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It was frustrating to no end, not knowing about the circumstances of Thom’s death or where his ultra-charisma-inducing Juice had gone. A trip to Mt. Sinai to gather intelligence was a dead end, just like I thought it would be. Everyone claimed they didn’t know anything about Thom, no matter how liberally I dropped the name “Ellington” around. The medical attendants I cornered were skittish, as if they were curious about exactly what happened too. Still, they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) tell me anything.
I kept playing with the KickingBird holo graffiti to see if there was some portal within the recording that would lead me to secret information. It would be just like Thom to give me some kind of brain teaser to figure out—one of his more exasperating traits. But if he did, it was too well hidden.
Quizzing Thom’s relatives in Beijing proved useless as well. He was a disgrace to the family name, as far as his parents and siblings were concerned. A series of personal assistants told me in some tersely worded messages that no one knew what had happened. I got the impression that they just wanted to put the memory of him in the obscure recesses of their minds. From what Thom had told me, his familial crimes mostly involved some petty thievery around the company offices and cavorting around the world with little interest in (or respect for) his heritage.
The only relative that would speak to me was his grandfather, Theodore Tseng, a cloudy-eyed septuagenarian. I knew from the pictures Thom had shown me that his grandfather had once been immaculately groomed. Now he had the haggard look of somebody who bootlegged bots on the streets of Shanghai, which is how he started his business some 50 years ago.
“What happened to him?” the old man demanded in a querulous tone, speaking in Mandarin. My mobile translated his words before they hit my ears.
“All I know is that he was attacked, and some of his property was stolen.”
He seemed to be playing out something in his head. “He’s not dead.”
“The hospital says he is.”
“And you believed them? Ha!”
In the end, Grandpa Teddy extracted more information from me than I was able to get out of him. Which was probably something he’d perfected over his life, given that he had created one of the most powerful corporations in the world. The Tseng transportation division alone brought in more revenue than all of my father’s holdings at Silverton, as Thom had been fond of reminding me.
There was no better way to relieve my troubled restlessness than to make a little trip north. I climbed on my bike; Count Down leaped into the sidecar. I flipped the plexiglass hood over our separate air cabins. And we zoomed slightly above some of New York’s traditional streets using the bike’s magnetic levitation system. We connected with a hypertube, a clear-sided evacuated tunnel that eliminated the gravity drag and accelerated our speed to 1,000 MPH.
In a matter of minutes, we could see the high-rises of the Boston-Cambridge Treasure Zone floating like jagged dreams on the simmering horizon. We exited the hypertube at one its major Boston hubs and sped just above some of the streets I’d haunted in my MIT days. Then we made our way into crumbling Dorchester, just outside the Zone.
Count Down let out a loud sneeze as the bike dropped gently to the pavement on Washington Street. It’s my theory that when dogs sneeze, it means they’re delighted. It was like the pup was sensing that he was about to meet some amaz peeps.
Sunlight splashed the mostly abandoned buildings. Three men sat on the front stoop of a brick building whose top had been blown off, probably by some urban warfare. They looked at me with the glazed jelly eyes of beached fish. At least they didn’t have the eerily happy demeanor of most Chav.
“Get the fuck outta here. You don’t belong,” their expressions seemed to say.
“Actually, I do. At least, my brain belongs here,” I wanted to reply.
Laughter erupted from the guy in the middle with a bald pink-ham head. He nudged his wizened friend on the right, pointing at Count Down. The dog’s pompadour was like frou-frou on a silly woman’s hat. A purebred definitely wasn’t what they were used to. My bike—a three-year-old Ducati, pretty old by Elite standards—must have looked pretty weird to them too, to say nothing of my long pewter-black hair.
“Don’t talk to strangers,” I told the bike—a code command. It gave off a low “whoop whoop” as a security field crackled to life around it.
A boy named Deko raced toward me, shouting, “JAY-RET!” Count Down bounded up to the 12-year-old, placing his front paws on his chest and licking his face profusely.
If Deko’s grin were any wider, it would crack open his face. “Whoa! You never said nothin’ about him.” He swiped the dog away with an arm. Count Down pranced back and forth like it was all a big game.
“He’s new.”
Deko cocked his head at me, adoration in his eyes. “Why you stay gone so long?”
“I’m a man of high distinction. I can’t just hang out here all the time.”
“We got high distincts too. Don’ you know that?”
The boy ran off with the dog close behind, disappearing beyond the corner. I threw off a relaxed look. Using my peripheral vision, I was able to see the bad-news trio get up in unison and shift-walk toward me. The gait involved sideway swaggers while moving dead ahead. Shift-walking was specific to the Bilboa Gang, which ruled this patch of Dorchester.
Their hunger to hurt me was palpable. They closed in, hands in their pockets, on guns or knives, no doubt. A pile of stray bricks emerged up ahead and an abandoned baby stroller off to the left that I could smash into them. Didn’t want to resort to the expensive little neo-knife in my back pocket. The weapon emitted such a thin, powerful stream of gases it could split open a man’s chest from 20 feet. No sense killing anyone.
They were nearly on top of me when a massive bird of prey loomed into view: Mama Neeta. The woman of slum righteousness was perched in front of a four-story building with a ragged chain-link fence. Just the sight of her stopped them cold.
“Mornin’, Mama,” Ham Man shrilled, his head dotted with sweat.
“You touch my friend, and I’ll tear off your noses and fry ‘em in butter.”
They pushed off.
“You got butter?” I asked with mock innocence.
“Don’ mess wid somebody that just saved your sorry ass.” God, how she loved me.
“You do ‘pissed off’ better than anybody,” I said.
Mama looked me over, all shiny with the compliment. She was weathered with 40-odd years of hard living, but the pastel sprays of color on her dress and sweater looked so fragile and sweet. They weren’t enough to keep her from shivering.
“What are you doing out in this cold?” I demanded, knowing full well she’d been anxious for me to arrive.
Her chin jutted out defiantly. “Prayin’ for your salvation. What the hell you doin’ with a dawg?”
“Don’t change the subject. Have you been taking your medicine?”
She snorted in disgust. “It don’ do a damned thing.”
“I’ll find you another medic.”
“I don’t need your help. And don’ you change the subject on me. A dawg?”
“That’s right. I’ll give him to Deko if you’ve got a kind heart.”
“Now how the hell I’m gonna feed that thang?”
“I’ll take care of that. And anything else he costs you.”
“Humph.”
Our bicker-banter continued as we went inside. I realized there was a really good chance that Mama Neeta didn’t have a coat. It was useless to ask because she was too proud to tell me the truth if she didn’t. The next time I came, I’d just bring her one. Not that she’d necessarily wear it. But that’s what her son Jewles would do if he were still alive.
Mama brought me some rice and beans, which seemed to be all they ever ate. My attention strayed to the short vids of Jewles, moving in 60-second loops, positioned on a tall set of shelves. My heart beat loudly. This is where my mind was.
In the earliest vid, he was a baby, with dark circles under wide, round eyes. A younger and more handsome Mama Neeta was holding him, hope bright as the moon. Her eyes swung from Jewles up to her dusty-skinned husband, Titus. He was in his military uniform and impatiently shifted from one foot to another. Titus had been killed in the Freedom Wars, fighting against Bolivian rebels who didn’t want their country to be part of United America. Just about every other country in North, Central, and South America had banded together into one nation a few decades before. Venezuela and Bolivia were the holdouts, and the U.A. was battling to change that with Chav soldiers like Titus.
Another vid showed Jewles learning to crawl on a fake, hot-pink sheepskin rug. And there was one taken when he was in first grade, with gaps in his grin where two baby teeth were missing.
The last vid was recorded just before Jewles was incarcerated at the age of 13 for jail-breaking the government-issued mobiles for Chavs. He’d managed to rig the devices so they could get past the Internet walls and access the rich content reserved for the Elites. He’d been selling them on Boston’s T subway line when the cop bots busted him. The boy’s kinky hair was brushed out hard, so it sloped off to one side on top of his head. There was devilment in his grin.
I’m here now, bro. I’m taking care of them, I told him silently.
Mama Neeta stared at me with liquid eyes. “He was beautious. Is that a word?”
“Should be.”
“A good boy. Don’t care what anybody say.”
“Friggin’ Christ-like.”
Her boney face looked at me perplexedly, not recognizing my humor right away. But then she smiled, dropping into her recliner.
A thundering of small feet drew close and burst through the door: Count Down followed by Deko, his younger sister, Lilya, and brother, Shakespear.
The girl threw her arms around me with abandon. I still wasn’t used to that Chav habit of touching just about anyone, as much as I loved it. They barraged me with: “What’s that dawg’s name?” “Where you been?” “You stay overnight? You never done, but you could.” “Can I ride him?” “Mama’s made a pie last week thinkin’ you’d come and Deko et the whole thang.”
“His name’s Count Down. No, you can’t ride him. And Mama, I’m sorry I didn’t come.”
“That’s okay.”
“Can we speak to him?” The kids weren’t talking about the dog now. “Please, can we’s?”
I sighed internally.
“Let him sit a minute!” Mama barked.
“Okay. Then can we?” Deko asked.
Four sets of eager eyes looked at me expectantly, wanting me to do this thing that I didn’t even have a name for—this thing that made me feel so uncomfortable but seemed so necessary.
# # #
ABOUT SEVEN MONTHS after my brain transplant, I saw a Chav woman staring at me from a street bench. I’d just come out of my convalescence and returned to MIT. Her face was contorted as if she was silently crying. I was overwhelmed by a revelation so stunning I nearly fell over. I loved this woman, beyond everyone and everything. More precisely, Jewles’ brain loved her.
Mama Neeta scurried away when she realized I’d caught sight of her. But two days later, I spotted her again across the street from Simmons Hall, where I lived. Before I could get past the low-lying traffic and cross the street, a huge black glove clamped down on her shoulder and spun her around.
I could see that the human cop was asking her a question as I powered through traffic. She looked so scared, stammering out a reason that the creep would actually believe, about why she would be staring at me, an Elite. He jerked her toward his car, and she tried to rip away.
There was a sick thwack as the cop slammed his billy club into her temple. She sank to the ground. He raised the stick again, and I grabbed it. “No! She’s a friend of mine.”
The cop was flabbergasted as his mobile picked up my I.D., with all the family ties, emanating wirelessly from my mobile. “Christ on a bloody cross,” he said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Ellington.”
I took Mama Neeta to a cafe in Central Square, where we could talk. Her paper-light fingers edged across the space to my hand. And I let her love feeling slide through me—marveling that she had ever found me. She had a friend who was a janitor in Mass General who stole Jewles’ transplant records.
It was astounding to me that Mama would choose to love a guy like me, with so many wealthy entitlements that her son’s life was sacrificed for me.
She told me about Jewles’ life as a black-market dealer plying his trade on the T, and sometimes on New York’s subway system when he could hitch a ride to stay with one of his uncles down there. He’d managed to keep the family fed that way. She’d never liked him doing that, but there didn’t seem to be another solution. Mama had lost her job cleaning buildings years before and couldn’t get another. Everybody hired bots to do that kind of work now.
I told her about how I’d picked up on his taste in food, the wide-angle vision thing, and another new predilection of mine: listening to really old blues songs. The tunes gave me a bad earworm some days; they played in my head so much. “He used to sing those damned songs all the time. Never could carry a tune,” she said.
Mama wanted to know every little thing in my head that had been in her son’s. But I didn’t tell her about his taste in women—big and blousy, with low hanging breasts letting off a funky sweat smell. It wasn’t what the mother of a 13-year-old wanted to hear.
Later, as we walked under a grey sky dimmed with evening light, her eyes filled up with a hungry worry.
“You need Americos?” I asked.
She went from forlorn to fuming in half a second flat. “No! Keep your Yellar-ass money.”
I’d never met someone who needed me so much. It didn’t make sense to say anything more then, but after a few more visits, I laid down the law. “Listen, lady. You don’t get to put that sorry look on your face without telling me what’s going on. That’s the way it’s got to be.”
“Okay.” She raised her defiant chin and let some grave seconds pass by. “Suppose we never see each other again.”
“You don’t want to –”
“I’m sayin’ maybe after a while, you don’ want to see us.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Okay, but if it does, that be okay. You just gots to promise me that you gonna do somethin’ good with that brain of his.”
I couldn’t bear to see her tears. “Okay,” I answered hoarsely.
The love in her smile seemed like morning light sweeping the rain away.
# # #
“YOU SURE?” MAMA NEETA was asking now. I nodded “yes,” watching her fingers stroke the armrests of her chair, darkened by decades of human hands. In the lighter parts, the fabric revealed an American colonial motif—someone else’s idea of pleasing. I had found the chair on a curb about a month before and brought it to her. It was a lot better than the hobbled seat she usually sat in. I knew that if I’d given her a brand new one, she wouldn’t have used it.
“You don’t have to,” she added.
“Let’s do this.” The whole family let out a gust of happiness. Lil and Deko drew the window shades, walking past Count Down, who was asleep in a corner like he’d lived there his whole life.
I positioned myself on the couch so that they could all crowd around me. Mama Neeta sat on one side and leaned her head against mine. Deko sat on the other side and did the same, so that I felt like those ancient things, a book between two bookends.
The two younger kids knelt on the floor, taking my hands in their own. Delicate little Lilya, all of five years old, seemed to know what she was doing. But Shakespear, only three, was just grinning like this was all a big game. His impish smile and poof of black hair always made me see a much older person when I looked at him.
Mama Neeta started things off like she always did. “Son? Son? Me again. Jes wantin’ to talk.” She listened as if she could actually hear Jewles respond, like my head was a 20th-century wall phone. “Oh, I’se okay. We’s all still messed up, tryin’ to understand how things come down to this, you inside this booby prize.” Mama Neeta gave my arm a teasing squeeze. “But we jus’ gotta get over that.”
“Guess what!” Deko blurted. “I’se still in school. And Ms. Nandinko give me first prize in the spelling contest.”
“An’ Mama give me a dress for my birthday,” Lil said. “Brand new. She found it in the trash bin right outside our door. It washed up real fine.”
I sensed Deko smirking. A few days after my last visit, he’d put the dress in the garbage for me. Mama would have raised the roof if she knew it was something I’d arranged; if there was anything she hated, it was charity.
“Penny’s going out with 2Bad now. She ain’t got no right,” Deko blurted.
“You hush!” Mama Neeta snapped, then told her dead son, “I know you don’ want her waitin’ on the dead. You jes keep your brain whirring for this Jarat man. Don’t let him down. ‘Cause you do that, you let me down too. An’ then there’ll be a price to pay I don’t even want to think about.”
She listened for a moment, then chortled. “Don’t you give me no lip! ‘cause yo mama love you so much it stupid. You got that?” She turned to the kids. “He’s sayin’ bye, y’all.”
“Bye!” “Bye!” “We be back!” The kids left the room in a solemn single file. Mama Neeta slumped in her seat, a load of bewildered embarrassment. “I know we’re just talking shit.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. My sadness doubled into a fist, as if Jewles’ own longing was speaking. “I’ll always do that for you. You know that.”
Mama Neeta looked at me sharply. “Watchoo hidin’?”
“Nothin’.”
“You gotta new girlfrien’?”
“No. Last one got rid of me a long time ago.” I felt her bore past the flippant reply to my anxious state. She could feel the darkness in my mind.
“You be okay,” she said, grasping at hope.
I thought about how Deko had left the room. It was like he’d been doing a military march. “Mama, has Deko been doing dreamisodes?”
“I tol’ him not to like you said. Why you askin’?”
“Probably nothing. Never mind.”
I went around behind her, pressing my thumbs into the thin, tired shoulders, reading her muscles. My eyes stared off into oblivion as I located the hardest knot in her back and kneaded gently.
Mama Neeta squirmed in pain, and I softened the strokes. She drifted, down, down to some delicious level, forgetting to speak until I stopped.
“Oh, Lord. You got some touch. You get a P-H?”
“A what?”
“Doctor citificate. For doin’ that kind of shit.”
“Do not mock me, woman.”
She wagged a finger. “Ha! Don’t tell me you don’t use that sugar on the girls. I know you. New one be along real soon.”
No sense going down that road. Life had gotten complicated since Jewles became part of my mind. I didn’t feel like I could be intimate with anyone, not right now. I stopped the conversation by walking off to use the facilities. They’d jerry-rigged the flusher by substituting a toothbrush for the handle. Someday I’d get them a real one.
On the way back, the smell of chocolate drew me into the kitchen. There was pudding in a saucepan on the stove. On the counter nearby, a baked pie crust was ready for the filling. Beneath the pastry’s flakey surface were tender little pockets of air, the stuff of angel wings, light enough to float up to heaven. It was an unbelievable luxury for them, to have sugar and chocolate in the house. Mama must have used the money I’d secretly left her in the empty cookie jar last time I came.
My mouth watered as I stood over the pan of brown pudding. It was a tossup, who craved the chocolate more: the Jewles part of me, or my own self.
The circular pan filled with intense brown pudding reminded me of Thom’s empty eye socket in the graffiti. I couldn’t account for it, but it was like the chocolate was suddenly calling me to test out that one place in the hologram I’d never explored. It was so damned awful. Would he really put a portal there?
I called up the holo of his mutilated face and tried not to squirm as I scratched his eye socket. That’s when things went strange. The last thing I remember was the sound of the kids laughing out on the sidewalk, playing with Count Down. Then the black hole where his left eye should be sucked me down, down. And I was swallowed into a recording of his memories.
# # #
I STARED OUT OF THOM’S eyes, seeing everything as he had. We were in a bar—he was in a bar. It was a place I’d been to a few times: The Pinnacle watering hole in Astoria, Queens. Surrounding me were five college lovelies who looked like they could unmoor ships with seductive powers that they hadn’t mastered completely. Their eyes burned like witches.
Panties were removed under the table. Tongues explored erotic terrain. “Fancy coming home with me?” Thom was asking in his Brit accent. I was speaking his words. I couldn’t have said anything other than what he had said at that moment, nor done anything differently.
“And where would that be?” asked one.
“The Edison Hotel. Just for tonight. Then it’s back to the Asian Commonwealth for me. Won’t be back for yonks.”
“Oh no! You can’t!” they cried out in dismay.
“Let’s blow this place.”
“As if any of us could say no,” said the auburn-haired member of the group, cocoa freckles faintly dusting skin smooth as melted ice cream. I felt Thom’s desire to lick it.
Thom’s chief bodyguard came into view, a muscle-bound Middle from the Commonwealth of Asia’s Hong Kong Zone. His name flashed in my mind: Li. He’d watched over Thom for years. “Nothing good will come of this,” Li murmured discreetly.
Fear rose up in Thom as if there was some threat. But his excitement for the ladies was overriding reason. “C’mon, mate. We’ll make it to the hotel in no time. You and the bots can handle it.” Li gave Thom a dubious look, but ever the loyal servant, he would never argue anything into the ground.
A teasing tongue explored my ear, Thom’s ear. I kissed the red, wet lips. Long straight blonde hair slipped through my fingers.
Li held the door open, and we all spilled out of the bar into the street. Six bot guards immediately surrounded us. They were massive in size. The women were insect-delicate in comparison, and so was Thom. We made for a long limo, five paces away.
WHAM. There was a searing grenade explosion, so loud that Thom’s eardrums felt numb and torn. Super-predatory drones surrounded us, crushing Thom’s bot guards in an instant.
The drones’ wings folded back into their backs. Each one had six snake-like tentacles that clutched spiked clubs. They whipped the weapons in big circles and sent them sailing into the women, hacking them into bloody pieces.
Thom roared in fury. Li picked him up and dove for the limo.
Another grenade blasted. Shrapnel sheared off the left side of Thom’s face. A drone grabbed my friend with one tentacle and tossed Li into the air with another. The bodyguard slammed into a curb headfirst, neck snapping back, completely lifeless.
Pain hammered through Thom. The drone’s tentacles slithered through his pockets like snakes. Through his one useable eye, my friend could see that it had found a vial. The Juice.
Thom’s heart rate went wild. He tried to sit up; I tried to sit up. “NO! NO!” He grabbed for the vial, but a club raised up above his head.
“Wo!” a man said, voice rich as blackstrap molasses. The drone froze. “What’d I tell you? Watch the brain. I need that. And get rid of his mobile.”
“Yessir,” the drone hummed, ripping the mobile stud off Thom’s ear. He seemed to be the leader of the drone battalion.
The man’s hand took the vial from the creature’s tentacle and uncorked it. A piss odor wafted out. “Fuck. That’s bad. Dang.”
Thom couldn’t see the man’s face, but his mind was flying through a million memories as he tried to place his voice and the silhouette of his backside. In a few instants, Thom knew that he’d never seen or heard the creep before, and as far as I knew, neither had I.
“You want me to take the brain out?” the lead drone hummed. Its tiny head bristled with tiny communication filaments.
“Make sure its undamaged first. No sense wasting time.”
Two of the beasts’ arms split into several smaller, worm-like tentacles, which slithered among the gashes on Thom’s face and into his nose and eye socket. Thom cried out in excruciating pain. Suckers on the feelers assessed his internal damage as more tentacles snaked into his mouth and throat to shut him up. Thom couldn’t even gag.
“No material damage,” the beast intoned.
“Okay. Split him open,” the man said. “Make sure every single computer implant stays in place. Get it to the lab pronto.”
Thom’s horror rose even higher. Despite his agony, and all the worms in his mouth, Thom managed to turn his head and watch the man walk away, trying to see more, grasp any clue about where the Juice was going. But there was nothing. I could feel a curl of irony as my friend watched the man climb into a Tseng X95, the most advanced maglev car his family had released.
Cold, determined hate radiated from Thom. Thoughts were traveling through his mind at extraordinary speed as he assessed the towering drone above him.
I knew from my past experiences with Thom that he had his own customized mobile very carefully hidden from view. The ear stud the drone had ripped off was just a decoy. His real one was a tiny little speck, affixed just behind his right ear at the hairline.
It was mind-boggling: how quickly his mobile pulled up schemas for drones on Thom’s invisible air screen, one after another after another until there was a match. As the drone leader got ready to extricate his brain, Thom used tiny little finger movements to revolve the schema. Then he zoomed in to the molecular level, pulling up information about the chemical makeup of the creature’s outer shell. He flipped the view so that he could see the creature’s backside and moved up from the legs, studying the readout of various chemical symbols. The drone was made up of so many different types of metallic parts!
Thom paused on the information about a metal bar, just between the creature’s two wings. A little surge of excitement flowed through him.
The rest of the drones crowded around Thom, transmitting thoughts back and forth between them in a series of pings. The worms slithered out of Thom’s mouth.
I expected Thom to finally gag, or at least hack out a cough. But instead, my friend looked at the creatures mildly and said, “Lead. You really should tell your manufacturer not to use lead.”
The head drone hummed in a way that suggested it was laughing. Its tiny tentacles coalesced into two long, hard limbs, and the beast flexed them, as if gathering power. Then they grabbed Thom’s head on either side.
My friend’s mobile was still operating, sending out a stream of data as the drone prepared to crush his crown. It was like the creature intended to split it open like a ripe peach. Thom seemed to be communicating with someone whom I couldn’t identify. There was a searing whish, and a fiery neo-knife sunk into the lead drones’ back, right in the metal plate between its wings. Damn! I’d never seen a neo knife with fire.
There was no time to marvel at that because the enormous metallic beast was screeching so shrilly it was hard to think of anything else. Thom dropped from the drone’s clutches as the creature’s tentacles looped around its back and tried to pry off the burning knife. The weapon penetrated even deeper, reaching the drone’s central operating controls. The drone crashed to the ground, writhing back and forth as it deactivated.
More whishing sounds were followed by other screeches as three fire knives pierced the other drones in exactly the same place. In seconds, all the drones were deactivated entirely, reduced to very expensive mounds of metal on the street.
Li’s mutilated face surfaced above Thom’s one good eye. The bodyguard pulled some more neo-knives out of his backpack. “You want me to make really sure they’re dead?”
Though it was fiercely painful, Thom managed to say, “No, that would just be overkill.”
A bloody smile bloomed on Li’s face. “Let’s get you to the hospital.” He grabbed Thom and headed for the limo. Blackness interceded. The memory was over.
# # #
BREATH SHOT OUT OF me in long gasps. I swiped the air, trying to save the vision as it faded away, but that wasn’t possible. I reeled away from the saucepan of chocolate on Mama Neeta’s stove, filled with a sudden certainty: Thom must be alive—or clinging on to what remained of life. He wanted me to know what happened to him and the Juice.
“Where the hell are you?” I cried.
Mama stood in the doorway, looking at me with a queer expression. “Don’t you be doin’ no dreamisodes ‘round here. I got a friend who don’ like ‘em one bit.”
“I’m sorry, Mama. It wasn’t that.”
Her smile fell into deep concern.
“I have a friend that’s in bad trouble, the most important friend I ever had. And I don’t know where he is.”
Mama knew I wasn’t going to give her a full confessional. She didn’t pry. I drew her to my chest, hoping her love would dull the terror from Thom’s vision. The odor of the harsh soap she used hit my nostrils.
“You just gots to promise me that you gonna do somethin’ good with that brain of his,” she’d said. If only I could find Thom and help him get better. If only he could get back the Juice!
Mama’s hands trailed over my heart. “You’re leaving.”
“Soon.”
“I’ll fix you a piece of pie. Won’t be long.”
“Thank you kindly.”
“You still want us to take the damned dawg?” She looked up at my face, and the shininess of her eyes told me that she’d fallen for the handsome devil.
I pulled out a mess of old Americo bills from my pants pocket. It was hard to come by physical currency these days, but it was all she could trade with. “Food, whatever he needs. Let me know when you need more.” Hopefully she’d buy something for herself as well.
Mama let out a snort of happiness. She turned to the stove, chin jutting out in the direction of hope.