Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

“I know, Mama, you told me.”

She ignored that part. “Been a mess about it too. I think she loved this one the most. Woulda been nice if you could have been at the funeral. Everybody was there, Mookie, Alonzo, Cynt—”

She was still naming names as he walked to the back of the house.

“Sloppy Joes in the fridge,” she shouted, her voice like gravel though she’d never smoked. His stomach heaved.

“I ate,” he yelled back.

He had stopped eating her cooking after he came home from college. He still remembered the day. He’d told her the macaroni she made from powdered milk tasted like poor people food, and she slapped his face, then ran from the kitchen crying. After that he mostly ate at his MawMaw’s. His mama still cooked for him, and sometimes he’d indulge her on simple stuff: pancakes and biscuits, or her annual gumbo. It wasn’t that her food wasn’t good, it was that he knew too much about how long her dishes sat in the sink, that she didn’t wash her dish towels, that sometimes she’d leave the bathroom and he’d hear the toilet flush but not the run of faucet water. She wasn’t always like that. She was the one who got him playing ball in the first place. She didn’t know much about it herself, but she enlisted the best coaches; she worked summers delivering pizzas to pay for the most competitive camps; she went to every basketball game dressed to the nines, and every one of his friends wanted to holla. But it was like that high-end version of herself was too lofty to maintain for long. Every few years she’d relapse into what he saw today. Sometimes as a kid, he’d stare at pictures of her in her good days — slender as one of those models in the white magazines, in her beige suits with hair down her back — and wonder what happened. It wasn’t just her looks that had suffered. When she was out of commission, she’d either spend hours going ham on him for made-up slights or look straight past him with a glaze over her face. Times like those, he didn’t think she even saw him really.

He needed to lie down for a minute and just think. Tiger had been talking about expanding, and T.C. had thought Bon Bon was going to clear his head, but his thoughts seemed more convoluted than ever.

When he woke up, it was past dark. “Shit,” he called out to no one in particular. He checked his phone: 9:00. His mama would be off at her night job, tending to that old lady with dementia. MawMaw stayed up until midnight, but he didn’t want to bother her so late. He would just have to make it quick though; there was no way he wasn’t going to see her, and his mama knew that too. Wasn’t that what she was so mad about?

He rummaged around for some resin, hideaway bud beneath the mattress or under his lone shelf of books, but no, his mama must have come in and cleaned the place. It used to be that his MawMaw was the one person he didn’t need to be high around, but he didn’t like to see her the way she was now, crumpled in on herself like a paper napkin getting ready to be discarded, and he could handle it if she was going out today or tomorrow, but his mama was talking about two years.

He got dressed for the two-mile-long walk.

Moving to their neighborhood when he was ten had been a miracle. His house hadn’t been much even then, just three bedrooms, 1,200 square feet, but they’d been staying in apartments since he was born, and once when his mama got laid off, they’d spent a month in the Magnolia Projects. It had been a dream to come out east, if only for the peace and quiet. His mama enrolled him at the Catholic school down the block, and he’d walk there and back without worrying about getting jumped. Now since Katrina, nobody stayed out past dark. The storm was more than five years before, but most of the lower Ninth Ward was still uprooted, and the people who had lived there, who had evacuated to places like Houston and Baton Rouge, just stayed. The ones who did come back were poor and newly homeless, and since the East had been on a gradual decline anyway, the city tipped the balance and infused T.C.’s neighborhood with Section 8 housing. It took only a year for T.C.’s neighbors to go from teachers and secretaries to thugs and prostitutes. He had been square before Katrina. Even after he lost his scholarship at LSU, he took classes at Dillard University and bagged groceries at the neighborhood supermarket, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm, and in its wake he’d become somebody different too.

Still, selling weed out of his house didn’t mean he didn’t feel scared anymore. Instead he had more to fear. Everybody he passed knew he grew plants in his mama’s guest room, that he always carried the product on him, the product and his proceeds. He was tapped right now, but they didn’t know that. Also, there was that new element that was creeping in, cars that didn’t belong on this run-off block, like the black Grand Prix he had never seen before, creeping by at five miles per hour then turning back down the street for Hammond. Before he went to jail, there had been a splurge of home invasions and armed robberies, and from what he’d heard, they hadn’t let up. Now he couldn’t help but look over his shoulder and wonder where po-po was. When he was up to no good, they were surrounding him.

T.C. began to calm down when he got closer to MawMaw’s. The houses on Lake Forest had always been nicer, and after the storm, people didn’t take as long to return them to their original state. MawMaw for instance had never lived in a trailer. She just rented a condo in Baton Rouge until the contractors were finished rebuilding. When she came back, everything was close to normal, and sometimes he wondered if she could convince herself that nothing had ever happened. He walked up her porch steps, sidestepped the lawn chairs and potted plants — one with an open pink flower he could have sworn she had told him was a petunia — and knocked on the door through the barred gate.

She made him say his name before she opened the door. It had been only four months, but he had braced himself for this, that she would look different than the woman who’d raised him, the woman who manicured her nails every week and treated herself to MAC foundation. She hadn’t had to waste money at a beauty salon, she always bragged, but now she wore a wig that pressed on her scalp like a helmet. Her collarbones peeked out of the neckline of her shirt, and she’d already taken her dentures out for the night. Still, he told himself to notice her face. Wasn’t her skin as smooth and fine as it had been when he’d stare up at her as a boy, as she peeled crawfish over newspapers, sucking the heads out with her pink lips?

Once she saw it was him, she dropped her cane in a clang and opened her arms.

“Your mama didn’t tell me you were out. Boy, get over here and give me a kiss.”

“I’m early, I wanted to surprise you,” he said. He almost repeated the line he’d told Tiger and his mother, that they needed to make room for the real criminals, but he wanted to get through this visit without mentioning that place if he could.

“Now you know you don’t go surprising people with heart conditions,” she said, and her smile lit up her face, the light brown eyes and pale skin. “Well,” she looked him over. “You’re certainly looking good.” She let out a loud laugh, sweet though, so sweet he wasn’t put off by her empty gums.

They walked to the sofa. The TV was on in the front center of the room, commanding as much attention as another person’s voice. She always kept it on now that PawPaw was dead.

“Your aunt Ruby just left,” she said. “I’m so glad,” she went on, though T.C. knew that wasn’t true. “I couldn’t handle another minute of her complaining. Another one of her grandkids moved in with her. I said, Ruby, if you didn’t want a big family, you shouldn’t have had seven kids.”