Page 25 - Vol. V #6

trees, slow and ridiculous as sloths. They were
and their only daughter Deborah was living with
a black man and they didn’t want kids, which,
as Delmas and Lil agreed, was just as well; it wouldn’t be fair to the kids, the world being the way it is. “Isn’t our family just the Rainbow Peo- ple,” Lillian once said with a bemused smile, on one of the rare occasions when everyone was vis- iting at the same time. Her daughter took it wrong and it turned into this big fight. When it got out of hand, Delmas yelled, “While you are in my house, you will treat your mother with due respect.” Deb- orah had responded in a flat, measured tone: “Due is the key word in that sentence.”
both athletes once.
~
~
Sandy’s boy leaves town suddenly before finish- ing the porch, takes what they’ve paid him and bolts. None of the grandkids gets hurt on the porch though, because none of them come to the house. All three of their children come at one time or another during Lil’s illness, but the grand- kids are too wrapped up in their schools and ex- tracurricular activities. It’s a different time. Their daughter Deborah, who doesn’t have children, eventually takes an emergency leave from her job and comes to stay for the long haul, except Lil- lian surprises them all, dies less than a week after Deborah settles in.
After they’d gone Lil had cried, “Why do they hate us?”
The morning before Lil’s funeral, Delmas sits on a bench at their nine-foot-long dining room table, facing the picture window. The front yard slopes down to the street; it is still dark, and a deer steps through the line of fir trees along the Chenault’s yard.
Now all three children were in town for Lil’s fu- neral. They’d all brought their families, or whatev- er they call their living arrangements—except the two grandkids who stayed back east with Betsy’s Chinese parents—but none of them were stay-
ing at the house with Delmas; they all got hotel rooms in the city, no doubt all went out for drinks together after the wake last night to complain about Delmas. He’d tried to give them his banjo and mandolin and they’d looked at one another; nobody wanted his instruments. Delmas had once been in a bluegrass band, had played banjo, real three-finger picking, not the banjo bullshit popu- lar now. None of Delmas’s grandkids play music; they walk around tapping and swiping at their little screens, wires hanging out of their ears.
Lil had a local guy build this table and benches. Admiring it after the guy had put it together, tak- en his check and gone, she had said, “You could fit six kids per bench.” They only had two grandkids at the time. The noisy crowd around her dining room table never materialized. Their children moved back east and after a few years stopped visiting even at Christmas. It was only their eldest, Aaron, and his Chinese wife who chose to have kids, and then only the two. The first time Aaron had shown them a picture of his wife, whose name was a very un-Chinese Betsy, Lil had said, “Oh, is she a dark girl?” Aaron had gotten all in a huff, but it was a reasonable question. The photo was on his phone, was dark itself, and her skin is darker than some Chinese people’s skin.
The deer makes its way across the front yard, nos- ing for hickory nuts, stepping gingerly like Lillian would, across the frozen driveway in her heels. Delmas sits in the dark. The deer is backlit by the orange streetlight at the bottom of their driveway.
~
Their other son Joshua had decided he was gay,
The deer’s head stays down, its jaw churning silently. The heater kicks on downstairs, and a few
Delmas had no answer.
“Bop,” Delmas says at a conversational level.
long seconds later tepid air whispers out of the
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