“Else?”
“You said we had lots in common.”
He lifted his eyebrows and looked at me over his glasses. “We’re moody.”
“Who!”
“Both of us.”
“Speak for yourself!” I snapped again. “I just think deep. That’s different.”
“If you say so,” Henry said.
“Mama was moody,” I said, stung. It hurt being called something she was. Like being called crazy. Again.
Henry nodded. “My mother was that way too.”
“You mean crazy?” I blurted before I thought.
“I’m sorry I said that, Zo’,” Henry said gently. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
He leaned forward, set his mug down on the hearth, and stretched to take a leather-bound album from the bookcase. He wiped the dust off the cover with his forearm. The spine crackled as he opened it. He set it on the chair arms between us. Yellowed black-and-white photographs were glued to the pages or stuck loose in between. In one, a stringy, sour-faced man stood impatiently in front of Henry’s house. He looked like he wanted to strangle the photographer.
“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing.
“That is the sole surviving photograph of Edward Augustus Royster, my father, your grandfather.”
“He doesn’t look happy.”
“Happiness wasn’t something he valued or sought.”
“What did he prize?”
“Hard work. Discipline. Facts he could prove. He analyzed soil samples for the county.”
He pointed to another picture, one of a frail, needy-looking woman. She was clutching the collar of her housedress to her throat and staring out as though something scary was about to happen.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“My mother.”
“What was she like?”
“Like your mother in her own way.”
I chose my words carefully. “Sick in her mind?”
“Yes.”
“What else was she like?”
He pondered the question. “I really don’t have the first idea what she was like under all that illness.”
I studied Henry for signs that he might be making this up, but his expression was matter-of-fact. I knew exactly what he meant. I’d known Mama’s sickness, but I didn’t know her. I knew her up times when she’d go out and buy things we couldn’t afford or get all made up and go out to bars to meet men. I knew her down times when she barely talked and shut herself in her room for days or even weeks. Her drugged times when she was woozy and confused. And the times she was trying to quit, when she’d be sickly sweet one minute, mean and spiteful the next. From one hour to another, I never knew what kind of mood she’d be in. I’d learned early to keep to myself, stay clear. My happiest times had been when Mama was in the hospital.
“Did you love your mama?” I asked Henry.
He thought for a long minute. “If I did, I don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember either,” I said, feeling uneasy. “I felt for Mama in my way. When I was real little, I thought she couldn’t help being sick. But as I got older I saw she could help it some of the time. She’d flat ignore the doctors and do as she liked. They’d say, ‘Take your medicine every day, and don’t take too much or drink alcohol.’ But she heard and did what she wanted to, over and over again.
“She kept bringing home one man after another, even though they all left once they figured her out. She never could keep a job, because when she didn’t feel like working she’d find a reason not to show up. We were always owing money and moving because of it. When we had a phone, it rang all day with people trying to collect. She’d say, ‘Baby, I’m doing the best I can,’ like I didn’t have eyes in my head, like I couldn’t see how she did exactly as she pleased, the heck with everybody else.”
I suddenly felt like I’d said more than I should. But Henry was just listening and nodding, like we were having any old conversation, like he knew.
“But I don’t remember loving Mama,” I said. “I worry about that sometimes.”
“Why?”
“You know how people are.”
“What people?”
Everybody, Hargrove, you, I thought, but didn’t say. “You know, like that lady in the supermarket? The nosy one? People who like to say what you are, when they don’t even know you, and how you ought to be and feel.”
Henry scowled. “I don’t give a flying flip what Lucinda Wilson thinks, and neither should you. You’re smarter than that. Another thing we share.”
“But you—”
“Wanted to get away from her as fast as possible.”
I stared at him, open-mouthed. So that’s why he’d told me to zip it. “What happened to your mama?” I asked.
“Her heart gave out, like your friend Mrs. King’s.”
He remembered. “When you were a kid?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Later, when I was grown and as far away from here as I could get. I left home feeling exactly the way you described.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“You were angry?”
“Oh, yes,” he said, like any sane person would be crazy not to be.
“Do you still feel like that?”
“Sure.”
“Is that why you curse so much?”
He laughed a little. “Metal is a cursed medium.”
We both turned back to the fire then and sat staring at the flames and watching the snowfall while we finished our cocoa. I was turning over in my mind all we’d said about our crazy mamas when suddenly Henry broke the spell, tossed the picture album down with a loud slap, and stood up.
“I think I’ll go out to the studio for a while,” he said, and just as I was thinking he’d had enough of me, he added, “Want to come?”
Henry rolled aside the two-story sliding doors to his workshop, and I walked into a space as big as a warehouse. A wonderful warehouse.
While Henry lit his heaters, I wandered around. Everywhere I looked I saw metal, metal of every size, shape, and kind. Shiny and rusty metal, solid and hollow metal, and metal in chunks, lengths, and sheets. Metal shafts, pipes, and rods; metal gears and cogs; metal circles, triangles, rectangles, spirals, and squares. Metal was leaned, heaped, and hung along every wall.
