Bang! by Sharon Flake Read Free Book Online Page A

doesn’t see what he’s doing to you.” She sings while she squeezes. “But I do. And I’m gonna stop him. I have to.”

Chapter 15
    MY FATHER’S people came by today. They don’t ever say they coming, they just show up—”Like rain,” my dad says. I like that. Not knowing and being surprised. My dad doesn’t always go for it, though. When they showed up, he started cussing. Saying he wished they would just leave us alone. My mother was glad though. “I get tired,” she said, “of being sad.”
    Soon as they stepped foot in the house, the music went on. The bass made the glasses shake.
    My father yelled, “Cut that down!”
    Ma Dear called him a grouch. She took out the playing cards. Aunt Sassy went to the basement and brought up the card table, and Cousin lit up the grill on the front porch. “After this,” Ma Dear said, “we’re going to the mall. There’s a new movie out.”
    My father sat down next to her. Ma Dear covered his hand with hers. “Tell me a good joke.”
    He said he didn’t know any.
    She watched Aunt Sassy wipe the table off. “I figured you’d say that, so I got one of my own.” Ma Dear dealt cards to my mother and father, Aunt Sassy, Cousin, his girlfriend, and me. “What do you get when you cross a man with a chicken?”
    Cousin laughed. “A man who can lay eggs?”
    I took a guess. So did my mother. Ma Dear said we were all wrong. When we asked her what you get when you cross them, she said she didn’t know. “Don’t remember. I’m seventy-four, you know. Can’t be expected to remember every itty-bitty thing.”
    I looked at Cousin’s girlfriend, Itah. She looked at my dad. My mother looked at her bare feet and we all started laughing at the same time. I told Ma Dear she don’t ever need to tell a joke. “Because you always mess them up.”
    She pinched my nose. “But I still know how to make y’all laugh, don’t I?”
    We laughed when Cousin Semple burned the hot dogs. Laughed some more when Ma Dear and Cousin’s girlfriend started arguing. “Your dress is too short,” Ma Dear told her. “Don’t get mad at me for saying what everyone’s thinking.” We laughed when my father took a nap on the couch and my little cousin put orange lip gloss on his lips and painted his fingernails pink.
    When Ma Dear and them come, it’s like somebody breathing air into a person who almost drowned. The whole house comes alive. Curtains blow when there ain’t even no wind. The sun shines off water glasses and warms up cold tea. People sing and dance and pee themselves for laughing so hard. It ain’t right, I think sometimes, that the good times leave when they do. So when everybody’s still laughing and drinking and having fun, I sneak up to my room and come down with charcoal and my drawing pad.
    “It’s a gift,” Cousin says, standing over me.
    My father says it’s not a gift. “It’s a present, from me. I taught him to paint, you know.”
    Itah pulls at her skirt. “Them hands gonna make you famous one day. Watch and see.”
    I tell them to go away. I can’t draw if everybody’s behind me. Ma Dear says it’s kitchen time. That means everybody’s gotta grab something, wash something, and put away something. I stay put. Draw the little ones walking like ants into the kitchen with ketchup and mustard and beans. Draw Ma Dear with my dad’s arms around her, tying her apron. And I put my mother in the kitchen laughing, even though she’s really by Jason’s bedroom door looking sad.
    “That’s for me, right?” Ma Dear says, coming into the living room with wet hands. “Gonna frame it and put it up over my couch.”
    Ma Dear’s living room is full of family pictures and drawings by me. “You can have it.”
    She leans over and sticks her cheek out for a kiss. “You ain’t spent the night since Jason passed. Time you did that, don’t you think?”
    I don’t spend the night nowhere no more. My mother would worry if I did.
    Ma Dear knows that. “She don’t