Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

And that was it. She kept going without another word and left Marvin standing with his long fingers clawed into the fence, exactly where Curtis was standing now. Marvin somehow turned what she’d said into a genuine mystery, one he considered, on that day and afterward, by wondering aloud about her life. Had anyone ever seen her mother at the school? Did they get along or did they argue all the time? Did they look alike? He let Curtis know how deeply he imagined her. As Lena became a real part of Marvin’s life, he talked less often to Curtis about her. And when they became a couple, Marvin hardly talked to him at all.

Curtis got him to go on a walk, like they used to, one Sunday afternoon. When they were near Drummer’s Grove in Prospect Park, he confronted him. “We supposed to be boys,” he said.

“Then be happy for me,” Marvin said.

“I can’t even remember the last time we hung out.”

The shaking of gourds decorated the sound of the drums. Marvin said, “You know how it is when people first get loved up.”

“You don’t even talk to me no more.”

Marvin laughed. “It’s not like that. You’re my boy. Trust. We’ll be good.”

“So it’s just a phase?”

“Oh, it’s real. Be happy I’m happy.”

“But what about me?” Curtis said. The drumming got more layered and complex.

“Okay, I see. You want it to be about you.”

“I just can’t believe you let a bitch get between us,” Curtis said.

Marvin stopped walking. He narrowed his eyes in the direction of the music. The head of a dancing man bopped up and down. Sounds from a wind instrument wove between those of the drums. “Don’t ever come out your mouth like that,” he said. “I’m serious.”

“That’s what you did though.”

Marvin closed his hands into fists and then opened them. Curtis watched them close and open, close and open. Marvin approached him, got so near their noses almost touched. Curtis breathed through his mouth.

“I’m out, man,” Marvin said, and gripped him in a strong lengthy hug.

Curtis let his arms hang limp at his sides, hands loose. As time passed, until the fire and the death, he kept his arms and hands that way, until he used them again to drink.

When Curtis came in, his mother was asleep in the easy chair again, the glow from the television in the living room bluing her form, the canned laughter a kind of murmured grace. He didn’t switch off the old sitcom and he didn’t wake her. Instead he listened to her dogged breathing. On the small table beside her were peanut skins on a paper towel, orange peels, a cup with the dregs of tea. When Curtis stayed out until seven or eight in the morning, his mother would be awake when he got in, looking tired as she sipped strong coffee and stretched her sore back at the kitchen table. Otherwise she’d be where she was now, floating on the merest shallows of sleep. When he told her not to wait up for him, she said this was nothing; she’d been waiting for him to come home for twelve years.

There was still a little time before sunrise. Curtis would often read in such circumstances; he’d become an avid reader of Walter Mosley’s novels in prison. But he liked the feeling of being near his mother now—he liked her when she was asleep—so he sat with a tall glass of water and forced his gaze onto the television screen. The off-hour commercials for ridiculous products held his attention better than the show itself. Despite his efforts, his body slumped against an arm of the sofa and he fell asleep.

Curtis often slept during the day, even when he was in prison, so his dreams were full of light. At least, this was how he made sense of what happened. Each dream was a city of houses and water and clear sparkling glass. Every inhabitant wore white, against which their brown skin was beautiful. People smiled and held the hands of their lovers, their children, and their friends. The strange thing about these light-filled dreams was that Marvin never appeared, not a piece of him in the fragments Curtis could gather upon waking. He told himself that the grandness of the dreams—the pristine landscapes and spacious houses, the variety and richness of color—was a symbol of Marvin’s presence, or that the diffuse light, the kind you see in old paintings, was the gold of his friend’s fantasies. But he knew his claims were suspect. He was stung by Marvin’s disregard for his dream-life.

It was not yet morning now, however, so his dream had a different character. Aside from the darkness of waking life seeping into it, there was the dim, gray shadow of the woman he’d hit with his car all those years ago. The woman sprang into the dream the same way she’d sprung out onto the street, and as she’d been that night, she was faceless, voiceless, and pale, gesturing woodenly at the edge of his vision. As she had been in the last few moments of her life, she was barely a smudge, nothing more than a faint mote in the air before suddenly looming. That night she seemed to fall upon the car like a burden dropped from the sky, and in the dream she acted the same way, flying at him, shocking him out of sleep. He jerked awake, shaken and afraid, with a metallic taste on his tongue. The taste offended Curtis, reminding him of the pit his mouth had become after Marvin’s death, in those months of heavy drinking.

In the kitchen Curtis’s mother was spreading butter and cherry preserves on slices of toast. “Glad it’s Sunday,” she said. Her job at the hospital gave her Mondays and Tuesdays off, so she was on the cusp of her weekend. She pushed his breakfast plate across the table and got up to place more bread in the toaster and fork scrambled eggs from the pan on the stove. She was already dressed for work. A saltshaker pinned two folded twenty-dollar bills, the amount she’d leave for him a few times a week to eat lunch and get around as he searched for jobs. While waiting for the toast to pop up, his mother hummed old gospel songs, something she’d never done when Curtis was growing up. She must have learned them as a girl back in North Carolina, and now as she drew closer to her life’s other edge, the songs must have come back to her again.

When she sat back down with her plate, she watched Curtis, nearly done with his eggs, toast, and sausage patties, before touching her own food.

“Want some more?” she said.

Curtis nodded and grunted yes.

His mother gave him one of her hot triangles of toast and began to scrape some of the eggs from her plate onto his. “Go on and eat it, Curtis,” she said. “Shoot, I’m getting fat anyway. I need to start back with my exercises.”

Remembering his private vow, that his life was now for wondrous things, he accepted what ended up being almost all of his mother’s breakfast so he could see her lips closed and smiling and her eyebrows settle back down to a sensible height, so there would be the satisfaction of silence. It was true that she was getting round in the midsection, but he knew she would never return to her exercises, because she’d never started in the first place.

Curtis felt her watching him eat the second portion of food. She’d be late for work if she didn’t leave right away. She was sixty and he wasn’t surprised by how old she was starting to appear. The visits she’d made upstate to the prison each month revealed the rhythms of her decline, and in the intervals he guessed accurately where and when age would touch her next. Her brown skin was somehow darkening. She had a soft pouch under her chin, and at the cheeks and around the eyes the skull was beginning to show itself behind her face. She was nothing to write home about anymore, but a man her age wouldn’t complain much. When she and Curtis’s father decided their relationship just wasn’t going to work, she was still a young woman, and quite pretty, but she made only halfhearted attempts at romance, as if she believed you got just one real try at it in life.