Chapter One

Corey knew it was his fault his mother went to prison. He thought about it every time he looked at her, and the way his heart quickened, and his breath caught in his throat when the thought rose up in him, made him want to stay away. Even now, seven years later, as he slowly made his way towards her one-room studio apartment, the thought crept up around him like a cloud of smoke from a cigarette that refuses to extinguish, no matter how many times you step on it. He ground his heel firmly into the thought, and yet it wafted up from the pit of his stomach, up his spine, around his waist, across his chest and wrapped itself around his neck, squeezing. He rubbed his hand slowly across the back of his neck and over his jaw as he walked, suddenly hot from the weak winter sun. He lifted his baseball cap and wiped his forehead.

Old Bubba, who sat every day on an old folding chair in front of an abandoned building drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag, nodded at Corey as he passed.

“’Sup?” Old Bubba mumbled, peering at Corey through half-closed eyes.

Corey paused and offered his fist for Old Bubba to bump. He shrugged. “You know.”

Old Bubba nodded again, smacked his lips in preparation, and took a long sip from his bottle as Corey moved on. The neighborhood hadn’t changed much since Corey’s childhood. Every third building was still vacant and boarded up, except where the boards had been pried from the windows and doors by squatters or had rotted and fallen off over time. Those buildings resembled grotesque faces with gaping black eyes and mouths. Sometimes errant trees sprang up inside the buildings and grew out of the windows or holes where the bricks were missing. When Corey was young, he sometimes had nightmares that he was walking down the street and the houses with big black eyes bent towards him, the trees reaching with long, thin arms. He would wake up terrified and panting, and the next time he had to go to school, he walked in the middle of the street, just in case.

His mother lived on the same block on which he had grown up, but in a different building. He walked up the crumbling concrete steps and let himself into the building with his key. He stopped to open her mailbox, one of eight lined up in the lobby. Nothing. The only mail she ever got was the occasional statement from Social Security. Her utility bills went to Corey because he paid them. She got nothing else. Not even junk mail. It was as if she no longer existed, which was true in more ways than one.

He let himself into his mother’s small, dark apartment. “Hi, Momma!” He forced a brightness into his voice he did not feel. “How’re you doing?” He put his backpack on the floor by the door and walked over to her.

She glanced up at him as she sat slumped against the back of the couch staring at the television holding a cigarette with a long ash threatening to fall. “Doing okay,” she said, her voice so low he strained to hear her. She slowly turned her attention back to the television. Everything she did these days was slow.

He perched on one end of the couch and pretended to be interested inthe television while he watched her from the corner of his eye. She didn’t look anything like the woman she used to be. This woman was thin and scrawny, with sharp cheeks and hips that looked like they might cut you if you rubbed up too close against them.  Her eyes stared straight ahead like dull black coat buttons—old, tired, worn.

Seven years ago, his mother had been anything but tired and worn. Instead, she was full of life with a loud laugh everyone recognized the moment they heard it, and eyes that grew wide when she was excited, which seemed to be all the time. Folks couldn’t get enough of her. The apartment was always full of neighbors and friends stopping by to chat, hanging around to see what she was cooking, asking for advice. Corey and his younger brother, Calvin, rolled their eyes when folks came around, as if they didn’t want to share her. But really, they were proud their house was the center of the block. Corey and Calvin belonged to all the folks who came by, and the neighbors belonged to them. If they ever got locked out of the house there were ten doors they cou