Bang! by Sharon Flake Read Free Book Online

talks to me. Sitting down with him at night and trying to get him to talk about Jason.
    “Where’s she going?”
    “Kentucky.”
    I wipe milk off my mouth. “Why she gotta go?”
    He looks at me like I’m nuts and says she has to go so she can stop making cakes, remaking Jason’s bed, and being sad all the time.
    I do not want to stay home alone with my dad. But he says my mother always comes back from Kentucky feeling better about things. He thinks if we let her know it’s okay to go, she’ll feel better about leaving. “And come back like her old self.”
    He packs tuna sandwiches and doughnuts in the red cooler, and unlocks the kitchen door. “Anyhow, while she’s gone, I’m gonna teach you some stuff.”
    “What kinda stuff?’
    “Stuff women can’t teach boys.”
    I rub my chin. “Like how to get a girl to—”
    When my father yells at you, it makes you feel like a dog that just messed the living-room rug. “There’s more to being a man than just getting into some girl’s pants!”
    I stare at the floor. “Sorry.”
    He slams the door. I look up. Twenty minutes to go before school starts, I think. I call Kee-lee to see if he has some weed.
    “Always,” he says.
    I sit up on the kitchen counter.
    “A penny for your thoughts,” my mother says, right when I’m hanging up the phone.
    I want to tell her not to go to Kentucky. Then I hear my dad say in my head, Be a man. Not no baby sissy girl who needs his momma to wipe milk off his chin. So I keep my mouth shut. My mother opens the door wide and the sun comes through the bars and makes thick black lines on the floor. She’s singing. Whistling. Opening and closing kitchen cabinet doors and pulling out a box of noodles, tomato sauce, and Italian seasoning. “Gonna make lasagna for tonight.” She sits ground beef on the table. “Your dad’s favorite.”
    My mother used to sing all the time. Not no church songs neither. Songs from the sixties and seventies. “Your father tell you I’m taking a trip?”
    “Yeah.”
    She cuts the fire up under the frying pan and dumps bloody red hamburger meat in it. “He thinks I’m going to get away from Jason’s memory.” The ground beef turns gray and pieces of the meat wiggle in the pan like worms on a hot car. “But I’m going to find us a new place to live.”
    I jump to the floor. “I ain’t living in the country.”
    She scrambles the meat. “Rather die here?”
    Before I can answer, she’s singing, “‘Sugar Pie, honey bunch. You know that I love you.’”
    “Remember that song?” she says, shaking her hips. “‘I can’t help myself . . .’”
    She dances over to me, holding the white plastic spatula in the air. Letting hamburger juice drip down her arm and onto the floor she made me scrub two nights ago. “‘I love you and nobody else,’” she says, taking my arm.
    I don’t wanna dance with my mother. But she’s happy and singing and glad for the first time in a long while so I let her hold my hands. Let her dip me, and turn me in circles, and tell me stupid jokes that Jason used to tell us all the time.
    “They’re not taking any more boys from me. No, sir,” she says, squeezing me to her. “I’m going south. Gonna stay as long as I need to. And when I come back,” she turns my fingers loose and runs to the burning pan, “we’re gonna have a new place to live. A nice safe place where the stink of death ain’t in your nose all the time.” She sneezes and pinches her nose and wipes her hands on her apron. “Don’t tell your father nothing I said, hear?”
    Pouring garlic powder in the meat, stirring in dried onions, she tells me about our land in Kentucky— fifteen acres she had since she was ten. My father doesn’t know she owns it. It was her secret stash, she says. Something for me and Jason when we were grown. She gives me this look, like she can see me never growing old. “I will take you from him— from here.”
    She reaches for the ketchup. “Your dad