She leads me in. Through the trash (the back yard). Through the screen door. In through a silent-sounding kitchen. Baker a few feet ahead of me. Me looking at mountains of dishes, dirty cracks between kitchen tiles, baby toys on the floor—a toddler’s—circular hydraulic walkers to work the baby’s legs—this one caked with brown and white substances, pyramids of powder—
“That’s flour,” Baker says.
“I’m sure.”
“And that is brown sugar.” She runs her finger along the top of the brown pyramid and steps to me, putting her finger inside my mouth, running it around my gums. “My sugar,” she says to my face, “is so much sweeter than this.”
“Charisma! Baker! Where art thou? Where?”
“I’m right here, Grammy! You ruined my surprise entrances!”
“Make thy entrances with more haste than waste,” her grammy says.
We go into the living room and this old woman is hunched over on..what?..some end of the couch not seen for centuries? A pile of hoarding existing only under this woman’s butt? She is wearing a white moo moo with stitching crossing the neck, traveling across the arm, and running into her forearm.
“Here. Grammy. Let me help you.”
Baker tries to take the needle and spine from her grandmother’s control, only then realizing what I had already seen (that her Grammy was perfectly happy sewing purple thread into her arm and Baker has tugged the string almost out of her arm before she realizes what she’s done).
“ ‘Risma! Baker hello! What in the Hell’s Angels is you doing to my arm!”
“Grammy! What the hell are you doing to it?”
“Let me go, thy excellent bitch! Rescind thee and resort thee to thy bath, with young son yonder introduce me thus!”
“This is Matthew, you stylish bitch! I’ve been talking to you about him all week! Remember? I said he was coming to visit me and that he’d be staying in my room and that we’d need to find a room for Wendy to stay in so Matthew and I would have some motherfucking peace and quiet!! Where is that little brat anyway?”
“She’s upstairs, Baker. She’s just upstairs. Why you have to come home and make such a big deal out of something as small as a camel passing through the eye of a needle—”
“Wendy!” Baker says. I hear the report in her voice like she’s back on color guard. Her feet snap together like Hitler’s. “Wendy! You better get your ass down here and introduce yourself to my friend Matt!” She stomps out this next part: “Wen. Dy. Get. Yourself. Down here. Now!”
“You could’introduce us,” Grammy says.
“No I can’t!! No, I, cannot. If I did that, then I would only have to reintroduce him when Wendy comes downstairs—does that fact make itself aware of you? To you? Does it Mom?”
“I don’t like it when you call me Mom. I ain’t your Mother Mary Mom, am I? I’m your simple gramma mom, a simple fucking grandma mom—Jesus Mary and Joseph Christ of a Son of Grandpa’s motherfucking Dog! Chain on the leash of thy right hand motherfucker.”
“Grammy, don’t curse.”
“A’ least I belie’e. At least tha’s true of me. Is it true to you is what you should be askin’. ”
“I ain’t sayin’ it b’cause you believe,” Baker says. “I’s sayin’ it b’cus you suck at cursing! God damn, Grammy, what’s that smell?!”
“That be my panties runnin’ girl—you know tha’ smell.”
“Eww. Enough!” Baker grabs my hand and takes me up the stairs. When we get to the crook, there’s a girl of 11 or 12 sitting with her knees up, watching Baker and my every move. Baker leans over and whispers to her: “We need the room for a while.” The girl nods and Baker and I go into the second door on the left.
It’s a messy room. A kids’ room. A girls’ room. Baker closes the door behind me.
“You can put your stuff down here.” She indicates a place on the floor by the first bed.
I put my stuff down.
Baker lies down. She gets under the covers. Her eyes tell me to be self-conscious. They tell me this trip was a waste and I’m crazy to be here. Came here for tha’ motherfucking pussy. Now I’m in the bedroom. Now the girl is in the bed. Now the girl is underneath the covers. Now my cock should be getting hard. I should be going down on her, on that sweltering, in the jack, no longer underage pussy that Baker carries with her. It’s with her all the time. On her person. She can touch it and it’s on all the time. Cracked-up whole. Nutcracker. A tall thin man stuffed in and out of it, in and out and in, and out, and in and out and in and out.
I see Baker’s ears perk.
“Did you hear that?” she says.
I listen closer.
“If that’s who I think it is,” Baker says.
She gets up from the bed and leaves the sheet on the floor.
“Should I come with you?” I ask.
“No.” She turns to me. “I got this.”
She leaves the door open and I follow her halfway down the stairs. The front door is closing and Wendy is next to me. We’re looking through railing slats like we’re the children and it’s Christmas morning except this Christmas Santa didn’t come or the value of the poles were reversed. Brooklyn, Baker, and Baker’s grammy stand before the door, at the bottom of the stairs, and on the end of the couch.
“What is this?” Brooklyn says.
Baker rejoins. “What is what?”
Brooklyn makes a pointed finger at me. “That.”
“Don’t point at him! Do not point your finger at him. No.”
“I told you not to bring him ‘cause this is the weekend that Rambuncto is getting released. He is getting paroled on Saturday. Did not I tell you this?”
I notice that Brooklyn is carrying a teenie tiny baby in her arms. Rocking him gently with the sound of her voice. Is it?—Yes. It is. This is the baby from Baker’s story. The one who almost got smothered by his mother in the corner room? The one with no mattress on the crypt? A cage of plastic—that making three metaphors for jail in the current house alone.
“How’s Baby Faulkner?” Baker says.
“Baby Faulkner is fine,” Brooklyn says this. “It’s you I’m worried about, though. Day after tomorrow. The day after tomorrow. Sometime in the late morning or afternoon. That’s when Rambuncto is going to get here.”
“You know he can’t stay here,” Baker says.
“I never in a thousand years said he’d be staying here. I said he’d be staying here a while while we look for an apartment. That is all I said except there are to be no visitors until after he’s gone. That’s so simple, Baker. It’s so fucking simple I’m sure that even your boyfriend can understand it.”
“His name is Matthew. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“But y’all are getting together to fuck all weekend. Is that right? Is that the deal? So what happens when Rambuncto gets here? Ya dig? Am I supposed to tie up my bedroll and sleep on tha motherfuckin’ porch? Rambuncto might, not, like, him. You know? Rambuncto’s been locked up with a bunch of jungle motherfuckers doing dog knows what all throughout the motherfucking night!! He’s gon’ be hungry for pussy and I am not going to be the one to deny him that.”
“Fine!” Baker says. “Give him your puss! I know I’m not thinking of getting in the way of you and Rambuncto fucking.”
“Baker. Please. I know you and Rambuncto have fucked and I know he likes it your way: strapless.”
“Rambuncto and I only fucked with a condom.”
“You’re such a liar. The worst. You can’t even tell a lie if you had to! You and Rambuncto? You’re going to stand there and tell me that you two used a condom every single time and that Rambuncto was perfectly ok with that?”
Everyone was quiet for a minute.
Finally Baker spoke. “I have zero plans for fucking your guy,” she said.
“So you admit that you and Rambuncto fucked.”
“I ain’t trying to hide it. Look, here: Matthew, there was a guy named Rambuncto who used to come around here and yes he used to fuck everyone in the house—even that little girl sitting’ on them stairs right next to you. Are you happy now, Brooky? Does that quench your thirst? And I ain’t sayin’ I didn’t like it, either, but since Rambuncto went to jail I’ve visited him for a total of five times and you was visitin’ him once a week for practically every week he was in there—what was that? Thirty or forty weeks? So I ain’t trying to fuck your man—I got my own man here. Tha’s who I’ll try and fuck if I try and fuck anyone in here!”
“That’s not gonna work, Baker.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I need y’all to get out.”
“Get out where?”
“Baker I don’t give a shit where you go I just need you two to get out. Of here. Right now. I ain’t kidding, Baker. Get the fuck out.”