“Then she can look a certain way on her own paycheck.”
“You don’t understand how it is now.”
Eleanor rose. She was sixty-five and shorter than her son by a head and she still knew how to make a grown man go still with the angle of her chin. “I understand exactly how it is now. I understood how it was in 1989. Difference is, in 1989 I didn’t have anybody’s mama to float me an eighteen-hundred-dollar costume for my insecurity.”
He left without hugging her. She did not offer. The gate clicked. The sedan reversed into the street. Eleanor went inside and opened the freezer long enough to confirm the bag was still there, frosted lightly now, a small monument to a number, and closed it again.
That evening she called Carole. They spoke for forty minutes about nothing that was truly nothing: the lemon chicken recipe, a church member’s gallstones, whether Denise’s new boyfriend was serious. Near the end Carole said, “Your mama would’ve stood at that pool same as you.”
“My mama would’ve prayed over it first.”
“You prayed,” Carole said. “You just pray in actions.”