Grit

fiction by Telisha Moore Leigg

“Kwon, I need a rest,... just a moment, then I can go on.” (Old Man / Dr. Corinth to Kwon on the way south to Boris, North Carolina, where he probably wasn’t wanted.)

Of course, there were as many reasons as stars not to pack an

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eighty-something-year-old Dr. Corinth /Old Man up and bring him down to my hometown of Boris, North Carolina, to be a guest at a wedding he wasn’t invited to, to reunite with a daughter he abandoned almost three decades ago. Why would I dare to bring the ghost back and why should I? Everybody thinks he is dead or should be, leaving like he did for academic fortune and fame that he didn’t really find enough of to make such a leaving worth it. This trip was a bad idea all around, but I committed to it.

We had to keep stopping. Old Man kept throwing up. During one of the first times we parked, this time at a rest stop just out of South Boston, it was raining hard, and we didn’t make it outside in time before he heaved, and it rained so hard after he threw up that we didn’t get out. We just sat with the stench of sickness between us. I drove to an old lot down the road called RW’s Car Wash and Laundromat, and there I bought the car-washing towelettes with quarters leftover in my cup holder. I pulled the towelettes from the crinkly plastic and wiped Old Man’s chin, chest, and hands where he had tried to hold it back. Old Man’s blue eyes met mine as he said, “Kwon, you don’t have to do this.” He looked defeated, but I kept wiping until he was clean.

First, my mother, Mean Keisha, is exactly like her name, and she is going to lose her absolute damn mind on me, throw a profound and proper freaking fit. And anyone who knows my mother, you know that her anger is a Viking reaping glory and should not be underestimated. I already clean up what I hear her saying, “You stupid boy, this old man playin’ you. Why does he find your soft ass? Why didn’t he come to her like a man? Huh? Huh? I don’t care what’s wrong with him now. Where was he then? What he want...no think, boy… what he really want?” And I would have no answers, but I wouldn’t have changed anything. That day, I kept driving down to Boris until we were twentythree miles out.

I am not alone although Old Man can’t help lead me down the highway. And why should he even though he knows the way. I’m a man and I can make it down roads I have often traveled. I glance to the passenger side. Old Man/Dr. Corinth is asleep, and his head rested on the passenger glass, his hands folded on his lap like gnarled loaves of bread. Maybe if I was raised by happy women, I could have turned back, but I wasn’t, you know. I was raised tracing their flinching and scars with my eyes, these sad-smiling women, these scared women, brittle-bitter women. I My mama, Mean Keisha, you can taste the sadness. My Aunt Fallon? It’s my Aunt Fallon’s wedding we are going to. God. Did you know she’s remarrying Uncle Allen, not because she loves him but because it’s a little less sad and a little less scary to be with a man she doesn’t love than remembered as a raped divorcee with two young girls. And he can protect her and them from her memories. It’s a sad-barter-world where I’m from. My Mama Mandy Blue….I will bring Old Man back to her. And I know she’ll have kindness for him like she had for me and Mean Keisha, and Aunt Fallen when she took us in. That’s what I hope.

We stopped again, Old Man and me. I ran into a CVS and got a seltzer, Pepto, a beach towel because that’s all they had, got some water to take some of his pills and to rinse the bad taste away. I was quick. Because…. no one should be alone. Because… peace is the stray cat that brings her kittens back to the step of some old lady that chased her away mostly, never really fed her, certainly didn’t keep her, that dumb cat hoping better for what she whelped than what she got. I think a lot of us live that way, so I don’t care what Mean Keisha says; he didn’t trick me. He asked. I answered. That’s a man’s way. Ten miles out, I stopped one last time for gas, and under the bright, fake lights and ethanol gas, Old Man’s breathing seemed low and shallow. But he was with me. I was going to make this reconciliation. I knew it.

His coming was on me. He never asked me directly, and he couldn’t make himself make the journey. I just couldn’t stand watching anymore, you know, waiting for him to pass, him each day more frail as he peeled his usual potatoes sitting on a fivegallon bucket under the porch of the shelter’s back deck. When I said to come, his fingers trembled, and he just nodded once, said a colloquial, “Peace, Kwon.” What else could I have done?

I’m not naïve. I know there is pain that can’t be fixed, only dulled. I know that, like I know for every Hunter’s Moon something is prey. Old Man/ Dr. Corinth, I see him biting down, see him grit his teeth against his suffering. He says to me that a man has to make the path he wants to travel, and I think of that on the drive down, almost out of Virginia, almost where I promised to take Old Man/ Dr. Corinth. We are both tired, but neither of us turns around. I propel my Explorer down the highway; for a while just me and Old Man glide on rain-slick, October-crisp roads, with the sun setting, and leaves looking like gold and burning flames.