The Last Noel by Michael Malone

thought, I sure do worry more about Kaye since I lost my poor child Deborah, because I’ve lost her sure as if I’d lowered her into the ground. And a child's a child, in their thirties, their twenties, or even a baby taken from you before you gave birth, like she’d lost two before Deborah came. A child's a child.
    Amma finished stitching the sunflower to the third apron. Well, Noni looked so pretty tonight and let's hope she has a happy time at that school dance—even if Kaye and his friend Parker put it down the way they did. Tat asked them why they weren’t going to the dance, and of course, the truth was they couldn’t have gone anyhow because they weren’t seniors andthey weren’t dating seniors, but Kaye started in on Tat about how this was no time to be dancing.
    â€œYou think they’re ‘dancing’ in Hanoi with those B-52s carpet-bombing them day and night?! You think Vietnamese children are ‘dancing’ down the roads on fire with napalm?! You think with the world blowing up I want to go boogaloo with a gym full of bubblehead crackers like Roland Turd?”
    Tat told him, “Boy, I’d boogaloo with Mrs. George Wallace I had my legs. And old George Wallace would cut in and grab his wife back, he had the use of his. And look at us both stuck in these wheelchairs. You don’t know what life's going to do to you, Kaye King.” Then Tat just wheeled himself over to the TV and turned on the news, while Kaye muttered at his back, “Life's not gonna do anything to me, old man, I’m gonna do things to life.”
    Well, Amma thought, probably he will. I’m not worrying about Kaye. She folded the finished apron and took another one from her stack. Her grandson wouldn’t be waiting on life to come smack him from behind, and even when life inevitably did, it wasn’t going to knock him over like it had his poor mama. Kaye always bounced back. He reminded her of that plastic punching bag he used to love that would pop back up at you. Bounced back and talked back and wouldn’t stop talking, that was Kaye. ’Course, he could always get you laughing sooner or later. Yolanda said that's why he’d been made night dispatcher at Austin's taxi company, young as he was. He made the drivers laugh with his voices and jokes. Plus he could always get the cars to the customer, like he had all of Moors County on a map inside his head. She wasn’t going to worry about Kaye.
    Amma heard heavy shoes come running down the stairs, young male laughter, then she felt a kiss and the brush of a moustache on the side of her neck.
    â€œStay cool, Grandma.” Kaye stood there at the opened refrigerator with his skinny school friend Parker Jones, both of them in solid black, head to toe, with big black circles of hairon their heads. Kaye pulled off the legs from the Cornish game hens left over from the supper Amma had made for Heaven's Hill. He gave two to Parker, ate two others himself.
    â€œYou turn off those lights upstairs?”
    â€œYes, ma’am.”
    â€œWell, go turn off those tree lights, too. Tat's not looking at that tree, he's looking at that fool television.”
    Kaye's dog Philly ran into the kitchen to see what the noise was about and followed Kaye back into the living room.
    Amma slapped Parker's fingers off a cake. “Leave that alone. Parker, you weren’t upstairs messing with Tat's leg box again?”
    For years Kaye's friend had had an insatiable fascination with the bones from Tatlock's amputated leg, and had loved to look at them. Parker had even borrowed the bones once to terrorize his sister into believing that he’d dug up a murdered man in their crawl space.
    â€œWe got better things to do than play with old bones,” Parker told her. “Times are changing, Grandma.”
    â€œThat so?”
    â€œYep, the black man's time has come.”
    â€œUm hum.”
    Kaye returned and spun the radio