“He ought to be having pork,” she says, cracking an egg into a waiting dish. “I asked him when I saw him, I said, What’s your favorite food? And he says, without missing a beat, he says, Pork, ma’am, with rice and gravy.” She adds a little cream to the egg, then whisks it all together with a fork and puts the bowl into place, so that before her on the counter is a lineup: catfish, cornmeal, egg, breadcrumbs, and then, on the stove, a waiting pan of oil. She brings a match to the burner beneath; it ignites with a whoosh.
“But it being Friday, and him being a good Catholic—or trying to be, as he said—he said he wouldn’t have any meat but fish.” She spears a fillet angrily, rolls it in cornmeal, dunks it in egg, drenches it in breadcrumbs, and sets it in the pan to fry.
She turns around. Mother sits in a chair by the window, a silhouette in the evening light, very still, her head tilted slightly, as if searching for sound in her silence—the sound of Nell’s voice, the sound of the concerto playing on the radio on the counter. Her bony hands are curled around the ends of the chair’s arms. On the table in front of her, the ice has melted in a glass of iced tea, given to her each evening out of habit, though Nell can’t remember the last time the woman took a sip. All she drinks now is milk through a straw, her fallen mouth puckering around the plastic.
“Even if he’s guilty, I don’t think he should die. But to be true, Mother, I’m not sure anymore that he’s guilty at all.” The utterance lingers in the air like something tangible, as tangible as its meaning felt inside her gut, poisonous and roiling. The boy. A boy, that’s what he is; she understood this the moment yesterday when she finally saw him in the flesh—a boy every bit as much as Gabe, just older. She didn’t want to meet him; but after months of rankling unease, something in her finally had to. “And if he’s not, well, may heaven forgive your son.”
Mother stares out the window, unhearing. Nell smells the catfish burning on the stove.