A Different Blue(26)

I had asked Jimmy once what my mother's name was. He had said he didn't know. He said I had

called her Mama, like most two-year-olds do. It sounds unbelievable. But I was just a kid,

accepting and unsuspicious. Jimmy had a little black and white TV with rabbit ears that I

watched in the trailer. It picked up whatever the local PBS station was, and that was about it.

That was my exposure to the outside world. Sesame Street, Arthur, and the Antiques Roadshow. I

didn't understand the nature of relations between men and women. I knew nothing of babies.

Babies were hatched, delivered by storks, purchased at the hospitals. I had no concept that my

father not knowing my mother's name was beyond odd.

“I called her Mama.”

The lady's eyes squinted, and she got a meanish look on her face. “You know that's not what I

meant. Surely your father knew her name and would have told you.”

“No. He didn't. He didn't know her very well. She just left me with him one day and split. Then

she died.”

“So they were never married?”

“Nope.”

“Why do you call him Jimmy and not Dad?”

“I don't know. I guess he just wasn't that kinda dad. Sometimes I called him Dad. But mostly he

was just Jimmy.”

“Do you know your aunt?”

“I have an aunt?”

“Cheryl Sheevers. It's her address listed on your father's information. She's your father's

half-sister.”

“Cheryl?” Memories rose up. An apartment. We'd been there a couple of times. Never stayed

long. I usually waited in the truck. The one time I'd seen Cheryl, I had been sick. Jimmy had

been worried and brought me to her apartment. She got me some medicine . . . antibiotics, she

had called them.

“I don't know her very well,” I offered.

The lady sighed and laid down her pen. She ran her fingers through her hair. She needed to stop

doing that. Her hair was all fuzzy and starting to stand on end. I almost offered to braid it

for her. I was a good braider. But I didn't think she would let me, so I was quiet.

[page]“No birth certificate, no immunization record . . . no school records . . . what am I

supposed to do with this? It's like freakin' baby Moses, I swear.” The lady was mumbling to

herself, the way Jimmy did sometimes when he was making a list for the store.

I told the social worker that Jimmy had some family on a reservation in Oklahoma but that they

didn't know me. It turned out I was right. Social services tracked them down. They didn't know

anything about me and didn't want anything to do with me. That was okay with me. Oklahoma was

very far away, and I needed to be close by when they found Jimmy. The cops interviewed Cheryl.

She told me later that they “grilled her.” Cheryl lived in Boulder City, not far from where I

was staying in the foster home. And amazingly enough, Cheryl said she would take me in.

Her name wasn't Echohawk. It was Sheevers, but I guess that didn't matter. She didn't really

look like Jimmy, either. Her skin wasn't as brown and her hair was dyed in various shades of

blonde. She wore so much makeup it was hard to tell what she really looked like beneath the

layers. The first time I met her, I squinted at her, trying to see the “real her,” the way

Jimmy had taught me to do with wood, picturing something beautiful beneath the crusty exterior.