Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

While Tricia helps Dennis carry the wheelchair up, Karen yells from the kitchen, “It smells in here! I told you to clean out the fridge, Kevin!”

“I did!”

They walk around looking for the source, find nothing.

“Maybe the place just needs a good airing.” Dennis opens windows to the thick, wet air of spring.

Tricia and Karen run out to the grocery store and by the time they come back they’re talking like old friends. Karen has given Tricia a bunch of medical advice on Tyler. Lawan isn’t proud of it, but it occurs to him this could be good. If they all think he’s busy with a girlfriend and her disabled son, maybe they won’t be so quick to think he can take care of Gloria. Won’t be so mad when they find out he’s already halfway gone.

For lunch they’ve bought a bunch of Arab stuff. A paste the color of a drop cloth and two salads, one made of cucumbers, tomatoes, and a crunchy bread, the other dwarf lettuce wilted in sour dressing.

“Could I have the tabouli?” Tricia asks, winking at him to indicate what? She already seems to know his family better than he does.

“So do you have your stuff here?” Kevin asks.

The time has come. For a second Lawan pretends not to be aware that Kevin is talking to him, then he widens his eyes. “What stuff?”

“Your stuff. To move back in?”

“Your brother doesn’t have to move in,” Gloria says. “I’m fine alone.”

“That’s how we got into this mess,” Karen says.

“We?” Gloria says. “I think I’m the one with the pins in my ankle.” She fell down the basement stairs, shattering her leg, because Gloria has multiple sclerosis. Living in a two-story house with all the bedrooms and the only shower upstairs makes no sense, but if anyone suggests moving, she gets angry.

“I could have done those stairs on my ass. Lawan didn’t have to carry me.”

“Somebody’s going to have to get your wheelchair up, unless you’re going to strap it to your head,” Dennis says.

“I can use my walker up there.”

A five-minute debate about whether or not Gloria is strong enough for the walker ensues. What if she has an attack? That’s what they call the sudden spike in MS symptoms that come unpredictably, sometimes not for years at a time, sometimes only months apart.

“You could have died falling down those stairs,” Kevin says. “It was pure luck Wan was here.” Kevin is six inches shorter than Lawan. He has to reach up to knuckle his hair, still two inches thick.

Lawan heard the thumping sound of Gloria’s head hitting the wall and the cracking as her legs caught between balusters because it was his laundry she’d been carrying downstairs. He’d stopped by to do it and while he was rummaging through the freezer, she snatched it up. Lawan was pretty sure Gloria hadn’t told anyone this part of the story.

That day he’d waited for the ambulance outside, feeling safer in the fresh air. When they pulled in he said right away, “My mother fell,” to be sure they knew he belonged here. He had to remind himself these were experienced people. Surely they’d seen a black man with a white mother before. For all they knew, Frank had looked like Shaquille O’Neal.

“Lawan is moving in,” Karen says. “There’s no other option.”

“I have to drive my route.”

“That’s no problem. I think Mom can swing a few hours alone.”

Karen proceeds to list the things he should do before leaving. Food. Medicines. Bathroom. Phone. Glass of water.

Now is the time to bring up the Marines. He passed the test and it was only Gloria’s fall that stopped his enlisting. Instead, he asks, “Long-term, though, what’s the plan?”

They all shoot him a warning glance. Even Tricia looks uncomfortable.

“One day at a time,” Karen says. “That’s always what you say. Right, Mom?”

“That’s right. Tomorrow might never come. Why waste today preparing for it?”

This had always been Gloria’s mantra, and the older Lawan grew the dumber he thought it was. Every day kept coming at you, like a slap across the face. Better get your hand up.

At two o’clock he manages to slip away. “Gotta go get the kids.”

Tricia sits beside him quietly for the first several minutes and he wonders what she thought of everyone, but doesn’t want to ask. As they’re pulling up to the first school, sliding in line behind a bus that picks up the regular kids, she says, “I take it you don’t want to move in?”

For a second he thinks she means with her, then realizes she’s talking about Gloria. “I don’t know. I’m not sure she wants me to.”

“Oh yeah, she does. She’s just too proud to ask. Mothers don’t like to be a burden.”

Lawan would like to ask Tricia if Tyler is a burden, but he knows that’s mean. If the answer is yes, she wouldn’t want to say it out loud.

On days like this, blustery and cold, he takes a blanket inside and tucks it around the kids in their chairs. The first time he did it a kid got scared and he said, “It’s okay. You’re just going to be a hot dog, all wrapped up tight in your bun.” The kid laughed and said, “Hot dog time,” so that’s what he calls it now and all the kids think it’s hilarious.

From the start Lawan felt he understood them. As a child, he had a speech impediment, remembers sitting at the kitchen table with Gloria, watching her narrow lips, the color of raw salmon. Your bottom teeth have to bite your lip, she’d say, then she’d puff. Fuh, fuh, fuh … Something about it made him feel she was always on the verge of hurting him.

At each house, he pulls into the driveway, straps the chair to the ramp, then lowers the ramp to the ground. By then a mother or grandmother, rarely a dad, is already coming out. Some of them will take over at the curb, some need help getting the chair up the house ramp and through the door. If it’s grandma, Lawan always waves her back inside. When he goes to leave, he whisks the blanket off like a magician revealing a rabbit and says, “I present to you, the Great Hotdogini!” The kids who can laugh always do.

Tyler is the last stop on the route. After Lawan helps Tricia get him inside, instead of going back to his apartment to pack a few things or returning to Gloria’s, he goes to see Lawsandra.

It turned out to be easy enough to find her. Just ask around the right neighborhoods, spelling her name carefully so people don’t confuse it with “LaSondra,” of which there are several. But there is only one Lawsandra, and she is his mother. Lawan wasn’t convinced of this until he asked, “So what’s my birthday?”

She thought a second. “May twenty-second. You was born at ten fifteen at night, and I was up on my feet by eleven, sneaking a hit in the bathroom under the fan.” She laughed. “They caught me and took my stash away and wouldn’t let me see you till the next day. They afraid I was too high to hold you right.”

Gloria and the rest know nothing about his finding Lawsandra. It’s simple enough to keep a secret, Lawan the only overlap between the two worlds. Every month or two he hangs out with his mother and her boyfriend Booker, who works at a tire store. Lawsandra claims she’s gotten clean, except for pot, which Lawan doesn’t think counts anyway, and she works part-time at KFC. She hates it, is trying to find something better, so Lawan gave her a few lessons in Microsoft Word and Excel, but even though she’s a fast learner, she doesn’t have the patience — or maybe the interest — and he can’t picture her in an office anyway, with her long gold nails and the way she oils her hair into the shape of a fan, like a chicken’s tail across the back of her head.

Their duplex slouches on a mud-soft lot east of Collingwood, dirty white aluminum siding, spongy porch boards and the ghost outline of long-gone shutters. Lawsandra seems happy to see him.