causing the 'Christ almighties' through the wall. He was a plain man, lean-faced, sad-eyed, long graying hair. We were supposed to call him Uncle Ray. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a beer. Shhhhht, it sighed when he popped the top.
'You're missing the Jesus show.' He didn't drink his beer so much as pour it down his throat.
'So are you,' I said.
'I'd rather be shot,' he said. 'Here's my theory. If there's a God, he's so fucked up he doesn't deserve to be prayed to.' He belched loudly and smiled.
I'd never thought much about God. We had the Twilight of the Gods, we had the world tree. We had Olympus and its scandals, Ariadne and Bacchus, the rape of Danae. I knew about Shiva and Parvati and Kali, and Pele the volcano goddess, but my mother had banned the least mention of Christ. She wouldn t even come to the Christmas pageant at school. She made me beg a ride off some other kid.
The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?
Uncle Ray leaned up against the doorjamb, smoking, looking out at the big pepper tree and his pickup truck in the yard. He sipped his beer, which he held in the same hand as the cigarette, dexterous for a person missing two fingers. He crinkled his eyes against the smoke as he exhaled out the screen. 'He just wants to ball her. Pretty soon he's gonna tell her to get rid of me, that s when I get my thirty-eight, teach him a fucking thing or two. Then you'll see a little Blood of the Lamb.'
I picked the marshmallows out of my cereal, arranged them on the rim of the bowl, purple moons, green clovers. 'It's not a sin if you're married,' I said. I didn't think he'd hear me but he did.
'I'm already married,' he said, looking out the screen toward the pepper tree, its boughs blowing like a woman's long hair. He shot a grin back over his shoulder. 'I got the virus big time.'
I alternated the moons and clovers, eating the ones that fell in the bowl. 'Where's your wife? '
'I don't know. Haven't seen her in two, three years.'
He seemed so calm about it, that someone was walking around with his name and his history and he didn't even know where she was. It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everybody separated from everybody else; hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, 'Haven't seen her in two, three years.'
It hit me, like a punch in the stomach. I could go for years and never see her again. Just like this. People losing each other, their hands slipping loose in a crowd. I might never see her again. Those dull eyes behind the dry aquarium, the shape of her back. My God, how could I have avoided knowing this all these months? I wanted my mother, I wanted something to hold on to me, not let me slip away.
'Hey, what's all this?' Uncle Ray came over and sat next to me at the table. He stuck his cigarette in his beer can and took my hands in his. 'Don't cry, kid. What's wrong? You can tell Uncle Ray.'
All I could do was shake my head, raw sobs like razors.
'You miss your mom?'
I nodded. My throat felt like there were two hands wrapped around it, squeezing, forcing water out of my eyes. Snot ran from my nose. Ray scooted his chair so he could put his arm around me, handed me a napkin off the table. I buried my face in his chest, and let my tears and snot wet the front of his T-shirt. It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green.
He held me, he was solid, he wouldn't let me drift away. Talking to me, telling me nobody was going to hurt me, I was a great kid, nothing was going to happen. After a while he wiped my cheeks with the back of his hand, lifting my chin so he could look at me, pushing my hair out of my eyes. 'You really miss her, huh. Tell me, is she as pretty as you?'
I smiled a little, his eyes were so sad and kind. 'I have a picture.' I ran down to my room, brought back a copy of my mother's last book, Dust. I gently stroked my hand over her picture on the back cover, on the beach at Big Sur. Huge rocks in the water, driftwood. She wore a fisherman sweater, her hair swept back by the wind. She looked like a Lorelei, cause of shipwreck. Odysseus would have had to lash himself to the mast. 'You're going to be prettier,' he said.
I wiped my nose on the short sleeve of my T-shirt, smiled. My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn't imagine owning beauty like my mother's. I wouldn't dare. It would be too scary. 'No way.'
'Hey, way. You're just a different type. You're the sweetheart type. Your mother looks like she could take a bite out of ya — not that I'd mind, I can take it rough too, but you know what I mean. For you, they'll just fall down like flies.' He peered into my lowered face with his kind eyes, speaking so gently. 'You hear me? You're going to have to push the bodies out of the way if you want to go down the street.'
Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Even if he was just lying to make me feel better, who bothered to do that now?
He flipped through some of the pages, reading. 'Look, this one's about you.'
I snatched it away, my face flaming. I knew the poem.
She used to recite it at poetry readings. I would sit drawing at my table as if I didn't hear her, as if it weren't me she was talking about, my body, my childish girl parts. I hated that poem. What did she think, I didn't know what she was talking about? I didn't care who she read it to? No, she thought because I was her daughter
