Jude

The only thing of mine to survive the fire was a picture of Holly Hobbie Mommy made before Jude was born, her belly swollen as she stood in her sister’s kitchen. Her hair was cut in a shag like Jane Fonda’s in the picture on the Frigidaire, but frosted. Her long-sleeved oxford shirt, a man’s going-to-church-shirt, hung to the hem of a pair of cutoff jean shorts. She and my aunt Leigh were barefoot, their toes bright red jewels half-buried in the brown shag carpet.

I can still smell the sweet smoke curling above emerald ashtrays near the kitchen sink where they dipped pictures in water before lifting them to drip. When I held the ash tray to the sun, it glowed through the bubbles forever frozen in glass. My aunt Leigh brought the joint to her lips, squinting, before she passed it to Mommy. Abba sang from the dark wood of the stereo cabinet in the corner of the living room, their words drifting, sailing in the hazy air. I tried to eavesdrop on Mommy and Leigh talking in the softest parts of the songs.

“Drunk again?” That’s Leigh. “How many times does that make this week?”

Mommy lifted the picture of Holly Hobbie from a pan of water, held it until the drips slowed.

“I don’t know. I don’t keep count.”

Leigh scrubbed a piece of cedar with steel wool. She rinsed it and handed it to Mommy, who draped Holly Hobbie over the face of the wood and centered it. Leigh picked up the joint and toked again, exhaled with a long sigh. “You can move in with me. Bill won’t care a bit.”

My first memory of Bill, my aunt’s boyfriend, is holding his hand as I balanced on new, plastic roller skates at the playground near Leigh’s trailer park where she lived for a while after she moved out of the apartment. She did not live there long, because Bill was “self-made,” she always told me, “in the money.” He had inherited his dad’s tire business, then bought a funeral home. The same funeral home where daddy’s body would be laid in a closed casket, Jude in his arms. A year later, it would be filled to the ceiling with rank river water in the flood of ’77, which pulled caskets from the ground and carried them downstream along with mattresses, insulation, milk crates, dead animals. The water would fill up the first floor of Leigh’s apartment building, climb the stairs to the foot of her door, but no further. When the waters came down, they would find caskets lodged in the arms of trees.

But in this memory Daddy is still alive and Jude would be born that summer. The smells in Leigh’s apartment stayed with me for the next thirty years like a security blanket. Years later, I would seek them out, hover near them like a moth. I would sit in beauty salons, pretending to read a magazine as I’m inhaling, drowning in my past. I’d smoke pot because that smell is the closest I can get to her.

Mommy laughed. It was her polite laugh, short and subtle, not her genuine laugh that bubbled up from the belly. A macramé owl hanger with two big eyes blocked part of her face from my view. It held a potted vine that fell gracefully to the floor where it had begun to coil. She stroked the picture with a sponge, erasing the bubbles and imperfections until the surface was smooth.

“If this one’s a boy,” Mommy said, “he’ll be a fool for it.”

Holly Hobbie hung in my room, framed in the glow of the security light where bats swooped and dived for bugs. She stood in profile, holding wildflowers, her face hidden by her enormous bonnet. Her head was bowed as if she were praying-or maybe crying—like she knew what was to come.

The night Jude was born I waited with my Granny Bobbie, Daddy’s mother...