But there’s one part of the service where Ma always eases up on acting like a warden. And that’s when Pastor Carter starts sweating, and Sister Jefferson starts laughing. See, when the sweat and laughter comes, that basically means the spirit is in the building. And when Pastor starts banging his hand on the pulpit, and throws out one of those everybody-knows-it scriptures like, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” that’s the cue for the organ player, Dante, to get ready to play the happy music. Happy music sounds like the music they play at the beginning of baseball games, except sped up, and looped over and over and over again, until every lady in the church catches the spirit. And when you catch the spirit, that don’t mean you reach out and grab it like it’s ball or something. It’s not like that. Catching the spirit is more like the spirit catching you. And when it happens, you dance. But not like dance dance. Not like Cotton be dancing. You dance like the church is roach infested and it’s your job to step on them all. Like you trying to put a hole in the floor. Like you trying to break the heel off your white church pumps.
And Ma loves this. She always has. But now, she can’t dance. So, when she looks down the aisle during this part, it’s because she wants to see me and Maddy catch the spirit. Actually, she just wants to see us do a triple-time step. See us move our legs a million miles a minute. Maddy loves it. As soon as she hears the music, she gets to bouncing around in her seat the same way she does when I’m doing her hair. Me, well, I don’t ever really feel nothing. But I love my mother. So I give Maddy the look, and she stands up, shoulders rocking, silly smile smeared across her lips, but only for a second before she mimics the other “saints” and screws her face up like she just caught another whiff of the Thomases. Then I stand up. Ma rolls the wheelchair back so we have enough space to slide out of the pew without tripping or brushing against the wheels of her chair and dirtying up our holy dresses.
And once we’re out, oh . . . it’s party time. More like, workout time. It’s like black Riverdance, or something like that. Actually, it reminds me of some of the warm-up drills Coach makes us do at practice. High knees. Footwork. And Ma loves it. But she can’t fist-pump and yell, “Go, Maddy! Go, Patty! Go! Go! Go!” in church. Not really appropriate. But what she can do is yell, “Yes, Lawd! Yessssss! Thank ya, Lawd! Thank ya!” And that’s basically the same thing.
After service, Momly is always waiting for us, and I go through the same process—getting Ma in the car, the wheelchair in the trunk. The only difference is on the ride home, Ma’s all high off Jesus and now ready to talk about what I’m normally doing great at, even though not so great this week. Running.
“You know I pray for you. I pray God put something special in your legs, in your muscles so you can run and not grow weary,” she said, lifting a finger in the air, proud that she was able to slip a Bible verse into regular conversation, a thing she was always trying to do.
“She’s really something, Bev,” Momly adds. I hate when they try to make me feel better by talking around me, like I’m not right here.
I lost.
I lost, I lost, I lost.
I sit in the back, clenching my jaw. Maddy sits next to me, kicking the back of Momly’s seat.
“Oh, I know she is, because she’s mine.” Ma turns around and this time beams at me. “And I don’t make no junk.”
TO DO: Introduce myself (which I should’ve done a while ago)
I SHOULD PROBABLY introduce myself. My name is Patina Jones. And I ain’t no junk. I also ain’t no hair flipper. And most of the girls at Chester Academy are hair flippers who be looking at me like my mom some kind of junk maker. But ain’t none of them got the guts to come out of their mouths with no craziness. They just turn and flip their dingy ponytails toward me like I care. Tuh. I guess it’s no secret that it’s never easy being the new girl. And I get to be the new girl in two different places—on the Defenders team, and at Chester. Lucky me. But at least the Defenders I can deal with because I know, for a fact, I can run.
I’ve been running track for three years now, thanks to Uncle Tony. Well, not just him. It really has more to do with my mom, dad, Uncle Tony, and Maddy. My whole family. But let’s just say Uncle Tony okeydoked the idea into my brain. See, it was my dad’s birthday, and also a few months before my mother’s legs were taken, and we were celebrating with cupcakes—real cupcakes, not pretend ones—that my mother had baked in honor of him. Yellow cake, strawberry icing, Dad’s recipe. It had become a tradition that I loved, even though it always made me sad. It was really just a chance for everybody to sit around and for the oldheads to crack jokes and tell me and Maddy stories about him. Maddy never knew him. And even though I did, and I remember him—I’ll never, ever forget him—there were a lot of things I just didn’t know. Like how he used to make beats, and sell instrumental tapes to aspiring rappers and singers in the neighborhood. And how he used the money he made from that to put himself through culinary school to become a pastry chef. And how he loved letting me lick the batter off the spoon before baking a cake, but not nearly as much as he loved seeing me chomp down on the finished product. But apparently, according to Uncle Tony, none of these things were as sweet to him as seeing me run.
“Your daddy called me when you took your first step,” Uncle Tony, peeling the paper from his cupcake, explained in the middle of an I-remember-when session. “I answered the phone and Ronnie just started yelling, ‘She did it, Toon! My baby did it!’?” Toon was what my dad called Uncle Tony, a nickname from when they were kids back when Uncle Tony was obsessed with, you guessed it, cartoons.
“He sure did. He was so proud his Pancake was walking,” Ma confirmed, smirking like this memory didn’t bother her, even though the shine in her eyes said different. Maddy, who was too young to really care about any of this, listened in, cupcake icing smeared all over her chin. Didn’t really make sense for me to wipe her mouth until she was done making a mess. The things you learn.
“But when you started running . . .” Uncle Tony shook his head. “That’s when he really lost it. He’d send me videos every other day of you dashing back and forth across the room. Little fat legs just movin’! But you’d have thought you’d grown wings and started flying or something the way Ronnie was acting.” Uncle Tony licked pink frosting off the cupcake and went on. “I don’t know what it was about seeing you move like that. But your daddy loved it. You were definitely his Pancake, but you were also his little sprinter.”