Free The Queen of Everything by Deb Caletti Page B

Lee and croak, "Go on, go
on."
    Afterward Cliff Barton buzzed by the reception
in his biplane, and Hugh Prince did a marimba solo he'd practiced for the
occasion,
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    and Nathan fed Mom carrot cake they'd ordered
from Nadine, who bakes for friends and sells the extras out of the back of her
station wagon. Nathan got ahold of himself and walked around showing everyone
his tomato plants, which in a few months would be as round and ripe as my mother
would be. Tim Berg, D.D.S., who runs his practice out of a schooner docked on
the sound out near Asher House, tried his hand at the gourd rattles.
    The entire day I forced myself not to run away.
My father had always been the weekend guy, the
take-you-places-and-visit-the-
grandparents guy. But I guess that day, for
the first time, I started thinking about the possibility of living with him
full-time. I imagined going home to his house after a day at a normal school.
His house would be a quiet, regular home where the strangest thing that ever
happened was the time the coffeepot started spitting water.
    The day of my mother and Nathan's ceremony, Big
Mama patted my shoulder a lot. She was living with us by then. If it wasn't for
her, I might have done what I felt like doing, ripping the gourd from Tim Berg,
D.D.S.'s, hand and screaming at them all to go away. But Big Mama was the kind
of person you didn't want to disappoint. I'd started to count on her a lot in
the months before, when everything caused an argument between Mom and me.
Vicious arguments.
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    Fingernails in flesh arguments. Arguments that
caused Miss Poe to make her point by walking around wearing a huge, puffy set of
earphones connected to a Walkman.
    Big Mama and my own mother had been friends for
years and years, since my mother lived in Chicago. Big Mama came to live at
Asher House after her husband, Clyde, decided he did indeed need a hole in the
head. She and Clyde had come to Parrish a few months before, for Big Mama's job
with the fisheries department. She had to finish out her two-year stint before
she could go back to her home in Nine Mile Falls near Seattle, and she couldn't
bear to go back to the small house she and Clyde had rented on the island. Big
Mama's job had been a temporary one; Clyde Belle, or rather, parts of him,
stayed on Parrish Island permanently.
    Even though I knew Big Mama was suffering, she
was there for me. She said things that made sense. Big Mama talked about God a
lot, and salmon. She knew a lot about both things. She knew a lot about children
too; she had four grown ones.
    I liked to listen to her; her voice made me
calm, like laying your head down on a pillow. I didn't know Laylani Waddell yet
then, but let me tell you, Big Mama never went around like Laylani did, wearing
Jesus shoes. Big Mama made God sound like the friendly next-door
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    neighbor you actually wanted to see at the
mailbox. Even if you happened to be in your robe with your morning
hair.
    In spite of Big Mama's help, my mother and I
were a blow-up waiting to happen. And it finally did happen the night after my
mother's ultrasound test. She had wanted me to come with her and Nathan, and so
I did. I even fetched her a hundred tiny paper cups filled with water until her
eyeballs were practically swimming in their sockets.
    When it was time for the test, she did a funny
cross-legged walk to the table and had to be helped up; her naked belly stuck up
tight and glistening as a slice of Swiss cheese. It was embarrassing. Then the
nurse came in and squirted a splotch of goop on my mother and pressed this thing
that looked like a microphone on her, rolling it around with this look of
concentration like Mom was a big crystal ball about to reveal our future, which
I guess she was.
    All during the test, my mother was making these
little gasps because she had to go to the bathroom so badly. I guess they have
to make your bladder float like a rubber boat, I don't know; I didn't