All of the Above (6 page)
I give Marcel a hard stare. “Get outta my face, fool. I can pick out my own food.”
But I gotta admit that after all the fast food and pizzas and boxes of cereal we eat at my uncle's, maybe I forgot how good real food tastes. I take four big pieces of chicken. Ribs. Wings. Pile them on my plate like a barbecue mountain. When I pick up the ribs with my fingers, I can feel my fingertips burning, I swear. And by the time I've eaten about half the food on my plate, my whole body is breathing heat. I have to open my mouth to let out the smoke.
“Stuff's pretty good, man,” I hear myself saying to Marcel.
Maybe it's all the food, or Collins getting rid of the country music on the boom box and playing some rap, but I stay longer than I planned. I been to worse parties; let's just say that. We stand around the food table, talking about all kinds of things. Sports. Music. Movies. Collins is up-to-date on his movies, even though he doesn't have a clue about basketball. Doesn't even know who plays center for Cleveland. How could you not know that?
But when Sharice starts running her mouth about how our math club is like its own little family, I have to get up and leave. We're all sitting around eating Marcel's chocolate cake when Sharice looks up. “We're kinda like a little family, aren't we?” she says, smiling and licking frosting off her fork. “Mr. Collins is like the head of the family. And the four of us—me, Rhondell, Marcel, and James—are like the kids. And Terrell and Deandra are the second or third cousins who show up out of the blue every once in a while, right?”
Makes my skin crawl to listen to her. Who would picture our math club as a family? What's this girl thinking? That's what goes through my mind.
“You crazy,” I say, pulling my coat off the back of the chair and putting it on, because I'm not sticking around any longer for this kind of talk. “Gotta get going,” I say. “Bye.” And then I'm out the door.
I sprint past all the empty classrooms, locked up for the night. The only sound you can hear is my shoes slapping on the tiles. In my mind, I draw a picture of big footprints disappearing over a hill like they show in cartoons. The farther away I get from Sharice's idea of a Christmas party, the better I feel.
After James leaves, nobody speaks at first. I'm feeling real embarrassed for saying what I did (WHY DON'T I EVER LEARN?), but then Marcel jumps up and says, “Maybe the Prez don't want to be family with us, but here's the real question—who wants to be family with him?” And that makes everybody start laughing. Marcel reaches for the plastic cake knife and twirls it between his fingers. “Anybody want more cake to eat, because I do.…”
While we're stuffing ourselves with second pieces of cake, I ask Mr. Collins to tell us more about his family. “How old are your kids?” I ask him, through a mouthful of cake.
He takes out his wallet and shows us their pictures. “Here's Emma.” He points to a picture of a little girl with curly blond hair and a round pie face. “And that's Max,” he says. The boy in the next photograph is older, maybe ten or eleven, and has Mr. Collins’ thin face, brown hair, and serious look, no doubt about it.
“Is he good in math?”
“Terrible.” Mr. Collins smiles and shakes his head. “He's like his mother, more into music and computers and that sort of thing.”
“And what was that first picture in your wallet?” I ask.
Rhondell gives me one of her stop-being-so-nosy looks. But I can't keep from being curious about people, you know. As Mr. Collins was turning to his kids’ pictures, I couldn't help seeing the black-and-white picture of somebody's face in the front. All I wanted to know was who it was.
Before Mr. Collins turns back to the picture in his wallet, I hear him take a deep breath and let it out slowly (like maybe I shouldn't have asked to see any more). But then he holds up the picture and everybody leans closer to get a look at it. It's a small photograph of a teenager in a military uniform. His face is serious, but he's good-looking, you can tell.
“That's my brother Jerry,” Mr. Collins continues in a quiet voice. “He was a soldier in Vietnam.” And just the way he says that sentence makes your stomach suddenly turn over and you don't even have to ask the question to know that his brother is dead.
“He doesn't look that old,” I say, feeling uncomfortable. “How old was he in that picture?”
Mr. Collins closes up the photographs carefully and puts his wallet away. “Nineteen,” he answers in a soft voice. “Old enough to die in Vietnam. At least the people who sent him to war thought he was.”
“My daddy is a Vietnam vet,” Marcel adds, acting prouder than he should, I think, especially after somebody has told you that their brother died in the same war.
But Mr. Collins just replies, “Well then, you've heard a lot about it.”
“Willy Q wants me to go into the military just like him.” Marcel shakes his head. “Ain't doing that, though. No way. I'm gonna be a movie star. Or a comedian.”
I try to change the conversation to something else. I pull another question out of the air. “Did you always want to be a math teacher?” I ask Mr. Collins.
He stands up and brushes the cake crumbs off his shirt. “After my brother died, I did,” he replies.
When Marcel asks him why, Mr. Collins says it was because math had answers when life didn't. “In math you can solve problems and find solutions,” he explains. “There are rules and patterns. Like the tetrahedron.” Mr. Collins points in the direction of our half-finished one. “But when your older brother dies in a war and you're only twelve years old, there aren't any solutions to find. Somebody dying when he's nineteen years old on May fourteenth in 1969 on a hill called 937 in South Vietnam—those numbers in life don't have answers, they don't make sense, no matter how hard you try to understand them.”
There's a long, uneasy silence after he finishes talking until Marcel jumps up nervously and shouts, “Why we talking about this serious stuff, all of a sudden? Making me DE-pressed. I thought this was a CHRISTMAS party!”
“Yes, you're right, it is.” Mr. Collins puts on a big smile and walks over to the boom box. “Let's get some Christmas music on and talk about something else.”
But later, when we're loading up Mr. Collins’ car with leftover food and party stuff, I can't keep my voice from starting to tell him the story of my mom and Gram. (Maybe Marcel doesn't understand what he meant, but I do.)
“I lost my mom when she was nineteen, too,” I say as we're walking down the hallway and the other two are way back of us. “So I know what you mean about math and life.”
Then, before I can stop it, I hear my voice pouring out the whole story. How my mom went out riding in a shiny blue sports car the night she died. How I'd been sick and colicky, my Gram said, and I'd spent two solid days and nights screaming and crying until nobody wanted me anymore, least of all my mom, who was still young and not ready for a baby at all, especially not wrinkly-faced, screaming me. “Just going out for a drive with some friends and getting something to eat,” she told my Gram. “I'll be home before eight.”
But she never came home. The cops knocked on Gram's door about nine that night and asked if she had a daughter who had gone out riding with two friends in a dark blue car. When Gram said yes, they told her that the car had been racing down the road, lost control, hit a pole, and all of them were killed. All three people. Every time Gram told this story, I always blamed my mom's death on the blue car. I don't know why. (Maybe it was easier to hate a car than people.)
I tell Mr. Collins that Gram raised me until her heart began to act up. That was the phrase she always used—“act up.” It started with trouble catching her breath. I remember how I would fly up the dark wooden steps in her house, taking them two at a time, and I'd stand at the top waiting and she would go up three or four steps and have to stop to rest. “You and your young legs,” she would say, trying to smile in between coughing and fanning her face with her hand. “Not sure I can make it all the way up there to tuck you into bed tonight, honey pie.”
And then, it wasn't long before she couldn't even go up the steps. She slept on the couch in the living room wrapped in the bright-colored crocheted afghans she liked to make, and I was the only one who lived in the upstairs rooms. When I was seven years old, she had to be put in a hospital, and she died in that same hospital just about a month later.
But I leave out the other part of the story—which is the fact that I was the one who called for the ambulance that took her to the hospital in the first place. If I hadn't done that, maybe everything would have just continued on like always—me running around the upstairs rooms, playing magic castle and building forts, and Gram sleeping under her crocheted quilts downstairs.
I also don't mention the bouquet of yellow flowers either. When the nurse sat down next to me in the waiting room one morning and told me that Gram had left for heaven during the night, I was holding a bouquet of yellow daisy flowers I had planned on giving to her that day. I remember staring at those yellow flowers and hating them with all my might, because it seemed to me those flowers must have known Gram was gone and just let me go ahead and buy them anyway.
Yellow and blue had been my bad luck colors ever since.
After the whole story pours out of me like a river that can't be stopped, I feel afraid right away. I had never told anybody about my Gram and my mom before. (What is my problem?) But Mr. Collins seems to understand some of what I'm saying, I think. “That's a hard way to go through life, I know, Sharice,” he says, quickly patting one hand on my shoulder like an uncomfortable father. “I felt the same way about my brother, very much the same way. It isn't easy—still isn't easy.”
I know this sounds like a strange Christmas party, but to tell you the truth, it was a really good time. When I walked down the street to the bus stop after the party was over, I felt lighter. My mind was full of Christmas songs, and chocolate cake, and red and green streamers. And for the first time I had told somebody the story of my mom and Gram, and I felt better about that, too.
(I should have known that the feeling wouldn't last long.)
Nobody eats barbecue in January. That's the truth.
It's teeth-chattering, spit-freezing weather. Me and Willy Q huddle in the back room. Try not to freeze to death from cold and boredom. Parking lot covered in about a foot of snow. Order window jammed shut. If anybody comes up to order—which almost nobody does—I gotta put on my coat, push my shoulder into the side door to get it to open against the snowdrifts, go around the building, and take their order. I always give them my What-Kind-of-Crazy-Person-Would-Want-Barbecue-When-It's-Ten-Below look.
You poor kid, they usually say. Does your boss make you come out here and take orders without any hat or gloves? Yep, I always nod, while my fingers turn into blue icicles writing down their order. Maybe they won't come back again, I figure. Child abuse, you know.
Willy Q spends most of the day hunched over on his stool, squinting at the little black-and-white TV on the counter. He watches all the talk shows and worries about how much money we aren't making. “Pack your bags, Marcel,” he'll tell me about every half hour. “I hear them coming to evict us.” Worst month in all the years he's been doing business, he says.
Always been the worst month. Every January. Don't say that to Willy Q, though. Ever since that conversation in math club about Mr. Collins’ brother dying in Vietnam, I've been trying to be nicer around him. That conversation in math club got me thinking: No Willy Q. No me.
Maybe I'm trying to show him I'm glad he kept himself alive in Vietnam, so I could be alive, too. I don't know.
“How about making up a new sauce?” I say on one no-customer afternoon.
Willy Q's eyes flicker from the TV to me. “What's wrong with the sauces we got?”
I shrug my shoulders. “Just trying to think of something new,” I tell him.
Willy Q snorts. “We don't need new, we need sales.”
He goes back to watching TV and I go back to doing a half-finished crossword from an old newspaper I found sitting on top of the meat freezer.
But it isn't long before Willy Q turns toward me again. “What kinda sauce were you thinking of?”
I tell him we need a winter flavor. Nobody wants Tar in the Summertime in January. Can't even see tar. Or blacktop. Or anything but snow in January.
Willy Q snaps his fingers. “Snow in January Sauce. That's it.”
The rest of the afternoon, me and Willy Q make a mess of the back kitchen, trying to cook up a winter barbecue sauce that's white. We pull out just about every bowl in the place and mix together all kinds of crazy ingredients. Willy Q starts pulling stuff off the shelves and out of the refrigerator, left and right. Mayonnaise. White vinegar. Milk. Cream of tartar. Even a handful of snow.
Man, that's awful, we laugh and choke and cough, trying a taste of everything. A few times we nearly fall over, laughing so hard. When I spit tartar and mayo sauce all over my shirt, Willy Q has to stop for air and wipe the tears out of his eyes.
We never do get a good Snow in January Sauce made. But like Willy Q says, it don't matter. Least it keeps us from freezing to death. Or going crazy.