Love Me Back (17 page)

What’s this we? I say. You had nothing to do with it. They don’t know we didn’t know whose camera it was, but
even if they think it
was
hate no way do they think you knew anything about it. It’s not on you.

Don’t matter, he says, it’s all the same. Everything’s on everybody.

So where I’m going with this is the phone call I took today. They used to come in, the Bishop and the handler, every few weeks, and I didn’t see them for months after all that. If I thought about it now and then I hoped I was just missing them on my days off but today the handler called to cancel the Bishop’s birthday party in The Private Room, which had been reserved for the purpose ever since the day after his birthday party in The Private Room last year. I didn’t ask why they wanted to cancel. I said Thank you sir, even though I didn’t know what I was thanking him for. Then I said And please give our best to the Bishop—hope to see you both here again before long. We’ve missed you.

All right, he said. You the little girl gave me back the camera?

Yes sir, I said.

Thought so. I recognized your voice. You tell Danny he’ll never have the Bishop’s business again in this life, and he’s a sick motherfucker, may God forgive me for cursing a man who has no shame.
No
shame.

Yes sir, I said. I’m sorry, sir. Take care.

I hung up the phone and my neck was hot and it was very quiet in the office.

The fourth and last night in Mexico your father and I drink horchata, sitting on rough-cut logs around a fire. Everyone else has gone to bed after our final worship service, which was held here by the fire. We sang hymns and devotionals and all the stars were out. It is the first time I have seen the Milky Way and I look and look and look.

We stay there as the fire dies, talking. It gets colder and colder so your father goes inside to get his sleeping bag. We wear it around us like a shawl. We keep expecting the youth minister to come looking for us and make us go to bed but he doesn’t. I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again, I say. Your father says Come on, Snowflake. Let’s go inside.

Our group has been staying in the church of our host congregation, sleeping on the floor in our sleeping bags. I think he means we will go inside and go to bed, I in the fellowship hall where the girls are and he in the classroom with the boys. But when we enter the church he leads us down the short hallway to the kitchen. Past the kitchen is a door with a picture of a woman kneeling at an altar, praying.

My teeth are chattering as we enter what seems to have been a closet or a pantry before it was converted to a tiny prayer room. On the shelves are books and hymnals and
Bibles. On the floor is a velvet cushion to kneel or sit on, in front of a small table. There are rocks and dried flowers and a small bowl of rice on the table, among other offerings.

We can see only because of the dim filtered starlight coming from the hall; there are no windows. He lights the candles and then closes the door to the hall. He takes the sleeping bag from around my shoulders and quickly zips it back into the shape of a sleeping bag, while stepping out of his boots. Take off your shoes, he whispers. I take them off and put them next to his. The room is only a foot or two longer than the sleeping bag, and not much wider. He pulls back a corner of the sleeping bag and motions for me to get in. He moves the velvet cushion to the top of the sleeping bag, and waits for me to get settled, my head on the makeshift pillow. Then he gets into the sleeping bag too, and zips it up all the way. Hey little Spoon, he says, embracing me. I have never felt so whole, or safe, or known since.

This should warm you up fast, he says. Body heat.

He kisses my neck.

Did you follow me through the gateway, into the blizzard? I whisper.

Yes, Aviendha of the Aiel, he says, playing along. We have both been reading Robert Jordan’s
Wheel of Time
series.

I roll over, on top of him. Rand al’Thor, I say into his neck. What’s your plan for getting us back?

I don’t have one, he says.

We wake together when we hear noise in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. He looks at his watch. Six forty-seven, he whispers. Hurry.

We fumble quietly out of the sleeping bag. I put on my shoes and kiss him and put my ear to the door. I don’t hear my whole life being written for me inside my body, cell by cell.

I burn my neck with a fondue skewer while you watch
The Cosby Show
on my bed. You are watching all two hundred episodes for the second time. You refer to the episodes by sweaters: the one where Vanessa wore the black sweater with the yellow cars. Sondra’s flower sweater episode. The skewer is sharp but I don’t use the prongs. I turn on the gas burner and hold the metal rod over the blue flicker until the plastic handle begins to feel warm in my fingers and the prongs turn red, devilish. I wait for the laugh track because I know the skin will make a popping crackling sound I don’t want you to hear but it would most likely go unnoticed anyway. It would sound like a normal cooking sound. I press the metal rod in hard and let up after a count of three. I put it in the dishwasher, small shreds of skin stuck to it.

It hurts but it feels good. I mean it feels like relief. The pain is real and synchronizes all the pain in the rest of my self that I cannot manage to organize. Draws it up to my neck and tells it what it is: You are pain, this is what you feel like.

When you ask about the greenish bubbled stripe that
appears across the hollow of my clavicular notch I say I think a bug bit me.

You ask to touch it and you are fascinated by how the blister feels full but fragile. You say it’s gross but you want to do it again. You are skeptical. You say I should go to the doctor. You say What kind of bug would do that?

We can’t have pets in my apartment so we put together a jigsaw puzzle of a Saint Bernard on the floor in the hall. You name him Barry, after the legendary Alpine rescue dog. You buy a bag of dog food with your own money and leave bowls of food and water next to him. I hear you apologize to him once when you accidentally step on his tail.

You tell me you have decided you are not going to have children when you grow up. You are going to live in an RV, which you call a house car. You will have two dogs and it will just be the three of you, traveling everywhere with the windows down. You tell me Barry will be too old to go with you. You whisper so his feelings aren’t hurt. You ask me if I will take care of him when you leave home and I say I will.

Calvin D. Colson

Cal is a hustler. Maybe he’s a type, maybe he’s all over Chicago or Atlanta or some other bluesy black place like Memphis, where he’s from originally. But his stuff works in Dallas because there’s a lot more space around a black man striving here than in those other places. He was king at The Restaurant. First thing he ever said to me was What are you doing crossing the guest like that. Don’t ever cross the guest. I was new to The Restaurant and fine dining both, I was serving someone’s salad with the wrong hand on the wrong side. I cared about him from that instant. Wanted to please him, got Velcroed to his there’s a right way to do this. That was when The Restaurant was my life, when it was all I had, when I’d run away from her. I’d sleep till nine or ten, one big meal before the shift with the paper or a book. Alone, most always alone.

To do a good job at a table you have to care. Whatever show you’re doing, wherever else your mind is, you have to put a twist of real on the very end of it. The people are waiting for that and if you don’t pull it out they know and they
don’t like it. Cal did care, or at least he did that show better than anyone. Something in the way he leaned over people, touched their backs even though you’re not supposed to do that, it was like they were in his home and he’d say Now what you want to do is put that first bite together with all of it, get you a little tomato, a little that purple onion, and the thing that brings it all together is get you a piece of that basil. Rub it around in that bas
al
mic—mm! Mm. Tell me bout that.

He said a lot of words that way, slightly off. Mama gon kick me to the curve if we touch, he’d say to me as we messed around on my floor in the afternoon. He had a bank job in addition to The Restaurant, something one of his highrollers made up for him. What he did there was try to look lively in a beautiful suit. Something from Bachrach. He could wear any color and he could put stripes and checks and prints together and it would work because he was puffed up inside it like he was born to win. What I want to know is was that real.

In that restaurant all of us were off. Chipped. Everybody on the way to the curve. Maybe it’s the same in a law firm, a nail salon, whatever high or low. Maybe that’s just what it is to be alive, you’ve got that broken sooty piece of something lodged inside you making you veer left.

Calvin was profiled in a local newspaper when they did a piece on great Texas steakhouses. “Mr. Colson provides what he calls an ‘old-school’ dining experience, part service, part performance, and all professional. Ask for him at The Restaurant or you’ll miss out on what fine dining ought to be,” the reviewer said. Lissandri gave him a Rolex for that.
If you read up on our level of service you’ll find all kinds of uptight lists about not engaging with the guests, don’t say your name, don’t try to get call parties, don’t push anything on the menu over anything else, be formal and anonymous and perfect. Cal broke all those rules and people tipped him outrageous sums for it.