Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones

brought it up again. I was secretly relieved. There was something frightening about the idea of men driving cars into other cars, destroying each other as a means of winning. I did not like fights. I had enough of that at home. More than that, I was unsettled by thewords that people who knew cars used: hemi and header and gasket and cam and rocker panel and dual carbs and all that. Whenever I was around men and boys talking cars, it was like listening to a foreign language.
    I wished my father was there, but I knew better than to say that out loud. He would know what to do. Even my mother had said so many times. “I can’t do this alone,” she would say. “Every home needs a man.” Or, if I resisted going outside to play ball, “If your father were here, you would go. Your father was an excellent athlete. He could teach you how to play ball if he were here.” My father, I decided after listening to Mother, was good at all the things that I didn’t know how to do.
    “How did you and Daddy meet?” I liked asking questions when I already knew the answers, just as a means of keeping my mother talking about something besides me. So far she hadn’t caught on.
    “He saw me singing in the choir in Great Falls. I was teaching there, and he saw me. I should have listened to my daddy. You know, Randy Hinson wanted me to marry him, and I wouldn’t do it. He asked me more than once. Of course, if I’d done that, then I wouldn’t have you, would I, sugar?” This always puzzled me. Why couldn’t this Randy Hinson, whoever he was, be my father? Would I look the same? Where would they live? Would he make me play ball and eat things I didn’t like?
    “I will say this for Mack,” Mother said, “I think he truly did love Buddy. You know, Mack didn’t have much of a father, and Buddy was the closest thing to a daddy that your daddy ever had. He was a fine man.”
    “Daddy?”
    “No, honey, Buddy.”
    I waited for her to say more, and when she didn’t, I said, “I’m hungry.”
    “Didn’t you eat lunch back there at the crossroads?”
    “I had some ham.”
    “‘I had some ham,’” she mimicked. I thought I was going to get the food lecture, but all she said was, “We don’t have time to stop now.” I opened the book I’d brought and read some more about Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. The book was small, with orange covers, and it was one in the series called “Childhood of Famous Americans.” I had just gotten to the part where young Samuel learned to play the piano by watching his mother’s hands on the keyboard. This seemed like an impossible feat. I thought about asking my mother how she thought he could have done that, but that would open the door to the piano-practice lecture.
    “How did Uncle Buddy die?” I asked.
    “I told you, he had a heart attack.”
    “Like Leenie.” My oldest aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, who looked old enough to be my grandmother, had suffered two strokes years before I was born that left her paralyzed down one half of her body. She used a walker to get around and wrote all her conversation out on a pad, and if you were sitting close to her, you had to read out loud what she wrote to whomever she was “talking” to. She spent half the year living with her grown daughter and the other half with her grown son, and I hated visiting either family when she was in residence, because she hogged the TV and wouldn’t let any of us change the channel.
    “No, Leenie had a stroke.”
    “Aren’t they the same?”
    “No.” I suspected that she didn’t know herself and I was sureof it when she changed the subject. “It’s such a shame about Leenie. If they had found her sooner, she could have been cured. If they had taken her to Duke, they could have given her therapy. But they kept her in the hospital in Charlotte and they didn’t know anything there. I think Tom and Melita had something to do with that. They might as well be Christian Scientists. But