His Third Wife

Mrs. Taylor’s eyes were slowing; her hands were loosening over her breasts. The freeze was leaving her.

“Why? I tried everything . . . and you just let her come in here and—”

“Mama! Mama, stay with me. The ambulance is on the way!”

The eyes stopped.

“I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

The hands fell to her sides.

“Mama? Can you hear me? Mama?”

The eyes rolled up at nothing.

“Look what you did to me, Jamison. Look.”

There was no movement.

“I loved you,” Val said.

“Mama! No! Mama!”

PART III

“. . . until death do us part.”

“There Are No Good-byes”

In a perfect world, Mrs. Taylor’s son wouldn’t have had to bury her. Well, in a perfect world, she would’ve died, yes—and maybe sooner than she had—but in that perfect world Jamison wouldn’t have had to bury her. Burials, funerals, wakes, memorials, those were things people did who wanted to move on, who intended to let go. But Jamison wasn’t one of those people. He wanted his mother back. And instead of planning her funeral, he’d spent most nights considering how he might do that. It was dangerous. He was a smart man. Not a crazy man. So he knew he couldn’t revive the cold body he’d had to look at for a second time at the morgue on a rainy night after waiting for the perfect flash of lightning. There was only one way. The gun was in the nightstand. He lay in his bed for days looking at the oak box.

Mrs. Taylor’s sisters showed up to bury their baby sister—three short bullets of women with wide hips and attitudes that showed they’d been raised in the same sandbox. They descended upon Jamison’s home like a swarm of bees. Cleaning and cooking, whispering and making phone calls. They told Jamison planning a funeral was women’s work. He didn’t need to worry about a thing. They just needed his credit card—Mrs. Taylor hadn’t had any life insurance. Calling him “baby boy” and vowing that they’d take care of him for the rest of his life the way their sister would see fit, they only pulled him from his bed for dinner and signatures.

One night, he called for water and no one came, so he went downstairs and found a party of women in his kitchen. There were pictures of his mother in various stages of life scattered all over the table. They were laughing. His aunt Belinda was in the middle of a story about the day her baby sister got saved and got to rolling all over the pulpit until the entire deacon board picked her up and carried her out. Jamison was still aching, so he pretended not to listen. He went to the refrigerator with a cup and pressed for water.

“Baby sister went a hundred percent on everything. She ain’t never went half. All heart, she was,” one sister said.

“Evil!” another said and they all laughed.

“Yes, evil, but decisive in her evility,” another said, and everyone hollered.

“Evilina,” another said.

“Queen Evilina!”

“Yeah, but only when you crossed her. Only when you hurt someone she loved.”

One sister had quietly gotten up from her seat and taken a picture over to Jamison at the refrigerator. It was of him and his mother standing in front of the Grand Canyon. She rubbed her nephew’s back but didn’t say a word as he stood there looking at the picture like it was a vision right in front of him.

“She loved,” someone said.

“Loved her family. Loved her son.”

“Loved her son more than life itself.”

There was a collective, elongated sigh that had been perfected by women gathered around kitchen tables for such purposes.

The funeral events—and that’s what one would call them—were a mix of tradition and new money. Claiming always, “Baby sister would want it this way,” the three sisters took Jamison’s credit card and bought the biggest pink and gold casket they could find. They didn’t wait for people to send flowers. They ordered twenty dozen pink roses to be delivered wherever their sister’s body went (new ones at each stop). When they called the newspaper to place an obituary, they decided that the quarter-column statement the editor was offering was too small for the mayor’s mother. They paid for a two-page spread—in color. A chartered bus went down to Mobi