puffy waxiness to it that filled out all the small wrinkles and made it hard to guess her age. Because of a plastic oxygen tube fitted to her nostrils, her voice had an uncharacteristic nasal sound.
Harry Lewton was sitting in a plastic chair beside her, his legs sprawled wide. He had just finished a walk-through of the hospital, and he was feeling frustrated. So far, the search teams had come up with exactly one dead rat in a crawl space and one homeless guy trying to sleep off a pint behind a Dumpster.
“Momma, it doesn’t matter what she looks like,” he said. “Just so she takes good care of you.” Up north, he had worked hard to play down his East Texas accent, but in his mother’s presence it had a way of creeping up on him.
“Stop fussing over me, Harry. I think you’ve got all these people on pins and needles on account of me.”
Harry winked. “Don’t worry. It does ’em good.”
“Oh, Harry!” she said. “Can’t you ever stop worryin’ about other people? Twenty years ago, when you were fifteen, it was different. You were a godsend then, stepping in to help raise your little brother and sisters, after that no-account daddy of yours got drunk on the job and hurt his back and decided to live the rest of his life on a pittance of disability checks. I can’t thank you enough for it. But I’m your momma, and I never asked you to take care of me . I always could look after myself.”
“It’s nothin’. It was nothin’ then, and it’s nothin’ now.”
“Hogwash! You got them kids dressed, gave ’em breakfast and made ’em lunches every day of the week, so’s I could leave at five-thirty to go drive that bus. And then, after school, you stuffed bags at Kroger’s Market till after dark, just so we could have a decent supper on the table. You call that nothing?”
“Hell, Momma. If I’d’ve had idle time on my hands, I’d have wound up in the Dixie Popes or one of those other neighborhood gangs. I liked bumpin’ my knuckles too much.”
“But it cost you your childhood, Harry. I look back, and I am ashamed of it.”
“This is no time to talk about things like that.”
“No, Harry, it’s exactly the time.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Let the shame be on him that’s dead and buried. Enough said.”
It was hard for Harry to look upon his mother’s face. It had taken on a lifeless, unchanging masklike quality that made her seem like a stranger, and not the vibrant, chestnut-haired beauty he remembered. He got a knot in his stomach thinking of her, back in the days when folks called her “Sugarfoot” for the mean figure she cut on the line-dance floor. Now she needed help just to blow her nose. How does she hang on like that? he wondered. How does she face the day?
He knew how. She had the quality known in East Texas as grit, and she had it in spades. There was no other way the family could have lasted. Grit could be toughness, sometimes, and at other times tenderness. But what it meant was you could not be beaten down. Harry remembered one night when he was five or six, and he had sat up in bed shaking after his daddy smashed the TV set in one of his drunken rants. Momma heard him crying, and came to his room carrying a glass of milk and a beat-up old pawn-shop guitar. In her honey-and-molasses voice, she sang to him an old Pentecostal song that had been made famous by the Carter family:
Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
If we’ll keep on the sunny side of life.
A simple song, but it had the power to dry away his tears that night. It defined his momma the way he had always known her. And his heart ached to think of it now.
Harry heard the step of a hard leather shoe on the linoleum, and looked up to see a balding, gray-haired man in a white coat come into the room.
“Morning, Dr. Weiss,” said Harry. “Kind of you to drop by.”
Weiss nodded curtly and went
Harry Lewton was sitting in a plastic chair beside her, his legs sprawled wide. He had just finished a walk-through of the hospital, and he was feeling frustrated. So far, the search teams had come up with exactly one dead rat in a crawl space and one homeless guy trying to sleep off a pint behind a Dumpster.
“Momma, it doesn’t matter what she looks like,” he said. “Just so she takes good care of you.” Up north, he had worked hard to play down his East Texas accent, but in his mother’s presence it had a way of creeping up on him.
“Stop fussing over me, Harry. I think you’ve got all these people on pins and needles on account of me.”
Harry winked. “Don’t worry. It does ’em good.”
“Oh, Harry!” she said. “Can’t you ever stop worryin’ about other people? Twenty years ago, when you were fifteen, it was different. You were a godsend then, stepping in to help raise your little brother and sisters, after that no-account daddy of yours got drunk on the job and hurt his back and decided to live the rest of his life on a pittance of disability checks. I can’t thank you enough for it. But I’m your momma, and I never asked you to take care of me . I always could look after myself.”
“It’s nothin’. It was nothin’ then, and it’s nothin’ now.”
“Hogwash! You got them kids dressed, gave ’em breakfast and made ’em lunches every day of the week, so’s I could leave at five-thirty to go drive that bus. And then, after school, you stuffed bags at Kroger’s Market till after dark, just so we could have a decent supper on the table. You call that nothing?”
“Hell, Momma. If I’d’ve had idle time on my hands, I’d have wound up in the Dixie Popes or one of those other neighborhood gangs. I liked bumpin’ my knuckles too much.”
“But it cost you your childhood, Harry. I look back, and I am ashamed of it.”
“This is no time to talk about things like that.”
“No, Harry, it’s exactly the time.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Let the shame be on him that’s dead and buried. Enough said.”
It was hard for Harry to look upon his mother’s face. It had taken on a lifeless, unchanging masklike quality that made her seem like a stranger, and not the vibrant, chestnut-haired beauty he remembered. He got a knot in his stomach thinking of her, back in the days when folks called her “Sugarfoot” for the mean figure she cut on the line-dance floor. Now she needed help just to blow her nose. How does she hang on like that? he wondered. How does she face the day?
He knew how. She had the quality known in East Texas as grit, and she had it in spades. There was no other way the family could have lasted. Grit could be toughness, sometimes, and at other times tenderness. But what it meant was you could not be beaten down. Harry remembered one night when he was five or six, and he had sat up in bed shaking after his daddy smashed the TV set in one of his drunken rants. Momma heard him crying, and came to his room carrying a glass of milk and a beat-up old pawn-shop guitar. In her honey-and-molasses voice, she sang to him an old Pentecostal song that had been made famous by the Carter family:
Keep on the sunny side, always on the sunny side,
Keep on the sunny side of life
It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way
If we’ll keep on the sunny side of life.
A simple song, but it had the power to dry away his tears that night. It defined his momma the way he had always known her. And his heart ached to think of it now.
Harry heard the step of a hard leather shoe on the linoleum, and looked up to see a balding, gray-haired man in a white coat come into the room.
“Morning, Dr. Weiss,” said Harry. “Kind of you to drop by.”
Weiss nodded curtly and went
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