Raleigh said, “Take my keys. You two can sit in the car. Make sure you turn on the air.”
My mother took my hand and smiled. “You look like a wild animal.”
Behind me, Raleigh took my seat beside Wil ie Mae and started snapping peas. She leaned over and whispered something to him that made him smile.
RALEIGH WANTED TO MARRY my mother. That Wednesday over Tonk he put his cards on the table, in more ways than one. He said, “Gwen, you deserve something better than this. You deserve to be somebody’s only wife.”
She didn’t take him seriously at first. She said, “Pick up your hand, I can see al your cards and that takes the fun out of it.”
“I’m serious.”
She laughed. “Wel , do you have someone in mind? Do you know somebody that wants to take me away from al of this?”
“I’m serious, Gwen,” he said. “I have been thinking about this for a few years now, and I want to make a real commitment to you and to Dana.”
My mother placed her cards on the table facedown, like she thought that they could pick up their game once this awkward conversation was through. “What are you saying, Raleigh? What are you saying to me exactly?”
“I am asking you to marry me. To be my wife. Legal y. Respectful y.”
My mother got up from the table and went to the couch and sat herself on the space where the cushion was split. Raleigh fol owed her. He was so long and lanky that he moved like something engineered to bend with the breeze.
Raleigh kept talking. “We can get our own house and live like ordinary people. I am already Dana’s father on paper, so there is nothing complicated to figure out. And don’t worry about James. He’l come around. He’s got to see that it’s not fair the way that he’s been able to live for the past nine years. He’l have to see that it makes sense for you and me to be together. It wil be better for Dana. James, he’s got more already than any one person can hope for.” He took my mother’s hands and held them to his mouth. “What do you say, Gwen?”
“You haven’t said that you love me,” my mother said. “Why are you doing this? You don’t love me.”
“Yes, I do,” Raleigh said. “I love you something terrible. I love you to my bones. I love you, Gwendolyn Yarboro.”
“No, you don’t,” my mother said.
“Yes. I’ve loved you since that first day I met you hiding in your bed at that rooming house. Please, Gwen. Let’s do this.”
My mother said, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what?” Raleigh said. “You don’t know if I love you or if you love me?”
“I know for sure that I don’t love you,” my mother said. “Not in that way. But I don’t know if you love me, either.”
Raleigh leaned back on the couch. “You don’t love me? Not at al ?”
“I love you some,” Gwen said. “But you are my husband’s brother. There’s a different way you love your brother-in-law.”
“You are not my brother’s wife,” said Raleigh. “He is not my brother and you are not his wife.”
“I don’t know,” Gwen said.
“You know, Gwen,” Raleigh said. “You know it.” He got up from the couch and put Louis Armstrong on the record player. “Dance with me,” he said, holding his arms out.
“This is not a movie,” my mother said, suddenly angry. “Dancing with you won’t make this right or wrong. You are asking me to give up my whole life for this.”
“I am asking you to marry me.”
“I don’t know, Raleigh,” my mother said.
FIVE DAYS LATER, she was dressed in her blue suit sitting with me in the back of the old Lincoln.
“Dana,” my mother said. “What would you say about Uncle Raleigh becoming your new daddy?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how would you feel if we went to go live with Uncle Raleigh and he would be your daddy and I would stil be your mother — I wil always be your mother, there’s no changing that ever — but it would be me, you, and Raleigh living together.”
“You can do that?”
“People can do whatever they want.”
I thought it over while scratching the mosquito bites on my legs. “What about James? I can’t have two daddies, can I?”
“James wil always be your father.”
“So what about Uncle Raleigh?”
“Okay,” my mother said. “It’s like this. When you get older, you wil say to people, ‘My real father didn’t raise me. My mother married my uncle and so I think of my uncle as my father.’ You get it?”
“No.”
