“Uhm, Winona, don’t you just know how to call me from my dreams,” my mama cooed, wrappin’ Winona in her muscled yellah arms.

Yet Liliane and her mama were, how you call it, “nonplussed” by my mama, Aurelia, makin’ herself at home. Liliane and S. Bliss exchanged flowers at the breakfast table. Lili handed her mother drawings of the blossoms Bliss groomed. And then Bliss laid a flower in Lili’s palm. I ain’t lyin’. When their eyes met, Bliss giggled like a precocious child, raised her left eyebrow a bit, hugged Lili, and turned jauntily to Parnell, saying: “What a delight to the eye you are this mornin’, my sweet darlin’.” From behind some foreign newspaper, Parnell’d grunt: “That’s enough of that now, Bliss. All you sit down and eat.” And then, without trying to hide at all he blushed and startin’ eatin’ those funny-lookin’ grits with milk and sugar next to corned beef hash and eggs. See, I know for a fact can’t nobody pick their family. I think even Uncle Parnell knew it. When he raised his spoon to his mouth, full with sugary grits, the man blushed. In a room fulla women he blushed cause wasn’t no way he could be “not” related to us; no matter how he was intendin’ to eat his grits, with sugar or without!

Winona’s singin’ “Caint Nobody Do Me Like Jesus,” wiskin’ dishes off the table, callin’ all kind of mischievous spirits. To avoid the emptiness Bliss left the room with promises to return. She imagined Parnell peopled her kitchen table with his paramours and sluts, who never opened their mouths, but caroused in their silent laughter. Liliane began drawing some unknown climbin’ flowerin’ vine on the kitchen walls. I turned to my mama, who stepped on my toe and shushed me. Uncle Parnell smoothed his mustache, slowly risin’ from his seat, biddin’ his daughter “Good day.” Lili’s eyes followed the contours of yellow and coral roses as she drew them. When she looked at her father I bet she saw Magnolia stellata and Silver Jubilee roses caressing her daddy’s cheeks. That’s how she painted him, surrounded by flowers. To my mind, she was set on designin’ a world for the three of them, a whole world just for Parnell, Bliss, and Lili herself. A world where nothin’ ever became ugly or mishappen, her very best to draw her way out of what you and I gotta deal with on a day-to-day basis. Shit.

“Bye, Daddy, I’ll wait up for you, okay?” Liliane chirped.

“You don’t have to, darlin’,” Uncle Parnell apologized.

I can hear Mama mumblin’. “Now, he don’t mean one word of that, honey.”