Delicious Foods by James Hannaham Page B

afternoon he came home to find her, hair disheveled, one pink roller in, nearly passed out across the card table they used for meals. He pulled out the chair beside her to discover one of his father’s shoe trees lying sideways on the seat cushion, and the combination of these sights made him aware of everything he had pretended not to understand about his mother. In the past, he had walked in on her intensely caressing or staring at photographs of his father or objects he had owned, but this time he felt as if he had interrupted some deeply shameful activity between his mother and the shoe tree, perhaps the aftermath of a voodoo spell meant to transplant his father’s soul into the shoe tree and resurrect him. The absurdity of the situation gave Eddie the courage to ask a question so outlandish, insulting, and terrifying that every other time his tongue had tried to form it, the query had evaporated.
    Did somebody kill my dad? he asked.
    Yes, she said from under a canopy of her hair, like he’d asked if the sun rose in the east. Then, more ferociously, raising her head, she added, They killed him hard, so he would stay dead.
    Who did?
    They don’t know, Darlene said.
    It didn’t cross Eddie’s mind until several days later that she could have meant more than one group of people by the word they. By then, the subject had disappeared. He kept trying to figure out what she’d meant, but during the rest of the year, all through second grade, he couldn’t find a gentle path to bring her back to talking about his father’s death and discover what she’d had in mind. First of all, whom she’d meant by they. The police? The people in town? She’d said it like she meant the detectives who had failed to get enough evidence to convict the suspects, but she’d also said it scornfully, as if she didn’t believe that the detectives didn’t know. Or did his mother mean that she knew, but nobody would listen? His eight-year-old brain tried to unscramble the mystery, until a final possibility emerged like a poisonous toad from a bog, shaking mud off, and this option proved ugly enough to weigh as much as the truth. That they knew, but pretended not to know. That one of them might have helped or covered up the evidence.
    That summer, right before he died of pancreatic cancer, Sparkplug told him how they killed somebody they wanted to stay dead. Darlene and Eddie had traveled to the closest hospital, in Delhi, Louisiana, to pay their last respects.
    You bind his hands behind his back with twine, Sparkplug confided while Darlene used the bathroom. You break his legs. You bash him in the mouth with a tire iron so that he swallows the majority of his teeth and the fragments scatter. You stab him eighteen times. You set his body on fire in his own store. You shoot him with his own gun. I’m telling you this because you ought to know, he wheezed. And bless her heart, your mama ain’t gonna say.
    Eddie was too stunned to believe what this guy, a known oddball he hardly remembered, told him—it would take another five years to sink in.
    Sparkplug passed away, and that November Darlene and Eddie moved to Texas, into a small apartment in the Fifth Ward. Eddie had screamed and wept that they would have to leave his father there, and everything associated with him, including the Mount Hope Grocery, but his mother explained, holding in her own tears, that they could come back anytime, and they’d also leave behind many painful memories. The store’s just an empty lot now, she said.
    When they moved into the new place, she called to him from the vacant living room before her friend arrived with the rental truck full of their possessions. This will be better, she said, her voice reverberating through the space. We’ll be closer to family, I’ll be further away from temptation.
    It was not better.
    Temptation came with them. A few months after he and Darlene moved to Houston, creditors started calling. His mother, often some combination