Page 33 of Bounced!

“You can’t buy a baby.”

“You can buy everything now. They deliver groceries. I bet Amazon would deliver a baby if you did that Prime thing.”

There was a clatter on her end.

A cabinet.

A spoon.

Three things happening at once, the way three things were always happening around Vernell.

Then the clatter stopped.

All of it stopped, the cabinets and the spoon and the saucer, the whole bright racket of her going quiet at once, which she almost never did, which meant whatever was coming she meant all the way down.

“Dante.”

“Ma’am?”

“I know you’re a big, strong man now.” Her voice had gone soft and low and certain, the voice from under all the noise, the one she used maybe twice a year and never wasted. “You’re grown and taking care of everybody else like you always did, like you did before you were even big enough to . . . I know that’s what you’re doing.”

“Mama—”

“Son, please, let me finish. You might be a big, strong man, but you’re still my baby boy. Don’t you forget that, not ever. These arms are always going to wrap around you, no matter how big you get, no matter how far off you go, no matter what. You hear me?” She took a breath. “You know that, baby boy? Don’t you?”

I sat there in my quiet kitchen with my coffee going cold and my starved-coat-rack of a dog against my foot. I was six-two and thirty-nine years old and made up mostly of things I didn’t say. For the longest second ever in history, everything I could’ve said caught in my throat.

“I know it, Mama.”

“Say it back.”

“I know it.”

“All of it.”

“I’m still your baby,” I said to my kitchen, to the photograph by the door of her mid-laugh, to nobody and everybody and the tears clouding all of it. “You’ve got me. No matter what.”

“That’s right. I love you more than anything in this world, Dante, even more than sweet tea.” I heard her sniff once, brisk, allowing herself exactly that much and no more, then she snorted at her own joke. All the other noises came back all at once, the cabinets, the spoon, the whole bright racket of her, restored.

“Are you seeing anybody?”

I hesitated.

It was nothing, less than nothing, a quarter of a second of air where a “no” should have gone out clean. Instead, it caught for the length of one heartbeat, on the shape of a huge, gray-bearded man asleep across town and a curb I’d stared at longer than the errand required.

A quarter of a second with anyone else was invisible.

Vernell was not anyone else.

“Dante Pierce, you better talk.”

“I’m not seeing anybody, Mama.”

“You paused.”

“That wasn’t a pause.”

“That was a whole pause. I raised you. I know your pauses. You’ve got a ‘no-pause’ and a ‘yes-pause,’ and that, sir, was a ‘yes-pause’ with a hat on it, one of those good ‘go-to-church’ kind of hats.”