beside the remote control, was a bowl of M&Ms, because diets were suspended on Mondays as wel .
I once heard my father joke to a young man we were driving from the airport. He looked sort of nerdy, clutching a skimpy bouquet of Gerber daises to give to his fiancee. The young man told us that he was meeting his future in- laws for the first time.
“Smart move,” my dad joked with him. “You never want to marry a girl before you see the mama. You need to know what you’re getting.” My dad laughed and the young man in the backseat stared into the flowers, worried about what sort of magic mirror he was about to look into. I took in my mother sprawled exhausted on the couch and I wondered if this was what I was going to grow up to be. If that nervous young man in the back of the limo were to see my mother standing on the front porch waving him in, what would he think?
I goose-stepped toward her with the bouquet of roses and she looked alarmed. I glanced over my shoulder back at Daddy and Raleigh. Here we were trying to do something nice, and we scared her.
“Chaurisse,” Mama said, “what you got there? Somebody sent you some flowers?”
I looked again at my dad, as we hadn’t real y prepared ourselves for dialogue. Raleigh waved his hand, so I forgot the medium tempo of the song and hustled toward her with the roses outstretched.
“They’re for you.”
The rest went almost as choreographed, although I forgot and set the flowers on the coffee table next to the remote, when I was supposed to hand them to her. Daddy looked a little bothered, but he handed me the envelope with the invitation and I forked it over. Mama opened the outer envelope and giggled upon finding the smal er one tucked inside.
“What is this?” she said, grinning as Raleigh snapped her photo.
When she made it to the tiny square of tissue paper that was packaged with the invitation she said, “Ooh, expensive,” and not in the snide voice she used when opening the invitations that clients gave her, but with real appreciation. Then she read it and let out a little yelp.
She stood up from the couch and hugged me to her in a firm grip. Her body shook against me as she cried on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I returned her hug, patting her back as she mewed like a newborn kitten. With the party invitation in her hands, she couldn’t get enough of the feel of us. She let me go and then reached for Uncle Raleigh and cried a wet spot onto his white shirt. Then it was Daddy’s turn, and she grabbed him like she had just won the Showcase Showdown on
It’s funny how you think you can know a person.
20
BLOWOUT
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was the Year of the Party. First there was Ruth Nicole Elizabeth’s Sweet Sixteen in February, which showed everyone how it was done, and then there were a couple others which were almost as swanky. It got to the point where a person didn’t even feel right having a party if it wasn’t going to be catered. Bucking the trend, Marcus McCready came home from Hampton in April and decided to throw a spring break jam, not formal but
Dana was so excited about that she didn’t go through her usual wishy-washy I can–I can’t routine. She said yes when I mentioned it and on the day of, she was waiting for me at the back parking lot of Greenbriar, on time and bearing gifts — two identical tube tops that would show everyone that we were best friends. It’s what she used to do with Ronalda, she said, as we changed in the backseat of the Lincoln, trusting the tinted windows to guard our privacy.
Ninety miles isn’t so far on the odometer, but you know the old joke: “Be careful when you leave Atlanta, because you’l end up in Georgia.”
Marcus’s family had bought the house on Lake Lanier after his father, a country boy from Mobile, remarried a woman from New York, who insisted that she needed a “country home.” Egged on by a real-estate agent who insisted that Lake Lanier was going to be the Martha’s Vineyard of the south, Marcus Senior made the purchase even though my daddy personal y warned him against it. “Forsyth County ain’t nothing but a clump of sundown towns.”
Once I had cleared the city limits and the traffic cooled off, I pul ed over to a gas station to fil up and get a look at the map.
“You always get ful service?” Dana said.
“I’m putting it on my dad’s card. He doesn’t like me pumping my own gas.”
She smirked.
“It’s not up to me,” I said, unfolding the map while a thin white kid screwed off the gas cap.
“I know the way,” she said. “I’ve been out there before.”
