“Come give us a las’ kiss,” she called my way. “I don’t care who you are, Sutie sure do miss getting regular sugar.” She leaned forward, forgetting she’d just snatched and hurt me. She angled out now into daylight—a face like some old turtle’s as it flexes frontward from its Stone Age shell.

I took one extra breath then bent toward her. I kissed the smoothest skin my mouth had ever touched. Such skin must contain more lanolin than any white lady’s. Compared to her, my mom was all-over made of sandpaper. My mouth stayed there two/three beats longer than planned. And, suspended, I seemed to enter a crackling zone of thought or electricity around this blind gourd-sized skull. It was the strangest thing, as if her head were some radio transmitter tuned to a station where static was about to clarify toward being steady band-music, but not quite yet.

“Sutie, they still delivering such stuff as I send?,” Clyde already stood behind me, squinting in her brilliant muddy yard. “They bringing you your food right steady?”

She waved us off, “I ain’t ever done less work and et more biscuits. Sutie’d feel bad if she could half-remember to.” Then she gave us a sucked-in laugh, fond and half familiar. “Now don’t you boys be strangers,” Auntie called last thing.

Leaving, still tasting the healthful iron of my own blood, I turned. She sat rocking, her hand lifted with goodbye. And I—helpless not to—soon waved back through our car’s rear window. Her patched shanty gleamed bright as any bottle cap.

“She can’t see you, baby,” he said, kind. “I know,” I told him, feeling strangely as happy as I was confused. My hand still flap-flapped toward the porch. “But knowing her,” I said, “she can probably feel it. She’s mad at me, Dad. I don’t know why. I never did one thing to her. But I tried not to let her be just mad. I think, down deep, Sutie still likes me some.” I said this, simple. Overreaching myself only partly to please him. But Dad grew quite strict-looking. He seemed angry with some feeling I could only guess at.

“You’re mine,” he said in a new hard tone. “She loves you cause she’s mine and you’re mine, too.—Mighty small club, hunh?”

He spoke again only when we reached the first mended asphalt road, where white-owned property began.

“Anybody present like a three-scoop Dairy Queen special?”

We arrived home even later than usual.

We never mentioned our side trip to Mom, much less to each other. Not ever once again.

•  •  •

We are getting to the Sunday when I killed him. If I seem to drag my feet to slow that some, forgive me. I was such a trusting little bastard. I just didn’t know. You can maybe see it coming. But I? was eight. And couldn’t stand to know the truth quite yet.