LITMIR.BIZ

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strength before laughing loudly and stalking off.

      In DeAndre’s mind, Fran knows, there is the notion that at fifteen years, he’s a man. Her son is by no means cutting the ties with her; they are still family, to be sure, but he is no longer letting her treat him as her child. The change infuriates Fran. And it pains her.

      Because in ways that matter, Fran tells herself, she’s been a real mother to DeAndre and DeRodd. True, the coke and dope haven’t left much money for new high-tops or weekend movies or Sega Genesis games. Still, her habit has never clouded her love for her sons, and she knows they both feel it. The back bedroom isn’t much, but her children have never been without a place to lay their heads. Nor has there been a day when they went hungry, or left the house without school clothes. Time and again, she feels, she has proven herself a mother to DeAndre by standing with him against the city bureaucracies. She’s been there for the meetings with the vice principals and for the suspension hearings at the school headquarters on North Avenue. She’s been there at the precincts to take custody of him after every arrest, or at the juvenile hearings at the courthouse downtown. She’s been there with him at Bon Secours and University Hospital, there in the emergency room for the skinned knees and broken bones, the asthma attacks and kitchen burns. And she’s always been there for him in the quiet moments, when he would lose his bluster and let his fears show, when he needed to be stroked and comforted.

      She isn’t consistent; she knows that. In calmer moments, Fran can readily admit to shortcomings, citing her failures as a parent with cold precision. But she will argue in the next breath—and argue with some validity—that her sons are better off than so many others who are running loose on Fayette Street, raising each other in packs on the corners, making up the rules as they stumble through the shards of broken childhood. Dink-Dink, for instance, who at thirteen is already a stone sociopath, out on the corners at all hours, shooting at grown men over drug debts, or disrespect, or simply for the sheer joy of pulling the trigger. Or Dink-Dink’s running buddies, Fat Eric and Lamont—children crazed enough to fire pellet guns at passing police cars or to storm into the Korean carryout with their zippers open, waving their equipment at customers and the embarrassed counter girls. Or the twins—Arnold and Ronald, the oldest sons of Gary’s girl, Ronnie—who left school at fourteen to run wild. Two years from now, they will be keeping house in an apartment on Fairmount, an address they’ll acquire when the adult occupant is sent to jail. The twins will kick in a back window, then come and go as they please, their days occupied with the sale of drugs along Gilmor Street, their nights spent turning the apartment into an amusement park for the rest of the neighborhood kids. Fetid trash will be left where it’s dropped; human feces in the corners, bullet holes in every kitchen appliance, chair, and wall. And all of it will go on with their mother in the apartment directly below, concerned with nothing beyond her high.

      The Dink-Dinks and Fat Erics of the neighborhood were a year or two behind DeAndre and his contemporaries, but even among the Fayette Street regulars they are regarded as a wild, new breed: violent, unsocialized, devoid of responsibility, without connection to family or friends or even to themselves. And while Dink-Dink and his crew mark the first wave, the disaster is clearly accelerating. Younger packs are already making their mark in this neighborhood; Old Man and Chubb, for example, are already up on the corners at nine or ten years, running for the Mount Street dealers.

      Fran has given DeAndre and DeRodd more than that. Even now, though lost in addiction, there are things that she won’t do:

      She won’t put her kids out on the corner to work a package for her benefit; that DeAndre is on Fairmount is his own decision and against her will. She won’t hold DeAndre’s drugs, or hide his gun, or teach him what she knows about how to cut dope or stretch a package into better profit. She won’t wink at his misadventures on the corner, allying herself with his cause for the sake of the dollars or vials that might come to her. She hates that he is already on the corner; she hates listening to the gunshots that echo from Fairmount and Gilmor at night, wondering if the ambo siren is for DeAndre or if the police wagon racing around the corner has been called for her son. She hates that he’s already smoking those big Philly blunts, starting out with $10 bags of weed, the same way she did. She can’t stop any of it, of course; she’s compromised, a parent without proper standing. But neither will she give it the sanction so many others do.

      Nor will her sons be seen eating at the soup kitchen at St. Martin’s so that their mother can spend the food money on drugs. DeAndre will not suffer Easter without a new outfit and a new pair of Nike Airs; DeRodd won’t mark his birthday without a cake, or Christmas without some kind of toy. These things matter to Fran, who can tell herself that she manages to keep just enough balance in a world that is tumbling all over the place. And by that thin standard, she’s entirely correct: Where so many others have given up entirely, Fran Boyd is still a mother to her children.

      Not that Andre acknowledges it. Now that he’s out from under her wing, taking what she’s given as his due, he demands more, and his manner turns sullen and pouting when more isn’t forthcoming. I’m on my own out here, DeAndre likes to tell his friends. Nobody does nothing for me.

      He just doesn’t know. Fran is tempted to put him out again like she did last summer, or at least charge him some rent if he’s not going to go to school. What she ought to do—what she would like to do—is whip his ass good. But those days are long gone.

      So all right then, she tells him in an imagined rant, you’re a big boy now. You’re the man. You just go ahead and play it like that and the next time Collins gets out of a police car to kick your ass, you’re on your own. And the next time they call me from the school about one of your fuck-ups, you’re not going to have me down there lying for you. And the next time you’re downtown for a juvenile hearing, you won’t see me. Your ass’ll get flat on that courthouse bench waiting for your mother to show.

      Fran pumps herself full of indignation, squirming on that crushed couch cushion now, aching to pounce the next time he rolls past her steps. She’s had her fill; her eyes flash anger as she looks up toward Mount Street and sees DeAndre stepping from the carryout. Look at him, she thinks, all wrapped up in himself, as if it’s all about him. Fuck that.

      Halfway down the block, DeAndre seems to sense her glare and quickly locks into it, goading her with a blank stare of his own as he moves toward her. He slows his pace, but his eyes never waver. Fran rises as DeAndre nears the foot of the stoop, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets. He barely breaks stride as one hand snakes out and tosses her a small paper bag, which she catches instinctively.

      Smokes. She shakes her head. “Why you play me that way?”

      DeAndre laughs, walking on toward Fairmount.

      “Damn you, Dre,” she shouts. “Get back here.”

      But DeAndre ignores her.

      Shit, says Fran to herself, glumly peeling the cellophane from the pack. Why he got to be like that? Always setting her up just to knock her back down. Always letting her see the worst in him, and then, at the last possible moment, coming through with a little bit of heart.

      Like this last Christmas Eve, when the money was gone and DeRodd had his Santa list of toys all written out. Fran felt like she had no choice and rode the bus out to Reisterstown Mall, then raced through the stores on a last-minute boosting spree. She was just starting to get it done, too, until she forgot to take the security tags from several items, setting off alarms as she left one store. One mall guard actually chased her into the parking lot and Fran just managed to get on a southbound M.T.A. Scared and breathing hard, she looked back over her shoulder and saw one of them jawing into his walkie-talkie. A few blocks farther, when a police cruiser pulled alongside the bus, Fran slipped out the rear doors, turned a corner, and got so damn lost in Northwest Baltimore that by the time she made her way home, the stores were closed.

      Thinking on it now, she can remember climbing the steps to that back room in the worst kind of mood, kicking herself for letting it slide to the eleventh hour, dreading the look in DeRodd’s eyes. She went drag-ass into the bedroom to find DeAndre on the bed watching television, a pile of shopping bags on the floor in front him.

      “Wassup,” he said.

      It

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