“You sit on the bed.” Mama lets go of my hand and I stumble toward the twin-size bed, feet still buzzing. There are three other beds in the room, one in each corner, and each section of the room has been fingerprinted in portraits and photos and posters. It looks kind of like a child’s bedroom, but I can tell Mama is proud. She stands at a dresser now, rummaging through drawers, finally pulling out a hairbrush and spray bottle full of something that isn’t water.
“Remember Mama’s special potion?”
I didn’t. I do now, though, almost the moment she says it, memories of sitting on the floor, scalp bruises, Mama saying she’s putting a spell on my head gonna make me so pretty. Or maybe I don’t remember any of this because Mama is reciting these stories and memory is really just the things we trust to be ours and I guess I want this to be a story of Mama and me, so it is.
I expect Mama to come sit next to me on the bed and ask to brush my hair, but instead she sits on the ground right in front of my feet and hands me the brush and bottle.
“Got so many knots in there, thought you might wanna help me while we catch up.” Mama leans her head down so her neck is visible. Mama’s neck is five different shades of brown and black and purple and I can’t tell whether it looks like she been beat up or like her body is a whole galaxy.
Spraying her hair, I’m hit with the concoction’s scent of lavender and shea butter. When we were little, Mama would take us into the shower with her and soap us up with soap she said she made, but neither of us never saw her making it. Her soap smelled like a mix of new shoes and forest.
When we got out of the shower, she’d rub her entire body in shea butter that she bought from the West African shop down the street and then she’d sit us in her lap one at a time, her naked, smooth thighs a sweet comfort even in her boniness, and rub us down in it too, so we were soft, shining babies. Sometimes we’d dance to Prince or Mama would let us listen to Daddy’s old CDs and we’d be nothing but skin. We stopped all that after Daddy came home and I think Marcus never let Mama close to him again, blamed her for Daddy’s return and his death, for Uncle Ty, for what she did. I blamed her too, for some of it at least, but I also needed her. She was the only one who knew what it felt like to watch Daddy dissolve from our lives, and I didn’t have an Uncle Ty to take me away. I only had Mama’s hums.
“Now how ’bout you tell Mama what’s going on?” Her voice is so smooth, lulls me back into all the lullabies she used to sing.
I sniff. “They raising our rent so high and I didn’t have no choice, so I been out on the streets and, I don’t know, Mama, I’m just scared.”
Mama reaches back and rubs my knee with her fingers. “And now you want Mama to help you.”
I can hear how hopeful this whole thing makes her, giddy to be needed.
“Thought with Uncle Ty’s number and everything, you might be able to.” My voice is so small now, it gets swallowed by the sound of her breathing. Mama’s hair still looks the same as it always did and, watching each curl soak in potion, I don’t understand how my mama could have done what she did and still kept her hair, kept her voice. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what, baby?”
“Fuck over our whole family.”
Mama doesn’t pause, says, “No point in losing sleep over something none of us can change. Like I said, was survival.”
I pull the brush once through her hair, knowing how it’s gonna hurt. Mama don’t make a sound.
“We been trying to survive every day since then and I ain’t been locked up.”
“You call me when that changes. There are consequences to surviving out here, just ’cause you too young to know it yet don’t mean I gotta apologize for the truth. I spent every day for years apologizing, praying up some heaven that might forgive me. I don’t got no breath left for that.”
Mama holds her hands up and I look at them from behind her hair, which is less kinky than both mine and Marcus’s, and the creases in her hands are pale, with a trace of lavender, color that shouldn’t exist in a palm.
Looking at Mama’s hands, I remember a time when Alé was fourteen and I was thirteen and she decided that she was gonna learn how to read palms. She used my hands to practice, trying to distract me from Daddy’s approaching death. She would point to the line running vertically up from my wrist and say, “See how it splits right there? Means you got two caminos de la vida, you know, ways shit might go down.” Then she would look down at the palm-reading book from the library resting in her lap. “And you gotta make a choice someday.”