If You Want Me to Stay by Michael Parker

noises turned magically into a tight Muscle Shoals rhythm section backing up Aretha, the smell of exhaust and garbage and spilled beer and something slightly sulfurous which I took to be whatever body of water my mama was living on. Aretha singing “You Send Me.” Darling you do, you do, do. She sent me on down to street toward the Promise Land to find my mama. Babies say mama. No
d
. I was hungry again. Also bone tired. My feet swole up in my Adidas. I’m sorry Carter. I loved you but I favored Tank. If Tank was the favored why did I leave him with Angie? Let’s say that like she claimed she had none of my daddy in her. That left only my mama’s blood in her veins, my mama who had run off and left her boys in the hands of a man prone to flat-out neglect. That meant Angie herself was going to run off. She’d leave Tank with some giant of a man name of Termite.Or to fend for himself in a house trailer with beach roaches I knew to be the size of blue crabs. Tank would be one of those kids you read about discovered by a neighbor fending for themselves after having been abandoned by all those put on this earth to tend to his welfare. That would be me. What had I done? Ain’t no way that was going to happen because if I went around assuming the apple don’t fall far from the tree in the case of my sister, foul-mouthed inheritor of my mama’s tendency to run off, what then did that say about my own future?
    The idea of having to plan my baby steps within my daddy’s limits sent me staggering. Ants in my head tunneling their bad bad thoughts through the sand, visible to passersby and porch sitters as my flesh was transparent, they could see my brain. You try to hide something and the more you try to hide the more everyone notices. I staggered down that street like a blind man. Aretha sang “Amazing Grace.” She sang the ever-loving hell out of a wretch like me. The apartments fell away to a block of low storefronts. From one I heard the dim rumble of drum and bass and then a tinny organ rising out of the beat. A large woman, black and sharply dressed, sidestepped up onto the curb from a high-idling Buick.
    â€œCan you show me the way to the Promise Land?” I cried out.
    â€œLord God, child, come right along here,” she said. She took my hand and I followed. Was she not the same woman back home in Trent who had tried to help Tank when I pushed his obstinate ass out of the pickup at the laundry so Icould steal the very shirt I wore on my back? She showed up places to save us. Whenever we most needed her. If people love you and you’re in trouble that trouble rumbles in their stomach. She had changed her church hat and she had maybe put on a few pounds but she was still wearing those shiny high heels. Plus she knew where the Promise Land was.
    â€œI’m trying to find my mama.”
    â€œYou getting ready to meet your Heavenly Father,” she said.
    We got closer to the music. She pushed open the door to a storefront with blacked-out plate-glass windows and we were right up inside it, that music.
    Or else the music was inside of us. If you were lucky enough to hear it it never left you, which was why those people without it (like my sister, who could give a spit what was on the radio and never seemed to care about my daddy’s records which was why she had to leave, why she was maybe on the money when she suggested she was not really our sister) couldn’t just up and let it in their hearts. Aretha strayed, according to my daddy she had some hard times, but she never really left the church. She was at heart always a gospel singer. About Jesus I don’t think so but how could you not know how deeply my daddy’s music sprung right up out of the church? You could hear it in those high notes Aretha nailed, a rapturous spirit pouring out of her. It would touch you, too, if you let it. You didn’t need to be, like Aretha, a preacher’s daughter. You