“You should know something about that,” Cornell said to me. With that he smiled for the first time I’d seen that day.
“Anyway,” Newland continued, “I send ’em a picture of myself and my house and Spider, my dog. I told ’em that I worked for the post office and that I was a sorter.
“Then for a long time I forgot about it — it was almost a year before Mi Lin send me a e-mail.”
“I told him,” Mi Lin said with a pronounced and yet understandable accent, “that I like what he says more than all the other men, that his pictures were about a real man who lives a real life. His house looks big to me and I like a dog. I work in toy factory and save two thousand dollars. I tell him that if he pay eight thousand I will send him my two for the rest.”
“We were all so worried that it was some kinda scam,” my mother said. “We told him not to do it.”
“But I could tell that she was for real,” my brother argued. “You could see it in her pictures and in the way she said what she said. I wrote her back and said that I wasn’t rich and that I didn’t even have enough to keep her without her gettin’ a job, and she wrote back that she liked to work. Boy, you know I hit the credit union the next mornin’. I lied and said I was improvin’ my house, but you know I was rentin’ then.”
“So it all worked out?”
“There was some trouble here and there, but you bettah believe that Mi Lin come here and I married her aftah only three weeks.”
“I’m very happy,” Mi Lin said.
She grinned at me and I felt a brief surge of amazement. I realized that my little brother, the silly kid asking the same questions over and over in our backyard, had turned into the kind of man whom this woman could love and I could respect — that he had entered life with a steady gaze and even step.
Newland had surpassed me and that made me smile.
“So what about you, Sandra?” Cornell asked.
“What about me?” There was no love lost between me and my older brother, because there was no love to lose.
“What trouble brings you to this house?”
“My husband died.”
“And why are you here?”
“Why am I where, Cornell?”
The question threw him. This was a game we had played since we were children. I’d make fun of him and then he’d beat me up.
“Sitting at this table,” he said at last.
“Is this your table?” I replied, the playful, willful child in my tone.
“It’s our family table.”
It came back to me why I had left home. My father was dead and Cornell, for whatever reason, had decided that he was the man of the house. My mother was a helpless wreck and so I received the brunt of my brother’s misguided attempts to keep his world from flying apart.
“Cornell,” my mother said in a commanding tone I hadn’t heard since I was ten.
My brother looked but did not speak.
“This my house,” Asha Peel said firmly. “Not yours. You and your family are guests in here. And if you cannot accept and respect your sister on the Lord’s day in my house, you don’t have to stay.”
The silence at that table went way down inside of me. If I had not already decided to give up the adult film world I would have at that moment because of my mother’s words.
“I was just sayin’ that she don’t have a free pass back from the kinda life she been livin’, Mama,” Cornell said, grasping onto the frayed fabric of a lifetime feeling that he ran our family.
“She has a free pass with me, Cornell. This is my daughter and I will love her no matter what. And if you can’t respect her then you show me the same disregard.”
“But, Mama...”
“That’s all, Cornell. You have run roughshod over Newly and Sandy long enough. I am the elder in this house. Respect me or get out.”
Cornell cast a spiteful eye on me. We might as well have been children. He hated me for having a share in our family, and I dared him, for all his superior size and strength, to try to drive me out.
His adopted children sat around Yolanda, their mouths agape, their eyes trying to make out the new patterns of power in the room.
“Why you have to come back, Sandy?” Cornell asked.
My mother got up from her chair and walked out of the room. I followed her.
In her wake I realized how dangerous my brother had been after our father died. It didn’t feel like an excuse for the kind of life I’d lived — not even an explanation. It was more like a sudden comprehension of the lay of the land, an aerial view of a terrain I’d always lived in but never really knew.
My mother went to the kitchen door to look out on the overgrown grass of the backyard. She’d already changed out of her maroon Sunday suit into a blue-and-white dress with a complex floral pattern running through it.
“Mama,” I said to the back of her graying head.
She turned, I remember, and hugged me fiercely. She was shaking but not actually crying, groaning a low note of remorse.
She leaned away again as she did in the church parking lot, holding me by the wrists. When I looked into her face I saw nothing of me. My mother had a broad, generous look, where I had inherited the long and lean visage of my father.
“I should have told him that a long time ago,” my mother said. “I should have stood up for you and Newland when you were still under my roof.”
“You were just too hurt when Daddy died like that, Mama. It hurt all of us so bad that none of us knew what to do.” I embraced her again.
“But I lost my way,” she said. “I lost sight’a my children and they got away from me.”
“Not Newland,” I said into her lilac-scented hair.
“No,” she agreed. “Newly was always my baby. But Corn turnt into a bully and you might as well have been in China.”
I cherished those few words between us. There was no conflict or disagreement, no anger or need for resolution. My mother had been blindsided by the death of the man she loved, and her babies scattered into that darkness like frightened mice running from a sudden, unfamiliar growl.
“You got a cigarette in that li’l bag?” my mother asked.
“You still smoke?”
“So little that you can hardly call it smokin’. It’s more like I take a puff now and then.”
“Yeah, I got a couple.”
At the far end of the backyard, under the clothesline, my mother kept two folding pine chairs. We sat there and I took the nearly empty box of English Ovals from my purse. I brought the handbag with me because of the pistol it contained and the children in the house.
My mother took a drag off the odd-shaped cigarette and sighed.
“That taste good. You still smokin’, baby?”
“I haven’t had one in days,” I said truthfully. “I usually carried them around for Theon. He was always tryin’ to quit and then goin’ crazy when he found himself without.”
“What happened? How’d he die?”
“He got electrocuted. It was an accident.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He was a troubled man,” I said. “Now those troubles are over.”
I breathed in the smoke. It was a warm Sunday and there were no words I needed to say.
“What you gonna do now, Sandy?”
“First I’ll bury Theon and then I’ll get on with my life.”
“Are you still gonna make them movies?”
“No. I’m done with that. It’s not that I think it’s wrong. I mean, it ain’t wrong to work in a coal mine for a dollar a ton... it just ain’t worth it.”
My mother grinned at the phrase my father used to explain his life in the street.
I kissed her on the mouth.
“I missed you, baby,” Asha Peel said to me.
“It’s been a long time,” I agreed.