Free Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong Page B

non-family steward wasn’t part of the bargain that Fletch had made with his son-in-law. If only more than a cupful of his ashes had been found, Fletch would have turned over in his grave, knocked a hole through the side panel of his coffin, and headed straight for the courthouse to drag Walter Wendell off the bench. There were probably enough ashes to make a fist, though, and Walter Wendell had dreamed about that fist coming down on his head, a gavel demanding justice.
    My father must have known what he was getting himself into. A partnership at Fletcher Burch was like a brand-new Bel Air. He hadn’t earned it. Thomas must have known that DeAnne was the key, and, as was true of all keys, she could open doors and lock them shut.

O RVILLE W RIGHT WAS THE FIRST A MERICAN MAN TO FLY . H IS older brother Wilbur was the second. Together they entered history as “the Wright brothers,” equal and two-headed. In the privacy of their sibling rivalry, alone and always one-sided, Wilbur never forgot that Orville was the first to raise himself off the ground and touch it down again with all his limbs intact. The brothers knew that their true achievement wasn’t flight but flight accompanied by a safe landing. Icarus flew. It was how he descended that determined why his story was told and retold. Icarus flew . That was what the brothers said to each other by way of a prayer, and as a reminder that flying wasn’t their only goal. Wilbur, till the day he died, would look into Orville’s eyes, which reminded him of his own and of the North Carolina sky, and see there a speck of gray, a plane lifting into the clear blue. When Orville blinked, this reminded Wilbur that the first flight was only twelve seconds long. Between the two of them, there were four successful attempts that day. The last one and the longest in duration belonged to Wilbur: fifty-nine seconds. An appreciable difference that, once their identities became factually entwined, was often overlooked and forgotten. Wilbur flew. He wrote it on a piece of paper and placed it inside his shoe. He did it to assert his personhood and to document the singularity of his achievement. Wilbur flew .
    I first read about the Wright brothers in the pages of North Carolina , and from that moment on I have liked Wilbur better. I cross-stitched his two-word declaration of independence onto a handkerchief that I made in my sixth-grade home economics class. I used periwinkle floss and dotted the i with a star. I received a C-minus for my efforts. My stitches were uneven, and the cursive f looked more like a b . I had intended the handkerchief as a Christmas gift for Kelly. I kept it instead.

    From second to eighth grade, Wade and I shared the same school bus stop, located at the front of his house by a SLOW CHILDREN sign. We were the only kids who lived on Oak Street. Irony, thankfully, came late to us. We were lucky in that way. On cold fall mornings Wade’s mom would send him out with two paper cups of hot cocoa, the kind with the very small marshmallows included in the mix, so tiny that they threw off our sense of perspective. Looking down at these floating white dots, we felt like giants. The first time Wade handed me a cup, he said, “My mom chocolatemilk says this is for you cannedgreenbeans.” After that, the handoffs were silent. What more was there to say? Cup, cocoa, giants, wait, cold, bus, school. All the important things between us were already established and understood. I didn’t need another word, and he, being a boy, didn’t know that words were necessary. We left the empty cups at the base of the street sign and climbed aboard the bus, and by the time we were dropped off in the afternoon the cups were gone.
    On colder winter mornings, Wade’s mom drove us to school. DeAnne never offered, and my father would have disapproved if he had known. What was he paying taxes for if his daughter was being shuttled to school in a private vehicle? If he was in a joking mood (most