can roll a joint like nobody’s business, tight little sticks with just enough slack in the roach. I told her—”
“Mama, please,” I interrupted. I looked over my shoulder the way I always did when she started talking about that stuff. My mother had been a dedicated marijuana smoker all of her adult life. She said it was for her glaucoma. And if you reminded her that she’d never had glaucoma, she would bend your ear about the virtues of her preventative vision care regimen.
Other than being against the law, the problem with Mama’s habit, and the reason I automatically glanced over my shoulder when she started talking about that mess, was that James had worked for the Indiana State Police for thirty-five years. Mama got caught twenty years back buying a bag of dope on the state university campus on the north end of town, and as a favor to James, the head of campus security brought her home instead of arresting her. The campus security chief swore he’d keep it under wraps, but things like that never stay quiet in a little town like Plainview. Everybody knew about it by the next morning. It tickled Mama to no end when her getting busted became a sermon topic at church a week later. But James didn’t see the humor in it when it happened, and he never would.
I was eager for Mama to get back on track with the story of her evening with the McIntyres, skipping any illegal parts, because foremost among my mother’s many peculiarities was the fact that, for many years, the vast majority of her conversations had been with dead people. Thelma McIntyre, the excellent joint roller, had been dead for twenty-some years. Big Earl, on the other hand, had been just fine one day earlier when I’d seen him at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat buffet. If he had indeed been visiting with Mama, it was not good news for Big Earl.
“So, Big Earl’s dead, is he?” I asked.
“I imagine so,” she said.
I sat there for a while, not saying anything, just thinking about Big Earl gone from the earth. Mama gazed at me like she was reading my mind and said, “It’s all right, baby. Really. He couldn’t be happier.”
We found out about Mama seeing ghosts at a Thanksgiving supper back in the 1970s. Mama, Daddy, my big brother Rudy, James, Jimmy, Eric, and me—I was pregnant with Denise that fall—were all gathered around the table. In keeping with tradition, I had done all of the cooking. Flowers Mama understood. She had the best garden in town, even before she devoted a plot to her prized marijuana plants. Food Mama never quite got the hang of. The last time Mama attempted to cook a holiday meal, we ended up feeding her black-and-gray glazed ham to the dog and dining on hardboiled eggs. The dog took one bite of Mama’s ham and howled for six hours straight. The poor animal never quite recovered. So I became the family chef at age ten and we ended up with the only vegetarian dog in southern Indiana.
That Thanksgiving supper had started off real nice. I had cooked my best feast ever and everybody loved it. We joked and ate and celebrated having Rudy at home. My brother had run off to Indianapolis as soon as he graduated high school, so we didn’t see much of him and my boys barely knew their uncle. Everyone was having a good time, except for Mama, who was testy and distracted all afternoon. She got more agitated as the meal went on, mumbling to herself and snapping at anyone who asked her what was wrong. Finally she stood up from the table and hurled the butter dish at an empty corner of the dining room. She shouted, “Goddammit to hell!”—my mother can cuss a blue streak when the inspiration hits her—“Goddammit to hell! I have had just about all I can take from you, Eleanor Roosevelt. Nobody invited you here and it’s time for you to go.” She shook an accusatory index finger at the corner of the room where the stick of butter, avocado-green plastic butter dish still adhered to it, slid down the wall, leaving a shiny trail like the path of a rectangular snail. Mama looked at the astonished faces around the table and said, “Don’t give me that look. She may have been the perfect little lady when she was in the White House—all lace doilies and finger bowls—but since she