Three weeks after she had promised to come by the next day, Joyce finally got up the courage to visit her mother. She waited until one o’clock, hoping the washer and dryer repairman would show up before she left. Her mother had not called back to remind her of the promise, which was her mother’s way. As always, Joyce tried to anticipate all that her mother would throw at her and spent the walk down to her mother’s thinking of ways to counter it. She would not have noticed the woman and the three children walking down the other side of 5th Street had the little girl with the woman not cried out to one of the boys, “Stop, you hurtin my sore!” When Joyce looked over, she saw the woman scolding the youngest of the boys, shaking her finger in his face. Joyce saw immediately that the other boy, standing off to the side of the others, was Adam. She uttered an oh loud enough for the man passing by her to ask if she might be ill.
She crossed the street and touched Adam’s shoulder, saying, “I know you remember who I am, your Aunt Joycie.” The boy looked up at her and blinked twice, then looked at the woman he was with as if she might have the proper response.
“Thas my child, lady, leave him be,” the woman said.
“It’s all right,” Joyce said. “Me and Adam know each other from way back, don’t we, Adam?” The boy shook his head. “Sure you do,” Joyce said. “Come on now, think. Remember how I useta to fix you all them banana splits piled up this high?” There seemed to be no memory at all in the boy’s face, and for several seconds he looked out into the street as if Joyce were a bother. “Remember all them baths with the soap bubbles? Bubble time?”
“Listen, you can see he don’t even know you,” the woman said.
“It was a long time ago,” Joyce said. She took money from her purse and gave Adam five dollars. Then, seeing the other two children look hungrily at the bill, she gave them five dollars as well.
“I don’t let my children take money from strangers off the street,” the woman said.
“She useta to be my mama,” Adam said, inspecting the back of the bill.
“You can’t have him back,” the woman said, grabbing each bill and throwing them at Joyce. “I got him fair and square. I got the papers on him to show it. You can’t have him.” She gathered the children by the hands and hurried them against the light across H Street. She continued to watch the woman and the children go down 5th Street, and when they were nearing F Street, Adam turned to look back, as if to confirm the feeling she had that the initial denial was part of some game.
Her mother lived in the Judiciary House, an H Street apartment building for senior citizens and the disabled. Joyce let herself into the apartment with her own key and found her mother in the living room. The small black-and-white television Joyce’s father had bought on credit twelve years ago was on, but her mother was reading a paperback book and paid no attention to the television. Her mother, who did not look up when her daughter entered, was wearing, as usual when she was inside, one of her dead husband’s shirts and a pair of his checkered socks. And as Joyce bent down to give her mother the kind of kiss on the cheek that Santiago would give Joyce, she smelled her father’s cheap musky aftershave.
“I want you to give Sandy a message,” her mother said, taking off the eyeglasses she kept on a string around her neck. “And if you want I’ll tell it to you slow so you can get every word down.”
“I’m fine, Mama,” Joyce said. “Thank you very much. And how you doin?” Her resolve to do battle had dissipated in the street with the woman and Adam. In that second-floor bedroom in her 10th Street house she had set aside for her mother, there was a telephone with giant numbers so her mother would not have trouble dialing her friends. And there was a picture over the poster bed of Jesus Christ, blonde hair down to his shoulders, praying in the garden at Gethsemane.
“Santiago been comin by some nights and sleepin sida my bed like he did when he was young,” her mother said.
“That sounds like good news to me, Mama. I’m glad you two friends again. You coulda told me this on the phone.” She sat across from her mother in a cheap metal chair that was part of the dinette set. “I would think you’d be glad to see your grandkids, since you don’t want to come to my house.”
“It ain’t the comin and stayin and what not. He stayed here the other night. Got up early when that beep-beep thing went off and let hisself out. And when I got in here I found a hundred-dollar bill on the table layin under the sugar dish. One hundred dollars. It’s on the table there and you take it outa my house when you go. I ain’t some sportin woman in the street. I told him never to bring a thing in this house but hisself and the clothes on his back. Well, maybe he’ll listen if the words come from his own mother.” She had been reading a romance novel and now she inserted a funeral-home bookmark in her place and closed the book.
Joyce said, “He just wants to make you happy, Mama. You know how he likes to be generous with his family.”
“I just this moment changed my mind,” her mother said. She never once looked at her daughter, only watched the people on the television. “Since all this givin is in his blood that way, then tell him not to come to my house again. And if he comes I’ll have him locked up.”
“That’ll break his heart, Mama.”
“Tell him not to worry: God don’t put no more on us than we can bear.” Her mother put on her glasses and opened the book.
Joyce stood and went to the door, and her mother told her not to forget the money.
She took the long way back home, lest she bring bad feelings back to her house. She walked downtown along F Street and looked in the store windows. At a shop at 12th Street, she bought a doughnut and several large cookies with the hundred-dollar bill and ate them unselfconsciously as she walked along, the way a child would. At a shoe store near 13th Street, she abandoned once and for all any hope she ever had that her mother would come to live with her and spend the rest of her life in the room on the second floor. And at Garfinkel’s she wondered if that doctor could go back inside her and pull one end of that pretty bow so that it would come untied and she might make Rickey, with all his whininess, happy.
There had been, along the false-wood part of the coffee table, a few cigarette burns when she bought the table. Rickey had somehow managed to make the burns disappear and the table looked almost new. The burns had been near some pictures taken at various Christmases. In one, taken months after his mother married, Humphrey was sleeping in a chair by a window. In his lap was a knit cap Clovis had given him. When they woke him for dinner, he was angry, as if he had been arguing in his dreams and did not know he was now awake. “I got my pride, you know,” he shouted. “I still got a whole lotta pride people don’t even know about.”
In another picture, taken during a Christmas when he was still courting her, Rickey had allowed Joyce to set Clovis in his lap, arrange the boys on either side of him, and photograph the four of them in front of the Christmas tree. “I’m a family man without a family,” he’d told her not long after they had met at a cabaret in Southeast. And those words were in her mind when she knelt on the linoleum floor and took their picture. Three times. “I can give you all you want,” she had said before he moved in with them. “I can give you all the kids you can afford.” “I can afford a hundred,” he said. “Then that’s how many I can give you.”