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the daily tab inside his silent head. “Our car is blocked in out in the front yard. Who’s in charge of moving cars in and out? I heard tell Dickie and Bill was doing that,” she said, naming the husbands, respectively, of my mother’s two sisters, Jo Ann and Peg. A chorus of laughter erupted inside the house. Confused, we turned toward the sound—all of us as mute as Uncle Doots—and waited for it to subside. “You know, Joycie,” Vena Mae said, “if we hadn’t had a funeral today, this would have been a
right nice
party. Wouldn’t it, Lyle? Wouldn’t it . . .” She stopped herself when she saw me staring up at her through my fingered-together mask. “Look at you,” she said. “I got news for you, boy. You’re more Dorothy Kilgallen than Arlene Francis.” She turned on her high heels and headed for the house. “Doots!” she called. “Doots! Where are you? We gotta make Neshoba before nightfall!”
    â€œYou got a
right nice
sister,” said my grandfather to my grandmother.
    My grandmother shook her head as Vena Mae disappeared into the house. “Yep. She’s something,” she said, taking off her cat-eye-shaped glasses and cleaning the lenses with a dry corner of the handkerchief that Vena Mae had given her. She put the glasses back on. “But I don’t know what I would have done without her all these years. Remember when Nan was born? Not an easy birth that one. Vena Mae was there for me for a lot of them down days afterwards. Me having yo’ mama, Arlene, was almost as bad as when yo’ mama had you. You come out plumb blue. You were a blue baby, sugar.Weren’t breathing a’tall. I had just started working as a nurse’s aid back then and come running out of that room just a’cryin’. Thought we’d done had us a stillbirth. I got halfway down the hall before I heard you start t’cryin’ yourself. Sweetest sound I ever heard. But why ain’t you cried none today, sugar? I was thinking about that while I was cutting up one of Lola’s chocolate pies.” I tightened my mask. I shrugged. “We were all so relieved when you was no longer blue in the face back then that we pulled a fast one on yo’ daddy. You were born around noon and he was over at Lola’s having lunch. When yo’ daddy got back to the hospital we told him he had twin girls.” My grandfather laughed. My grandmother straightened her shoulders beneath his jacket. “Let’s see if this really helps,” she said. She flicked off her cat-eyes. She placed her index fingers against her thumbs and fashioned her own version of an Arlene Francis eye mask. She positioned it on her face. “Now I understand,” she said, winking at me through her fingers. “I always thought you couldn’t see nothing when you put this mask on. But I’ll be darn, if it ain’t just the opposite,” she said, now winking at my grandfather over my head. “That’s your magic secret, ain’t it? I figured you out, Arlene. You can see
everything
when you put this mask on. I can even see them crows yonder.”
    I dropped my hands. I looked toward the fading horizon. This long, awful, to-be-forever-remembered day was drawing to a close. The crows out there looked like bits of night already arriving. I draped an arm on each of the large roots that surrounded me. I pretended I was on a throne. My grandmother’s eyes, still framed by her fingers, filled with her endless tears. My grandfather also began to cry. The crows closed in. “Fuck,” I said aloud for the first time.
    My grandmother gasped but did not slap me. “What did you just say?” she asked.
    â€œFuck.”
    My grandfather went for his handkerchief.
    â€œSugar, that’s not a word Arlene Francis would use,” my grandmother said.
    I shrugged. “Call me Kevinator,” I told