I used to hate it when Mama would clean my cuts. I’d thrash and scream as loud as I could to keep her from touching them as if I knew for certain it’d be the death of me.

“Leave me alone, you evil witch!” With my nubby fingers I’d attempt to claw at her skin.

“Hush now,” Mama would say, taking my arms into her own like a straightjacket and heaving me over to the bathroom. “There ain’t no reason to be actin’ like a wild beast.”

“I hate you!” I screamed. Andrew, my little brother, who still in the baby walker at that time, would stare wide eyed at me as I attacked our mother for no good reason. Eventually, Mama got fed up with me.

“Lois Joan, if you don’t quit all this screamin’ I swear I’m gonna amputate that leg.” Momma squatted in front of the cabinet under the sink and began digging for the rubbing alcohol. With the amount of times I’d fallen off my scooter or off of the playground, you’d think she’d have it in a place right up front where she could grab it quickly. Mama was stubborn like that. She didn’t like things to change too much.

“Mama, you hate me! You hate me! Just leave it alone!” I strained my tiny voice as I threw my head backwards. Andrew’s walker rolled over to the doorway of the bathroom.

“Now you stop that.” She moved rolls of toilet paper and bottles of cheap floor cleaner out of the way. I, meanwhile, began kicking my legs furiously, paying no heed to the stinging in my knee. “Baby, you know that I love you. But if I leave that nasty cut alone it’s gonna get infected. Look at it.”

I shook my head.

“Lois, look down at your leg.”

I knew better than to try her patience any further than my tantrum and obeyed.

“You see all that dirt in there? If I leave that, your leg’s gonna get infected and we’re gonna have to amputate. Do you want that?”

Stubbornly, I kept my eyes locked on my knee as I shook my head.

“Do you think I want that?” She said.

I didn’t answer and there was silence. Andrew, spurted out words in his baby language and bit on his fingers. I told him to shut up and Mama shot me a glance. You know, that look all mother are notorious for. She finally found the half empty bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured it out on a wadded up piece of toilet paper.

“It’ll only hurt for a little bit, I promise. Just like last time.” Her voice was low and calm. “I promise, Baby.”

I flinched. If you’d asked me back then I would’ve told I didn’t, but I most definitely cried. Mama poured some of that rubbing alcohol on my leg after she rubbed all the dirt off and blew gently on the open wound. To this day I don’t know how it works but it seems to me that all mothers are endowed with some kind of special healing breath that can take away the pain of even the worst cuts.

“Mama, you gonna cut off my leg?” I said quietly while she pressed the bandage to my knee.

“No, of course not, Baby.”

“How do you know?”
“Because I just cleaned it.”

“So you know that for sure?”

Mama smiled, pushed the hair in front of my face, and looped it behind my ears. She patted my cheek. “What I did was get all the bacteria out. If there’s no more bacteria, ain’t no way you’re gonna get an infection.”

I nodded. I was pretty sure I’d heard of bacteria before in school. They were the invisible creatures that were crawling all over everything. Momma pulled me against her full chest and ran her hand along the back of my head.

“Now you go get back to playin’.” Mama said softly. I could hear in her voice that she was smiling.

After that, I never gave Mama trouble when she needed to clean up my wounds. I still cried, and it still hurt. But I understood why she did it. Fascinated by the idea of bacteria, I started reading books about it at school. Our library was fairly small, but what I could find I devoured. As I got older, my reading comprehension increased and the books I could actually understand became more available to me. Mama always told me that when I was about eleven I had a turnaround in my personality. The wild child was suddenly tamable with a book, so long as it was a book about science that is. The couch in the living room that was pressed up to the front windows became my new favorite spot, and Andrew’s too. I spent long hours there reading cover to cover from books any other kid my age would hate to read. Andrew would sit right across from me leaning against the other arm with an action figure or playdough of some sort in his hands. When I wasn’t reading, I was watching out of the window.

“Whatcha always looking for?” Mama said one day while she was sweeping.

I shrugged and looked down at the window sill. There was a coat of dust along the old wood polish. I wondered how long it had been since somebody wiped it down.

“What’re you lookin’ all dreamy for?” Mama said incredulously, “Are you in love?” I didn’t even have to look at her to know her hand was on her hip. I blushed and hid my face in my forearm. Andrew’s high laughter was the descant to our Mama’s voice.

“Oh!” She said suddenly, “Baby, who’re you in love with?”

“No, Mama!” I shook my head vigorously and laughed. “No, I’m just watching the street!”

“Yeah, you better be ‘just watching the street’.” She went back to sweeping. “You’re too young for boys. I don’t wanna deal with your heartbreaks right now.”

I smiled to myself and looked back down at the dust on the sill. Andrew leaned his head on my ribcage while the rhythm of Mama’s broom against the floor lulled us. I drew in a deep breath and exhaled. The dust on the sill flew up in flurries. The pieces made me think of a colony of bacteria. Each individual organism moving around all by itself, but still a part of a bigger cloud.

“Mama,” I said quietly, almost as if I didn’t actually want her to hear me.

“Yes, Baby?”

I waited a moment before speaking, not actually wanting to say what I’d been thinking. “Where’d Daddy go?”

The sound of Mama’s broom stopped.

“Now, why you thinkin’ about that?”

I shrugged and followed a single piece of dust as it flipped and twirled its way back down to its fellow particles. Andrew pulled himself up onto the back off the couch and followed my eyes to the dust.

“Your daddy ain’t nothin’ for you to worry about.”

I rested my temple on my arm. “Other girls in school talk about their daddies.”

“Well, you ain’t the other girls in school.”

I removed my arm from under my head at this point and began running my finger along the layer of dust in front of me. It was coated with grime.

“Did Daddy have germs in him? Like bacteria? The bad kind. Is that why he’s gone?”

“Baby,” Mama’s voice didn’t sound like she was smiling. It was something else. Something I didn’t like to hear. “Baby, don’t talk like that.”

“Is that why he’s gone? Like a bad leg? Did you make him leave because of that?”

I turned my head and Mama wasn’t in the room anymore. I don’t know at what point during my questions she walked out. I looked at Andrew and he wouldn’t look at me.

“I didn’t mean to make her mad.” I felt the need to defend myself. Andrew wrapped his arms around me and didn’t say anything.

A couple minutes later Mama came back with a rag in her hand and started wiping down the window sill. The rims and whites of her eyes were puffy and pink. She sniffled as she wiped and said that the cleaner was bugging her allergies. I couldn’t look at Mama’s face while she cleaned. I didn’t know what to say to her so I said nothing.

There’ve been a lot of situations with Mama where I’m not sure what to say. When I was a kid and she used to take me to church all the ladies would come and pull my cheeks with their fingers, but they had long nails and it always made me uncomfortable. They’d go on about how cute I was and how chubby my cheeks were. I’d look at them funny and Mama would give me that look again.
“Now what do you say?” She’d say with fifty-percent expectation and fifty-percent threat. But I honestly had no clue what to say. How do you respond to someone whose form of a compliment is calling you a “chunk-a-munk”?

I would never get the end of it from Mama if I didn’t say thank you with my manners. For me, it was something I never understood. The dress wearing, even though she knew I would play after church. The tithing, like we had any more money to give. The luncheons, with all the ladies and their fake smiles. The church-going, like there was anybody actually listening to our prayers. All of it. It took me years before I finally made sense of anything Mama had told me or done in all the years it took me to grow. All the time it’s taken me to keep growing.

When we were kids, Andrew and I would grow side by side. He was up to my hip for a long while, until I slowed and he kept going. Then I stopped and he got taller. He’d have Mama measure my head against his just to prove he was taller. All the people at church would always go on and on about how tall and fit Andrew was, and how much of a chunk-a-munk I was. But nobody said anything the first day Mama wasn’t there with them in the pews. Nobody even smiled at me. At Andrew, they did, but not me. They knew I didn’t want it. I hadn’t been there in years. Everybody left the sanctuary like they usually did except Andrew and me. He sat there for hours with me. Not saying anything. He just breathed. But we both knew it wasn’t like Mama’s breath on our scrapes and bruises. It wasn’t the same.

“It’s getting late,” I said to Andrew, finally. The sun was well past noon. Neither of us had eaten.

“I know,” his voice wasn’t high anymore. It was soft and low like Mama’s was.

“You should go eat.”

“I’ll go when you go.”

We spoke facing the altar at the front of church. Andrew was more familiar with it. He’d never stopped going because he found something at the church that I hadn’t, the same thing Mama found there I presume.

“I think I just need some time to sit and think alone.” I looked down at my black flats.

Andrew hesitated a moment before he finally stood from the pew. He said he’d come back as soon as he was done eating and bring me back some food and we’d talk. I nodded while he hugged me from the side and avoided eye contact. The sound of his footsteps stopped a moment once he reached the door. I knew he’d turned to look at me, but I didn’t want to look back. He made me think of Mama, and I was awful angry about it. I was an adult legally, but still a child by that point—just out of college. Andrew was about to start.

“All the other kids get fathers.” I said to the empty room. “Everyone else gets to live longer than forty-nine.”

No one responded to me, but I hadn’t expected anyone to. Mama was a good woman, she was a god-fearing woman, and she was taken too soon.

“It’s not fair.” My voice was bitter and sick, “You don’t get to just take people like that. Mama was the best woman I knew and you took her. Just ripped her away and expect us to be okay with it. What’re we supposed to do now?”

Like the child on the toilet seat in the bathroom years before, I kicked my legs and ignored the stinging. My knee hit the back of the pew in front of me and a Bible fell out of the built in shelf to the floor. It lay open on the floor and I glared at it.

“Mama came to church every Sunday and more than that, and this is what you do to her?” I leaned my face into my hands and whispered, “I hate you. I hate you. You never been kind to us.”

I cursed myself for being so angry. Mama wouldn’t have wanted it. Through the open windows along the side of the church the wind blew into the sanctuary. Its breath passed over the open Bible on the floor, flipping through its pages, and over my hunched body.

“Why am I like this?” My voice was quiet, as if I didn’t want anyone to hear me. But there was no way I could’ve kept from being heard. I think some people get the notion that because God doesn’t use rubbing alcohol he must use holy water instead. But I don’t think those people remember well enough to have any recollection of how bad alcohol hurts when you’re a kid. If you’d asked me at the time, I would’ve told you I didn’t. But I cried for hours in that sanctuary, all the while the wind blew gentle and warm. By the time Andrew got back my face was sore and raw. He laughed and said my eyes looked pink and puffy like Mama’s.