Where the God of Love Hangs Out

FORT USELESS AND FORT RIDICULOUS

Lionel Sampson reads to his brother from the flight magazine. “‘The Seeing Eye dog was invented by a blind American.’”

Buster laughs. “Really. Invented. Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs.”

Julia’s sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother’s house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they’ve had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster’s wife’s minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle’s gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law’s, because now that Julia’s getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it’s not clean, you do have to tidy up a little before you get to work in Julia’s kitchen, and Jewelle would just rather not.

Lionel closes the magazine and the homely flight attendant brings them water. (Remember when they were pretty? Lionel says. Remember when Pop took us to Denmark, Buster says, and they all wore white stockings and white miniskirts?) The flight attendant lays linen napkins in their laps. Lionel likes first class so much that even when a client doesn’t pay for it, he pays for the upgrade himself, and he’s paid for Buster’s upgrade, too. Lionel spends more on travel than he does on rent. His wife thinks he’s crazy. Patsine grew up riding the bumper of dusty Martinique buses and as far as she’s concerned, even now, your own seat and no chickens is all that anyone needs.

Buster opens another magazine. “Looky here, little girl in northern India is born with two faces. Only one set of ears, but two full faces. She’s worshipped in her village. Durga, goddess of valor.”

“Jesus,” Lionel says. “What’s wrong with people?” He looks at the picture of the little girl. “Patsine’s pregnant.”

“Oh, great. Good for you. Patsine’s great.” Buster has disliked all of Lionel’s other girlfriends and wives. The mean ones scared him and the nice, hopeful ones depressed him and Jewelle would say to him, after each meet-and-greet, “All I’m saying is, just once, let him bring someone who isn’t a psycho, a slut, or a Martian. Just once.” Buster pats his big brother on the knee and says, Well, aren’t you the proud papa, and the homely flight attendant smiles at them both. Mes félicitations, monsieur. She brings them pâté and crackers and two flutes of Champagne. Lionel gives his Champagne to Buster and asks for sparkling water.

Buster keeps reading. “It says the village chief wants the government to build a temple to the two-faced baby.”

“Who wouldn’t,” Lionel says.

They’re over the north Atlantic, only ten hours until home and eating a pretty good lunch, as Buster is not one to say no to a good meal. Buster sips his Champagne and Lionel drinks his Perrier and stifles his envy and longing by reviewing all the terrible things that happened to him when he was drinking. He nearly killed an old lady on a Sunday drive; he fell down a flight of stairs and ripped open his scalp, so that when he sat in court the next day, the judge finally said, M. Sampson, the blood is distracting me, and Lionel left to tighten his bandage and came back to a trail of red drops at his side of the table. He lost the case and the goodwill of his partners. If you want to look at the big picture, as Lionel tries to these days — his drinking has led to failed relationships with women who had nothing in common except bad judgment and despair.

As her husband and brother-in-law are over the north Atlantic, Jewelle piles all of her children’s things into the van and Jordan and her nephew Ari play basketball and Patsine makes several slow, steady trips to the van, each time carrying something small and not too heavy. Corinne doesn’t help even that much, because she’s taken off to her best friend’s house, so she and the other girl can weep and embrace as if the Thanksgiving weekend apart is a life sentence. Jewelle can’t say a thing to her daughter about her drama-queen behavior or her aggrieved and enormous uselessness because they have just gotten over a huge blowup about people of color, a category in which Jewelle Enright Sampson (English, Irish, and Belgian) does not figure, but her daughter, Corinne Elizabeth Sampson, does. (I joined the NMS Students of Color group, Corinne told her family, after her first day of middle school. I’m secretary. No one said, What color is that? And no one pointed out that Corinne was a few shades lighter than even the all-white people in the family. Her brother, Jordan, who is more coffee-with-a-lot-of-cream, snickered, and her father, who is a brown-skinned man, shook his head fondly. Jewelle called her mother-in-law, the only other white mother of tan children whom she knew, and complained. Julia told her that white mothers of black children were screwed whichever way they went: white trash or in denial or so supportive, they’re punch lines for black and white people, filling their shopping carts with Rastafarian lip balm and Jheri curl products and both kinds of Barbie dolls. Someone’s got to be the mammy, she said to Jewelle; unfortunately, it’s our turn. Think Halle Berry, she said; she seems to like her mother.)

When everyone is safely in the van, Jewelle wants to discuss the visit to Julia’s. I’m not criticizing, she says. I didn’t say the kitchen isn’t clean, she says to Patsine. Patsine has visited their mother-in-law only once before and the kitchen was neither dirty nor clean; it was unexceptional and she doesn’t care. Patsine says to Jewelle, You must forgive me, I am completely exhausted, and she closes her eyes. Corinne sits between her brother and her cousin and she is very aware of her cousin Ari’s long thigh pressing against hers, of his fidgeting from time to time, of his bare arm across her shoulders. All the children are listening to their music and Patsine is sleeping, or pretending to sleep, and Jewelle just drives to the Cape.

As the Russian guy is waiting for Buster and Lionel, as Jewelle is driving everyone to the Cape, Julia and her dog, Sophie Tucker, and her friend Robert lie in bed.

“Everyone is coming home later,” Julia says.

“So you’ve said. I won’t leave a trace.”

Robert gets out of bed and stands in front of the window, looking out at the ocean. The soft light falls over him, over his big shoulders and thick torso and thick legs, everything just faintly webbed by age except his impossibly bright gold hair.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to come to dinner,” Julia says. “You could bring Arthur.”

Robert shakes his head and gets back into bed. Julia tucks two pillows under his knees to protect his back.

“Oh, darling, could you …” he says.

“Oh, darling yourself,” Julia says and gets him another glass of cold water.

“You’re too good to me. Let’s get facials Saturday. On me.”

“I could use one,” Julia says, and she thinks that she could more than use one, that when she stopped coloring her hair, she just let the whole edifice collapse, from roof to rail, except for long walks with the dog.

Robert put his hands at his temples and pulls. He says “Honey, who couldn’t use one? I myself am going to start taping my eyebrows to my hairline like Lucille Ball.”

“Okay,” Julia says. “Me, too.” She rests her head on his shoulder and Robert strokes her hair, tucking a few strands behind her ear. “You won’t come?”

“No,” Robert says. “We can’t. You have nice ears.”

“They’ve held up.”

“They have held up wonderfully,” he says, and he pulls the quilt up over Julia’s bare shoulder and begins snoring.

A few hours later, Robert goes home to his lover, Arthur, who looks at Robert over his newspaper and sighs. Julia puts on her raincoat and takes Sophie Tucker for a walk.

Robert is sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Julia’s family to come. He’s been there all morning. He hears the car coming up the drive and goes to the porch. Jordan sees him first.

“It’s the old man,” he says, and Jewelle peers forward.

Robert taps on the van window and helps Patsine out of the van. He’s very strong for an old man. Jewelle moves too quickly for him to open the door for her and she feels a little slighted that he doesn’t, and as she is thinking that her mother-in-law must have fallen asleep on the couch, Robert pulls the two women toward the side of the porch, toward the browning hydrangeas. He tells them that Julia is dead.

He tells them everything he knows about the accident, which is only what the police told him when he had come back to the house for tea and found no Julia, and there was blood on the road and Sophie Tucker whimpering on the porch. Robert carried Sophie Tucker inside and the two policemen said it was a terrible accident, they said no alcohol was involved, they said the boy told them the dog ran across the street and Julia ran after it, and in the wet weather, the boy lost control of the car. The boy was in the hospital, the police said, and Julia was dead.

Robert hugs each of the women and Corinne runs over, like a little girl in a bad thunderstorm, to push her way under her mother’s arm. Patsine wishes her husband were here now to tell Ari, this boy she hardly knows, that his grandmother, whom she hardly knows, is dead. She tells Ari, in French, what has happened and he looks at her, stone-faced, and goes to his room in the attic. Jordan presses himself to Jewelle’s other side and he finds Corinne’s hand. Jewelle kisses both of them, frantically, and says, Oh, I’m sorry, honey, your nana is just so sorry not to be here.

Jewelle and her children go into the house and upstairs like one person. Robert offers Patsine his arm and the two of them stand in the front hall, until Robert says that perhaps he ought to go home and Patsine agrees.

When Buster and Lionel arrive, pulling their bags out of the trunk, Jewelle and Patsine run out to meet them on the driveway and the two men back away, a little, before their wives even speak. Lionel drops to his knees on the lawn and Buster kneels beside him and the two women sit down beside them, all of them on the damp, crisp grass as the driver pulls away. The four of them unload Jewelle’s van and Lionel and Buster go from room to room, kissing the children good night. In the morning, they find Ari in his grandmother’s bed.

“Is anyone going to the store?” Lionel yells up the stairs, and no one answers. Jewelle is walking on the beach. Patsine is napping. Jordan lies on one of the twin beds in the attic room, looking at a few old copies of Playboy his father or his uncle must have left behind. Corinne has taken over the living room, her dirty sneakers and sweaters trailing over the sofa and a gold-framed photograph of her latest hero, Damien de Veuster, dead leper priest, on the coffee table. It’s Jordan who has the right disposition for yoga, Lionel thinks; the boy’s a limpid pool of goodness in a family of undertow, and Lionel doesn’t know where he gets it. (Julia would have said that Jordan was very like Lionel’s father’s father, Alfred Sampson, who even as a black man in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1963, and even among white people hoping the world would never change, was revered throughout the town, and when he died, Irish cops sent flowers.) But Jordan is in the attic with his door locked and here instead is Corinne, a big-busted, wild-haired girl, her bodhichitta tank top rising over her round, tan belly, her green stretch pants dipping very close to her ass crack, racing toward enlightenment and altruism like the Cannonball Express.

“You wanna take the bike to the grocery, Corinne?” Lionel asks.

Corinne puts a finger to her lips, as if her uncle Lionel is disturbing not her, which wouldn’t matter in the least, but the tranquillity of her spiritual guides. She exhales deeply and squeezes her eyes closed.

“Christ almighty.” Lionel yells upstairs. “Is anyone going to the goddamned store before it closes?”

Lionel can’t go; he doesn’t have a license. France — his home for some thirty years and a nation exceptionally tolerant of drinking and driving — lowered the blood-alcohol level to something like a glass of water with a splash of Pernod and now he can’t drive anywhere, not legally. He doesn’t try. Not driving is his penance, like not drinking, which is itself so preoccupying and gives him such a novel and peculiar and fraught perspective on every activity, he could almost say he doesn’t mind, although he has thought a lot about Balvenie Scotch in a heavy crystal glass for the last two days. Ari jumps down the stairs in two huge steps, punches his stepfather in the arm, and hangs in the doorway to watch Corinne breathe. He breathes with her for a moment. Late last summer, Corinne put her hand on his cock by accident when he spilled his juice and she went to help him mop it up and then she felt him and she dropped the roll of paper towels in his lap and went back to her seat, but that moment is what Ari has come back for.

Late last summer, when everyone had come to Julia’s for Labor Day, Julia took them all into town for Italian ices. The eight of them sat on the wrought-iron benches in front of Vincenzo’s, sucking on paper cups of lemon and tangerine. Julia stood up. She threw her paper cup to the ground and cupped her hands around her mouth. She yelled, “Robert. Robert Nash.” And at the far end of the street, two men turned around and came toward her. Julia began to hurry toward the taller man, and he put his arms around her and all they could see was his crisp white shirtsleeves and gold watch, and when Julia stepped back and put her hand to his face, they saw his pressed jeans, his bare feet in Italian loafers. “Très chic,” Jewelle whispered. Julia and the old man hugged again and finally Julia introduced everyone. (“Oh, Robert, my son Lionel, my grandson Ari, my granddaughter, Corinne, my grandson Jordan, my son Buster — I’m so sorry, honey, I should say my son Judge Gabriel Sampson and his wife, Jewelle. How’s that?”) And the old man looked Lionel up and down in an unmistakable way. (“I’d know you anywhere,” he said. “Your father’s son.”) He shook hands with everyone. He said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you all. This is my companion, Arthur.” The other man looked like a middle-aged hamster and he cradled a big bouquet from the florist, wrapped in lavender tissue and cellophane.

Jordan poked Ari and Ari rolled his eyes.

Robert said, “And what are you two young men doing for amusement?”

He didn’t sound like an elegant old fruit; he sounded like a distinguished and rather demanding English professor, and Julia hid her smile when the boys dropped their eyes. Robert used to reduce college boys of all kinds, potheads, lacrosse players, and clean-cut Christians, to tears with that tone.

Ari shrugged. Conversation with American strangers was Jordan’s department.

Jordan said, “We might do a little fishing.”

“Fly-fishing?”

“No. Just, you know, regular,” Jordan said.

Lionel nodded. “Just reel and rods and worms. Nothing fancy.”

Robert smiled again. “Well, if you can handle a little motor-boat, I have one just rusting in the driveway. You’re welcome to it.”

Everyone except Arthur smiled and Lionel could see the man calculating the cost of the lawsuit when one of the boys lost a hand in the propeller or came home crying after an afternoon skinny-dipping at Robert’s.

Lionel put a protective arm around each boy and began to shift them away.

Robert said, “Well, come look at the boat if you want. And there’s a basketball court across the street. My neighbor’s in Greece and it just sits there. It’s a waste.”

“We could ride over tomorrow,” Jordan said

“C’est de la balle.” Ari glanced toward the old man. “Cool.”

“Just as you say. Arthur, do show them where we are,” Robert said, and Arthur handed each of the boys a business card with Robert’s name and phone number and a little pen-and-ink map on the back, marking their house with a silver star.

Robert said to Julia, “And you must have these,” and he took the huge bunch of pink and yellow alstroemeria from Arthur, flowers they’d gotten for their front hall, and handed them to Julia. She kissed him again and ducked her head into the flowers, sniffing, although there was no real scent, and she exclaimed, like a girl, all the way home.

Lionel and Julia walked behind the others.

“You think the boys should go over there?”

Julia turned on him. “He’s an old friend of mine, Lionel. He was a friend of your father’s and he was extending himself, out of kindness, to my grandchildren.” And Lionel was glad he didn’t say what he was thinking.

Finally, someone does go to the grocery store and people sit, in knots of two or three, on the deck, or walk on the beach or walk in and out of Julia’s room. Lionel and Buster smoke on the front porch. Someone orders in bad pizza and they eat it off paper plates and even Jewelle does nothing more in the kitchen than dump the cold slices in a pile and refrigerate them. By ten o’clock, Buster and Jewelle are listening to Lionel and Patsine in the next room. Lionel is talking angrily and Patsine makes a soft, soothing sound. Then Lionel gets up and goes down the hall for a glass of water and they can hear everything, even the click of the bedroom door as Lionel closes it. Patsine asks a question and Lionel gets back into bed and then there is more whispering and a little uncertain laughter and then Buster is glad he can’t see Jewelle’s face while his brother gets a blow job.

When Buster was fifteen and Lionel was twenty-five, Julia sent Buster to spend the summer with his brother in Paris. Buster spent his days riding the Métro, listening to music from home, and trying to pick up girls. At night, Lionel made dinner for them both.

“How’s it goin’? With the ladies?”

Buster shrugged. Lionel poured them both a glass of wine.

“Listen to me,” Lionel said, “and not to those assholes back home. You do not want to get advice from sixteen-year-old boys. You don’t want to be the kind of guy who just grabs some tit or a handful of pussy and then goes and tells his friends so they can say, ‘You da man.’”

“No,” Buster said.

“That’s right, no, you don’t. You want to be the kind of man women beg for sex. You want women saying, ‘Oh, yes, baby, yes, baby, yes’” and on the last “yes,” he got up, took a peach from a bowl on the counter, and sliced it in half. He threw the pit into the wastebasket and he put the fruit, shiny side up, in Buster’s hand.

“Here you go. See that little pink point. You got to lick that little point, rub your tongue over and around it.” He smacked Buster on the back of the head. “Don’t slobber. You’re not a washcloth. You. Are. A. Lover.”

Buster breathed in peach smell and he flicked his tongue at the tiny point.

“That’s it, that’s what I’m talking about. Lick it. It won’t bite you, boy. Lick it again. Now, you get in there with your nose and your chin.”

“My nose,” Buster said, and Lionel pressed the tip of Buster’s nose into the peach.

“Your nose, your chin. Your forehead, if that’s what it takes.”

Buster gave himself to the peach until there was nothing but exhausted peach skin and bits of yellow fruit clinging to his face.

Lionel handed him a dish towel.

“How long do you do it for?” Buster asked.

“How long? Until her legs are so tight around your head you can’t actually hear the words but you know she’s saying, Don’t stop, don’t stop, oh, my God in heaven, don’t you stop.”

“And then what?” Buster picked up another peach, just in case.

“And you keep on. And then she comes. Unless. Unless, you’re slurping away down there for ten minutes and nothing’s happening, you know, and all of a sudden she arches her back like this”—and Lionel arched his back, until his head was almost to the floor—“and she yells, Oh, Jesus, I’m coming.” Lionel screamed. And then said, “If that happens, she’s faking.”

Buster almost choked on this, the thought that he would practice all summer, become as good a lover as his brother, and then the girl would only be pretending to like it?

“Oh, why would she do that?”

Lionel shrugged. “Because she doesn’t want to embarrass your sorry ass and she also doesn’t want to lie there all night, waiting for nothing.”

“That happens?”

Lionel poured them both another glass. “Oh, yes. Sometimes you do your best, and it’s not good enough. So you man up, limp dick, shattered spirit. You pick yourself up and you say to her, Tell me what you really want. You say to her, Put your little hand where you want mine to be.” Lionel drains his glass. “And you do like she shows you. Don’t worry — the ladies are going to love you, Buster.”

And Buster wraps his arm around his wife’s soft waist, beneath her nightgown, and she pulls it up and places his hand on her breast. Their dance is Buster’s palm settling over her nipple, his fingertips sliding up the side of her breast, Jewelle rolling over to put her face next to Buster’s, Jewelle licking at the creases in Buster’s neck. Jewelle runs her hand along the smooth underside of his belly and he sighs.

“Oh, you feel so good,” she says. “You always do.”

“My Jewelle,” he says.

“Oh, yes,” she says. “No one else’s.”

They love this old dance.

“I think we should do it right away. We’re all here.” Jewelle has waited for Lionel to speak but he’s been lying on the couch for ten minutes, not saying a word.

“What is the ‘it’?” Patsine asks.

Jewelle looks at Patsine. Patsine has something pointed and sensible to say about everything, all the time.

“I think the ‘it’ is a memorial service.”

Lionel lifts his head a bit, so he can see everyone.

“I hope that little sonofabitch dies,” he says, and he sits up, changing his tone. “You know, her wishes were very clear. Cremation and lunch. No clergy, no house of worship, and no big deal. Obit in the Cranberry Bog Times or whatever and that’s it.”

“Cremation?” Patsine asks, and shrugs when everyone looks at her. Julia was not her mother and it’s not her business but she liked Julia very much and she would not slide a beloved into the mouth of a furnace by way of farewell.

“Why not? It’s not like she was Jewish,” Corinne says. It really isn’t Patsine’s place to ask all of these questions when she’s been married to Uncle Lionel for about five minutes.

“Her father was Jewish,” Lionel says, and everyone looks at him.

“Her father was Jewish? Julia was half Jewish?” Jewelle says.

“Well, not the side that counts,” Lionel says.

“I’m part Jewish?” Corinne says.

“Yes,” Lionel says. “You are not only a quadroon, you are also, fractionally, a Jewess. You can be blackballed by everyone.”

Buster puts his hand on Corinne’s shoulder and shakes his head at his brother.

“Nice.”

Lionel lies back down. He recites.

“Ma’s mother was Italian. Her father was Jewish. We never met either of them. The old man ran off and left them when Ma was a girl and her mother raised her nothing, which is why we are the faithless heathen we are. Long after the divorce, the old man dies in a car accident — I think.” He looks at Buster, in case he’s gotten it wrong — it’s thirty-five years since he heard the story — but Buster shrugs. He was even younger when Julia told them the story and it doesn’t seem to him that he ever heard it again. Buster shrugs again, to show that he’s already forgiven his brother for teasing Corinne. She needs it; his daughter has become like fucking Goebbels on the subject of race and he can’t stand it. “He never remarried and he left all his money to Ma’s mother. She went on a round-the-world cruise after Ma graduated college and then … she dies. That’s all, folks.” Lionel spreads his arms wide, like Al Jolson.

Patsine says flatly, “Jewish men do not abandon their wives.”

Is that so, Jewelle thinks. She guesses some French Jewish married man sometime must have not left his wife for Miss Patsine Belfond, and Jewelle arches an eyebrow at Corinne. Lionel kisses Patsine’s puffy ankle. He loves her politically incorrect and sensible assertions. Fat people do eat too much. Some people should be sterilized. The darker people’s skins, the noisier they are, until you get to certain kinds of Africans who are as silent as sand.

“Well, apparently one did,” Lionel says cheerfully. “Although Grandpa Whoever, Morris, Murray, Yitzhak, made up for it by leaving Grandma Whoever a lot of money, which was great until she died of food poisoning in Shanghai or—”

“Bangkok.” Buster says. “Bhutan?”

“Burma?”

“She died of food poisoning?” Corinne says.

“Bad shrimp,” Lionel says, closing his eyes.

He hears his brother say, “Or crab,” and he smiles.

“People don’t die from food poisoning,” Corinne says.

Jewelle has had enough. “Your aunt Helen almost died from food poisoning when we were girls. We were at the state fair and she got so sick from the fried clams she was hospitalized for it. She vomited for three days and she was skinny as a stick anyway. She really almost died.” Corinne and Jordan stare at their mother. Their aunt Helen is big and imperturbable, a tax lawyer who brings her own fancy wine and her own pillow when she visits, and it’s impossible to imagine her young and skinny, barfing day and night until she almost died.

Lionel presses his feet against his wife’s strong thigh and keeps his eyes shut. If he keeps them closed long enough, everyone but Patsine and Buster will disappear, his mother will reappear, and the worst headache he has ever had will go away.

“I guess there are always things people don’t know about each other. I didn’t know that about Helen and the clams.” Buster takes out a pencil. “I think we should do a little planning, for the service, the lunch, for Ma.”

“Fuck you,” Lionel says.

“I know.”

Robert has been standing in the doorway for about half a minute, listening to his friend’s children. He wants to write it all down and tell Julia after. You wouldn’t believe it, he’d say. They are all just like you said. Lionel is completely the master of the universe — you must have loved him a lot, darling, to give him that self-confidence — and Buster is Ted E. Bear on the outside but very strong on the inside; you’d sleep with Lionel but you’d marry Buster, is what I’m saying. Well, not you, of course, but me — back in the day. And poor Jewelle, doomed to be runner-up, isn’t she, even with those absolutely fantastic tits and still workin’ it, but my God, Patsine, what a piece of work. Don’t ask her if that dress makes you look fat because she will tell you. But I can see why you were thrilled she married Lionel. She has bent that man to her will and he is so glad, I can tell you that. Jordan’s a love; he’s like Buster, although maybe without the brains. Julia would pretend to smack him and he would apologize and she would say, Go on, go on eviscerating my loved ones, you terrible man. And he’d say, Corinne, my God, that child is why convents were invented. And Ari is very sexy in that broody, miserable way but it’s hard to see what exactly one would do with him. And Julia would look at him and he would say, I’m just sharing my observations, and she would say, You should be locked up, and he would say, And then you’d miss me, and she would say, Yes, I would, and I’d visit you in jail once a month and bring you porn.

Corinne sees Robert first and she pokes her uncle Lionel. They all look over at Robert and they all say hello, more or less.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Jewelle says.

“No, thank you. I’m sorry to disturb you. I just thought I would … come by.”

“We’re planning a service, just a lunch,” Lionel says, and Robert can see how hard the man is trying to be civil. “Maybe you want to say a few words.”

“Yes,” Robert says to the roomful of people who don’t want him there. He is an impediment; he is an awful, faggy roadblock to their mother’s memory, and the sooner he picks up his odds and ends and goes back to Old Fagland, the better. Robert is not a brave man; he has stood up for himself a couple of times, in a polite way, over the course of seventy years, but he isn’t the kind of person who stays where he isn’t wanted. Julia was. Julia was just that kind of person, going where she wasn’t wanted, telling people to go fuck themselves, and Julia had loved him. He had braided her long gray hair and they had discussed whether or not she should cut it after all this time, and he had rubbed moisturizer into the dry skin between her shoulder blades and trailed his fingers down her spine and toward the small folds of skin above her waist. Julia said, No playing with my love handles. Robert had leaned forward to kiss them and said, Lovely, lovely handles. Robert pulls up a chair and he pats Jewelle on the knee.

“If I may change my mind, coffee would be lovely.”

Lionel says, “Maybe some Marion Williams in the background?”

Robert says, “Absolutely. Julia was playing ‘Remember Me’ just the other day.”

The day after the luncheon, they are still cleaning up. Buster washes and Lionel dries and Jewelle, who knows where everything goes, directs the putting away. Patsine sits at the kitchen table, with her feet up on a chair. Buster sings, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, honey,” and Lionel growls, “Some of these days, you’re gonna miss me, babe,” and Patsine and Jewelle look at each other, eyes welling up, for their grieving husbands.

“Be useful,” Jewelle says to the boys, and she gives them both platters to put into the sideboard. There’s no point in giving them the wineglasses. Corinne pokes her head into the kitchen and disappears.

“Corinne,” her mother says. “I could use a hand here.”

Corinne walks into the middle of the kitchen in her grandmother’s black T-shirt, her own yoga pants, her mother’s black patent-leather pumps, and a green-and-black silk scarf tied around her neck, Apache-style. (“A-patch,” her grandmother said. “It’s a dance, not a rodeo.”) Her eyes are bright red.

“Nana loved this song,” Corinne says. “So, okay.”

Buster dries his hands and Lionel and his brother stand with their arms around each other.

“Pretty legs, great big knockers, that’s what sells them tickets at the door. Honey, these are real show stoppers, it’s what keeps ’em comin’ back for more.”

Corinne sang this song with her grandmother when no one was home. They shimmied and shook their behinds and one time they both slid down the banister onto pillows. They did the Electric Slide and Nana taught her The Stroll, too, and they danced around the living room like crazy women until they fell onto the couch, laughing and breathless.

“Pretty legs, great big knockers, that’s what put the two in two by four. Oooh, baby”—Corinne pauses for her big finish. She struts across the floor like a showgirl and flings open her arms—“Oooh, it ain’t the ballads, it ain’t the rockers, it’s pretty legs and … these great … big knockers!”

Her father and her uncle whistle and stamp their feet. Ari stares at her, and it’s not that sly, slitty look that makes her feel like hiding in the bathroom; his eyes are wide open. Her mother sits down next to Patsine and Patsine is holding Jewelle’s hand tightly but they are definitely smiling and Jordan shakes his head in admiration because there is no one like his baby sister. Corinne runs to her mother’s lap and buries her head in Jewelle’s shoulder. Jewelle puts her arms around her girl and showers her with kisses. Corinne can feel the bump of Patsine’s belly pressing behind her and Patsine’s hand on her hair.

Robert is standing on the other side of the kitchen, clapping. “Oh, my dear, what a gift,” he says. “What a send-off.”

Lionel looks at the empty kitchen table and he looks at the clock.

“It’s dinner time.” He hands food to each person and soon the table is covered with three cartons of Chinese food, from Julia’s favorite restaurant, and a deep dish of oyster stuffing and a Tupperware of sweet potatoes with maple syrup and two kinds of chocolate-pecan pie, one for the people who like bourbon and one for people who like it and have to avoid it, and a casserole of creamed spinach with half a nutmeg taped to the top, for the last minute. Jewelle sticks one of the good silver spoons into the bowl of cranberry sauce she brought from home and Buster sets bottles of pear and apple cider and red wine on the table and hands out the crystal wineglasses to everyone. Patsine rests her hands on the baby.

Lionel stands up and lifts his glass and looks at his brother. “Remember this one? A Jewish grandmother and her grandson are playing on the beach, building sandcastles. A wave comes along and drags the poor kid out to sea. The grandmother falls to her knees, screaming and crying. ‘Oh, God, oh, God, please save my only grandson. Please, he is the light of my life. Please, God, just save him, that’s all I ask of you.’”

“Oh, yeah,” Buster says and he stands up. “And another wave comes and drops the little boy back on the beach, good as new. The grandmother hugs and kisses him. Then she looks up at the heavens and says, ‘Excuse me? He had a hat.’”