Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page A

noisy man who ran a corner store. He was the only brother who was married. He and his wife lived behind his store. Uncle Buddy and Uncle Robert were aging bachelors who lived in the home place up the road, and sometimes Daddy went to live with them, the way he was living now. Uncle Buddy had worked for the post office in Lancaster, and Uncle Robert was a farmer. They owned one of those Studebakers that looked the same whether you stared at it from the back or the front. They were Daddy’s half brothers, the children of my grandfather’s first wife. Daddy and his two sisters were the children of my grandmother, whose name was Mae but whom everyone called Mother Jones. I dreaded visits to her apartment in Lancaster, because there was nothing to do there but watch television and try to catch her parakeet whose namewas Bird and who had the run of the apartment. Bird’s favorite perch was the mirror in the bathroom, where he could lurk for hours until you’d forgotten he was there. Then he would scream and take flight, scaring the daylights out of anyone unlucky enough to be sharing the bathroom with him at the time. My grandmother was a no-nonsense woman who didn’t even pretend to know how to play with a little boy. When I got parked with her, she usually ignored me and got on with her cooking, although sometimes we watched
The Edge of Night
, her favorite soap opera. Mother Jones lived with her two unmarried sisters, Annie, a sweet spinster with a high-pitched, whispery voice like a little girl’s, and Wood, a spectral presence whose conversation amounted to endless questions: When did you get here? When are you leaving? Did you come with your mother? Are you going to eat with us? Wood’s only occupation was playing solitaire, and if she caught you playing, she told you which card to put down before you could figure it out for yourself. Grandmother said that Wood was brilliant when she was young, but that something happened to her, but I never found out what that was. Nor did I ever find out her real name. Mother refused to understand why I didn’t like my grandmother, whom she complained about incessantly but whom she professed to love whenever we argued about it, and once we spent a half an hour in the car outside my grandmother’s apartment arguing after I refused to get out of the car and go in, relenting only after my mother convinced me that I was being selfish and making a scene.
    Because the funeral was at two in the afternoon, no one had had time to eat dinner between church and the funeral service. Sowhen we got back to the house where Uncle Buddy had lived with Uncle Robert, everyone fell on the food as though it were the last meal they would ever see. I was secretly glad to see the mob in the tiny kitchen, because this meant I could postpone eating and maybe avoid it altogether. I hated eating in front of my relatives, because those occasions brought out the bully in my mother: she would make me eat anything just to prove that her boy wasn’t picky. Standing in the living room, I noted that for the first time, the house lacked the stale man smell that I had come to expect as soon as I crossed the porch and entered the front room. The aromas of food filled the neatened, tidied space: ham and salad, cold fried chicken, frosted cakes, jugs of iced tea. The curtainless windows were open because there was no air-conditioning, but someone had pulled the shades on the sunny side of the house, preserving its habitual, ambered dimness. The only other child there was one of my girl cousins who was too nice to play after a funeral and who had gone back to the kitchen and found a job pouring tea into glasses. The men took their food out to the front porch and the unpainted front steps that led down to the bare dirt yard. The women stayed back in the kitchen.
    I drifted from one group to another until Mother swooped down, filled a plate and told me to eat. I found a spot on the end of the sofa, in a dark corner away