Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

The sound of his voice made me gasp and giggle. I stood up like a drunken woman and made my way to the parking lot.

Outside I was reunited with my family, known and unknown. Cornell, who was a few years older than I, glowered, and Delilah (to my surprise) smiled brilliantly. Newland had his arm around the lovely Asian woman’s waist, and my mother, Asha Peel, came crying into my arms.

“Sandra, baby,” she said.

I held on to her as if for safety in those complex emotional waters.

“Mom,” I whispered.

“This is Mi Lin,” Newland said as they approached the embrace. “She’s my wife.”

I smiled and freed a hand to shake.

She grinned with abandon and then laughed.

My mother moved back, holding me only by the wrists now.

“You look so beautiful,” she said.

Cornell’s glower became a full-out scowl.

Delilah lifted Edison in her arms and came forward.

“You remember your mother, don’t you, Edison,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Is it Christmas?”

“No,” my stepsister said. “She’s finally come home.”

There was a look of shocked delight on the boy’s face. He stretched out his arms and suddenly I was holding him. His weight was nothing, but my own body felt as dense as stone. Edison squeezed my neck and I had to concentrate not to crush his skinny little body in my arms.

A beautiful and unforgiving black woman came up to Cornell’s side.

The world around me seemed to be spinning. I felt like a youngster drunk for the first time. I had moved so quickly from one world into others. This action seemed to resonate with the minister’s sermon somehow.

“We’re all going to my house for supper,” my mother said. “You’re gonna come, aren’t you, Sandra?”

I wanted to say yes. I intended to go. But the overwhelming nature of that day, of the past days, slowed my ability to speak.

“You can bring Theon,” she said.

“Theon died, Mom,” I said, “but I’ll be happy to come to dinner.”

“I’m so sorry,” Asha said. “Not that you can come but about Theon.”

“I’ll drive you and the little man,” Cornell said to Delilah.

“No, baby,” my stepsister said. “We’re going to ride with Eddie’s mother.”

“Yaaaay,” my son yelled.

“Uncle Cornell says that you couldn’t be my mama no more because you did bad things,” Edison said in the car.

He was sitting next to me strapped down by the adult-size safety belt. Delilah was in the back.

“Is that true?” he asked when I didn’t respond immediately.

“Eddie,” Delilah said.

“No, baby,” I said. “What Cornell meant was that the kind of life I was living would have been a bad thing for a child like you. I was protecting you from things that could have made you scared and upset.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“You’ll find out one day, honey.”

“Do you still do things that scare a little kid?”

“Not anymore. No. All that is over as of next Saturday.”

“What happen then?”

“I have to go to a funeral and then... and then I’m gonna start a whole new life.”

“Can I come stay with you?”

I looked up in the rearview mirror.

Delilah had long curly hair that was pulled back and tied with a yellow bow. She had a cherub’s face and bright brown skin. One might have called her plain if not for the happiness she exuded. Her eyes were kind and hopeful.

She nodded at me.

“I want you to,” I said.

“Then can I?” Edison asked.

“Today is the first day I been back around your grandmother and Delilah and your uncles and aunts,” I said. “And so we have to take a few days to figure out what will happen then. I have to find a job somewhere and a new place to live before I can take you with me.”

“Is this your car?” my son asked.

“Yes, it is.”

“It’s nice.”

“Thank you.”

“Maybe we could live in here.”

Delilah laughed and tickled Edison from over the seat.

He laughed too and pretty soon we were all laughing. Before we got to my mother’s house Eddie taught me a song about where the little lost donkey goes to get found.

My mother had baked three small butter-basted chickens with white and wild rice stuffing. She quartered the chickens and served them with broccoli spears and canned cranberry sauce. There were three apple-pear pies on the side table for dessert and multicolored pitchers of ice water sweating on the windowsill.

The house I grew up in was small but always seemed large. Even that dining room gave the sense of being a bigger space. It was crowded in there. Along with the people from church there was Winston (who was five), twelve-year-old Margaret, and a baby named James. These three brown children belonged to Yolanda, Cornell’s wife. Their father, I was told by Delilah, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Yolanda was beautiful in a rough kind of way and looked somewhat familiar.

The sensations of that room cut a deep and wide swath into my memory. The baby crying and Edison’s laughter, Newland’s perpetual innocence, and my mother’s sense of order and decorum. The smells and sounds, even the air on my skin were reminders of a life I once loved, then hated, and finally forgot for a while in a haze of drugs, sex, and glitter.

“Where’d you and Mi Lin meet?” I asked Newland.

He and his bride were seated across the table from me. On my left side sat my son and on my right was my mother.

“Online,” Newland said.

“Really?”

“Lin is from Hong Kong,” Newland explained.

Newland was dark and skinny with a round head like my son’s. His expression, since he was a baby, was always one of wonder and surprise. He never had trouble with the gangs or the police. No one wanted to hurt Newly, and he was always willing to help you if he could.

“And you were online pen pals?”

“One night I found this Web site about women from other countries lookin’ to be American wives,” my brother said.

“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.