Beauty Rising Read Free Page B

of my husband’s death?” Her voice rose sharply. “Get out of here and stop this nonsense.”
    Mr. Baldwin cowered by the refrigerator. Our kitchen was so small that a twosome fighting took up nearly the whole room.
    “So, what would you like me to do?” Mr. Baldwin interjected.
    “Cremation,” I said deliberately at him.
    This lit the fuse, and the explosion sure enough followed. Mom got into my face yelling every type of obscenity – the kind I had heard all before. Too many times. They didn’t pierce as deep or cut so easily. I walked to the counter for a glass as my mother hung onto me with her verbal assault. I ignored her. What she said didn’t matter. What she felt didn’t matter. What Mr. Baldwin thought of our relationship certainly didn’t matter. I walked back to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of milk. Mr. Baldwin hovered over me from my left; my mother’s assault continued from the right. As I lifted my glass to my mouth, my mother grabbed it out of my hand and hurled it across the room. The glass sailed over the table and smashed through the kitchen window which overlooked the back porch. Glass splintered onto the table, though most of it was caught up in the thin cotton curtains. Everything stopped for a moment. My mother quieted down and backed up a step away from my ear. Mr. Baldwin rubbed his hands against his pants, fidgeting terribly. I looked at my mother. Her scowl stared at me but did not penetrate. I was remarkably calm.
    “Mom, if you would just listen to me. Dad told me last night what his wishes were. And I will honor them. I am no longer your little boy. I’m a man, Mom. I’m a man. Don’t you know how old I am?”
    A show of truth and emotion rarely heard by these four walls.
    “So you can rant and rave. You can swear at me and call me stupid. But for the first time ever, my Dad gave me a simple request – a heartfelt request. You can hate me for the rest of my life, but Dad is being cremated.”
    Mom started crying. She turned around without a word and headed for the staircase.
    “And Reverend Fox is speaking at the funeral,” I yelled after her then turned back to Mr. Baldwin who stood flatfooted but surely eager to charge out the door. “Mr. Baldwin, I’m sorry about all of this. It’s been kind of crazy around here lately. Can you make the necessary arrangements for the cremation?”
    “Sure. Yes. I’ll take care of it.”
    “And you can talk with Reverend Fox about the memorial service?”
    “I will,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Do you want the service at the funeral home?”
    “No. Why don’t we have it at the church?”

At the Police Station

    The taxi driver rescued me from the throngs of people who continually wore me down with their concentrated stares. A visibly irritated 250 pound red-headed white man garnered an obscene amount of attention. Between the little boys who would come and pull the hairs on my arms and the girls who overloaded me with ‘What your name?’, ‘hello, hello’, ‘where you fum’ I experienced in a matter of minutes a lifetime’s worth of attention that I would have received on Home Avenue in Lyndora. The girl whom I held in my grasp was long gone as was my wallet. I felt so alone, except for the annoying taxi driver. He was happy I had already prepaid him, and I actually felt happy that he was still with me.
    “Just down here is police station. You can tell them.”
    We walked through the crowd; eyes were stuck all over me. Several people grabbed my gut. Little girls giggled at me and pointed at my hair. Hawkers selling everything from joss sticks to banana leaf wrapped rice hung all over me. I was a broke foreigner. A hawker’s worst nightmare. The taxi driver kept pulling me along.
    “Where was your wallet?”
    “In my back pocket.”
    “That’s stupid. Don’t put it in your back pocket.”
    “I know.”
    “If you know, why you do?”
    Shut up I thought.
    At the end of the dirt street sat a two story, mustard