The Mare

Velvet

I tried to sit and watch Napoleon Dynamite with Dante, but I couldn’t, not with Shawn dead, sit there and act like nothing happened. I couldn’t talk about it to my mother and I didn’t want Dante to hear it anyway.

So I waited until just before my mom would be home and then I went to Lydia. I had not been there for a year, but I saw her sometimes on the street and she was nice to me. So I went to her door. Her daughter Kristal answered wearing a shirt with Tweety Bird on it; she was only a few years older than me, but in a year her body had grown up all the way even in that shirt. She didn’t let me in; she went to get her mom. Lydia opened the door, but she didn’t let me in at first either. She just went, “What up, sweetheart?” with not much sweet. When I told her why I couldn’t go home, her voice got so hard she almost shut the door with it. “Then you have to go to the police,” she said. “I can’t help you.”

“But the police know,” I said, and I was crying then. “It happened while I was up riding horses and I just found out. His grandmother told me.”

“Why don’t you go home then, baby?” she said. I told her because my mom lost her job and had too many bad things already, and she opened the door. She put her hand on me and asked if he was my boy, and I said no, he was just a boy, but we talked sometimes, and she said, “Come in and sit with us, then. We just sittin’ together. Don’t talk about it — my babies don’t need to hear it. But just sit and watch some TV with us.” And she let me stop crying and then we went in with her family and she sat with me on the couch with her arm around me while a little boy and his girl twin watched Madea.