“Either way, we need to do something. We need to find her a man, Byron. I mean, no disrespect to Mr. Bennett, you know I loved that man like an uncle but no, this is not good. We need to find her a man, someone who can keep up with her. He’s got to be at least fifteen years younger. At least.”
Byron shook his head and laughed.
“Why are you laughing? Don’t laugh.”
Everyone needed a friend like Cable. He could make Byron laugh in the worst of times. But later, Byron lay awake in the middle of the night, thinking about what Cable had said about his mother.
Death wish?
There was a feeling up under his rib cage, a kind of panic. He picked up his cellphone to call Benny, then put the phone back on the nightstand. He thought Benny should know, Benny should be here. Their mother needed to have her children with her. But his ma had to be the one to make that call. Either that, or Benny needed to get off her selfish rear end and get in touch. Of her own volition. Otherwise, they would just have to go on the way they had since before his dad died.
Without Benny.
With his sister’s absence seeping into the cracks in their lives.
Much later, Byron would see that his mother’s surfing incident was a turning point in their lives. After his ma left the hospital, Byron canceled a couple of work trips and went back to sleeping in his childhood home. His mother, still unable to drive or volunteer at the community garden, rented a wheelchair for a couple of weeks and planned some playdates, as she liked to call them. Byron drove her to one of the old film studios, to a museum, to a concert. Then he took her to see that famous black swimmer at the convention center. By then, she was fairly agile on the crutches and seemed happier than she’d been in months.
It was during that period that Byron first saw Mr. Mitch, the lawyer who apparently knew much more about Byron and Benny than they did about themselves. He should have guessed that his mother was up to something and that Mr. Mitch, like others before him, had already fallen under his mother’s spell.
The Usual
The weather folks said 2017 was turning out to be one of the hottest on record for California, and it didn’t surprise Byron one bit. The whole year had been a bit off, as far as he was concerned. He didn’t know yet that the coming year would be his mother’s last. He only knew he was ready for it to end. All these brush fires. His mother’s accident. Being turned down for that promotion. All the things that were not going well with Lynette. They were constantly arguing and half the time, he couldn’t figure out about what, exactly.
“Ma?” he called, stamping his feet on the rug in the entryway. His boots released a chalky dust mixed with ash that had floated down from the brush fires up north.
“Hello, son,” came his mother’s voice from down the hallway. “How was your day?” His mother’s mood seemed to be improving as her injuries healed.
“The usual,” Byron said. The worst of the California brush fires had claimed lives and burned homes. All of them had stripped the hillsides of plant life, which would leave them more vulnerable to mudslides when it rained. Which would further erode the soil, pollute water sources, slow seedling growth, and, once again, destabilize hillsides. Each year, Byron was called on by local journalists to comment on stormwater flows into the ocean and polluted runoff, even though his work actually focused on other areas of research.
Byron was popular with the schools. It helped that he had a gargantuan social media following and was a brainy athlete. This last characteristic was especially appealing to educators, who invited Byron to their public schools to drive home the message that athletics and scholastic excellence could go together and that one should not be an excuse to eschew the other.
Byron was happy to be served up as a role model for students, especially those whose demographics continued to be underrepresented in science and tech careers. But in wanting students to break free of thinking that might keep them from going into certain careers, the schools were often guilty of reinforcing, rather than shattering, stereotypes.
The whole sports thing was an example. Everyone wanted Byron to highlight his track-and-field wins in college, everyone asked him if he’d ever played basketball. These were the sports he was expected to mention when talking with inner-city kids. No one had ever asked Byron about the sport that most clearly defined him as a California man: his surfing.
His mother had been the one to teach Byron how to surf. They had always gotten stares, the little black kid and his towering mother, leaning into their surfboards in an era when many Angelenos believed the sport had been invented by blond men. Sometimes she would bring him back to the sand and head out on her own with the board, drawing shouts of approval as she staggered back ashore.