Long Division(24)

I never had a girlfriend because the last time I saw Shalaya Crump she told me that she could love me if I helped her change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.

Barely awake, I opened Long Division and read until I fell asleep.





THICK PARTS.


As soon as I stepped off the Greyhound bus in Melahatchie, Grandma hugged my neck, but I was straight zoned out. That Long Division book had me feeling weird, new weird, like I was a character in a book or video game and someone was writing or controlling all the craziness around me.

Grandma interrupted my new weird. “My baby’s still husky,” she said, and kissed both of my jaws. Then she grabbed my shoulders and took a step back. “You look so intelligent. I don’t care what none of them folks say.”

Whenever I went down to Melahatchie, I always felt younger than I was. Mainly, it was because Grandma had really never talked to me or treated me any different between the ages of five and fourteen. I had to trim the hedges, crack open walnuts, and get the okra out of the bottom of the deep freezer now just like I did when I was five years old.

I threw my stuff in the back of her Bonneville and thought about how besides being the thickest grandma in Central Mississippi, I would have bet my original wave brush that Grandma was probably the thickest, finest grandma in all of Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana. I’m not saying Grandma was perfect, either, but even the annoying stuff about Grandma, like how she was completely swinging from the scrotum sack of the Lawd, was—well, kinda…thick.

Grandma was probably six feet tall, and every part of her body and face was so thick that nothing looked thick. But her stuff was symmetrical, too. Sometimes you’d see folks with all thick parts, but half of their body weight was all up in their ass or all in that gut, or one of their eyes was way bigger than the other one, or maybe there was too much distance between their eyes and where their hairline started.

For example, my mother had this rounded, thick, mushroom-style nose and she looked like the early version of Weezy on that old Nick at Nite show, The Jeffersons. Mama looked like Weezy, but Mama’s lips were kinda… well, I hate to talk about my own mama like this, but Mama had lips like the white folks on Jersey Shore. There was no thickness or pinkish hang to Mama’s lips. You saw thin poofy lines and you saw teeth. Snake lips, I called the fat beneath her nose. I still don’t know how in the hell that happened to Mama since she came out of the vagina of someone as thick and perfect-looking as Grandma. You wouldn’t even know Grandma was six feet tall or the finest, thickest Grandma in the region until you walked right up on her.

Anyway, of all the different kinds of people in the world, Grandma was the last person I wanted to watch me act a fool at the contest. But I also knew, even though she couldn’t say it, that she was one of the only people who would know what it was like to be up there on that stage and not know if there was a difference between being right and doing wrong.

Grandma had a bag with two pork-chop sandwiches in her hands and her eyes were twitching like a hummingbird while she sat in that driver’s seat.

“Them folks is just evil,” Grandma said. She never mumbled or slurred her sentences and her voice was deep, heavier than cane syrup. “Plain devilish. You hear me?” Grandma thought the man who worked in the bus station restaurant hadn’t given her enough change back on purpose.

“Well, did you tell him how evil he is, Grandma?”

“Naw, City. No telling what that man could’ve put in our food.”

She pulled all the way out of the bus station. “You gotta be careful with them folks if you stay with me the next few days. You hear me?” I nodded. “If you learned anything after messing with them folks on that stage, should be that you don’t never know—”she looked me right in the eye.

“Never know what?” I asked her.

“How far they’ll go to get you.”

Grandma told me that we had to stop by Walmart before we went home. She said Walmart had a sale on her new favorite brand of wig, Wigs4Blax, and that she might as well get the wig today since this was her half-day off.

My grandma had three jobs. She worked as a housekeeper at the Island View Casino. She washed and ironed clothes for three white families in town. And she sold pound cake and fruit salad every other Saturday afternoon.

When we pulled into the lot of the Walmart, a green pickup truck flew past us and damn near knocked the front end off the Bonneville. Grandma stuck out her arm and secured my chest while slamming on the brakes. “Jesus give me strength,” she said. “What in the world is wrong with your children?”

It was the middle of the day, so most folks who worked hard and sweated for a living were still at work. Grandma was getting ready to park next to this orange and gray Cadillac sitting on 22-inch rims.

“Young folks ain’t got nothing better to spend that money on except long cars and crazy tags?”

“What?”

“What a nigga do in the dark will damn sure come to the light somehow.”

“Grandma?”

“Yes, baby.”

“I appreciate how it sounds when you say ‘nigga’ and I’m sorry about acting a fool at the contest.”

“Shhhh,” Grandma said and parked the car. “And leave your little brush in the car. Folks in here likely to steal everything that ain’t nailed down.”