The Best American Short Stories 2018

Jamel Brinkley A Family ^{from Gulf Coast}

Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see any movie with his mother on a Friday night. Her expression went from pleading to irate. The boy said nothing more. With his head taking on weight, hung as though his neck couldn’t hold it, he followed as she went inside.

It was a chilly evening in November, the sky threatened by rain. Curtis blew warm breath into his cupped hands. Obedience, he thought, he could talk to the boy about that. He’d been making a list of topics they could discuss. The question of obedience was right for a boy of fifteen, when the man he would become was beginning to erupt out of him like horns. Though sometimes it was important to disobey. Curtis had known this since he was younger than the boy was now. Twelve years in prison hadn’t changed that, and so Curtis was here, doing what his mother had asked him that morning not to do anymore. He’d been seen watching Andre and Lena, and his mother’s friends were gossiping about what they saw. Maybe Curtis still had a grudge against Lena, they said, or maybe he simply couldn’t let go of the past. He didn’t care what his mother or her friends said. A man decided his own way, and there came a time when a boy growing into his manhood had to as well. Unless your balls haven’t dropped yet. Curtis could say that to the boy, teasing him the way he and the boy’s father, Marvin Caldwell, used to tease each other when they were young. Marvin dreamed most vividly of everything he would do for his mother one day, but even he knew to disobey her.

Curtis took a last look at the names of the movies and tried to guess which one Andre might have wanted to see, which one Lena would have chosen instead. He counted his money. He’d only spent twelve of the forty dollars his mother had left for him, so he decided to get a bite to eat while he waited for the movie to end. At the Downtown Bar and Grill, an old favorite, he ordered a hamburger and soda. Refills were no longer free, so Curtis kept asking for glasses of water. From where he sat he could still see the brilliance of the marquee.

The rain began before Andre and Lena came out of the theater, but they took a walk anyway. Curtis followed them. Lena opened an umbrella that was large enough for two, but as they strolled along the promenade Andre kept drifting away from her, exposing his body to the cold drizzle. Lena stopped at a bench and used a piece of newspaper to wipe it dry. Andre maintained a distance from her when they sat. Curtis stalled for a few moments, and then settled near the middle of the next bench. A large trash can partially blocked his view of them, but he could hear their conversation.

“Your daddy liked to come out here,” Lena was saying.

“You told me that before,” Andre said. Curtis had been following them for weeks, but had rarely been this close. He’d never heard them talk about Marvin.

“Well, it’s nice, isn’t it? Look at that view.”

Andre gestured at the rain. “I can’t see nothing.”

Curtis had been out on the promenade several times since he’d been released from prison. There was plenty to see, he thought. A great, unseen hand depressed the keys of the city, sounding notes held constant in the many windows, a thousand little squares of humming light. These seemed to float independently, since the tall buildings themselves, their outlines obscured, were indistinguishable from the black enamel seal of the sky. The night grew more thickly clouded by storm, but in the shifting bands of reflected light from the bridge and the city, Curtis could see the surface of the river alive and puckered like so many restless mouths. Given all the nights he’d spent here since getting out, it felt like a triumph that he no longer thought of feeding himself to the water.

“Why we out here, Ma?” Andre asked. “It’s wet. I’m cold.”

“It’s not so bad under the umbrella.”

“Can we go?”

“I just thought you’d like to stay out a while longer. Might as well enjoy it now. I need you to be at home tomorrow.”

“For what?”

“You know how the girls from work go out to Temptations after our shift,” Lena said. “Well, this time they finally invited me.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday, Ma.”

“I know what day it is. And I need you to be at home. For my peace of mind.”

“While you out shaking your ass at the club.”

“What’d you say, boy?”

“Nothing,” Andre said. “I’m cold.” He stood and started walking back the way they’d come.

Lena chased after him, sounding pathetic as she called his name.

Curtis didn’t follow. After a while, he got up and strolled along the promenade in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The only other person he saw was a man with an unsettling face. The man’s bouts of muttering formed clouds that flowered like visible emblems of his secret language before being pulled apart by the wind. But it was the way this man’s hands jumped within his dirty coat as he shuffled along that marked him as dangerous and insane. Curtis had been both of these things, in those months after Marvin died in the fire. Those months before Curtis went to prison. It was danger lurking in the man’s left pocket, he suspected, and insanity leaping around in the right. He liked the feeling of their passing him by.

Curtis huffed the name of his long departed friend—my dead friend, he told himself soberly—so he could see the wind take it, imagining that it too, along with the words steaming from the man’s mouth, drifted off and seeded the East River. The river was badly polluted, but he liked it anyway. It flowed in either direction, reaching both ways until it licked the sea. As the man prattled on, now some distance away, Curtis again said Marvin’s name, which rose from his lips and hovered there for a moment, clean as an unstrung bone.

He might have also said the name of the dead woman, the one he had struck with his car, the one who intruded on his dreams. But his life was for other things now, he’d been desperately telling himself, beautiful and wondrous things.

The rain began turning to sleet, the sound of it an exhalation steadily hushing the world. Curtis indulged his sense of feeling contained but not trapped. Under the capacious dome of sky he was free, but bounded, so his newly freed limbs wouldn’t fly apart. As much as he wanted to stay there on the promenade—often he stayed until the spell of night began to break—the sleet was penetrating his slicker and the thin coat he wore underneath. His hands and feet were already numb. Curtis shivered. It wouldn’t make any damn sense to get out of the clink just to turn around and catch his death of cold. He walked quickly to keep the chill from settling into his muscle and marrow.

The next night, Curtis walked along Atlantic Avenue, not far from the movie theater and the Downtown Bar and Grill. It was eleven o’clock and he was enjoying the bustle and breadth of the thoroughfare. He was still amazed at how much had changed: the number of fancy restaurants and wine stores now. Then again, many of the old bars remained. And the new nightclubs were just the old nightclubs with different names.

An empty bus made its way past, the driver lit against its dark frame like an insect stuck in amber. On the corner stood a white woman trying in vain to hail a medallion cab, and Curtis stood beside her, as though waiting to cross the street. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, wearing only a trim jacket and a scarf over her short dress. Her uncovered head twitched, shaking her cropped hair from her lips; her legs were thin but shapely, the color of rich cream. She was what Marvin used to call a “slim goody.” Curtis imagined how soft the inside of her thighs would be. He imagined her open mouth.

It had been a long time since he’d had sex with anyone but himself, with his own clutching hand. In those first years in prison, he kept an old black-and-white picture of the actress Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. Following those first years of her smiling in the swimming pool came explicit pictures of women opening their shiny, hairless bodies to the camera. When he first got out of prison he bought a couple of magazines with centerfolds, but then he discovered how easily videos could be found on his mother’s computer. He still liked that picture of the actress in the pool most of all.

The white woman’s phone began ringing, and she greeted the caller, apparently her mother, the simple words strained by her tone of heavy familiarity. The second Curtis heard her speak, a feeling of exhaustion overcame him; she reminded him, for some reason, of the woman he had struck with his car. But if that woman had been white, Curtis knew, he would still be in prison, with many more years there ahead of him. To get away from the voice now whining into the phone, he jogged across the street.

In front of Temptations, three men were lined up behind a black velvet rope. The bouncer wore dark glasses and appeared to have no intention of letting the three in. Curtis took his place in line as the first man began to complain.

“Come on now, chief. We been waiting out here for a minute.”

“Damn near a half hour,” another said. “Say it straight.”

“And the hawk is out, big man. Come on.”

The bouncer said nothing. Another man got in line behind Curtis as a livery taxi pulled up. Three women got out and were followed by Lena Johnson, an afterthought. The bouncer wasted no time letting them in.

Waiting with the other men in line gave Curtis plenty of time to reconsider going in, even after Lena’s arrival. In fact, he tried to change his mind, calling up reasons he should—images of the promenade, of the white woman on the corner—but it was Lena’s nyloned legs emerging from the taxi that were lit up on the stage of his mind. Moving slowly in a sapphire dress, she trailed the other women. The shock of seeing her dolled up was slight, but after she vanished through the door, every scene that proceeded on the stage of his mind featured the nylons and the sapphire dress and ended in foolishness. He kept thinking about Andre imagining these scenes unfold or trying to decipher his mother’s face tomorrow during the broadcasts of Sunday afternoon football. The boy needed to be spared his mother’s small tragedies.

About fifteen minutes later, the bouncer announced to the men that it would be a ten-dollar cover to get in, speaking as if they had only just arrived. He examined Curtis’s clothes doubtfully before admitting him. Curtis wore jeans, but they weren’t that dirty; the real problem was that he had on work boots instead of what Marvin would have called “slippery earls.” This outfit wouldn’t have gotten him into the places they used to frequent, back in the days when they used fake IDs.

“Good luck, playboy,” the bouncer said. He stepped aside to let Curtis through the curtains. “Your broke ass gonna need it.”

The nightclub had two floors. Curtis didn’t spot Lena on the ground level, so he went down to the basement. He took a seat at the bar that gave him a good view of the room and recognized certain features: the low ceiling with its copper tiles, the four pillars that marked the boundary of the dance floor. He and Marvin had been here before, when there was only a basement level. The place used to be called Nelson’s.

Curtis had extra money from an odd job helping his mother’s neighbor move some boxes, plus what was left of yesterday’s forty dollars. It was easier than he thought it would be to order a bourbon. The words didn’t get stuck; the bartender didn’t stare. The taste of the drink closed his eyes and warmed him from his throat to his navel.

The music blasting in the club sounded like pure racket, but this wasn’t new. While he liked some of the rap other boys listened to when they were growing up, Curtis was always drawn to older music, songs from the 1960s and ’70s. All right, old man. Marvin had a great time teasing him about this. Look at the old head tryna get his groove! He’d mock Curtis by bending over and holding his lower back, two-stepping with an imaginary cane.

Lena and her friends were already out there shaking their bodies, each with a drink in hand. Some new dances must have caught on from the music videos. As he watched, Curtis felt he was a man true to better times. He returned to the problem of Andre, how he’d manage to talk to the boy and what his first words would be. After a while, a tall man in a suit came up behind Lena and began to whisper in her ear. She laughed. Soon she had backed herself into him and they were fused in body and time. She pursed her lips and slapped her thigh with her free hand as they danced. Although he and Lena were the same age, thirty-five, Curtis was upset to see her carrying on like this. Feeling sorry for the boy and, somehow, for Marvin, he wished he had just gone to the promenade. He ordered another bourbon.

Lena and the man in the suit talked for a while at a different side of the bar. He had bought her another drink, but the smile was gone from her eyes. She seemed much less engaged now that they weren’t dancing. The man must have noticed this too. He tried to pull her back onto the dance floor, but she refused. The man tried a few more times and then his mouth turned cruel. He appeared to curse at Lena before he walked away.

She stood at the bar for a while, staring into her drink. Then she tossed it back, the entire pour, and drew from her purse a thin cigarette that looked cold in her brown fingers. She said something to one of the women she’d come in with and went past Curtis upstairs. For a moment it seemed that her gaze had fallen on him, but in places like this people’s eyes darted everywhere. He followed her. From the entrance, he saw her smoking out near the curb. Her coat was still checked inside and with her purse pinned under her arm she held herself, trembling against the cold. She dropped her cigarette and watched it smolder and die on the ground. She could have been some kind of bird staring down from a high perch, wings pinched against her blue body, refusing to fly.

“Hey playboy,” the bouncer said. “You leaving or what? It’s in or out, my man.”

As Lena took out another cigarette and began the drama of lighting it, Curtis walked back into the club. He stayed on the ground floor this time, where the music seemed not quite as loud. Sipping from his third bourbon, he thought about how easy it had been to go from his first to his third, and beyond, on the night the girl was struck by his car. Dismissing this, he wondered instead about what Andre was doing, if he too was taking advantage of his freedom or compounding the little tragedies of the night by sitting timidly at home. A boy his age should be in the world, seeing as much as he could claim or aspire to. He should be terrified by the new sensation of a girl’s modest breasts in his hands, by the new sensation of her hands in his jeans, not by thoughts of his mother in a short dress playing at youth out here in the drunkenness of night. They were thirty-five, yes, but they were old. The boy was still young and he had his father’s face. Curtis had gotten close enough to see that. His face was the same, but his fate wouldn’t be.

Curtis smelled the tobacco on her breath before he felt her cold hand on his shoulder.

“You might as well come on,” Lena said.

When he spun around on his barstool to look at her, she grabbed his drink and finished it in one swift motion. “Come on and dance with me,” she said.

He allowed her to lead him to the dance floor, less crowded than the one downstairs. He bent his knees, searching for their bodies’ fit—it turned out he hadn’t forgotten this, how to accommodate the body of a woman. They danced to old lovers’ rock. Her breasts were crushed against his ribs, his leg planted between hers. She held his shoulder and rode his hip. He touched a hand to her back and found skin there, exposed and sweaty.

She was clearly drunk, and he, with the bourbon at work in his blood, had the impression that he was anonymous to her. He wished he could vanish on the spot and leave her to her phantom, but something begged him to stay. It didn’t seem sexual—his body had yet to respond in that way to hers—so, he told himself, it had to be his obligation to the boy. But it felt like something more bewildering than an obligation. The yearning didn’t belong to him, and it didn’t belong to her either. It was beyond either of them, he felt, so it claimed them both. It was as though a bright delicate object they couldn’t see, some filament, were held between them, along the length of her sapphire dress stretched taut by his thigh, the spark of it hot where he carried her on his hip, moving her in the rhythm of his stationary stride, and they had no choice but to pull each other close, to preserve the object between them, otherwise it would drift free and fall and lose its light. The exhilaration of her breathing and her slim clutching thighs and her hand pulling on his shoulder were the forces she exerted on him, and he carried her with his hip and his knees bent and his back dimly aching, but all that mattered was the fragile wire pressed between them, lit by something they could neither face nor abandon.

This feeling of being stuck persisted, and Curtis was horrified by it. When the long set of lovers’ rock ended and released them, he averted his eyes from the sapphire dress going loose again between Lena’s thighs. He knew of nothing else to do but go back to the bar and order another drink, and when she followed him there he ordered one for her as well. It was what anyone in the role of her phantom would do. Her drink was cooled by a sculpted sphere of ice that had the look of perfection and permanence, a little moon displayed in glass. When Lena drank she did so deeply, and the moon slid, and it wet the tip of her nose. Curtis’s drink had no ice. When he took it up he tilted it so the liquor fell just short of his lips and he could inhale its heat before drinking.

What did she see when she looked at him? Added weight had rounded his face, and a beard darkened it. His hair had receded above the temples so that a blunt arrow pointed down at his nose. What would Marvin look like now if he were alive?

Curtis avoided Lena’s eyes, hoping the rest of their time together would pass like this—in silence. He tried to lose himself in the music that was playing, but it wouldn’t permit him access; its borders were dense, its patterns impossible to predict.

“I know who you are,” Lena said. “You.”

Curtis was overcome with a feeling that by entering this place he had once known, he had also elected for so much more. He sat and was helpless. Everything around him—the music, the carnal laughter, the spinning stellar lights—all of it was a frenzy. He’d forgotten this basic truth, that freedom was a wilderness.

There was no place for them to go. He explained that he was living with his mother for a little while, listened as Lena said that her son was at home. Then she surprised Curtis by suggesting they get a room. Just for a couple of hours, she said. She was lonely. It wasn’t all that late yet. The nightclub itself would be open until four, and her son knew not to expect her home until after that. He’d already be asleep anyway, and she’d still wake up before he did. “All that boy’s worried about is having his breakfast ready in the morning,” she said. She told him she made pancakes and bacon on Sundays.

Curtis hadn’t expected the drinks to be so expensive, so only six dollars remained in his pocket. His dignity would have been one reason to tell Lena no. Andre was another, but he was a reason to say yes too. Getting mixed up in her night wasn’t the best way to get closer to the boy, but it might be the only way. “I spent all the money I had on me,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” Lena said. “I got it.”

Their motel was called the Galaxy Inn. A strange smell hung in the air of their room, which was nearly as small as his cell had been. A coat of silver paint had been recently applied to the walls, but there was something else, an organic pungency. Little effort had been made to mask the presence of former occupants. There were useless dials on the walls, mysterious blinking lights. Curtis felt trapped in some television show from the 1960s, a science fiction program he watched in syndication as a child.

Lena lay next to Curtis with her back to him. She was abruptly calm, abruptly still. He couldn’t even hear the sound of her breathing. He’d been surprised by her wildness, which exceeded his. The rough sheet covered her to the waist, displaying her long neck and the slick coins of her spine. Curtis felt the urge to yank the spine out of her, to scatter those coins all over the bed and catch a true glimpse of her inner workings under the room’s dimmed bulbs of winey light.

“I should go soon,” Lena said. “See about my son.”

“Tell me about him.”

She sat up. “Andre?”

“That boy’s asleep. You got time.”

She studied his face. “What’s in that head of yours?”

Curtis shrugged and made himself hold her hand. “Come on, tell me a little something.”

Lena began hesitantly, but her initial vague description of her son eventually turned into a long complaint about her challenges with him, how easily she seemed to make him upset. He was a good child, she said, but their relationship was worsening and it was difficult to manage things on her own. “It’s not just that he’s a teenager,” she said. “It’s more than that.”

“He’s probably just girl-crazy,” he said.

“Uh-uh, I don’t think so,” she said, and went on, speaking with more kindness about him now.

When she was done, Curtis insisted on giving his view of things. The question of obedience was on his mind, but nothing he said was profound. Still, Lena listened to everything he said and seemed thoughtful when he fell silent again.

“You know,” she told him, “if it was my boy you were interested in, there were easier ways than sniffing after my behind. You could’ve just walked up to him on the street and told him who you were.”

Curtis straightened against the headboard. To him that sounded like the most difficult thing in the world. “I was just looking out for Marvin’s people, that’s all.” He felt embarrassed, a little angry. “I know it’s not the usual way,” he added.

Lena shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “I know you been gone, but you not invisible. People talk. I got eyes.”

“How long have you known?”

“Long enough to think plenty on whether to do anything about it.”

Curtis gestured at the blinking walls of the room, a tired old version of the future. He gestured down at the bed. “This what you decided to do about it?”

“Well, you were there, sniffing as usual,” Lena said. “I had my notions, and you just happened to be the one. I knew you were safe. And I figured you’d go along with it.”

He yanked off the sheet and exposed the full nakedness of his body. He sprang from the bed and glared down at her.

“I’m all done with that,” she told him, “so you can put it away now.”

“I’m not somebody you know,” Curtis said. “I never was.”

She rubbed the edge of the sheet between her fingers. “Look, I’m gonna go. You can stay the rest of the night if you want, if you don’t want to sleep at your mama’s house.” She rose from the bed and watched him for a few moments, frowning. “You don’t know me either,” she said, and began to dress.

Curtis left not long after Lena did. No need to stay and stare at a dead end. Night was starting to drain from the edges of the sky, but he didn’t go directly to his mother’s house. Walking restored him when he was upset, helped him regain his focus, even before he went to prison, and now he savored it much more, despite the times he was harassed by cops. As adolescents he and Marvin would often stay out late, sometimes until dawn, romping all over Brooklyn. Marvin preferred walking or taking the bus to the half-blind underground careening of the subway. He liked taking different routes, preferring the slightest deviations or even dangerous blocks or neighborhoods to what he would have called the “same old, same old.” But he did like the promenade.

When the two boys went there together and gazed out at the protruding jaw of the city, they spoke most openly of their desires. Marvin spoke as if the days and years to come were nothing but a cycle of restoration. “I’m gonna get my mother a house,” he’d always say. This was his favorite thing. Not only would he pay off her considerable debts, he would do this too. The house he imagined buying for her was like a place he’d already been in, stepping past furniture bought from her catalogs and out to the little vegetable garden she’d keep. Looking up with her past the white slats to the blue roof where the birds would be rebuilding their nest. “She wouldn’t want the birds there,” he said once. “But I do. They do all the things I like.”

Marvin spoke of girls as if he weren’t a virgin, as if he knew a thing about the frightening business of female nudity and of sex, which Curtis understood was animal and floral: the odd nosing around, the smells and the sap, the near-violence of fingernails and coarse hair, the peeling back of language to a hard core, like the spiked stones of peaches the boys used to throw at stray dogs.

Then, for reasons Curtis never understood, Marvin got stuck on the idea of Lena Johnson. He talked about her constantly, and soon the boys’ wanderings through the borough began to circle her old neighborhood, not far from where Curtis was walking now. There was the basketball court—still there, Curtis knew—where Marvin kept insisting they go, despite the busted rims.

One spring day they saw her there. She came from across the street and began to stroll the sidewalk along the length of the court, lifting her hand to take languid pulls from a cigarette. Marvin raced over with an odd look on his face, his hands in loose fists. He was carrying little rocks swelled and blanched by the sun, as though he wanted to roll them at her like gifts through the openings in the chain-link fence. Curtis followed, smelling the opportunity for mischief. The boys caught up and then kept pace with Lena on their side, daylight flickering in their faces, blinking madly through the diamonds of the fence. The flashing light did not transfigure Lena’s appearance. She was still just a skinny girl with pointy elbows and spooky eyes, whose shirts and sweaters were always linted-up, whose flat ass made a pair of jeans droop and frown.

When Marvin greeted her, she blew out the smoke that had been held in her lungs. She was inhaling from a joint, they realized, not one of her usual cigarettes. At school she was made fun of for having stale breath. Curtis laughed at these jokes, and Marvin used to laugh too.

“My mama told me not to talk to strange boys,” she said without looking at either of them.

“What? It’s me, Marvin Caldwell. From school.”

“I know who you are. Don’t mean you not strange.”

“But you talking to me anyway.”

“Do you always do what your mama says?”

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.

Those energies she used in doting on Curtis, fussing over him the way it seemed Lena fussed over Andre. As soon as Curtis set his fork down on his plate, his mother snatched them up, along with her own, then went to the sink and began washing them.

“I was telling Shirley what we talked about on Friday,” she said. “She thought you were gonna give me lip, but I said Oh no, my boy gets it. Look, I know you loved Marvin. He was like kin to you. But following his people around ain’t what’s right for you. I know you know it. Can’t look back. It’s like the Bible says: Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established. Turn not to the right hand nor the left—”

“Ma, don’t you gotta go?” Curtis said.

She waved him off with a gloved hand, flashing yellow, flicking suds and drops of water across the kitchen. “My baby is home,” she said. “Ain’t no thing to put some soap and water to a couple dishes.”

That’s right, he thought. Your baby. Can’t get a job, can’t get my own place, can’t open a goddamn bank account. You wouldn’t even care if I pissed the bed.

His mother snapped off her rubber gloves and glanced up at the clock. She blinked slowly, keeping her eyes closed a beat or two longer than necessary, opening them as she took in a great draft of breath. Curtis steadied himself for what was coming. This had the look of one of her speeches, the ones that began, Baby, you know the Lord has forgiven you. Now you just need to forgive yourself… Curtis wasn’t sure God had forgiven him. He wasn’t sure God agreed that the accident couldn’t have been avoided. He wasn’t sure about God. If God was true and had forgiven him, then why did He keep sending the woman into his dreams at night? Curtis had to do it the other way. If he forgave himself first, maybe then God would follow.

He steadied himself, thinking of beautiful things and filling his head with their music: The words of the man on the promenade, grabbed by the wind. “The Payback.” Freedom on his tongue like the taste of curry chicken and macaroni pie from Culpepper’s. “Someday We’ll All Be Free.” A pretty woman opening her legs and arms for him. Devil in a Blue Dress. “Ruby.” Marpessa Dawn taped to the wall. “A Felicidade.” Marvin, his friend. Andre, who looked so much like his father. “They Reminisce Over You.” “Little Ghetto Boy.”

Curtis followed Lena into a bank one afternoon that week. He tried to make their encounter seem like a coincidence, but could tell she knew better. They talked uncomfortably for a few minutes, both averting their gazes. Then he apologized for the other night and told her he wanted to see her. After some hesitation that seemed to him like a ceremony, Lena gave him her phone number.

When they got a room together on weekdays, Lena would tell Andre she was working an extra shift, but they usually got rooms on Saturday afternoons. Curtis brought her home once, while his mother was at work. Lena told him it was fine, but he felt humiliated being with her on such a small bed, in a room filled with his childish things. He was morose after they slept together. Even the scent of their sex couldn’t distract him from the pervasive smell of his mother. When Lena tried to comfort him, he asked her to tell him about the night Marvin died.

She flinched. “Y’all were like brothers,” she said. “You know all about it.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“I wasn’t there either,” she said. “You had to know that much.”

“But tell me about the last time you saw him.”

She was quiet for a while before she spoke. “I was waitressing back then too,” she said finally, “the late night shift at a diner over by Coney Island. I like waitressing. You get to know folks and they get a kick out of you remembering them and they tip you good—well, as best they can.”

“What about Marvin?”

“Like I said, I was working the third shift, and that started at midnight during the week. Marvin had already lost his construction job. Then he lost his side gig too. You know how hard things were for him.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, he couldn’t handle it. Poor thing was always beat from looking for jobs all day, every day, but he liked to stay up and watch me get ready for work. Tried to keep himself awake with a book of all things. Can you imagine? He was one to think reading in bed would keep a tired man awake.”

“What was he reading that night?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

“Did he like Easy Rawlins and Mouse?”

“I don’t know.”

“And the fire?”

She looked at him for a long time and then studied her hands. Her voice, when it came, was cold now: “You must’ve heard how it happened, Curtis. It was just like that.”

“Tell me.”

“I told him not to smoke in the bed, especially when I wasn’t around. But the man was tired, always, and with every job telling him no, he was a bundle of nerves. I kept telling him to ask for help, but he had to do things all by himself. Too proud. He wanted life to be different for us, and for his mama. All that debt…” She shook her head. “He thought we deserved to be in a better place.”

“I heard his spirits were low.”

“Sometimes.”

“You would know better than me.” Curtis tried to say this with some tenderness, but she flinched again. For the first time she seemed genuinely pretty, even beautiful to him, like a woman grieving calmly in a painting. He pressed on: “Do you think he… ?”

“What?”

Curtis looked at her.

“Took his own life? Is that what you mean?”

He nodded. He knew he was being cruel, but couldn’t help himself. He wanted to hurt her.

“What, in his right mind he just lit a match and let it fall on the damn pillows? You asking me if he meant to destroy his own self? Why would you say such a thing? Why would you even think it?”

Curtis sometimes imagined that his friend would understand what it was like to feel that blue, but he knew Marvin had loved life too much to take his own. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. The faded Knicks poster on the far wall hung askew. “He wouldn’t have done that with Andre on the way. He knew about the baby, right?”

Lena seemed baffled. “Whatever did or didn’t happen, it wasn’t because of what was growing inside of me.”

Curtis nodded, but meant nothing by the gesture. “Tell me the last thing he said to you.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “As far as we were concerned, it was just another day.”

“Last time we saw each other, he gave me a hug.”

Lena lay with her back pressed to him, her knees drawn up and touching the wall. “That’s no surprise. I never heard him say a bad word about you,” she said. “What in the world happened between you two?”

Curtis didn’t reply. After that Sunday afternoon by Drummer’s Cove, Marvin eventually reached out to reconcile, but Curtis ignored him. He met any attempt to talk or spend time together with silence. When they finally did talk, Marvin begged to borrow some money.

“I lost both my jobs, man,” he said, “and nobody’s trying to hire a brother. I can’t catch a damn break.”

On the phone, Curtis stayed quiet.

“I’m having a real hard time, man.”

Before he hung up, Curtis said, “Well maybe that bitch you got can help you out.”

He didn’t tell Lena any of this, and it was obvious that she didn’t know. He listened to her breathing now, the steady in and out, the deepening. He closed his eyes. In a while he was startled awake by his recurrent dream, and then startled again by a cold hand on his shoulder. Curtis saw it had taken a great effort for Lena to reach out to him, even though they had no space between them on his bed. Her reddened eyes, taut mouth, and fingers roughly scratching at the points of her elbows meant she knew she could never be loved by him—he had told her as much as they talked before falling asleep. Maybe she already knew she couldn’t love him either. He held her, though, in the little bed, and then she held him too. As they lay there, he decided he would never bring her to his mother’s house again.

Lena eventually got in the habit of inviting Curtis to the apartment, just for meals at first: dinners or late Sunday breakfasts where he got to see Andre. On Sundays, the pancakes were dense. Lena piled the bacon in the pan, so it always came out soggy. It was greasy and almost sweet on the tongue. As it slid down his throat, Curtis held his hand to his mouth and gave Andre a funny look, but the boy seemed to like the food. He didn’t seem pleased with much else.

In the beginning, Lena told Andre the simple truth that Curtis was his father’s good friend. “He’s like your uncle,” she said, but the boy rolled his eyes. When he called Curtis uncle he said it with a hint of derision. The two of them got along well enough though. By the end of the fifth month, Curtis was frequently at their apartment; by the sixth, he and Lena stopped getting rooms. They both danced around the question in such a way that either of them could claim the other had asked about him moving in. When Curtis told his mother it was happening, she cried the way she did when he was sentenced to prison. He invited her to visit them, but she said she would need some time.

Curtis pretended Lena had never called him the boy’s uncle, but Andre went on calling him that anyway, still with a mocking tone. He liked to say it in the mornings when Curtis emerged from Lena’s bedroom, or right before he went in at night. “Morning, Unc,” he’d say, or, “Have a good night, Uncle Curtis.”

When they were in bed Lena would signal Curtis by rubbing her cold feet along his legs, and then there would be lovemaking. The first few times they slept together, he was surprised at how much pleasure her skinny body gave him. He wasn’t gentle with her, and the things she whispered to him made it clear she didn’t want him to be. But now he hated the little sounds she made, the words she said, loud enough that the boy would be able to hear. Sometimes, not quite meaning to, Curtis covered her mouth.

When summer arrived, Curtis took Andre to the basketball court in Lena’s old neighborhood and watched him hang listlessly from the rims. They took long walks together, though Andre complained. “Why don’t we just take the train?” he asked. They had macaroni pie at Culpepper’s, but the boy said Lena’s was better. Curtis told him about his time in prison. Andre seemed uninterested until Curtis began to exaggerate, and then the boy asked him if being locked up was the way they showed it in some movie Curtis had never even heard of. His reply was yes. Exactly like that.

One of Andre’s favorite things to do, because it made him laugh so hard, was to ridicule his mother. It bothered Curtis afterward but he joined in anyway, making fun of his own mother too. He laughed with Andre at the promenade when the weather was nice, tears wetting his eyelashes. Curtis often fell silent and made a show of watching the young women walk by.

“What makes mothers the way they are?” Andre asked one day. It was the first time he posed a question like this to Curtis, that of a boy seeking the wisdom of a man.

“They lose themselves and get all kinds of ridiculous,” Curtis said. “Ain’t no mystery to it.”

But Andre was quiet, and it was hard to tell if he was listening. Curtis fixed his gaze on a jogger in red shorts, and leaned forward to keep her in sight as long as he could. He pointed so that Andre would look too. Then the joke from the old song leaped into his mind. “Goddamn,” he said. “Do fries go with that shake?”

Andre turned to look out at the harbor, his eyes a bit dulled. His taut lips shifted from side to side, as restless as the river.

Curtis kept up the banter about the jogger. “You like that, huh?”

“If you say so,” Andre replied with a shrug.

“Well, she looks like a college girl to me anyway, young buck,” Curtis said with a laugh. “Might be out of your league.”

“Man, I’ma be so glad when I go off to college.”

Curtis nodded and listened as Andre continued talking about his future, his life of success, of accumulation and bachelorhood. “There’s one thing you gotta do, though,” he told the boy. “A house. When you make it big like that, you gotta get your mother a house.”

Andre seemed taken aback, and was quiet for a long time as he considered the idea. “Ain’t you supposed to do that?” he said. “I mean, I can come visit and everything. But you gonna be with her, right? You can make that happen. She’d like that, wouldn’t she?”

Curtis didn’t say so, but he supposed she would.

“Hey,” he said, “you never ask me anything about your daddy.”

Andre shrugged again.

“I got a lot of good stories. Don’t you want to hear them? You should get to know who he was.”

“What for? He’s still gonna be dead.”

“Your father was a good man,” Curtis said. “And—”

“I know, I know. You loved him like a brother.”

“No,” Curtis said. “That’s what people keep on saying but it was more than that, a lot more.” He was startled by the sound of his own voice, the force of it. He gazed down at his curled hands, unable to bear the gentle, curious way Andre was looking at him. He couldn’t find the words to explain the affection he felt, still, for the boy’s father, and in this moment he didn’t want to be misunderstood. Another jogger went past but neither of them paid her any mind.

“What happened the night you killed that lady?” Andre said.

“I was drunk,” Curtis said. “They said she had some drink in her too. She came out of nowhere and got in my way. That’s all.” He rubbed his palms against the knees of his pants. “I did something I shouldn’t have done.”

Since no one would hire Curtis for steady work, he was often free to spend time with Andre, when the boy allowed him to. Lena supported them, sometimes working extra shifts at the restaurant. She stood aside and let Curtis try to deepen his relationship with her son. She put a smile on her face when Curtis, and sometimes Andre too, made fun of her Sunday bacon, picking it up by one end and wriggling it in the air. She must have noticed the way they both looked at her when she reached for her cigarettes. Soon enough she stopped reaching for them, and then Curtis no longer saw them in the apartment at all. She didn’t buy tickets for movies on Fridays, unless she was going to the theater by herself. When the woman Curtis had struck with his car kept entering his dreams, Lena didn’t put her hands on his shoulder. If she ever cried at night, she refused to be comforted by him. She still signaled him with her cold feet, however. She still made her little demands for intimacy, and sometimes he did too.

Before they slept, she lay beside him in bed and listened as he talked about Andre, unable to stop himself. “He seems happier, doesn’t he?” Curtis asked one evening, and she agreed, as though he truly understood her son. It was true, Lena told him, and she called them her men, her two men, which she was in the habit of doing, as if they were all she had ever wanted. “I think Marvin would be glad,” he said, but wondered. Lena agreed again and appeared pleased at the thought of all her contented men. Curtis forced a smile onto his face too. He kissed her cheek, lightly, his lips barely making contact with her skin. He and Lena wouldn’t love each other, but there was love they openly shared, and that would be enough, for now, to make a kind of family.