Blood Relations by Chris Lynch

weakly. “I’m lookin’ for Toy, remember?”
    “Oh,” she said, and kept on stirring. “It’s just that, you weren’t here last Saturday. Or the Saturday before. Or any of the other Saturdays. And the only other time I ever saw you, you seemed a little banged up and freaky.”
    I thought of three different things to say, none of which really answered her. “Should I go?” is what finally came out.
    “Oh, but there was that other time,” she said, walking toward me with the hot pan in her hand. She smiled shyly, slyly. “You did come here that one other time, didn’t you?”
    I swiveled side to side to side to side in my chair. Couldn’t get that image out of my head now, of the first time I saw her, on the couch with her big old hairy husband and that other woman. Couldn’t get the image out. She’d planted it back in my head just like that and I couldn’t get it to stop playing over and over again. Didn’t totally want to get it out, to tell the truth. Her back. Her long, smooth, S-curved red-brown back. If she wasn’t here, in front of me, I could love that. But it was making me squirm now.
    She pulled down two mismatched mugs from a tree in the middle of the table, held the pan high, and poured. She didn’t comment on my long squiggly silence. Then she let me off the line. “But anyway, most of the time, is my point, most of the time you seem to show here when you’re sort of limping. You limping now?”
    “No,” I said indignantly. I straightened up, stopped fidgeting in my seat, and grabbed my mug.
    Felina picked up her mug too, took a sip. She winced, held the sip in her mouth, ran and spat it in the sink. “Don’t drink that,” she said, coming back to swipe my cup away. “I’m sorry. That was old stuff. I’m sorry. I have something else. I have these little packets, instant, but flavored, you know, vanilla, mocha. Came in the Sunday paper. I’m sorry.”
    It seemed like some really big thing to her, that she gave me bad coffee. Like she was in trouble now or something. She hurried to put on the kettle and tear open the foil pouches of instant coffee.
    “It’s not a big deal,” I said. “I don’t usually even have coffee. Probably I would have liked it just fine.”
    “You’re a good boy,” she said.
    When finally she sat at the table across from me, I got a chance to study her face. It wasn’t an old face. It had a lot of deep lines in it, and the skin around her eyes was a little gray, but still, it wasn’t an old face. It wasn’t, to me, a mother face.
    “I don’t think I’ll buy this coffee,” she said, sniffing and stirring. “It’s weak.” Then she looked up, looked at me looking at her. “Thirty-three,” she said.
    “What?” I got nervous and started looking down into my own cup. “Nah, I think it’s fine. I’d buy it. Though I don’t really know much—”
    “I’m thirty-three.”
    “I didn’t ask.”
    “No, but you’re looking. And you’re thinking. So there it is for you. I’m thirty-three, Angel is seventeen. You want me to do the math for you?”
    I shook my head and sipped my coffee.
    Felina pushed her coffee away with a frown, then waited. She was waiting for me to say something but nothing was coming to me. Except that vision of her on the couch again, but I didn’t want to talk about that .
    “I forget, did you ever tell me why you are here?” she asked, folding her arms.
    “Ya, I was here for Toy, but he’s not here so I should go. I have to get a haircut, I just remembered.” And I was happy to remember, because I was getting nervous as a cat, though I didn’t know why. I gulped down the coffee and started bowing and stumblebumming out of the room. “Thanks. Thank you. Tell Toy—”
    “I could cut your hair.”
    Thrilled and scared at the same time, it came out like this: “Hummina hummina huh?”
    She smiled a big wide, bright-white toothy smile. “I never cut a red before. I used to work in a salon. I’d love it, and save