“Yeah,” I say. “He’s doing better.”
“Good. That’s good work, son.”
He says it the way he says everything, short and settled, and goes back to the game. But the fact that he remembered from a conversation six weeks ago and filed it and brought it back out tonight, tells me more than a longer man’s speech.
Mama comes over with a plate for me.
“So.” Mama pulls her chair out, sits, sets her elbows on the table. “How’s work?”
“Work is work.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s going. Shoulder cases, knees, the usual.”
“Mm.” She nods. “You smile different when you talk about this team. More than last year.”
“I smile the same.”
“You smile different. Dad, doesn’t he smile different?”
“He smiles different,” my dad says, without looking up from the game.
“See?”
I take another bite. This is how it goes. I am an adult, I have been an adult for the better part of a decade, and yet I still feel like a schoolkid around them.
“You seeing anybody?”
The question arrives the way it always does.Anybody.She has been saying anybody for four years now, since the conversation in this same house when I told her and Dad both. Bi. That was the word I used. She nodded once and didn’t say anything for a while. She used to say “any girls.” Then there was a period where she didn’t ask at all, maybe a year, which was its own kind of answer.
Then one Sunday she called and said “you seeing anybody, baby?” and the word was different and I heard her choose it. She has been choosing it ever since, every time, and I have never told her what it gives me, because some things you just let people do for you without making them explain it.
“Not really.”
“Not really,” I answer.
“No.”
She is looking at me. Not hard. Just looking. Nan is at the counter with her back to us and the tilt of her shoulders tells me she is listening and pretending not to.
“You’re not telling me something, Isaiah.” I look up. She hasn’t moved. Her hands are still on the table, one on top of the other. She isn’t pushing.
“I’m fine, Mama.”
She watches me for another second. Then she nods, once, and pats the back of my hand. Her hand is cool.
“Okay, baby.”
She gets up and takes the plate I was still working on and tells me she is going to warm it up because I ate too slow, and she goes back to the kitchen.
Dad changes the channel. The game is over. He switches to ice fishing in Minnesota, even though he has never in his life been fishing in Minnesota. This fact has never stopped him from watching an hour of men pulling small fish out of a hole.
Nan comes over, pie in one hand, plate of it in the other. She sets one piece in front of me. Her hand lands on the back of my neck while she does it. Just rests there while she tells me about the crust, and I do not fully hear any of it because her hand on my neck is warm and heavy and has been that exact warmth and that exact weight since I was small. My body has always responded to it the same way, which is to drop about half an inch I did not know I was carrying.
“You try it first. You always try it first.” She pushes the plate closer.
“Nan.”
