Free A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom Page B

Jewelle through the kitchen door. He likes Jewelle. He always has. Likes her for loving his little brother and shaking him up, and likes her more now that she has somehow shaped him into a grown man, easy in his new family and smoothly armored for the outside world. He likes her for always making him feel that what she finds attractive in her husband she finds attractive too, in the older, darker brother-in-law. And Lionel likes, can’t help being glad to see on his worst days, those spectacular breasts of hers, which even as she has settled down into family life, no longer throwing plates in annoyance ordriving to Mexico out of pique, she displays with the transparent pride of her youth.
    “Looking good, Jewelle. Looking babe-a-licious, Miss Corinne.”
    They both smile, and Jewelle shakes her head. Why do the bad ones always look so good? Buster is a handsome man, but Lionel is just the devil.
    “Are you here to help or to bother us?”
    “Helping. He’s helping me,” Corinne says. She likes Uncle Lionel. She likes his big white smile and the gold band of his cigar, which always, always goes to her, and the way he butters her bread, covering the slice right to the crust with twice as much butter as her mother puts on.
    “I could help,” Lionel says. There is an unopened bottle of Scotch under the sink, and he finds Julia’s handsome, square, heavy-bottomed glasses, the kind that make you glad you drink hard liquor.
    Lionel rolls up his sleeves and chops apples and celery. After Corinne yawns twice and almost tips over into the pan of cooling cornbread, Jewelle carries her off to bed. When she comes back from arranging Floradora the Dog and Strawberry Mouse just so, and tucking the blankets tightly around Corinne’s feet, Lionel is gone, as Jewelle expected.
    Her mother-in-law talks tough about men. Everything about Julia, her uniform of old jeans and black T-shirt, her wild gray hair and careless independence, says nothing is easier than finding a man and training him and kicking himloose if he doesn’t behave, and you would think she’d raised both her boys as feminist heroes. And Buster is good, Jewelle always says so, he picks up after himself, cooks when he can, gives the kids their baths, and is happy to sit in the Mommy row during Jordan’s Saturday swim. Lionel is something else. When he clears the table or washes up, swaying to Otis Redding, snapping his dish towel like James Brown, Julia watches him with such tender admiration that you would think he’d just rescued a lost child.
    Jewelle runs her hands through the cornbread, making tracks in the crust, rubbing the big crumbs between her fingers. Julia’s house, even with Lionel, is one of Jewelle’s favorite places. At home, she is the Mommy and the Wife. Here, she is the mother of gifted children, an esteemed artist temporarily on leave. At her parents’ house, paralyzed by habit, she drinks milk out of the carton, trying to rub her lipstick off the spout afterward, borrows her mother’s expensive mascara and takes it home after pretending to help her mother search all three bathrooms before they leave. She eats too much and too fast, half of it standing up and the rest with great reluctance, as if there were a gun pointed at her three times a day. In Julia’s house there’s no trouble about food or mealtimes; Jewelle eats what she wants, the children eat bananas and Cheerios and grilled cheese sandwiches served up without even an arching of an eyebrow. Julia is happy to have her daughter-in-law cook interesting dishes and willing to handle thebasics when the children are hungry and not one adult is intrigued by the idea of cooking.
    Buster will not hear of anything but the cornbread-and-bacon stuffing Grammy Ruth used to make, and Jewelle, who would eat bacon every day if she could, cooks six pounds of it and leaves a dark, crisp pile on the counter, for snacking. Julia seems to claim nothing on Thanksgiving but the table setting. She’s not