Chapter 6 — ZAY
Nan’s porch light is on when I pull up, which means my mama has been at her about the bulb on the side of the steps for at least the last hour. I can hear them before I even make it up the walkway.
“Isaiah!” My mama spots me through the kitchen window, and her voice goes up. “He’s here, Mama. Let him in, I got my hands in this pan.”
Nan opens the door before I knock.
“Let me look at you.”
“Nan. It’s been a month. I saw you at Thanksgiving. I’m the same.”
She ignores that and pulls me down so she can kiss my forehead. Then she steps back, takes her inventory, and lets me come in.
The house smells like she’s been cooking since yesterday.
The tree in the living room is the same tree she’s put up every year I can remember.
It’s fake pine with lights the one color Nan will tolerate, which is white, because “everything else looks like a carnival, Isaiah.” My dad is already in the recliner.
He folds his newspaper, stands, and shakes my hand.
“Son.”
“Dad.”
“Good drive?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“That’s a good drive in Atlanta.”
He settles back into the chair. That’s the full greeting. My dad loves me the way my dad loves everybody who is his, steady and quiet and without a lot of reaching.
Mama comes out of the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder and a spoon in her hand. One-arm hug, spoon careful. Then she pulls back and looks me over the same way Nan did, which is where Nan got it from, or the other way around, I’ve never been able to tell.
“You got that look.”
“What look?”
“The tired look.”
“We had a road trip last week, Mama, of course I’m tired.”
“Mm-hm.” She pats my cheek twice and turns back toward the kitchen.
Nan’s table doesn’t have the leaves in, which means tonight is just us. My sister is in California with her husband’s family. Mama’s brother is in Savannah with his.
“Sit down, baby. Get off your feet.”
“I drove twenty minutes, Nan.”
“Sit down.”
I sit down. She hands me a glass of ginger ale and goes back to the pan she has no intention of letting my mama touch.
Dad watches the game with the sound low. Falcons. Losing, because they are the Falcons.
“You working through the break?” he asks.
“A couple of days off. Game the day after next so everyone’s back.”
“So you got some time.”
“I got some time.”
He nods. Then, without looking away from the screen, he says, “That rotator cuff you mentioned at Thanksgiving. The one giving you trouble. He doing better?”
I look at my dad. He is watching the Falcons lose. His face has not changed.
“Yeah,” I say. “He’s doing better.”
“Good. That’s good work, son.”
He says it the way he says everything, short and settled, and goes back to the game. But the fact that he remembered from a conversation six weeks ago and filed it and brought it back out tonight, tells me more than a longer man’s speech.
Mama comes over with a plate for me.
“So.” Mama pulls her chair out, sits, sets her elbows on the table. “How’s work?”
“Work is work.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s going. Shoulder cases, knees, the usual.”
“Mm.” She nods. “You smile different when you talk about this team. More than last year.”
“I smile the same.”
“You smile different. Dad, doesn’t he smile different?”
“He smiles different,” my dad says, without looking up from the game.
“See?”
I take another bite. This is how it goes. I am an adult, I have been an adult for the better part of a decade, and yet I still feel like a schoolkid around them.
“You seeing anybody?”
The question arrives the way it always does.
Anybody. She has been saying anybody for four years now, since the conversation in this same house when I told her and Dad both.
Bi. That was the word I used. She nodded once and didn’t say anything for a while.
She used to say “any girls.” Then there was a period where she didn’t ask at all, maybe a year, which was its own kind of answer.
Then one Sunday she called and said “you seeing anybody, baby?” and the word was different and I heard her choose it. She has been choosing it ever since, every time, and I have never told her what it gives me, because some things you just let people do for you without making them explain it.
“Not really.”
“Not really,” I answer.
“No.”
She is looking at me. Not hard. Just looking. Nan is at the counter with her back to us and the tilt of her shoulders tells me she is listening and pretending not to.
“You’re not telling me something, Isaiah.” I look up. She hasn’t moved. Her hands are still on the table, one on top of the other. She isn’t pushing.
“I’m fine, Mama.”
She watches me for another second. Then she nods, once, and pats the back of my hand. Her hand is cool.
“Okay, baby.”
She gets up and takes the plate I was still working on and tells me she is going to warm it up because I ate too slow, and she goes back to the kitchen.
Dad changes the channel. The game is over. He switches to ice fishing in Minnesota, even though he has never in his life been fishing in Minnesota. This fact has never stopped him from watching an hour of men pulling small fish out of a hole.
Nan comes over, pie in one hand, plate of it in the other.
She sets one piece in front of me. Her hand lands on the back of my neck while she does it.
Just rests there while she tells me about the crust, and I do not fully hear any of it because her hand on my neck is warm and heavy and has been that exact warmth and that exact weight since I was small.
My body has always responded to it the same way, which is to drop about half an inch I did not know I was carrying.
“You try it first. You always try it first.” She pushes the plate closer.
“Nan.”
“Go on.”
I take a bite. Sweet potato pie is not supposed to be this good. It is supposed to be fine, and good enough except this one.
“It’s the same.”
“It better be the same.”
“It’s the best.”
She slaps the back of my neck lightly, which is her version of affection after affection, and then she goes to the living room with a plate for my dad and a plate for my mama, who pretends she was not going to eat pie and then eats it.
I stay another hour. Mama and Nan rearrange the kitchen the way they did yesterday and the way they will tomorrow.
My dad watches his Minnesota fish. I help Nan carry two Tupperwares of pie out to her freezer in the garage, because Nan’s freezer situation is a system that requires a second pair of hands every December.
She pats the side of my face when we’re done.
“You come back this week.”
“Okay, Nan.”
She lets me kiss her forehead, and she squeezes my shoulder with more strength than a woman her size has any business having, and then she stands in her doorway with her arm around my mama’s waist while I get in the car. My dad waves once through the kitchen window.
The drive back down home takes fifteen minutes.
Christmas lights on by six, the old houses along the road lit up the same way they were last year and the year before that.
I pass the church on the corner of Beecher where Nan used to take me, the station where I bought my first pack of gum with my own money.
My music is low and I turn it lower without deciding to, and then I notice, and I leave it.
My apartment is how I left it. Shoes by the door, coffee set up for the morning. I hang up my coat and sit on the couch.
I check my phone.
Text from Marchetti. Sent twenty minutes ago. I did not hear it come in because I was driving.
A song link.
hope you’re having a good holiday
That is it. The song is one I don’t know, which he does on purpose, because he figured out by October that the game of sending me something I don’t know is more interesting to both of us than sending me something I do.
I press play. Slow. Vocals low in the mix, an acoustic line underneath. Not one of the ones that has been on my drive rotation. One I haven’t heard before but I like because he’s good at that, because he pays attention to what I respond to and adjusts.
I lean back against the couch and let it play.
The pen box is on my counter. I put it there when I got home from the facility the day he gave it to me, set it down next to the coffee maker because that end of the counter is where things go when I have not decided what to do with them.
I have walked past it eleven times in six days and not once reached for it.
I get up now. The song is still playing as I go to the counter and pick up the box. My thumb finds the edge of the lid without needing to look.
I sit back down and open it.
Two pens in black velvet. I pick up the fountain pen first. It is weighted, not heavy, but weighted so your hand knows it is holding a tool and not a toy. I roll it between my fingers. The clip has the firebird on it, small, the way he said. I angle it to the lamp.
I set the fountain pen back in the velvet and pick up the rollerball.
Lighter. Simpler. I turn it over and the firebird is on the same side of the clip, the same angle, the same tiny distance from the tip.
He had this engraved and I am holding it in my palm in my apartment on Christmas night while a song he sent me plays from my phone on the couch.
I have watched him hum while he is waiting for me to finish a note. He was watching me write with the skipping pen. He has been watching me write with the skipping pen since October.
I put the rollerball back in the velvet. My hand is steadier than my chest is. I close the box and set it on the coffee table in front of me and pull my feet up onto the couch.
It’s a pen set. I can put it in the drawer with everything else I have decided not to look at too closely, the songs and the singing in the hallway and the way he says my last name like it has a different number of syllables than it does.
I can file it there and go to bed and in the morning the drawer will still be closed and I will make my coffee and the pens will be on the coffee table and they will just be pens.
The song ends and another starts, whatever he queued for me, and I let that one play too.
I don’t text him back tonight. I will, in a day or two, with another song in reply, and he will send another, and we will keep doing this thing I didn’t know to draw a line around because I didn’t know it would become a thing.
I didn’t know it would work its way into my daily life, quiet and steady, the way a song gets into your head before you notice you’re humming it.
I look at the pens on the coffee table. I don’t pick them back up. I don’t need to. I can see them fine from right here.