Little Boy Blues by Malcolm Jones Page A

she could have gotten therapy. You know now you can get therapy and be just fine.”
    “What’s therapy?”
    “Like exercise. But with machines.”
    “How did it happen?”
    “What?”
    “Leenie’s strokes.” I liked this story.
    “She was staying at Aunt Mat’s, and she was upstairs and she couldn’t get to the phone. She lay there for two days before they found her.” Aunt Mat was one of those vaporous relations I had heard a lot about who had died long before I was born. She had reared my grandmother and I was never sure if she was a real aunt or just called that. I wondered if my grandmother was adopted. Aunt Mat ran a rooming house next door to where my mother had grown up in Kershaw. Aunt Mat’s house was sort of scary, because in my memory it had never had a coat of paint, and it sucked light out of the atmosphere like a black hole. I liked it, though, because it was always cool and dark in the downstairs and no one had taken the furniture away even after no one lived there. The summer I was six, my mother and I had gone to live at my grandmother’s, and my cousin and her three children had come and lived in Aunt Mat’s house because my cousin’s husband who was in the Air Force was stationed in Saudi Arabia. Aunt Mat’s house belonged to Leenie now, and she was there toothat summer, but it was big enough in the house to get away from her. Sometimes I would go upstairs to the room where she had the last stroke and try to imagine lying there for two days. The rooms upstairs were hot, right under the roof, and there were numbers still on the doors from when it was a rooming house. My cousin Billy had fallen out of one of the upstairs windows when he was a baby, and somehow landed unhurt. I knew which window that was, too, and I liked to unlatch the screen and lean out and imagine falling to the ground, an experience made all the more harrowing because down below, not three feet from Aunt Mat’s house, was a picket fence separating her property from the house on the corner. I imagined how easy it would have been to fall on the fence instead of the ground.
    “Shorty Clyburn had to climb in the window and rescue her,” Mother was saying. This was my favorite part of the Leenie story, the rescue through the window. I played the moment over and over in my head like a movie and in the process always remembered too late to ask how Shorty knew to climb in the window in the first place since Leenie couldn’t talk anymore.
    I got tired of reading and started staring through the corroded hole in the floorboard, watching the road go backward between my feet. I had long since polished off the second Coke, and now the bottles were clinking together under the seat.
    “Will you please get those bottles and do something with them,” Mother said, and the tension in her voice warned me that she was still angry. I knelt down on the floor, found the bottles and returned to my seat.
    “What do you want me to do with them?”
    “Just hang on to them. I don’t know. What on earth made you buy two drinks?”
    “I told you, one was for you.”
    “And I didn’t get a sip nairn,” she said with a wan smile. This was her way of teasing, talking like her country relatives. I looked at the bottom of the bottles to see where they came from. One was stamped Valdosta, Ga., and the other one came from a bottling plant in Greenville, S.C.
    “Buddy really loved me,” my mother said, almost to herself. “Nobody loved me like Buddy did.” I knew she meant no one else on my father’s side of the family. “I hope you never know what it feels like to be abandoned.”
    “ I love you.”
    “This world is made for couples.”
    “Like us.” On the trip down that morning, my mother had commended me for being mature lately. “You’re my little partner. My little man,” she had said.
    “I’ve worked hard at this marriage, which is more than Mack Jones can say, if he’s telling the truth. The day we moved out of Lancaster,