Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

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.

When we returned to the house Cornell and his family were gone. Delilah had made lemonade for her and Eddie, Mi Lin and Newland. They were sitting in the TV room on the mismatched chairs and sofa there.

Eddie climbed up on my lap and Newland began talking, telling stories as he always did when he had a captive audience.

He regaled us with the minutiae of the huge post office on Central and Florence.

“... and, and, and our supervisor, Nia, is what you call a performance poet,” he was saying, “and Jack, her boss, collects guns. We got two musicians, three ex-schoolteachers, and just about every race and religion under the sun. It’s not like they say — we’re not all crazy and antisocial, but you better believe that no two people in that whole buildin’ see a glass’a water an’ think the same thing.”

“You think I could get a job there?” I asked him.

“I think you could do better than that, sis.”

“You work there, Newly.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But only while Mi Lin at school studyin’ to be a dental assistant. After she get a job I’ma go to school too.”

“And study what?”

“I wanna be an architect. I wanna build houses.”

I thought about Rash but didn’t mention him. It all seemed too perfect: that I would have met a man who could help my brother — maybe. It was almost a miracle that my mother had stood up and defended me when no one, except my dead father and maybe Theon, ever had.

It was hard leaving Edison that evening. He cried and wanted to come with me. Delilah held him up and kissed us both.

Newland walked me to my car.

“What do you think it will do to Delilah if I take Eddie away?” I asked my brother.

“She always told him that she was just holdin’ him for you while you got some stuff together. He expects it and so does she.”

“It just doesn’t feel right.”