No, not lovey.
Covey.
Byron’s dad said Covey that day, he’s sure of it now, but it’s only thirty years later that the word makes sense. Until two days ago, Byron didn’t know that Covey was the name of a person, let alone his own mother. He’d just assumed it was a flub of the tongue. He still remembers because it was funny, how the word came out. Come on now, Covey, don’t be mad.
His ma gave their father a cloudy look, grabbed the bucket where the fish lay struggling against the air, and turned it over, dropping the fish back into the water.
“Oh!” their father yelled. “That was my fish!”
“Not anymore,” their mother said. Byron and Benny laughed until their eyes were wet.
“You two be quiet,” their mother said, and they laughed even harder. The next Christmas, their father gave the fish dish to their mother as a joke. That dish turned out to be one of her favorites. She used it to make casseroles, scalloped potatoes, sometimes even coffee cake, but never fish.
Byron and Benny are still chuckling now, wiping their eyes. Benny reaches out her hand, Byron gives her the dish, and she wipes it dry with a towel. She looks up at him with those eyes, same as his eyes, and he smiles at her, then puts an arm around her when she starts to cry.
Recipe
Benny waits until she’s alone in the kitchen to look through the junk drawer. She has to jiggle the kitchen drawer at the end of the counter while pulling at the same time. It’s the only way to get the thing to open, one thing that hasn’t changed around here.
This is where her mother kept dented pencils, ink-clotted ballpoint pens, freebie notepads from the pharmacy and the drain-cleaning service, confetti-colored paper clips and tiny plastic devices whose original purposes most people had long forgotten but which Benny could always figure out.
Ma would hand something to her from the junk drawer and say, What’s this? And Benny would squint at a pointed or twisted or curled-up object, turning it over in her hand, holding it close to her face and picturing its intended life. Benny runs her fingers now along the side of the drawer. There it is, where it has always been, a piece of folded, lined notepaper where her mother had scribbled down the recipe for her black cake.
Benny unfolds the paper and runs her finger down the list of ingredients. Rum, sugar, vanilla. And the occasional verb. Cream, rub, mix. It is only now that Benny realizes that the recipe has no numbers, no quantities at all. Wait, was it always this way? It’s the same one from her childhood, she’s sure of it. Benny sees, now, that her mother’s recipe was never so much a list of firm quantities and instructions as a series of hints for how to proceed.
What Benny learned from her mother had been handed down through demonstration, conversation, and proximity. What Benny learned from her mother was to rely on her own instincts and go on from there.
Byron
Byron’s phone is ringing. It’s Lynette. She didn’t come to his mother’s memorial service after all. He wonders. He thinks of what happened to Benny all those years ago, about her reasons for not being at their dad’s funeral. He can’t get over the fact that he and his mother had no clue. You never really know what a person could be going through.
When Byron answers, Lynette is sobbing. He can hardly understand her.
“A what?” he asks.
“A busted taillight, Byron,” Lynette says. “Jackson was just trying to get his wallet, get his ID, and the officer pulled a gun on us. I thought we were going to die.”
“Jackson? Jesus, is he all right?” Jackson, Lynette’s nephew. Great guy. It’s made Byron proud to see Jackson make his way into the professional world. A young scientist growing his confidence, a young black man opening doors.
“He was just trying to get me to the doctor, you know?”
“Doctor? What, are you sick? What happened?”
“No, Byron, I’m not sick. I just, I wasn’t feeling well. I’ll explain later. We still were hoping to get to your ma’s funeral but then they took Jackson into custody.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. They put handcuffs on him, Byron. And for what? We don’t know because they eventually released him. No charges or anything, but it was terrible. There we were, sitting in the car, and it was like everything just stopped, you know? It’s like, there was this one, long second where I just…”
Byron hears a sharp breath on the other end of the line. He thinks of Lynette, sitting there, right next to Jackson. Anything could have happened. He tries not to think about it, everything that might have gone wrong. But trying to undo the worry is like trying to undo his blackness.