The Wave by Walter Mosley Read Free Book Online

before.
    “I’m here at Angie’s house,” I said, stalling.
    “Oh. How is she? I hope you’re not making her serve you, Errol. You know she’s having a hard pregnancy. I had the same problems when I was carrying you.”
    “Do you have a tattoo, Mom?”
    She made a gasping sound and then was quiet.
    “Mom? Mom?”
    “Why would you ask me something like that, Errol?” It was as if there were a different person on the line. Not my mother at all. Or maybe she was my mother, but the tone of her voice said that I was the stranger, the threat.
    “Do you?” I asked, driving the wedge deeper between us.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” If I hadn’t been her son, she would have slammed the phone down, I was sure of that.
    “A strawberry tattoo,” I said. “On your—your chest.”
    “Oh my God. Who have you been talking to? What have they said?”

11
    My mother lived in the upper half of a duplex, set behind another duplex on Raleigh, near Santa Monica Boulevard. She asked me to meet her there in an hour, and I agreed.
    The apartment had been too large even when she and my father lived there alone. Now she might as well have been living in a warehouse. There were four beds in as many bedrooms, dozens of chairs, four tables, and three television sets. The apartment had ten rooms, not including the two and a half baths and kitchen.
    Despite the large apartment my mother was a small woman. She could have lived in a studio. She was only five feet tall, and slender, with short gray hair and big gray eyes. She hadn’t been beautiful at any time in her life, but the intensity of those eyes made up for it. Her love exhibited itself as anxiety instead of warmth. She had worried about me and Angelique, making sure we were healthy and clean and getting along well at school.
    She answered the door, looking past me.
    “Did Angelique come with you?” she asked without greeting.
    “Can I come in, Mom?” I said.
    “Of course you can, honey.” She backed away from the door, looking me up and down.
    “You’ve put on a few pounds,” she said.
    “Yeah. You got some coffee?”
    The TV in the den was on. The TV was always on in there, usually set on one of the news channels. I didn’t ask her to turn it off. The set had been on pretty much nonstop since the day my father died.
    “It keeps me company,” my mother had complained when Angie and I asked to shut it off. “If I get up in the middle of the night, it’s here waiting for me,” she added. “The light keeps me from tripping and falling down.”
    The national news was on, but the volume was pretty low. She served me coffee in my favorite mug, with just the right amount of half-and-half.
    “Who told you about that tattoo?” she asked as I took my first sip.
    “A guy I met in the cemetery.”
    “What?”
    I told her the whole story. From the late-night calls to breaking into the graveyard and bringing GT home. I told her about his delusions, too.
    “Where is he now?” she asked. Her words were stiff, I think because she agreed with me in thinking that GT was probably my father’s bastard son.
    “So did you have an affair, Mom?”
    “It was all a long time ago, Errol,” she said. “We all make mistakes.”
    “So you had an affair with a man named Bobby Bliss?”
    My saying the name horrified her.
    “He told you his name?”
    “Yes. He knew that you were with him.”
    “But I never told him Bobby’s name,” my mother said. “I never told him that. He said Bobby Bliss? You’re sure?”
    “I don’t know what to tell you, Mom. He knew your boyfriend’s name. I figure it’s because Dad used his second family to say things that he couldn’t say here with us.”
    “He told you about the strawberry tattoo?”
    “Yes.”
    “And about Bobby?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where is this young man now, Errol?”
    “He’s at Lonnigan’s diner with Angie and my friend Nella.”
    “Okay,” she said. “Finish your coffee, and then let’s go talk