name a price for her silence on the stand?
Bell shook her head.
“Darren, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t.”
“You gave the DA the gun in the first place!”
“I was trying to protect you.”
“You’re lying.”
She sighed in a way that flared with indignation. “I just told you I didn’t even know that was the same gun that killed that man. I thought if I handed it in, no fingerprints on it, it would stop them thinking you had anything to do with it.”
“I want you to leave.”
“Wait, Darren,” she said. “This ain’t why I came to see you. There’s something else I need your help with. It’s a problem I run into at the college in Nacogdoches, son.”
He laughed at the last word, reached for the freedom he felt earlier.
He was done with her.
He thought of the groceries in the cooler in the car, the dinner he had planned. September in San Jacinto County, he and Randie could eat on the back porch, could feast on a view of the wall of pines that bordered the property. He thought of the bottle of wine they would share at dinner, followed by a bourbon or two of his own afterward, three if the music was good, if they put side one of Freddie King Live & Loud on the hi-fi. He only had to get back his key, pray she hadn’t pressed its outline in a bar of soap before Randie arrived, and he could go back to the business of being a motherless child. When she at last handed over the spare key, and he told her to leave with the finality of words etched in stone, she looked at her only child and spoke with a directness of purpose that didn’t hide her obvious nerves or the hitch in her voice, the tender way it caught and bent when she said, “I’m sober, Darren.”
3.
HE DIDN’T believe her.
He told Randie as much over a dinner of buttered rolls and a roughhewn salad of chunks of cucumber and fat quarters of tomatoes from the garden and a butt of smoked Gouda Randie had found in the back of the refrigerator. She’d prepared the meal for them when it was clear that Darren was in no shape to cook, had lost all interest in food.
“She gave me my first beer, for God’s sake,” he said.
“Maybe she’s finally sorry for that… for a lot of things.”
