The Corner (65 page)

Fran backs away.

“She’s my mother,” DeAndre explains.

“I understand. But we got rules.”

“See you Saturday,” Fran reminds him. “I love you.”

On visiting day, Scoogie brings DeAndre and DeRodd, showing up during lunch. Fran has held a table in the basement cafeteria for them and she lights up as the trio comes through the door.

“Hey, you!”

She embraces her brother, who tells her how proud he is and how much better she looks. She does, too: Her eyes have lost their yellow tinge; her hair is cut and styled for the first time in months. She’s even picked up a few pounds; the deep hollows in her face are a bit rounded, though not even a week and a half of steady meals can make Fran Boyd look anything but thin.

“I remember how much better I felt after comin’ in from out there,” Scoogie tells her. “Eight years ago and I don’t regret not one day.”

Fran, for once, lets it slide. Today, all things are possible, even probable.

DeRodd takes in the surroundings; his mother is all over him, wrapping her arms around his waist, holding him to her side. A counselor offers him dessert and he’s instantly absorbed in the geometry of an ice cream sandwich. She saves DeAndre for last.

“Hey, boy. Get over here.”

Assured that no one he knows will see, he leans into his mother’s embrace. Fran steps back to look, then hugs him again.

“You look so good to me.”

DeAndre fidgets.

“I mean it,” Fran says. “I’m seeing you with new eyes.”

The four of them settle down to talk for a while, with Fran extracting promises from her children that they will stay for the meeting. Scoogie begs off, saying he needs to get his car into the garage again.

“You need a new ride,” Fran tells him.

“I
been
needin’ that,” he says, getting up. “You keep on keepin’ on, Fran. You on the right road now.”

They embrace again and he leaves the threesome at the table. When DeRodd wanders off in search of a drink, Fran and DeAndre have a chance to catch up. She fills the silence with talking, with plans, with all kinds of optimism for the future.

“I’m not going back to Fayette Street,” she tells him.

“I sure won’t miss that house,” DeAndre says. “Livin’ there ain’t been no joke.”

He tells her how it’s been these last few days at the Dew Drop. More of the same old thing, he says, but now Fran shakes her head bitterly at the stories, hearing the echo of corner happenings from the other side of the fence. DeAndre catalogues the absurdity:

“Ma, I knew not to put the snacks in the kitchen, but I thought if I hide them in the bedroom, I be all right.”

But the bedroom door was kicked in. “Uncle Stevie or somebody went in there, took the cookies and Tastykake that I bought for DeRodd. I came back and everything was tore up.”

“Whaa?”

“It was messed up. After that, I used the window. I pushed the dresser against the door and left the TV on loud so it’d be like I was still in there. And don’t you know they still got me.”

“They dope fiends,” she tells him, showing her distance. “They just always that way. But I’m tellin’ you, Dre, we not going back there.”

She reaches into her purse.

“This is for you, Andre,” she says, handing him a folded-over envelope. “Don’t read it now. You read it later.”

He pockets the envelope and looks around the room. Fran can see that something else is still unsaid. DeAndre looks at his mother, then at
DeRodd, who is chasing another young boy around the tables. He looks back at Fran and pouts.

“What?” she asks. “Why you lookin’ that way.”

“Ma,” he says, and he actually manages to smile. “I need four hundert dollars. Reeka … um … Reeka pregnant.”

“What you need money for?”

“Abortion.”

Fran smiles. Tyreeka was showing two months ago; she’s been pregnant for close to six months. An abortion is an impossibility. Her son, Fran guesses, is trying to run a game.

“Andre, where in hell am I gonna get four hundred?”

And that settles it: There will be no abortion. DeAndre will be a father at sixteen, Tyreeka a mother at fourteen. Fran will be a grandmother at the ripe age of thirty-six. In truth, all three of them wanted this child. For DeAndre and Tyreeka, a baby meant validation; for Fran, the grandchild would be a part of starting over. She would mother parents and child both.

“What does Reeka say?”

“She says what I tell her.”

Fran shakes her head, smiles, lets him pretend for a moment.

“Really, what does she want?”

“She want to have the baby.”

“Well then you ain’t got a choice.”

“It’s my decision.”

“Please,” says Fran. “How many months is she?”

“She say the baby due ’round Christmas.”

“She goin’ for checkups, right? She seein’ a doctor?”

“Her aunt got that covered.”

She asks more questions, most of them dealing with prenatal logistics. Fran is on the case; this is her first grandchild, after all. She tells DeAndre to have Tyreeka call the detox pay phone.

“Boy, you gonna be a daddy.”

DeAndre smiles, stretching his arms wide.

“I can’t believe it,” Fran says.

DeRodd returns to his chair. Up at the front of the room, staff members are putting a string of tables together. A counselor asks everyone to give him their attention. Fran pushes her seat closer to DeAndre.

“Listen,” she tells him. “What they gonna say, they gonna say for you, too.”

DeAndre shrugs and slumps back as the meeting begins in the usual fashion. “All right, people, Eric is gonna lead us in the twelve steps.”

“Hey, my name is Eric and I’m a drug addict.”

“Hey, Eric,” the room chants in unison. “Keep comin’ back.”

He gives them the steps in the sing-song cadence that comes from rote memorization: “… that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable … We admitted to God, to ourselves and another human being …”

Another resident follows with the twelve traditions of Narcotics Anonymous, and by that time DeAndre is sullen and restless. This is flotsam and jetsam from someone else’s shipwreck, with as much relevance to his life as English composition or social studies.

The leader runs quickly through the list of the chapter’s business, then introduces the afternoon’s speaker. He’s stick-thin, aged beyond his years, his arms marked by old scars. His smile is open and expressive.

“… so I’m standing on the back porch and I’m saying to her that I got to come in, that I just need some food, that I got a chance for a job if I can just get something in my stomach and get myself cleaned up …”

Fran nudges DeAndre. “He’s good. He spoke once before.”

“And she believes me, right?’ Cause I’m good, right? What can I say? Ain’t no way a low-bottom dope fiend can be bad at lyin’ …”

The meeting breaks into laughter. With the NA speakers, this business of capturing the universality of the corner is as much a gift as preaching or stand-up. Some speakers—those closer in time and distance to the pain —can’t get past their personal details; the intricacies of their own disaster still leave them in awe. But others, like today’s speaker, can make the leap to common ground. Sitting here now, no one listening in the BRC basement can stand apart from a truth revealed by shared experience.

“… I mean, you all done it, too. You know you have. When you got to cry to get a blast, you cry. When you got to beg, you beg. When you got to lie, you lie, right? So I get in the house. I get in even after she told me I couldn’t come back. And while she at the stove, making me a plate of chicken—and Mama could burn some chicken—I’m creepin’. I’ve got the clock radio and I’m outta there.”

He shakes his head, laughing at the horror of it. Laughing because what the hell else can you do.

“And, people, this is my mother. This the woman who brought me
into the world and raised me up and taught me right from wrong. I am a lowbottom dope fiend.”

Even DeAndre is now showing some interest in the confessional. Fran is nodding her head, thoroughly engaged, her thoughts directed to a few dope-fiend moves of her own. For the first time in a long while, she lets in a lost memory from the days before she landed on Fayette Street, back when Gary’s salaries were still paying for the party. She remembers and wonders about the old lady at that four-way stop. The poor woman was driving some churchgoing car; Fran was in the Mercedes, pulling up to the intersection at the same moment. The woman waved Fran forward, and Fran waved back. In the time that it took the lady to wave again, Fran had made up her mind. You first, she signaled, coaxing the woman out.

Then she stepped on the gas.

The collision money on the aging luxury sedan would have been payment enough. The insurance money from the lawsuit was icing on the cake. And Fran had crowned this crudball move by jumping from her wrecked car to verbally lash the old woman, convincing the lady it was her fault.

But now, listening to the thin man on the stage, Fran conjures the memory of the old woman’s face. The entire scene comes back to her and provokes real shame.

Up on stage, the thin man is talking about sleeping in abandoned cars and breaking into houses and cheating his brother out of forty dollars. He’s laying himself bare, and Fran, in the fourth row, is mightily tempted to do the same. When he finishes, the meeting winds down. Key rings are distributed to those with one day, one week, one month, and six months clean-time. The group then gathers for the serenity prayer. Fran drags her sons in the circle, hugging them.

“Thank you all,” says the speaker as chairs are rearranged.

DeAndre stretches, yawns, looks toward the door. DeRodd wanders off to ask about a second ice cream sandwich.

“He was good,” Fran says, “real good.”

“Man, I seen him coppin’ the other day from Drac and them on Gilmor,” DeAndre deadpans.

“You a lyin’ little boy.”

DeAndre laughs. Visitation ends with friends and relatives making their good-byes and crowding the stairwell back up to the lobby. Fran gets a promise of another visit—this time with Tyreeka—and lets her children go after a long embrace.

“You got the letter?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay then. I love you.”

That afternoon, in the vestibule of the Dew Drop Inn, DeAndre pulls the envelope from his pocket and begins to read. He expected these sentiments from his mother—saw them coming at him like a runaway train—but still, the three handwritten pages allow him to hope, to believe a little bit in the things Fran is talking about. He steps into the sunlight, still reading, finding his seat on the steps without taking his eyes from the paper.

“Dear Black,” it begins.

Not DeAndre, his given name. Or Onion, the baby name he suffered through. Fran begins with the courtesy of his favorite street name, the one he wants to hear. She follows the salutation with a smiley face.

She comes out on a fine September morning in that spirit, graduating on the twenty-eighth day with all the faith of the newly converted. She looks wonderful, too—ten pounds heavier, with a French-cut hairstyle, new denims, and big hoop earrings that are a gift to her from a fellow graduate. To everyone on Fayette Street, Fran looks like someone else entirely.

She means it to be so. Walking back up Fayette to the Dew Drop, her appearance almost puts a stop to business as the touts and fiends, runners and dealers draw a bead on this strange new entity.

“Look at you, girl,” shouts Zena, Stevie’s girl. “You shinin’.”

They embrace and coo over each other long enough for the family to emerge on the steps. Stevie and his son, Kenny and Sherry—all of them heap congratulations on Fran for making the move, all offering the general sentiment that they would soon be doing the same themselves.

But Bunchie’s greeting is the most heartfelt. Stepping out of the Dew Drop, she wraps her arms around Fran, peeling back to look at her again, then holding her in a swaying embrace for a long while.

“You did good,” she says finally.

Fran is touched by the warmth, by the surprising willingness of her family to applaud her escape. She’ll be staying up on Saratoga Street with Scoogie—he isn’t happy for the boarder, but he doesn’t dare refuse and leave her at the Dew Drop. Meanwhile Fran is looking for a place of her own. She’s been asking around, reading the classifieds. She’s also got a line on a Section 8 voucher apartment in the 1500 block of Fayette.