Whenever I get together to have lunch with my sister Pris, she’ll bring up my husband Dicky, me, Dicky’s ghosts. Then she’ll bring up daddy, because daddy had ghosts the way Dicky has ghosts, and that’s supposed to mean more about me than the two of them.
We’ve just gotten good into happy hour when Pris says: “Remember daddy and his cold water ghost? The day the ghost water in daddy’s bones told him to leave the site? Get in his truck? Go?”
She sips her half-priced margarita then goes on. “Ghost told daddy there was something he needed to see, and when he didn’t get up right away? The cold water ghost moved him for himself! Shoved him into his truck, turned the engine and drove him home!”
I remember the next part without Pris’s nudging. The part where we were what our daddy called Irish twins, eight ponytails between us, left home with our mother for the length of summer break.
We’d been unsupervised for the most part. Folded into the humidity of our den, coarse carpet rubbing ash into our palms and knees, nothing but a marathon of Barbie playing before us.
We’d occupy the kitchen and crunch bags of Top Ramen between our skinny fingers, pour in the seasonings and eat them raw like chips. We’d wade the wet ditch behind our home, me and Pris catching baby toads just to see how far into the air we could toss them.
If one of us had to pee, we’d roll down our panties and squat right there in the ditch, as the only bathroom was upstairs where both Pris and I knew not to go. Not ‘til mama said.
The day daddy came home early, Pris and I had been at the kitchen sink running tap water into rubber balloons. Whether from boredom or curiosity, we’d twisted the balloons shut, shoved them beneath our tops practicing the women’s bodies we’d wished on dandelion dust to someday have.
I’d heard the doorknob twist first. Smelt the heavy must of plaster, working men and deep earth push through the kitchen, right before eying the source. Then it was daddy. Shoving past us and our balloon breasts. Mounting two steps at a time, heeling down the hallway towards the closed door of his and mama’s bedroom.
We hadn’t realized we’d been following him. Not until the bedroom door swung open, when all we could see behind our daddy’s big body were the whites of our mother’s feet, tangled up in Man-monster.
Later in the night, me and Pris heard our parents talking about Man-monster. Mama spoke calmly, matter-of-factly, the same way Pris started speaking to me a year later when she actually grew boobs; when all the ideas I had for fun became dumb or boring.
Daddy sounded more exhausted than angry, said, “I don’t care about him. I care about you. Keep it to yourself, Lynette. Please. I can’t see it.”
Back then, I thought the whole world might unzip-daddy seeing mama and Man-monster together in their bed- and if not the whole world, at least my daddy.
When he didn’t, I did. A lifetime of shame hinged onto the word please, onto the crooked-moon way my daddy let it leave his mouth, break apart at my mother’s feet.
“Remember what happened after mama packed her things and left?” Pris says, “Daddy didn’t speak for a whole three months.”
I want the subject to change. “What I remember is your water balloon titty falling out and bursting on daddy’s work boots. Whose idea was that anyways?”
Pris covers her mouth and laughs, “It was yours.”
I know it was, but I say, “Like hell!”
“It was!” Pris says. She focuses on her cuticles, “The same way calling Mister Dynasus Man-monster was your idea. Same as calling daddy’s intuition, ghosts.”
After we’re nostalgic, after we’re sad and good and drunk off too many margaritas, Pris lets the conversation ease into simpler things: trash TV and okra stew recipes.
Eventually we’ll grow quiet with the mundane. Hitch the end of our conversation to unfinished work, laundry, an overdue oil change.
When we hug each other bye, Pris keeps her hands on my shoulders longer than what feels normal, and I know like the hush before rain what’s coming.
She eyes me strong and deep and says, “Has it started back up, Shay? That mess between you and Erick?” And I don’t know how she knows, other than when it’s on with me and Erick, I look different. Messy hair. Too much depth behind my eyes.
It’s hard for me to lie to Pris, because after our mother was long-gone she’d braid tame into my hair; told me how I wasn’t dying at thirteen when that burgundy rose showed up in the cotton soft of my panties, threatening me with a new life I could not yet understand.
“We were,” I say, “we were. But that’s all over now. I promise you, Pris. It’s over.”
Pris is nearly slurring, “Even with all his stuff, you’ve still got a good man in Dicky.”
I nod, “I know,” I say, “I do.”
“And I don’t know what it is with you and mama.”
“I’d pay someone to tell me.”
“Why y’all gotta set fire to every good thing that comes your way.”
I think Pris might start crying. Which means I might start crying. And that’s the last thing in the middle of this restaurant I want to happen.
“I’m cutting it off tonight, Pris,” I say, because I will say anything to make and keep good with Priscilla.
Pris shakes her head, and I wonder if she meant to nod- if the shaking was something of a Freudian slip. Pris says, “Yeah. You just go and do that.”
And I promise God to her that I will.
*
Inside of my car, I tug my seatbelt across my chest and text Dicky asking what he wants for dinner. He says a Stoffer’s lasagna, and I tell him okay, but that I’ll have to stop by the store to get it and that I’ll be home right after.
There are seven Walmart’s spread about the three cities on highways 85 and 138, and I can get to any of them from me and Pris’s favorite Mexican spot in a matter of minutes.
I choose the one off Hutcheson, where the buggy wheels spin and twist manically beneath the dead weight of too many frozen foods. And there are but three open checkout lanes where ropes of tired people thumb through Ebony Magazine, pop quiet onto the bare thighs of their toddlers, begging for candy, sleep, mother’s breasts.
Here, they are almost always out of Stoffer’s lasagna. Here, I do not bother looking for it. I park, not in the front lot, but in the back amongst the blue and gold freight trucks. They ease backwards into the opened storage unit, where Erick emerges-hands gloved, a clipboard tight beneath his underarm-set to manage their unpacking.
When he sees my car, there is a quick grin of recognition, something of relief and pride curling up his lip.
I can remember when Erick first got this job. When I was still cashiering and he was a smooth faced twenty one to my twenty nine, his only responsibility- to snuff out the produce that had ripened past its prime.
He would go from kiosk to kiosk pressing his thumbs against fruit flesh, bruising them past the point of redemption, then, as protocol would have it, rearranging them back into their bins, manipulating them frontwards where unvigilant customers picked the rotten fruit, took them home.
It was easier with him back then, the stakes of our fucking as malleable and unconcerning as his produce-boy position.
Now, Erick is manager and his expectations match the title. There’s been talk of a joint savings account. A home on the Eastside he’s had his eye on. Erick leans into the employee beside him, who nods then disappears. Then, he is looking at me, and he is coming towards me, pulling off gloves with the corners of his teeth, his clipboard tucked beneath his arm, until it is not, until it clanks headily against the concrete and I forearm my door wide open, and there is impact, and heat, and I am stumbling over boxes, broken flat and stacked up beside us, and I am up against the building’s hard brick, my thick leg wrapped tightly around Erick’s waist.
Erick palms my jawline, swallows my mouth, slides heat up the length of my thigh, then between them, spreading me as thin as new honey until I am what I came here to be: a body. Only a body. So full of him I am empty to myself. And in this moment I think, there are no men with ghosts. There are no Man-monsters. That’s what me and Pris have called them because those have been easier to say than the things that actually were, than the things that still are.
“Please,” I say against his neck. “Please. Please. Please.”
Once we’re finished, there is breathing. Backing away from one another. The sound of Erick’s belt buckle shimmying up his hips, as sobering as the realities we’ll return to.
I palm my weight against the wall, wiping Erick from my mouth, my neck, my breasts.
I think, Dicky will be resting on the sofa when I get home. Work boots at the foot of the recliner. Quiet with the TV barely above a whisper. I think, he should have salad with his lasagna.