it’s mine now,” Lester Ray said.
“Maybe Daisy was your mama. Maybe your mama died of the polio, and I been just tryin to spare you.”
“All right,” Lester Ray said, “my mother’s name was Daisy, then.”
“I ain’t said that.”
“Yes you did. You just did.”
“My sister’s name was Daisy. She died of the polio, I’m tellin you.”
“Awww, fuck it, then,” Lester Ray said, and he stormed out of the house, letting the rattly old screen door slam to behind him. He sat down by the river for a long time, looking at the picture. He waited until his daddy was passed out and then hid the picture in a Prince Albert can behind a loose brick under the house.
Mrs. McCrory, from behind the thick tangle of wisteria vines draping her back porch—ancient vines, several of them as big around as a man’s thigh—watched Mrs. Wrinstine’s old tomcat cross her backyard. The cat crawled close to the ground, wary, suspicious; it seemed to know it was only a matter of time before the jay struck. Mrs. McCrory had heard the jay squawking earlier, raucous and shrill, but it was silent now. It was playing possum to trap the dumb cat. The cat scooted forward a few feet, then was still. The heavy wisteria blossoms hung like bright lavender-red Japanese lanterns, and bumblebees floated indolently around them. The wisteria showered a fine perfume down upon Mrs. McCrory. She watched eagerly, anticipating the moment when the jay would strike. It would serve the old cat right. The old cat would sometimes come up on her porch during the night and puke on the floor. Leaving Mrs. McCrory a surprise. Mrs. McCrory was put out with all of Mrs. Wrinstine’s animals. Just that morning she had seen the woman’s milk cow flying over the fence, flying as though it had wings, up and away toward the river and beyond. It was not the first time she had seen the cow fly, but she could not immediately recall when the other time had been.
Mrs. McCrory never left her house any more. The boy went and bought her groceries, and in the winter he carted in the coal scuttles from the shed in back for the Warm Morning heater in her kitchen. Her son Orville had bought and installed the heater for her. Before that, for many years, she had relied on narrow coal fireplaces; there was one in every room of the old house, but she used only two or three of the rooms. Her son Orville had liked pronouncing the name of the heater: Warm Morning, he would say, like it was something out of the Bible, something you couldn’t say like normal things, stove or fireplace or table or something like that. She was supposed to be very grateful to him for buying her a Warm Morning and not just some ordinary heater. She only had to run it about two months out of the year, anyway, and she didn’t see how it was that big a deal. The boy cut her grass and raked her leaves, and he swept up for her, too, and dusted the house, and washed up whatever few dishes she used; she mostly ate her meager meals off a folded newspaper. She liked canned peaches and canned mandarin orange slices, Vienna sausages and potted meat.
Orville hardly ever visited her. He lived in Atlanta and was very busy. He was a traveling salesman for International Harvester. She couldn’t remember if he was married or not, or the name of his wife and children if he was. Her grandchildren. She couldn’t even remember her own grandchildren, or even if she had any. “I get older and stupider,” she would say to the boy. “You ain’t stupid,” the boy would say, “you’re eighty-three years old.”
“Am I?” she said.
“That’s what you said,” he answered her.
“When did I say that?”
“One day.”
“One day when?”
“Can I have some Kool-Aid?” he asked.
She had known the boy for years, since he was a little old bitty thing and she had watched him playing in her backyard and asked him to come up on the porch for some Kool-Aid. He had told her right off the bat that his mother had left, run off, leaving him with just his father. He was just a baby when she left, so he didn’t remember his mother. He was a good boy, strong and willing to work when he was not more than six years old. And he had grown into a strapping, good-looking young man at fourteen, who seemed to be able to do most anything he set his mind to. His daddy was the town drunk, and they lived in a battered little house on the next street down toward the river, near the city dump. He was at her house all the time. She gave him books to read, books that had belonged to her husband. The boy liked reading about the Greeks, the myths and legends and gods.
Mrs. McCrory was a big woman, not fat, tall with the figure of a much younger woman. Sinking breasts, a narrow waist, a widening behind that looked more like middle age than eighty-three. The skin of her face was smooth, with plump rounded cheeks and deep-set dark brown eyes. Her hair was completely gray, but curly and springy and thick. She was still a handsome woman, and sometimes when she caught sight of herself in a mirror she thought she was someone else. She watched the cat; it seemed to be searching in the grass for bugs, its ears cocked. It had forgotten the jay. Mrs. McCrory caught a flash of blue out of the corner of her eye at the top of a pine tree, then watched the jay dart down like a dive bomber and peck the cat on top of his head, then caterwaul off, wings flapping, squawking, while the cat hissed and rolled over and swatted at empty air with its paws. Mrs. McCrory cackled with glee. She laughed and laughed. “That’ll teach you, you mangy pussy,” she shouted at the cat, as the cat scrambled back across the yard and disappeared under Mrs. Wrinstine’s garage. The jay was preening, back in the top of the pine, pleased with itself.
Mrs. McCrory stood there a long time, gazing into the now empty backyard. She knew Orville was going to try to get her into a nursing home as soon as he could. An old folks’ home. He said that was best for her. He wanted the house, to sell it. She didn’t think it was worth very much. She remembered her Aunt Clara being in a nursing home in De Quincy Springs; she remembered the attendants asking her Aunt Clara if she “wanted to go potty.” Mrs. McCrory didn’t want to be anywhere where grown people asked other grown people if they “wanted to go potty.” That must have been what they did all the time at that nursing home, go potty, because the whole place smelled like one gigantic old person’s fart. Now who, exactly, was my Aunt Clara, Mrs. McCrory thought. What was her name, anyway?
Everything was suddenly gone from her mind, like the blue jay sweeping upward. Her thoughts were empty, a blank. Her head was like the inside of a child’s balloon. She tried to recall what she had been looking at in the backyard, but she couldn’t. She just stood there. She peered out at the world through gray eyes going blear. As though she were trying hard to see whatever she was looking at, even though she had no idea what it might be. She had been a widow for twenty years, but sometimes she thought it was only one or two years; sometimes she even talked to Winston, her husband, over the kitchen table or in the bed at night. She could feel the bed sagging when he got in and stretched his big frame out. No time had passed at all since she was a girl, being courted by the nice-looking young man she would marry, would spend thirty years with, would share everything with: their house, the many holidays, their triumphant days and their sad days, their son that neither one of them particularly liked as he grew up, Orville, with his sneaky eyes and greasy hair, and wherever in the world he got those eyes and that hair she did not know, could not imagine. She thought maybe that God had sent her this other boy, what was his name? Lester Ray. That God had sent her Lester Ray to make up for Orville, to be the son she should have had all along.
He was a good boy. She smelled beer on him sometimes, but it was many a good man’s failing. Winston drank, too. He drank a lot, for a long time: moonshine, bootleg, good dark whiskey in a sealed bottle, it didn’t matter to him. She didn’t know what Lester Ray drank, and she wasn’t going to ask him, all she knew was that he was a good boy. When she had showed Lester Ray the almost five thousand dollars she had saved out of her husband’s pension check and kept in a shoebox in the pantry, he had insisted that she put it in the bank where it would be safe. But she wouldn’t do that; she didn’t want anybody to know she had it, especially Orville. Lester Ray, for a while, had taken to sleeping on the glider on her back porch, to protect her, he said, from somebody breaking in and stealing her money. And maybe harming her. She made him come inside and sleep on the sun porch. Which he did for a while, until Orville found