A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,39

into my cheekbones and made my eyes tear. Out on the horizon a soft string of bruised clouds was piling up. The late afternoon sun gave them color. The washed out shades of gray, purple and pink looked like a child’s watercolor spread with too much moisture. I sat back on the chaise and thought about the first time I’d seen both my and Billy’s mothers together.

My mother had been working at the First Methodist Church on Bainbridge and Fourth Street in the historic section. For her own reasons my mother had left her lifelong Catholic church in South Philly, and every Sunday she took an early bus ride to First Methodist. Since my father had never stepped foot in church since his confirmation, it was not a subject he cared about or controlled her with. At the church she would work the kitchen, setting up coffee and rolls and morning juices for the clergy and their assistants. Because it was a volunteer position and a 6:00 A.M. requirement, she was mostly alone. I had already joined the police department and had come with her to help before, but when we arrived this day there was a stout, black woman in the kitchen. She had on an apron and was setting out heavy white coffee mugs.

She greeted my mother by her first name and with a meaningful hug. When I was introduced she offered her hand and said, “Oh my, Ann-Marie—this can’t be the boy you been talkin’ bout. Why, this is a man!

“Son, you is twice the size of my boy Billy.”

I looked at my mother. Her face was prideful and soft and more comfortable with this woman and their morning embrace than I had ever witnessed at home among blood relations. Their friendship would not have been easy in either of their respective neighborhoods, but it had a simple existence in this church basement. It was also a secret friendship that I admired because I knew my father would never have allowed it. That she had moved behind his back gave me a special appreciation for her.

In the weeks and months to follow I would see them several times in that kitchen, laughing together over a sink of dishes or huddled with their hands cupped over one another’s at the long empty table.

One winter morning I had come to pick her up, and when I came down the steps the two of them were whispering to each other and didn’t notice me. At first I thought they were praying, their hands again clasped together on the table.

But this time I saw a small bottle being passed, short and made of brown glass like an old apothecary bottle. And this time the tears had not been wiped away from my mother’s face. When I looked at Mrs. Manchester’s wet eyes she bent to my mother and whispered, “It’s all right, baby. The Lord will forgive.”

My mother refused to tell me why she had been crying. As far as I knew she had never let loose the demons in her life to anyone save a priest or her own version of God. She was quiet for the entire trip home but when I helped her out of the car and to the stoop, she turned to me and said, “You should go to Florida, Maxey. Mrs. Manchester’s boy Billy is a lawyer down there. You should meet him. You could leave this behind.” Then she spun with the back of her hand turned up to me, her sign of enough said, and stepped up into the house.

“M-Max?”

Billy was standing next to me. A glass of white wine was in one hand and a sweating bottle of beer in the other.

“You are absorbed.”

“Thinking about old times,” I said. “And mothers.”

“Ahh,” was his only response.

Billy and I had spent many nights on this porch, hashing out our mothers’ scheme. When the pieces were put together, he’d understood his own mother’s burden of complicity, and I had a clearer grasp on gratitude.

We both looked out at the ocean. Three miles out it was raining. I could see the dark curtain slurring down with thick bands falling in curls.

“To old times,” Billy said, raising his wine. We touched bottle to glass but neither of us drank.

“Our investors are t-taking us on quite a ch-chase,” Billy said, interrupting the thought.

Billy had been tracking the investors. He’d run their incorporation records back through the state’s Bureau of Professional Regulations. He’d found three companies filed under fictitious—but