The last thing I did after every cleaning was dust my kids’ baby pictures. Rev used to ask me why I bothered with those pictures all the time, assuming it was some sort of female sentimentality, but I’d given up cells, blood, life, and careers for them; I couldn’t help but need to feel pride. And to be honest, that was the best time of motherhood, when they belonged totally to me, when they couldn’t talk and only I could soothe them. That said, I was not one of those women who thought my children’s shit didn’t stink, but people had to admit that I had some good boys. Trey and Moshe were twenty-four and had a full ride to Meharry; Mack was twenty-two and driving trucks. My knee baby, Ivy, was twenty and studying music over at Ole Miss, and Manny was going into his senior year, set to be salutatorian—all with no children out of wedlock, thank you, Jesus.
I could scarcely believe I had adult kids and that I was this old. I mean I had watched it coming, but still I felt blindsided. Blessedly, my life hadn’t happened across my face. Not only did my classmates have multiple grandbabies, their formerly snatched waists lapped over their waistbands, and their mouths had been permanently splintered from years spent drawn around cigarettes. To keep my shape, I pushed back from the table and wore a corset and a pantie girdle every day. I also did calisthenics and rode my bike, and with Rev being so into physical fitness, he approved. Wednesday, I had taken so long cleaning and pattering around the house, it was already midafternoon when I decided to take a quick ride. The early June heat had yet to become unbearable; I figured I’d be home in good time to get dinner started.
In minutes, I was pumping down the street on the bike, and soon I cleared the neighborhood. The headiness I got when riding made me feel powerful, strong, and young, all the ways I never felt on my own two feet. I stood up on the pedals and urged the bike into a devilish speed, blazing through downtown via the Red Panther River trail. The river snaked on into the next county, but the trail stopped near the highway. There I dismounted, pushed my bike up the ramp, and paused at the two lanes of road between me and Carpenter’s Junk Store. They put their new shipments out on Wednesdays, and I came almost every week to poke around and chat with the clerk, Wilma. Every third word of Wilma’s was a curse, but she kept me laughing. It was usually easier for me to have a conversation with folk who weren’t in the church—because Barbara, Brenda-Gale, Melvistine, all of them, were too snooty and fake for their own good. Wilma was real. While we were sharing a laugh, Craig Carpenter came around the building.
“You oughta let me throw that bike on the back of my truck and drop you off at home,” he told me.
He had a beard and a mouth full of Skoal, but he wasn’t bad looking at all, sort of resembled Little Joe from Bonanza. I envisioned myself naked beneath him, tickled by a mat of rusty chest hair, squirming under the sweet stench of tobacco in a bed of hay.
“No, thank you,” I said.
Rev would have a hissy fit if he found out I was in the car with another man, a white one at that. If a Black woman was in the car with a white man, she was either tricking or cleaning, and Rev wanted his wife associated with neither. I wheeled my bike to the edge of the road, faced a dazzling, sinking sun. A car whooshed by, forcing a reckless shiver up my spine, a feeling so icy and familiar and choke-deep that it took all my might not to fling myself into traffic to see if I could get airborne. I glanced back, and Wilma and Carpenter were there, as if they were making sure I didn’t.
I turned the block and was relieved to see Rev’s car absent from the driveway; I figured he was probably out somewhere harmonizing. Manny’s truck wasn’t there either, and I wondered where he might be. If you asked me, he had too much freedom, but I couldn’t tell Rev nothing about none of these boys. His trust-them-until-they-proved-you-wrong approach to parenting always frightened me, and I’m certain he wouldn’t have been that way if we had daughters. I pushed my bike into the side door, leaned it across from the washer and dryer, and entered the kitchen. The lights were on, but the house seemed unnaturally quiet. After all these years of raising boys, I had yearned for silence. Now, with only one left, quiet proved to be just another thing I thought I’d wanted.
As I washed my hands at the sink in the half bath, I pushed the shade aside and saw Manny’s truck in the alley. I had repeatedly warned them against parking there, but they wouldn’t be satisfied until a robberman held a gun to their head and stripped them of all their belongings and dignity. I proceeded up the stairs, was poised to knock on his bedroom door, when I heard breathing: hushed and impatient. I gave the door the slightest shove and was looking at Manny from behind, hunched over whatever he was doing. His skin was taut with strength; his rump came right off his back like his father’s. A step to the right revealed Maggie’s girl on the floor beneath him. Her nipples looked like Cocoa Puffs, and I knew she couldn’t have good sense because she shielded them and not her privates. Manny turned his great, boxy head around, and the way he looked me straight in the eye in the midst of this trifling act instantly and thoroughly convinced me that deep down inside there was something wrong with him. I closed my mouth and the door. This was my fault; my mama used to say that if you went looking for trouble, you wouldn’t have to go far to find it. There were harsh whispers behind me, the shrieking of the embarrassed girl. My earlier fulfillment had done a Houdini, and my hip throbbed. I took two pain pills with a nip of the Jack that I kept in an economy-sized box of women’s supplies in my closet. When I heard Manny’s truck pull out of the alley, I took a bath, and afterwards, I thought over my options from my bedroom. One thing was for sure: I definitely wasn’t in the mood to stand in a hot kitchen and cook and then clean up after. While I was contemplating where to call in for takeout, he began knocking on the door, which I ignored. I decided to phone in an order to Borgononi’s. By the time the doorbell rang for the delivery, the house had come alive. Manny was playing his guitar, and Rev was holding a lively conversation with somebody in his study. I paid and tipped the guy, but, abandoned by my appetite, left the bags on the kitchen counter.
I peeked in the study to tell Rev the food was there, and then I paused and exhaled, grateful my fulfillment was kicking in. Finally, I went to the door of Manny’s room, left open on purpose, I knew. He looked up at me as I was trying to look away; our gaze held a few seconds past ordinary. I broke the stare first, directing it at my bedroom, where I was already lying down in my mind.
“Go eat, son,” I said.
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From Dominion by Addie E. Citchens. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 19, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Addie E. Citchens. All rights reserved.
