Two or Three Things I Know for Sure by Dorothy Allison Page B

complicated.”
    “Dot!”
    “Well, you know I’m right. That brand-new teacher an’t gonna last out the month. Around here parentage is even more dangerous than politics.”
    “Why is it so dangerous?”
    “Girl, you getting too big to ask silly questions.”
    “Well, I need to make lists. I need people’s names. Where’s our family Bible?”
    “Our what? Lord. Lord.” Aunt Dot waved one hand in the air. “Girl is definitely not from around here.”
    “We don’t have a family Bible?”
    “Child, some days we don’t even have a family.”
    “Dot, don’t get started.” Mama folded the sleeves of a damp shirt in over the button front, and then, gathering from the collar, rolled the whole into a closed tube. “And you just put down what you know.”
    “What do I know? Aunt Grace said once that Granny had eleven children. I know six.”
    “Eleven?” Aunt Dot took a sip from her cup and propped her chin on her palm. “Was it eleven? I thought it was nine.”
    “Well, nine! I still only know six.”
    “There’s no need to count the dead.” Mama snapped a work shirt open and sprinkled furiously. “Put down who you know. You don’t have to put down everybody.”
    “But you’re supposed to.”
    “Dorothy.” Her expression stopped me. I knew that look. One more word and I would be in trouble.
    “Well, I don’t have Grandpa Gibson’s name.”
    Dot put her cup down noisily. “Andrew, right?”
    “Andrew James.”
    “So, Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee.”
    “Andrew James Gibson and Mattie Lee Garner. Now, that’s enough.”
    I gathered up my papers and headed out the door. From the carport, I heard Aunt Dot’s booming laugh. “What you think? Should we get a family Bible?”
    Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is just this—if we cannot name our own we are cut off at the root, our hold on our lives as fragile as seed in a wind.
     
     
     
     
     

    MY MAMA DIED AT MIDNIGHT ON A SATURDAY. My sister Anne was with her, holding her hands and trying to tell her we were on our way. My sister Wanda and I were miles away, lost in the parking garage at the Orlando airport. I had just flown in from Buffalo, shaking still with the effort of trying to make the plane go faster by sheer will.
    “We have to hurry,” Wanda told me, and gave that bark of a laugh that meant nothing was funny. We ran. We dodged tourists and baggage handlers, squalling children and panhandlers for Jesus. “Get out of the way!” I yelled at a guy in a pale blue suit.
    “No need to be rude, sister,” he said in a voice that any other day would have cut me to the quick.
    In the parking garage we got lost. Wanda glared across the rows of economy vehicles, cursing, saying, “Damn, this doesn’t look right. Damn city growing so fast. Goddammit, this doesn’t look right.”
    The elevator wasn’t working at all, and Wanda was only half sure we were in the right building. She kept shoving doors open, throwing herself into another staircase, and dragging me up another level, up three before she finally recognized the half-finished color coding.
    “There!” she yelled. “Right there.” And I saw her Ford, recognizable at a glance by the tinted windows and the fuzz-buster duct-taped to the dash, parked sideways in its slot. I laughed then—at the car, at Wanda, at the comedy of it all, Wanda hiding her fear behind outrage while I could do nothing but shake my head and follow close behind.
    After, I kept thinking that it must have been that moment when Mama reached to grab Anne’s hand for the last time, when her mouth—no longer speaking what her mind was seeing—began that soft wordless howl. Twenty minutes of howling and then silence, and death happening then like the closing of a book.

    “You mean and stubborn and completely Ruth’s daughter,” Aunt Dot had told me when I visited her years ago and would not give her the gossip about Mama that she wanted. I had made a mantra of her words. “Mean