Louisa Meets Bear Read Free Page A

volume with beauty and delicacy delegated to her almond eyes and bow lips. She’s so young , my mother remembered having thought. And yet, the girl with her lushness, her full body and taut skin, seemed to my mother more fecund, a closer replica of Nature’s Madonna than herself.
    My mother extended her hand. Should she introduce herself by her last name or her first? Uncertain, she used both. “You must be Jackie,” she added.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œAnd this must be Brandon.”
    â€œThat’s the little bugger.”
    My mother leaned down to coo at the baby. Yellow crust rimmed his nose. The baby looked away, uninterested in my mother’s feeble sounds.
    Jackie led my mother in and motioned her toward a brown plaid couch with tufts of foam sticking out through the fabric. My mother caught herself about to dust off the spot where she would sit.
    Jackie lowered herself into a metal folding chair facing the couch. From the back of the apartment, my mother could hear music like she’d once heard in a nightclub on a trip with my father to a hotel in San Juan. The toddler carried her bag of Fritos over to my mother and began dropping the chips one by one into my mother’s canvas tote.
    â€œDenise, you stop that or you’ll get a smack,” Jackie said. The child kept on with her game. My mother reached down and lifted the tote onto the couch. She touched the little girl’s arm, and then fished around in the bag until she found her keys with the fuzzy animal ring. (You’d given it to me for my birthday, my mother told me. That was when you still thought that if you liked something, I would too.)
    The child picked up the key ring and wandered over to show it to her mother. Brandon had started to cry, and Jackie put a bottle in his mouth. Denise yanked on her mother’s pant leg.
    Jackie jerked her leg back. “Girl, you been getting on my nerves all morning.”
    Now Denise was crying. Feeling somehow responsible—really, she thought, the only adult in the room—my mother leaned forward and beckoned to the little girl. “Come, you can sit with me. Mommy’s busy with Brandon.”
    Denise next to her, my mother took out a legal pad from the tote. Folded into the pad was a sheet titled “Family Relations: Interview Assignment.” My mother glanced over the list of questions she’d so carefully reviewed the night before: Who do you consider to be the members of your family? With whom do you discuss your problems? Who do you turn to when there’s an emergency?
    Brandon had stopped sucking. His head rested now on Jackie’s shoulder. She reached into her pocket for a cigarette pack.
    â€œBefore we begin,” my mother asked, “do you have any questions?”
    Jackie lit a cigarette and inhaled. For a second she closed her eyes and an expression of calm passed over her face. “Yeah, who’s gonna see what I say?”
    â€œNo one. I mean, no one outside my class.”
    â€œMy caseworker ain’t going to see this?”
    â€œNo. This is for my educational benefit only.”
    â€œYou mean like homework.”
    â€œYes. It’s one of my assignments.”
    Jackie leaned back in the folding chair so that her shoulder blades rested against the metal back and her legs, crossed at the ankles, stretched in front. Brandon lay belly-down on top of her. “Just the Welfare thinks that my gram watches the babies. She does a lot, but like today and some mornings she cleans this lady’s house.”
    From the casework report, my mother had learned that Jackie, her two sisters, and her brother were raised by their mother’s mother, Faith, after their own mother had disappeared. Now this gram at fifty-two had a third generation of kids in her home. “So, who watches the children?” my mother asked.
    â€œI do, mostly. Or when I was going to school, I’d leave them with the girl downstairs.”
    My