Three of us sat beside Mama’s above-ground pool, out in the wilds of Black Creek. We were beneath a Dollar-Store umbrella, and a canopy of live oaks longleafs. My mother, my kid sister and me.
Mama’s old transistor radio played Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” My nieces were splashing in the plastic-framed pool, trying to see which child could rupture a vocal cord first. It was hotter than the hinges of hell outside.
“You look good,” Mama said to me.
“So do you,” I said.
“You’ve gained a little weight since the last time I saw you.”
“Well.”
The last time I saw Mama, my wife and I were moving away from the Florida Panhandle. That night, not so long ago, Mama and I were sitting on the Choctawhatchee Bay of my youth.
It was sunset. A heron was on the shore. And I was saying goodbye to Walton County, Florida, bound for Jefferson County, Alabama. Mama didn’t cry. But I did, a little.
She’s shorter than I remember. The woman has always been five-foot-two. But I’d guess she’s more like four-eleven
now. If she were any shorter you could put her in your pocket and carry her around.
She has two brilliant white streaks of hair up front. The rest of her hair is stubbornly brunette. Because that’s what she is. Stubborn. My father once said she was the most stubborn woman he ever met. “She makes talking to a mule look easy,” is how he put it.
The radio was now playing to Conway Twitty’s “Linda On My Mind.” The nieces were engaged in a mutant version of Marco Polo, the worst game ever created by humankind.
“So what’s been going on?” Mama asked. “What have you been doing with yourself since you’ve been living in Birmingham?”
“Not much.”
“You write all the dang time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is that all you do is write?”
“Sometimes I…