Mama and I are sitting on the front porch watching the fireflies come out on the lawn. I love how my shoulder still fits snug in her armpit, how she still calls me BabyGirl, even though I’m already twelve.  The sun has only just started to go down.  She hasn’t started talking about the poet yet and I haven’t broken my promise.

She always says this porch is her favorite room in the whole house.  My brother and I will say, “The porch isn’t in the house, Mama.” Just to make her laugh.  She gets my brother and two of his friends to move the sofa out here in the beginning of every summer.  The living room always looks a little off balance without it but no one seems to care.  Once the sofa moves outside, no one ever makes it past the front door anyway.

Leaning in to me she whispers, “You’ll meet him at a party.”  She’s talking about the poet now.  But not Walt Whitman or anybody like that.  I don’t really know who she’s talking about, but she sure does. Mama talks about the poet as if she knows everything about him.  Not about his poems, about him.  She says, “His skin will be soft and his arms will be lean.  He’ll have a voice that just won’t belong with his body.  You’ll think, this man is just too blond for that voice.  It will surprise you, BabyGirl.  It’ll feel like you just took a big gulp of root beer thinking it was Coke.”

“What will his voice sound like, Mama?”

She’s brushing my hair in long, quiet strokes, and at this, she stops.  “His voice will take you by the hand and lead you across a grassy field at dusk,” she says.  “You’ll feel chilly, but safe.”

We always talk about the poet when the fireflies come out.  Really, she talks and I listen.

“He won’t smile very much,” she tells me.

“Why not?”  When I ask a question like this, she ignores it.  I don’t know if it’s because she doesn’t know the answer or just because she thinks it’s a ridiculous thing to ask.  

She goes right on with her own train of thought: “But when he laughs he’ll sound exactly like a nine-year-old boy.” I can just imagine a grown man laughing and sounding like my younger brother.  

I guess Mama believes that she knows best what I need to know.  Everyone seems to know what’s best for everyone else around here.

* * *

Mama has a boyfriend who doesn’t come around much anymore.  His name is Edmond, but we all call him Mondo.  He used to come over for Sunday dinner, or just to sit with us out on the porch at night.  He always shows up when she goes in for treatments.  He’ll drive her there and stay with her the whole time.  I don’t think he’s ever allowed in the room with her while it’s happening, but he always waits right outside the door until it’s over and then he walks alongside the stretcher until she’s safe back in her room.  At least that’s how he tells it.  Mama doesn’t really know what happens afterwards.  She says the last thing she can remember is when they attach little suctions to her forehead.  After that, everything goes black.

Mondo will drive Mama home once the doctors release her and even stay the night sometimes.  The next day she’ll stay in bed; the treatments make her tired.  Mondo gets our breakfast and sends us down the road to wait for the school bus. In the afternoon we’ll find him in the kitchen with a blue bandana tied around his head, looking just like a pirate.  He always makes the same dinner: Mondo’s Pineapple Chicken.  It’s just a ring of pineapple on top of a piece of chicken, but when he serves it, he tops off each ring with one of those ice-cream-sundae cherries.  He says he makes it that way because us kids like it, but Mondo seems to like those cherries pretty well himself.

Usually in a day or two, Mama is back to normal again.  Meaning, she just cries at the usual things.  Not all day long from dark inside her bed.  I can’t really say the treatments make her happy, or even less sad.  But afterwards she can at least leave her bedroom.  It’s those treatments that let her come on out here to her favorite room in the house.

But lately, Mondo only seems to visit when Mama needs help.  He doesn’t just come over to play Parcheesi in the afternoon, or surprise her with an armful of lilacs on a Saturday morning like he used to. She doesn’t get mad about it.  She says it would be different if he were her husband, if we were his own children, and that she understands.  But I don’t really think she understands so much as she’s stopped trying to care.  The treatments make her forget a lot of things.  Like what’s worth getting mad about, and why.

Mondo’s known about her sickness from the very beginning.  He’s the one who helped her get the treatments when the medicines stopped working.  She always had a little pill she took with her coffee in the morning, like it was one of her vitamins.  Before she got those pills, she used to stay in bed a lot.  Sometimes she would close herself in the bathroom and stay there all day.  She kept the door locked and the only way I could talk to her was to lie down and put my lips up against the space between the door and the wood floor.  I would say  “What are you doing in there so long?” and  “Are you coming out soon?”  I know she heard me, but she didn’t answer.

One day I banged on the door as hard as I could.  I said, “Why won’t you answer me, Mama?  Why won’t you talk?”  And she whispered, “BabyGirl, I just don’t have anything to say.”

That night when Mondo showed up, he got her out of the bathroom.  He put a ladder up to the window and climbed in and carried her back to her bed.  He told us that he was going to bring Mama to some new doctors he’d heard about.

When she came back from that first treatment she still looked the same to Mondo and my brother.  Her hair was still the color of honey, just like mine, and her skin still flushed pink when she had a lot to say.  But when she looked at me, into my eyes, I could see the change right away. It looked like it took her a moment to remember that she loved me.

* * *

Mondo called this morning to tell me he was coming to pick up Mama tonight.  She was busy cleaning the cat spray off the dining room wall, so I stretched the phone cord as far as it would go and slipped through the back door so I could speak to him in private.  I told him Mama didn’t want any more treatments, which probably was true, but she had never actually said that to me.  He said, “She’s talking about the poet again.”  I said, “I think that helps.  And he said, “No. That’s not what helps.

I told him Mama said she was done with all that treatment stuff forever and that she might have to really hurt Mondo if he ever tried to bring her to that place again.

He said this would be the last time. He promised.  And he made me promise not to tell Mama he was coming.

“Ok, I said.

* * *

Sometimes when Mama talks about the poet, she’ll go on and on.  If my hair has a lot of knots in it, she’ll just sit me between her knees right in the middle of the sofa and she’ll talk for a half hour straight.  But she always starts off the same way.

“Don’t fall in love with a poet,” she says. “You’ll see him around town. Walking.  Always walking.  You’ll tell him you’ve heard people say he’s a wanderer, but that, to you, he looks like he always knows exactly where he’s going.  He’ll just laugh.  You’ll tell him he seems interesting, and that you’d like to get to know him better.  You’ll have his full attention, but he won’t say a word.  You might think he’s a moron, but you’ll go ahead and ask him out to lunch.”

“Why will I think he’s a moron?"

She ignores this.  “When you pick him up for lunch, he’ll invite you in to the place he lives.  A big, white house on a hill.  He’ll lead you up three flights of stairs to the room he rents in the attic. You’ll see a single bed, a dresser and a desk.  Books will be piled high on everything.  Books will line the whole perimeter of the room.  He’ll move some books off the chair and offer you a seat.” She stops brushing and I turn my head to face her.  “You know what you’ll say to him, BabyGirl?”

“What?”

“You’ll say, ‘Have you read any good books lately?”  Mama and I both start laughing, thinking about all those books.  She’s laughing so hard there’s tears in her eyes.

* * *

Mama is real smart.  And not just because she uses words like perimeter.  She reads a lot, more than anyone I know. She wanted to be a teacher when she was a girl.  That’s where she met my daddy, in college.  They both wanted to be teachers and they were going to each go to school, one at a time, to learn enough to be able to do that.  But then she had babies before she was ready to.  That’s how she explained it to me.  So neither one of them could go to school for a while.  She took care of my brother and me, and my daddy took a job.  That’s where he had the accident.

He was killed in a gas explosion. Everyone was.  He was a prep chef in one of the big restaurants right off the highway. The restaurant ended up black from the explosion, but the kitchen totally disappeared.  Like it was never there.  My daddy would prepare the food that the real chefs would cook later, kind of like how my brother and I husk corn for Mama while she’s basting her chicken. She says Daddy was probably chopping carrots and onions for the soup that night when the gas line exploded. She says that if you need to die young, that’s probably as good a way to go as any. I don’t know why anybody needs to die.  Least of all my daddy.

I don’t know if Mama’s sickness started before my daddy died or if his dying made the sickness start.  Mondo says that sometimes people can be sick deep inside their brain and it never comes out unless something terrible happens.  Mondo once told me he studied psychology before he became a salesman. So I asked him whether he could tell if I had the same sickness deep inside my brain.  He dropped to his knees and pulled me in against his chest. He smelled clean, like soap, and I realized two things at once. One was that I never really noticed what he smelled like before;  the other was that Mondo was about to cry.  So I never even got to ask what I really wanted to know, which was whether there was an operation that Mama and I could have, where we could switch brains.  Where she could just take my healthy brain and go on with the business of being my Mama.

* * *

She was crying this morning once she finished cleaning up after the cats.  We have three white cats and they’re all named Gandalf.  She calls them beasts and threatens to get rid of them at least once every week.  But today she was even more upset.  When I walked in the kitchen she was sitting on the floor.  She hadn’t taken off the yellow rubber gloves she wears when she’s cleaning cat spray.  In her hands was the big aspirin bottle she keeps on the lazy Susan for her headaches.  She couldn’t get the cap off with her gloves on, but I could tell that’s not why she was crying.  Her eyes were real puffy, like she’d been crying hard for a long time.

I asked her to let me help her with the aspirin.  She wouldn’t even look at me.  She said, “Don’t tell Mondo.  Don’t tell Mondo.  Don’t tell Mondo.”

She never did tell me what it was that I had to keep from Mondo, but she made me promise I wouldn’t tell.  She made me swear it. And, of course, I did.

* * *

Mama tells me things about the poet like she’s reading me her grocery list.  She closes her eyes and rattles them off one by one.  “He’ll wear a red corduroy work shirt.  He’ll paint tiny watercolors.  He’ll have a tattoo of a rose on his shoulder.  He won’t own a phone.”  She thinks I’ll be able to recognize him on the street if I know all these things.

“How will I know he’s a poet just by knowing he has no telephone?” I say.

“He’ll smell like cinnamon toast,” she says. As if that explains everything.

When Mama first started talking about the poet I thought she could see into the future. But now I think maybe she’s just looking into the past.

* * *

“Don’t fall in love with a poet,” she says. We’re on the porch sofa while she’s brushing my hair.  It’s almost dark now, but I can still see the freckles on her legs, stretching out from her long flowered skirt. Her voice starts off normal then gets louder and louder as she goes on.   “There will be coffee cups all over his room.  Coffee from Monday.  Coffee from Tuesday.  Seven little cups filled with days-old coffee.  He’ll walk around the room, talking under his breath, all the while pouring his leftover coffees into a fresh new mug.  He’ll be raised a gentleman.  He’ll hold out that cup to you first and ask you if you want any coffee.

“Mama, that’s what you do with your coffee.” But she’s looking beyond me, beyond the fireflies.

The more she talks tonight, the more she sounds like our minister during Sunday sermons. “If he invites you to read his poems, BabyGirl, you must understand what he’s offering.  He’s carrying your books.  He’s giving you his ring.  He’s expecting you at Thanksgiving Dinner.

“The poet will sit right down in the middle of the floor.  He’ll be reading Nietzsche and studying a Kandinsky and listening to Wagner but all the while he will absorb every word that spills from your mouth.”  She’s starting to scare me. Every time she says one of those names she yanks hard on the brush. I don’t know who any of them are or why their names make her want to hurt me.

“Who is Nietzsche?” I whisper, mostly to take her attention off my hair.

“Who is Nietzsche?  Who is Nietzsche?  Nietzsche is just the gentleman who’s decided God is dead!

She stands up and walks down the porch steps.  She’s walking slowly and doesn’t seem at all bothered by the bats swooping for bugs over her head.  She leans on the fence post and looks up the road as if she’s waiting for someone.  I’m trying hard to think of something to say, anything to get her back on the porch with me.

I run to the fence and stand next to Mama. I slip my hand in hers and lead her back across the cockeyed stone walk that Mondo built, back up the three steps, the peeling paint crunching under our feet, then onto our living room sofa waiting for us on the dark quiet porch.  She eases back into the sofa like a queen on her throne.  

I don’t have to see Mama’s face to be sure of what I can hear in her voice: that even though her body is right next to me, her heart is slipping away.

“You will spend the night with him,” she begins, “but his bed will feel so hard.  There won’t even be a quilt in the room to keep you warm.  He’ll give you a nightshirt that will smell just like Tuesday.” Mama turns me toward her, holding my face with her icy fingers.

“Your hands, Mama.  They’re so cold.”

She tells me to hush.  What she has to say to me is more important than icy fingers or pineapple rings or the soapy smelling man who has just slipped through our front gate and is walking up toward the porch.

“He will crawl into bed beside you and he will not kiss you.  He will not caress you.  He will not press his strong hard body against yours.”

My face is feeling hot.  Not just because Mama is talking about S-E-X but because she’s raised her voice so loud that Mondo has stopped at the far end of the walk. He points a finger at me, shouting, “You promised!” as if Mama’s yelling has anything at all to do with me.  Mondo understands some things about medicine and a lot of things about Mama, but it turns out he doesn’t understand anything about the poet.  I realize this too late; and that’s the biggest problem of all.

“The poet will roll on his side,” she cries out.  Not just at me, and not exactly at Mondo, but more like our preacher, projecting her voice to make sure she’s being heard by all the sinners in the room.  “And he will tuck his knees to his chest,” she says holding my face tightly in her hands, so that I cannot turn my head, not even an inch, to catch the eye of the man who is about to take my mama away from me.

She drops to the porch floor and pulls me right down with her.  At first I think she’s just hiding from Mondo, that she thinks he maybe won’t notice us now that we’ve left the sofa.  But we’re not just hiding.

She lays me down on my back on the hard, creaky floor, arranging my arms at my sides and turning my face straight up towards God.  Then she lies on her side next to me, tucking her own knees to her chest.  She has stopped her rant and seems now to be showing me just what the poet will do.  One look at her  tells me I dare not utter a sound.

Mama inches her body closer and closer to mine.  She buries her face and her fingers into my shoulders.  As if she’s holding on for dear life.