[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
“My mama says said loved me but she lied,” Wesley Kidd, near about thirty years old, calls out to anybody that’ll listen. He’s standing in the middle of Talawanda Street, right where it crosses Main, and two cars are stopped now, waiting him out. This is a small place, and if you’re downtown on a Tuesday like this particular one, at one-thirty in the afternoon, you probably ain’t got nowhere else to be.
Wesley’s mama is sitting on the one bench we got, a few feet away, there by the stop sign. Wesley has caused her trouble before; Wesley don’t think like a full-fledged grown person. His mama sits with her flowerdy cotton dress pulled down tight across her knees, a ratty sweater slung across her shoulders. Her back is straight like a flag pole: her hands in fists in her lap. She watches Wesley with her pale blue eyes as he paces back and forth across Talawanda.
“Come on now, Wes,” his mama says. “You know that ain’t true.”
“You lie so much the truth looks the other way when it sees you coming,” Wesley says.
“Get on out of the street, Honey,” his mama says. “Let these good people pass.”
Wesley shakes his head no and his blond hair falls across his eyes. He bends over, puts his hands on the knees of his overalls. “Mama says she loves me,” he says again. “Lies,” he says.
“What part is a lie, Wes?” his mama asks.
Old Mr. McKinnon in the yellow Ford truck has been listening through his open window. He cuts off his ignition. He gets out, puts his hand across his shiny forehead, like a salute, to shield his eyes, says, “Wesley, son, I would give a truckload of dollar bills to have one more minute with my dearly departed mama.”
Wesley stops his pacing, says, “Did she love you?”
“Oh, my, how she loved me,” Mr. McKinnon says, and then he knuckles under the weight of that sentence and has to wipe his eyes.
“Might she have lied about it?” Wesley asks.
“Not a chance,” Mr. McKinnon says.
Wesley points to the bench where his mama is thumping one foot against the grass like a guilty person. His mouth is turned down and he drops his fist to rub his eyes, and he is clumsy when he does it. “That one lies when the truth stands beside her yelling, ‘Boo!'”
Bessie Thorton is in the car behind Mr. McKinnon. She hits reverse, puts her arm up on the seatback and scoots down the road until she can swing it around and head away from here. She has a husband who expects his dinner on the table by four. She has obligations.
Wesley’s mama waves at Bessie as she retreats. She gets up off the bench, using the arm of the thing to help hoist her up. At forty-seven she’s not an old woman, but she looks like one, her hair already mostly gray, and when she stands she is stooped, her shoulders pulling in toward the earth.
“Seems like we’ve run off Mrs. Thorton,” she says.
“Never you mind,” Mr. McKinnon says. “She wouldn’t want you to worry about her when you have your own trouble.” And when he says this, he points to Wesley, who points right back.
Wesley has found three smooth stones and he is pitching them toward the streetlight, pinging the wire cage that protects the light bulb.
“Sugar,” his mama says. “What have I told you about throwing rocks?”
Wesley has another stone in his hand and he lets it fall to the street. “I could hurt somebody,” he says.
“You could hurt somebody,” Wesley’s mama says.
Mr. McKinnon speaks up. “My mama and I had a falling out. She didn’t like Maren, my wife. She had seen Maren outside the Majestic Theater with a gentleman who seemed quite interested in her. When I confronted her, Maren said it was just our insurance agent from two towns over, discussing our coverage, and I chose to believe her. And so I quit talking to my mama, for three years, and when they told me she was in the hospital, I didn’t go for two whole days.”
Wesley is swatting a fly that is buzzing his right ear. “I don’t like that story,” Wesley says, and he begins to rock on his big feet, the laces of his work boots undone and hanging loose.
Wesley’s mama is standing on the curb now. In two steps she could touch her boy, but she stays put.
“I’ve never told a living soul that story,” Mr. McKinnon says. “I have wanted to, over the years, especially after Maren left me. In the end, she said she hated the ground I walked on.” Mr. McKinnon laughs, a sharp, unhappy laugh. “My mama was right about her. Not up to snuff, after all.”
A dog howls, and Wesley says, “Your wife didn’t love you. She lied.”
Mr. McKinnon says, “A wife’s love is not like a mama’s love. It can go cold as soup on a January night over the least little thing. Or your wife can love you like Christmas when she first meets you and then forget what all the fuss was about before the next spring comes. But a mama, now that’s a horse of a different color. Your own mama,” he begins, but Wesley puts his hands over his ears and starts to hum.
“What’s gotten into him?” Mr. McKinnon says to Wesley’s mama.
Wesley’s mama tugs a hanky from her dress pocket, twists it into a small rope. “He heard me talking on the telephone,” she says. “I was talking to my sister, Levita, and I was saying how I always dreamed of going to Maine and eating a lobster the size of a housecat, and then I said the next wrong thing, that I truly regret, Mr. McKinnon, I do. I said, ‘But all my traveling days ended when Wesley was born. All my days from then on out were set in stone.’ And then Levita asked me why I wouldn’t go ahead and put Wesley in a home, and I told her I thought about it sometimes, like I thought about taking a long bubble bath, but I couldn’t do it as long as I had strength enough to carry him along. When she pushed me, I said, ‘I’d be lying if I said it was easy. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I didn’t think about another life, with Wesley altogether whole and living on his own, and happy, and me getting on with the little bit that’s left of life.”
Wesley picks up a stick that’s fallen in the road. He whips the air with it, says, “See there! Mama hates my guts!”
“The tongue of man,” Mr. McKinnon says, “is as an untrained dog.”
The A&M train rumbles by, on the tracks three blocks over, shouting with its whistle. When it stops, Mr. McKinnon says, “My own mama was too far gone when I got to the hospital. She was breathing with a rattle. She had gotten so old in the time I’d neglected her. I have not recovered from it, not in all these years.”
I have never seen a grown man cry until now, and it is worse than the screechy sirens on the one ambulance we got here in Lurton.
“When I went to clean out her house, she still had pictures of me hanging on the wall, and one by her bedside table,” Mr. McKinnon says. “That’s how a mama loves, Wesley.”
A dump truck rumbles up, sees Wesley in the road, and the driver calls out, “Y’all got trouble?” And Mr. McKinnon sniffs, wipes his wet eyes, says, “Just the normal amount, sir. And we’re figuring it out as we speak.” The driver honks his horn twice, waves, then backs up and takes Ridge Road out of here.
Wesley’s mama says, “I give up, Wesley, I really do. I can’t think of another thing to say. Maybe you should go live with Mr.
McKinnon. Maybe you’d be happier without your old ma.”
Mr. McKinnon stops his crying on a dime, says, “Now, now. No need for drastic measures. I have found that a good meal, a little rest, fixes just about everything.” He scratches his head, walks up to Wesley, who lets him put his arm around his shoulder.
“No,” Wesley’s mama says. “I am not fit, I don’t believe. Wesley’s right to be mad at me. And I’ve lied a lot in my life. Every day, practically. I tell Thomas down at Humpo’s Quick Stop that I am fine when I’m not fine. I tell the Good Lord I’m grateful when I truly am not. I tell Wesley we’re living on Easy Street, when mostly I don’t know how we’re going to get through the next week.”
Wesley seems to consider this. He tugs at his ear, then says in a voice that breaks my heart, “But do you lie when you say you love me?”
Well, Wesley’s mama comes undone at this. I think for a minute her knees might buckle. Wesley must think so too because he runs to her, pats her hair, then takes her hand. When she recovers her wits, she says, “I have never once lied about that, Baby Doll, not one time in my long, sorry life.”
Sheriff Comstock, a squat man with dentures, has gotten wind of the trouble on Talawanda Street and heads this way. He does not like confrontation, which is a problem for a lawman. But before he gets all the way up here, Mr. McKinnon calls out, says, “We’re all right, Sheriff. Just had a bit of a philosophical conversation going, trying to find the root of a mother’s love. Trying to find the depth of it.”
And then Wesley says, “Mr. McKinnon and me was about to take Mama over to the Shiloh Cafe, see if she could find her a big ole lobster, a big ole red bug of a lobster, because my mama always wanted one of them things, and sometimes you got to get your mama what she wants because life is not easy for mamas, even when you think it is. Even when you do everything you can to make them happy.”
“Well, go on, then,” the Sheriff says, his hands on his wide hips. “Go eat some lobster and let this town get back to its business.”
Wesley’s mama says, “Oh, Mr. McKinnon, Wesley was just joking. We’ll go on home now.” But then Mr. McKinnon says, “All this talk of lobster has made me a bit peckish myself. And I could do with a little company, and I’d love to buy y’all some supper.” He smiles then, the first time I recall seeing him smile in years, and then he opens the passenger door on the cab of his truck, and sweeps his other hand real theatrical like. And Wesley and his mama climb in, thinking their own thoughts, maybe thinking a good meal, a little rest, will fix every hurt thing that ever happened. It’s not likely to be so, but who has the heart to tell them?
