Hook Shot (Hoops #3)(102)

God, I’m such a fool.

Here I thought Aunt Pris wanted me to come make some kind of peace—to see Mama before she passes on—but she believes I can save her.

I swallow my anger, my resentment, and decide to play along.

“I’m not sure what I can do,” I say with appropriate solemnity. “I need to see what we’re dealing with here.”

Aunt Priscilla’s eyes brighten and she nods eagerly. “Yes. See what we’re dealing with. It could be anybody behind the spell. You know she’s got a . . . a mess of wives who hate her— husbands, too, truth be told. Is there anything I can do to help? Anything you need?”

“Yes.” I frown, pretending to think long and hard. “Go to the house.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, nodding.

“And bring to me . . .”

“Yes, what do you need?” she asks, breathless with hope.

“A piece of her jewelry,” I finish, meeting her eyes for a second and then looking away.

“Jewelry?” Aunt Pris’s brows draw together. “Just any jewelry?”

“Something she loves preferably and would want to take on her . . . her journey.”

“To the afterlife?” Aunt Pris whispers, blinking back tears.

I feel bad for a moment, but that passes. If I’m to have any kind of time alone with my mother, Aunt Pris has to go.

“If it comes to that, yeah,” I say in a rush before my guilt stops me. “But I may be able to use that before it does.”

“It won’t take long.” She heads toward the door, pauses, and looks back at me. “Thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would.”

“Neither did I,” I mumble. “You better go on so you can get back with the jewelry.”

I haven’t allowed myself to look at my mother lying prone in the hospital bed, not really. Once Aunt Pris is gone, I do.

I’ve seen her twice in thirteen years, both times when death was near. Once at Ron’s gravesite, and the other at MiMi’s. And the last word she ever spoke to me was goodbye. Now, when it feels like the only thing that will make this right is her words, she can’t speak. The beep of the machines, the only sound in the room, may be the bell tolling. Death may be with us again.

If Aunt Pris looks like Iris’s sister, my mother looks like Aunt Pris’s aunt. Yet, Mama is the younger. Life has been harder on her, or maybe she just never figured out how to shed the years like Aunt Pris did. We look more alike than I realized. I get the tilt of my eyes from her, the shape of my mouth. People used to say I looked like her, and she would tilt her head, studying me like l was a stranger and say, “Really? I don’t see it.”

“How do you think that made me feel, Mama?” I ask the silent woman. “You didn’t want to look like me. You didn’t want to see the resemblance, but there is one.”

A bitter twist masquerades as a grin on my mouth. “I work in fashion now, and I wear beautiful clothes, and sometimes people actually want to take pictures of me and hang them in galleries because they think I’m pretty. You never saw that, though, did you?” I ask her. “Is that why you did it? Is that why you chose him over me? I wasn’t light enough. Pretty enough. Did you always wish you could send me back, and first chance you got, you did?”

Tears flood my throat, floating the inevitable question to my tongue.

“Why did you let him hurt me, Mama?”

I sniff, impatient with my own tears. “Why did you choose him, knowing he was rotten? Knowing he had hurt your baby girl? Why didn’t you ever come for me?”

The question is harsh and raw in the sterility of the hospital room. “Did you never miss me? Did you ever go back to that day and reconsider giving me away?”

The line of futile questions stacks up around me, going nowhere, bouncing off the walls. Aunt Pris will be back soon with whatever jewelry she thinks I can use in a spell to save my mother.

I didn’t come here to save May DuPree.

I came to save myself.

Maybe not “once and for all,” because trauma doesn’t work that way. There may not ever be a “for all” to my healing. It may always be that the smell of pressed hair sets me off. There may always be days here and there when I can’t shake the sadness, the uncertainty that comes from being abandoned and betrayed. I may see trace amounts of this in my life forever, like a bloodstain on the floor that shows pale pink, but is never again spotless.

Oh, the blood of Jesus that washed us white as snow.

The line from one of MiMi’s hymns we used to sing on Sundays when no church would have us rises up to meet my pain. She rises up to meet my pain, like she always did. Head on. Fearlessly. With wisdom. Compassion. Unconditional love. The things she taught me got me this far. She was the first to lay bandages on my wounds. Today, I close them.

“I thought I needed your words, Mama,” I say, my voice hushed. “But my friend says the words that help me more may be the ones I say to you, so here goes.”

I reach in my purse for the journal I used to write the trauma narrative Marsha guided me through. The last page I flip to is where I begin.

“You had your chance,” I read the first line in a strong voice that doesn’t waver. “You had your chance to love me unconditionally, but you chose to change me. You had your chance to protect me as a mother should, but you chose to betray me for the man who split me in two. I was a little girl before Ron raped me, and after that day, I knew things I shouldn’t know. Had questions it wasn’t time for me to ask. He stole my innocence.”