2nd excerpt of "SUNDAY BEST" by Lori D. Johnson
Curtis
groans and tosses what's left of the partially chewed piece of toast. Leave it to Grandma Rose to shove him into
the reluctant role of savior. Little
does she know how much he himself is in need of rescue. Just last week he'd been fired from his first
decent paying job. Typically Rose, a
woman with a rep for taking in and nurturing strays, is no slouch when it comes
to sensing discontent, whether his or anyone else's.
Silent, sullen and sorely
unappreciative, the boy reminds Curtis too much of himself, or at least the
self he'd been when he'd first landed on Grandma Rose and Old Man Lamar's
doorstep--an event precipitated by his own mother's untimely demise.
Dead mamas--just another unfortunate
thing he and the boy have in common. And
both willful departures at that--one suicide, the other overdose. The more kind-hearted adults in his life had
done their best to shield him. But even
at the tender age of ten, Curtis had been able to see through the deceptive
nicety of a term like "home-going."
What kind of mother leaves for home without taking her kids with her?
During his stiff-legged trek up the
stairs, Curtis is nearly trampled by the six year old twins, Tosha and Tiara,
on their giggle-filled race down. A
happy pair, they push past him, seemingly unfazed by the fact that their mother
no longer occupies a space in the landing of the living.
While an enviable innocence to some,
Curtis knows all too well the truth of how the woman the two youngsters had
routinely referred to as "Mama" had seldom been one in any real sense
of the word. Dope, like a thief in the
night, who boldly returns by the light of day, had years ago snatched her away
from them and everyone else who'd tried to love her.
The girls make Curtis think of his own
little sister, Amanda, who’d barely been a year old when their mother had
passed. Less than a week after the
funeral, Amanda's daddy and some of his people had come and got her. Hit hard by the back-to-back losses, Curtis
had cried for weeks. But even more
devastating than either his baby sister's sudden whisking away or even his
mother's willful departure had been the fact that no one had ever bothered to
come for him.
Curtis's old room is where Mark has
been bunking. On easing open the door
and stepping inside, he finds the boy perched atop the cedar chest next to the
window. He is a tall, skinny kid with
the awkwardness of thirteen scrawled all over him like spray-painted graffiti.
"What's up?" Curtis says
when Mark finally pulls his frown from the window and turns his head in his
direction.
The boy is anything, but ready for
church--the bottom of his shoes are caked with dirt; an unknotted tie, like the
chain of a busted playground swing, dangles from his neck; his face could use a
good scrubbing and his hair is a black, matted field of uncombed naps. But what strikes Curtis most are the boy's
eyes, fixed, glazed and set back in hollow sockets, they are not unlike those
of a blind man whose sight, at some point, had been forcibly removed. Rather than extend a verbal greeting, the boy
nods and turns back toward the window.
Although it clings to the tip of his
tongue, like the taste of freshly-cut lemon, "You all right?" strikes
him as a stupid question. Curtis already
knows how the kid feels--the same way he had--like a dumped sack of garbage
with something horribly rotten on the inside.
He shoves his hands in his pockets
and wonders what Grandma Rose could have been thinking in assigning him such a
task. After a moment of coin-jiggling,
foot-shuffling and longing desperately to run back in the direction from which
he'd come, Curtis invites himself to a seat on the opposite end of the cedar
chest and joins the boy in his silent sulk out onto the world. Not so long ago, he had spent many an hour in
the very same spot, bottom buttressed to the worn wood and nose pressed against
the pane. The windowed nook had proven
an ideal one for eavesdropping, daydreaming or just pondering the complexities
of life.
He tries to get a feel for the boy's
take on the second story view--a view dominated in large part by the church
next door. A friend of the family once
commented on how overwhelming it must be to wake up every morning and go to bed
every night with a steeple staring down on you.
Overwhelming for whom? Certainly not Grandma Rose, who takes full
advantage of her proximity to the Lord's house.
Be it for Sunday school, eleven o'clock service, Monday night prayer vigil,
mid-week Bible study, choir rehearsal, or one of her various committee meetings,
she makes a point of walking through the doors of the church at least once
before the day is done.
Had it not been for Old Man Lamar,
Curtis knows chances are, he would have ended up a bonafide 'Dudley-Do-Right'
type or else, thoroughly ambivalent about donning the cloak of
discipleship. The Old Man had provided
him with the balance necessary to understand that doing the work of the church
and living for the Lord weren't always the same thing.
He couldn't help but feel that an
"Old Man Lamar" was really what Mark needed; someone with shoulders
big enough to lean on in hard times; someone who in twenty words or less could
tell the boy all he'd ever need to know.
In spite of his intimacy with death, what Curtis knew exceeded his
ability to articulate. Silence and
companionship were about all he felt capable of offering.
Besides, the boy didn't appear in
the mood for words, however profound, poetic or potentially life-altering. The thought took Curtis back to that first
conversation between him and his cousin Rodger.
He'd been sitting alone in the very
same room when his bowed head cousin had slunk in. "I-I-I'm sorry 'bout yo-yo-yo your
Mama," is what Rodger had finally sputtered after what must have been a
full minute of standing and sniffling.
"What the hell you got to be
sorry for?" is what a ten-year old Curtis had snapped back. "You didn't kill her, did you?"
A candy apple red Lexus pulls into
the church parking lot and Mark's dulled pupils suddenly flicker. He bolts forward, as if adhering to a drill
sergeant's "a-ten-hut," and bangs his forehead against the window
pane in the process.
"Look at him," Mark says
as the driver, dressed in a yellow pinstriped, grape juice colored, three piece
suit exits the car. "Son-of-a-bitch
really thinks he's somethin', don't he?"
Though they lean toward concurrence,
Curtis elects not to express his thoughts aloud. After all, the purple-clad SOB in question
just so happens to be Mark's father--Jared--or J.D. as he prefers to be called.
J.D’s wife and their three young
sons follow him out of the car. Not only
do the boys’ dark, shiny, moon-pie faces, mirror their dad’s, they’re dressed
just like him, too. In a leg-dragging strut
across the parking lot and up the church steps, they fall in behind him, like
soldiers, pledges or robots, one grinning, big bobbing head after the other.
At the parade’s end, Mark turns to
Curtis, and with his eyes ablaze says, “Ain’t you gon’ say nothin’?”
Curtis has half a mind to tell the
boy, “So, your Pop’s a jackass. Truth be
known, your Moms wasn’t a heck of a lot better.” But rather than voice a truth the child might
not be ready to handle, Curtis stares out the window and lets several seconds
pass before he stands and says, “Let’s go for a ride.”
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