Jodi

FATAL FLAW

I always make my own beef stock. Lotsa folks, they cain’t tell a homemade broth from one you buy off a grocery store shelf. But me, I like the hours a’ boilin’ and strainin’ and dicin’ and choppin’. ’Cause it’s perfect when I get done with it.

That broth, if it taught me something, it’s that I’d be okay in college. When I do something, I do it right. And that’s what school’s all about.

I was scheming on how I’d get to making my dreams come true while I was in The Shops at The Breakers not believin’ my eyes was telling me some people’d pay what I make in a whole month for a sweater. I saw a book that caught my eye right quick. Tiffany’s Palm Beach. It was all full a’ gorgeous pictures a’ gorgeous people lying by the pool and crystal-blue waters and houses that even Graham and Khaki’s house woulda fit right inside. I got to thinkin’ on them other parts of Palm Beach that we had driven through, them places where poverty lives and buildings fall and desperation pushes grocery carts right down the street. It were all a part of Palm Beach. But it certainly weren’t a part of Tiffany’s Palm Beach.

Khaki, she was Tiffany. She couldn’t near believe I’d want to leave Kinston. ’Cause my Kinston, it was trailer parks and drunk Momma and fightin’ and Ricky trying to kill me and scraping by to have enough to eat. Khaki’s Kinston, it was farmland and plantation homes and Pauline cooking dinner and the love of her life.

She and Tiffany, they don’t see what me and those grocery-cart folks see.

My cell phone—the one that Graham called my “bonus”—it got to ringing. I weren’t paying no attention, thinkin’ it were just Khaki wanting to see if I could go to the Ocean Bar and get a bite. Alex, he’d be pointing at the clown fish swimming around right there inside the clear bar, saying “Nemo! Nemo!” And all them people’d be feeding their youngens thirty-dollar cheeseburgers like it weren’t nothin’.

But that voice, it weren’t Khaki’s.

“Don’t hang up.”

I couldn’t have even if I’d tried. It was like my hand got superglued to the phone, one a’ them senior pranks we woulda played.

“Before you say nothing, you gotta know I’m clean again. I’m real sorry for treating you bad when you brought your baby by.”

It was my momma, raspy voice and all. I got so sick I had to sit down right there in the hall. And then I got to figuring why: We had escaped by a hangnail. I cain’t predict the future any more than I can change the past. But it were laid out right clear like one a’ them picture books I read to you. If I hadn’t give you up, if I had stayed workin’ too hard for too little, being with men and working for bosses that treated me worse than an old shoe they tossed in the bin, this would be me and you in twenty years. Me calling you up, saying I were clean again, apologizing. You being sicker of my excuses than political ads in the fall.

My momma, she just kept on talkin’. “I reckon I oughta come by and we can have us a sit-down.”

I knew sure as pectin makes jam set real easy my momma wanted something. I cleared my throat. “I’m outta town. I cain’t.”

She’d be wonderin’ good where I was. But she didn’t let on none. “That’s all right. You just call your momma when you get home.”

“Momma, how’d you get this number anyhow?”

“How do you think it makes a momma feel when her own youngen don’t even give her her phone number?”

“Momma, how’d you get my number?” I repeated.

“Well, I had to get me a new phone and all our numbers is on the same account so they give it to me up there at the phone place. So, come on, baby girl, you just call your momma when you get home from wherever you are.”

I could feel the anger risin’ up in me, making my insides feel near on fire that my momma had got Graham feeling sorry for her and now he was paying for her phone. Some people’d say she didn’t have no choice, but me, I knew better. Everybody on this green earth has a choice about taking advantage of the good people that never done nothing but love them.

But every good storybook character, they all got a fatal flaw, that thing that keeps ’em making the same mistakes over and over again. Mine is that I cain’t stand to hurt nobody’s feelings. Don’t matter if you’ve broken my spirit like a wild horse, I’ll keep lettin’ you on back in. I cain’t stand treating people bad because I know how it feels.

“Okay, Momma. I’ll call ya.”

I hung up feeling near like my face was under water and I couldn’t get no oxygen. Momma, she was like that x-ray scanner at the airport. She could always see right through when I was gettin’ something like happy. And then, like one a’ them pickaxes on the ice sculptures down the hall, she’d damn near tear me apart.