The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering Read Free

shook you down hard, and if your pockets were empty they made sure teeth fell out instead. I wouldn’t risk it without Faron. He was my muscle.
    Umma was my warmth. I would like to say love, but mostly she saved that for Pop. She was a wiry woman but hot, like the coils of an electric stove. In those days after our father went to Cuba, Umma did not embrace us; she coiled around us until our skin began to burn.
    She meant to make a better life for me and Faron so she enrolled at the Old Miamy School for Drugs and Doctors. She’d always been crack at sewing up Faron’s playground wounds. She could read decent well, and the clinics were so hard up for physicians they would take anyone. I believe there was also a measure of pity in their decision to accept her, though no serious person would admit to such an outmoded sentiment. Umma chose obeegy, making babies.
    When she did her rounds at the babying clinic, Umma wore a calico dress some nurse had left behind in the lockers. It was a few sizes too large, and the gathered front pockets were always weighed down with stray objects she’d collected throughout the day. This was her idea of housekeeping. When she went to sleep I would go through them looking for my books, pencils, or underpants.
    One night, when we’d been living in the Gables about four or five months, I dug through her pockets in search of Pop’s wallet. Instead, I found a canvas bundle the size of a grande burrito. The inside was carefully stitched with little flaps that contained what appeared to be medical supplies—syringes, needles, brown tinctures in plastic bags. A small square of paper fell out and I picked it up. In a cautious, cramped hand—not my mother’s—someone had written:
    YOU DONT HAVE TO.
    I have always been good at waiting. I was born to keep vigil. Umma’s shifts at the clinic ran till midnight six days a week. When the red digits of the oven clock showed twelve I would climb onto my bunk and survey the elevated stretch of Dixie Hiway. It ran so close to our tenement that you could leap across from a stairwell window on the third floor. And it was so empty, I had no trouble picking out my mother’s frail shadow as she walked the hiway home. Good Samaritans made bonfires of cottonwood and scrub pine to scare away coyotes and light the way. If you stayed clear of the median you were safe enough, but still I worried.
    It was always much past midnight when Umma’s calico dress finally appeared on the firelit roadway. She would look up and wave before vanishing around the side of our building. Faron always met her in the lobby to keep her safe from the Stairdwellers. They were a special sort of edgy after midnight, but so was Faron. He got himself stabbed in the arm once with a coat hanger.
    Sometimes Umma liked to stop at the bonfires to comfort herself with her fellow commuters, and that comfort might stretch on for hours. Some nights I’d nod off before she made it home. My eyes would swim out over the Dixie Hiway and the shadows that pressed in around its bonfires, over the ruins of Old Miamy all pink and lit up for the nighttime tourists. I’d wake up smelling wood smoke and know our mother had come home. She would bind me up in the hot wires of her arms. I would burn in the folds of her calico and fall asleep.
    *   *   *
    Me and Faron did our Vocationals in Mining. Your uncle took to the dirt like a regulation earthworm. He could crawl on his belly down seepholes with no clue where he might emerge. The earth would close around him, he said, like a big mineral hug. It made him feel like a part of something.
    Me, I felt like dinner down there. Stepping into a mineshaft was like feeding myself to a giant. Tight spaces, thin air, total darkness: what separated mining from the grave was a paycheck, and you earned almost as much dead.
    As the months wore on and I missed Pop more and more, I started playing hooky from