Mama didn’t mind waiting. Went back to Louisiana, grew up, worked almost ten years in a hospital answering calls, and saved up enough to move out to Oakland. Then Mama went looking for Daddy, twelve years after she first met him in that park. She eventually found him bartending in a little pub off MacArthur Boulevard in 1989, when downtown was full of crackheads and abandoned buildings and cops who still liked to mess with Daddy, the lead-up to his eventual lockup.
Mama knew she was that kind of beautiful that seemed to have just walked out of a painting. Her hair was teased into a faux mohawk like she was starring in a Whitney Houston music video and she was a graceful tall, took these huge steps when she walked. Mama wore wide-leg red pants to go fall in love with Daddy and kept them even after they tore at the seams. This time, when Mama strutted up to him, he was so mesmerized he almost dropped a bottle of whiskey. Not by the way she looked but by the way she existed. Mama was like woman grown out a seed, arms twisting, fruit and breasts and all things hard to resist. Daddy wanted to wrap his arms around her trunk and Mama knew he would.
An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.
Mama married Daddy and they moved into the Regal-Hi by the time Marcus was born. When Mama looked at Daddy, she saw posters of a lightning boy’s face. She didn’t never see the way Daddy fogged up in the winter or how he would save a dollar bill before he’d ever save a family photo. I only ever saw Daddy and his music: dancing in the kitchen. Daddy was away in San Quentin from ages six to nine for me and I barely remember him not there. Marcus don’t feel that way, though. Used to throw a tantrum every time Daddy tried to touch him post-lockup. Mama used to tell him, “You lucky yo daddy got out ’fore you even grown a single hair on that face.”
And she was right: we were lucky that everyone knew Daddy’s name, until the day when suddenly we weren’t so lucky, and Mama’s trunk splintered.
“You’d really give me Uncle Ty’s number?” I ask.
Mama coughs again on the end of the line. “Course I would. Just want my babies to come see me out here first.” She says it and it sticks onto the insides of my stomach, the way Mama makes everything into a deal.
“Mama, we ain’t gonna try to get you out again or nothing. Can’t do it even if I wanted to. You in a halfway house now, you should be happy about that. And you know Marcus not going nowhere for you.” My teeth grind and I don’t know why she always makes me say it, crush all the parts of me that just want her to hold me and hum.
“You gotta talk to him, Kiara, really talk to him. I know you ain’t been trying like that and it’s okay, baby, I just need you to come here. Give me an hour and I’ll give you all your uncle’s shit. We got visiting hours Saturday morning. I know I’ll see my babies there. You be there.”
And Mama repeats this, goes on about all the things we’re gonna do together. I don’t say nothing else because her voice is here, breathing into me. I sit down on the tile floor, close my eyes, lean back against the wall, let the phone send her voice right to me, let the heat melt me away. Mama hangs up at some point, the bathroom lightbulb goes out at some point, and I drip into sleep at some point. The night blurs together into a stream of Mama’s voice.
The bus ride up to Mama is loud. The windows don’t open and the whole vehicle is a fever of noise and muck and bodies without destinations. I didn’t even know there was a bus to Stockton, but I looked it up and got on the first one this morning straight out of Oakland right through Dublin to Mama. When I boarded the bus, I already knew it would be hours of waiting to escape. I have a window seat, but this woman with three trash bags full of clothes decided to sit next to me and I swear those bags smell like the section of West Oakland right by the wastewater treatment plant.
Yesterday I went to the studio looking for Marcus and found him where he always is, rapping some nonsense. I begged him to come visit Mama with me, but he refused, over and over again, no matter how many of my tears escaped, said he’d already tried working at the club for me, that he needed space to record his album.
Not long after I left Marcus, Alé called and asked if I wanted to share a washer at the laundromat down the street with her. I haven’t seen Alé in a while, but after everything with Marcus I couldn’t imagine sitting and waiting in the apartment for night to come, so I said yes. Still, when I went to the apartment to fill a pillowcase with my dirty clothes, the only ones I could find were Marcus’s. So I took Marcus’s laundry to meet Alé and when I poured it into her basket, she looked up at me like a bloody knife had fallen in there with all the clothes.