SNOWBALL

A Christmas Story.

In the north end of the parking lot, men in parkas and fat pants cluster around a black Yukon, joking, gesticulating, chumming to sub-woofers. The pulsing SUV sparks red, green and blue, and stories float and knock, though no one’s listening. Loose shadows, long limbs, everything moving—Honest John’s lets them be. Men need a place to hang. It’s Christmas eve.
The rest of the block is quiet: Twilight Zone boarded up, three peeling bungalows dark. Beside a ratty vacant lot, a mustard-colored cottage with a hand-painted sign proclaiming Jesus Is Alive! Pentecostal Tabernacle has its doors closed, but one dim bulb lights the porch.
Now and then a crow’s raucous cry rips the sky.

A silver Honda pulls in across the street, rasping against the curb. The driver, a woman with sallow skin and nesty hair named Billie (Wilhelmina), bows her head, removes her librarian’s glasses, and rubs her eyes. Now that she’s here, Billie does not want to get out of the car. She would rather lock the doors, lower the seat and lie down. Her nerves are shot from the long drive accompanied by a screeching wiper-blades and a smeared windshield—and she got lost, twenty minutes going the wrong way. Her heart started beating so hard it made her cough.
She stares at the celebrating men. Honest John’s lot, sporting a single string of blinking Christmas lights, is backlit by the office window’s glare and Billie can’t make out her son among the circling silhouettes. When a figure detaches from the pack and sprints around the corner, she wonders if that was him, if he saw her car and took off.
Billie breathes deeply, trying to clear her head, which is rushing like an ocean, like someone’s holding conch shells over her ears. What if the men accost her? What if her car is stolen? Her forgotten turn-indicator blinks on a dirty Burger King bag, a smashed plastic coke bottle, and Colt 45 cans in the curbside rivulet.

Billie has come to Honest John’s because her neighbor Marietta stopped over that morning with a plate of Christmas cookies, and Billie was struck by Revelation: take the cookies to Marcus. She believed it was God speaking.
Marcus is Billie’s youngest child by ten years, the adopted son, the Black son, though Billie doesn’t refer to him that way; she refers to him as her youngest son. Also, her troubled son. She hasn’t seen him for almost two years.
She worries that Marcus won’t speak to her—in fact, no longer acknowledges her as his mother—and she worries that coming to Honest John’s will wreck the new life she has struggled to build. She doesn’t think about what it might do to Marcus’s new life. She has not imagined Marcus as having a new life.
She starts to feel conspicuous, just sitting there, so she slides her purse under the seat with her heel, opens the door, collects the cookies, and gets out. She slams and locks the door. She stops herself from checking.
Hoarse complaint breaks out among the crows. A skinny little tabby bounds out of the weeds to leap across the sidewalk. When it slinks under a car, the crow-grumble stops. Billie surveys the dark houses; she wonders where the cat lives.

Her face burning, Billie makes herself stride across the street, carrying the plate of cookies in front of her like an offering. She’s also carrying the hope that God really does want her to be here, which would mean she’s doing the right thing.
Dave, her Pastor—also her boyfriend—always seems to know what God wants. A short, serious man with warm amber eyes and nutbrown skin, Dave also seems to know what’s best for Billie, and she has leaned on him, grateful for his guidance. Now she feels like an apostate, sneaking off to the south end of Tacoma without telling anyone. If Dave knew about this Christmas Eve mission, he would be disappointed in her. So would the Parenting with Love and Limits group.
The tabby is stalking some invisible something.  The drizzle is coming down like frozen spit.
Billie’s squints toward the man-pack, trying to make out faces. Too much hood—indigos, purples; they’re all the same. She gestures in their direction, half head-fake, half nod, and makes herself smile.
They ignore her. No one could tell that the men see the white woman hustling across their lot in the icy spatter, but of course they do: they know she’s not a threat and they know she doesn’t belong and they.
Someone lights up.
Billie steps onto the stoop and fumbles with the wet door handle. Holding the plate against her chest, she pushes into the warm, brightly lit office. The door slowly closes behind her with a pneumatic shush.
A display of tires, multi-pointed stickers, $59.99!!!  $79.99!!!  $104.99!!!  Signs: Oil Change, Alignment, Shocks & Struts. The wooden bench beneath the plate-glass window is stained with grease. Behind a chipped Formica counter a wiry man is tapping on a clipboard while speaking into a telephone cradled on his shoulder. Billie stops, shifts her weight, and settles in the center of the room, the gay little plate held down by her waist.
The man does not turn.

Billie’s older kids, Philip and Angela, were gone into their own lives, but that was to be expected. What was not normal, what threatened to sink Billie, was her belief that her youngest, Marcus, could be dead. It has been two years of checking for a blinking red light every time she walked through the door; two years of checking the newspaper every morning the way some people check baseball scores, trying to judge by age and size if Marcus was the boy who got shot. The worst two years of her life.
Philip and Angela had watched Marcus proceed from skipping school to staying out all night to disappearing for days at a time. They had watched his appearance devolve, his evasive eyes go red-rimmed and flat. They thought Marcus—resilient little shit—was bad, not dead.
Billie’s older sister, Tommy, said What is this, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? She called it becoming Black again.

The man behind the counter lowers his voice and glances over his shoulder at the white lady: red ski parka, salt-and-pepper hair, misty wire-rimmed glasses and a Christmas plate wrapped in saran wrap and water-beaded. He says, A’ight,grabs a pen from the pocket of his blue denim work shirt, which has Dwight stitched in red, and scrawls something on his clipboard. Then he turns.
“Ma’am?” he says, his expression neutral. He thinks she must be lost. He lays his clipboard on the blue Formica.

The first time Billie understood the enormity of what she’d done—her kids were growing up; please just one more baby—was when Marcus was three, when he’d crashed into her studio with both hands flattening his little Afro, crying I want hair like this, like the Lone Ranger.
Kids called him names. One time only one kid showed up for his birthday party. A little cub scout told Marcus he couldn’t get his Wolf badge because he was already a monkey. Billie had no idea what else. Marcus did not tell her everything.
But they were happy, a happy family, skiing in the winter and camping in the summer. Marcus loved splitting cedar with the hatchet and stacking it into a teepee for the campfire, he loved cooking hot dogs with his buddy Noah and then tearing around the campsite with marshmallow torches.
Billie had always believed Marcus would be okay as long as she helped carry his heart.

She peers into the garage through a dirty yellow door held half-open by a wire: empty lift, pink shop rags, Coats Tire Balancer, a giant jack. She can hear the umber throb of rap, but she can’t see the workers. A sign says Absolutely No Customers Allowed In Bays.
“Ma’am?” Dwight says again. He can tell this old white lady is not a walk-in. Some kind of missionary lady, maybe. Is she looking for the Tabernacle? He scratches his neck and says, “Help you with something?” He hopes she’s not a crazy.
The fluorescents make Dwight transcendent.

After the divorce, Billie and Marcus had moved from a suburb east of Tacoma, Washington, to Seattle, and she’d enrolled him in Garfield High, his first predominantly African-American school. She thought he would love it but the very first day Marcus came home with bruises. Blacks don’t skateboard, he told Billie, and he threw his deck off the porch. And for a long time at Garfield, Marcus would not speak. He said he sounded white.
He said he missed his dad.

“Oh, yes. Hello,” Billie says, nodding at Dwight. “I’m looking for Marcus? Marcus Milhouser?”
Dwight’s expression does not change.“What address.”
“No, he works here.”
“What address?”
The paper with the address is on Billie’s passenger seat.
“I’m sure he works here. Um, Shakir?”
The man shrugs and shakes his head. He looks at his watch. Honest John’s closes at five on Christmas Eve, and Dwight has promised Momma Vi that he and Miles would be there by six. He looks at his watch again.

Just two weeks ago Letitia, Marcus’s ex-girlfriend, called Billie to share her customary complaints and to see what Billie had planned for Christmas. And she wanted to give Billie an address, with this disclaimer: it was old, and she had gotten it from Tronika, who did not know shit about shit. Oh, and if you believed Tronika, Marcus had a new name, too.
The name he brought with him when he was eight weeks old was Stephen. Billie and Stu named him Marcus. Now he was Shakir.
Honest John’s address had sat unused on Billie’s desk because she’d made a vow that until Marcus came to her with a clear plan, she would not pursue him anymore—a solemn, binding vow, signed by her, signed by every member of her PLL group, signed by Pastor Dave, and, by proxy, by God.

Billie glances again at the yellow door.
“Maybe someone in there would know? I just need to talk to him, you know. For a minute,” she says.She raises the plate of cookies and lists toward the garage, but her feet are stuck. Absolutely No Customers Allowed In Bays.
Dwight stares. She could be juvy. Maybe she is crazy. He can tell she’s not going to quit. She’s staring back with a set smile. Dwight says, “Let me—” and he jerks his head sideways. He nods, sighs, glances under the counter. He glances at Billie again. He picks up the clipboard and saunters out from behind the counter. As he passes, he takes a closer look at the cookies.
Billie flushes. Marietta’s gingerbread men strike her as possibly offensive—no certainly offensive, silly, white grins on brown cutout men. She has the urge to apologize; wants to say, but I have a Black son.
“Wait here, please,” Dwight says, and he steps into the garage.

Two years earlier, after Marcus flunked out in his first year at Howard University, Billie began going to church, where she found the Parenting with Love and Limits group, and where she met Pastor Dave.
Tommy said, Isn’t it a little late for the family that prays together stays together? Then she  called it “black humor,” raised her eyebrows, shook her head, and said, See? My God. But Billie couldn’t hold anything against Tommy, who had not only long ago lost a little daughter to meningitis, but had recently lost her son James to AIDs. James had loved Baby Marcus. They all had, Tommy, her kids, Bobbie, her kids. He was everyone’s baby.
In Pastor Dave’s opinion, he was everyone’s pet.
Billie didn’t go back to the group until Dave came looking for her. She had to agree that nothing she’d tried had worked, and a few weeks later, script in hand, Billie informed her son that she was no longer willing to provide for him in his present unproductive lifestyle. She’d laid out parameters for the transition and given him a month.

The group said using the word lifestyle was a way to separate the person from the behavior, creating less shame, although Marcus did not appear to be troubled by shame. Billie had substituted the word unproductive for the word criminal. All she knew for certain was drinking, a reckless driving arrest, and a misdemeanor possession arrest. Maybe he was stealing. Letitia claimed he was dealing. But Billie didn’t know.
Marcus said, You’re kicking me out? To him, the year since coming home was nothing— he was working on things, it took time. He sat on the kitchen stool, scowling, a muscular young man with tiny dreadlocks, like kidney beans all over his beautiful round skull. Once Billie left the room, he grabbed something from the fridge, slammed the door, stomped down to his lair and turned up his music so loud the house trembled.
The next day, having thrown Billie’s grandfather’s Adirondack chairs across the yard, he was gone. Billie was at work. She thought he must have gone to his dad’s.
You kicked him out? Stu said when she called. Stu had remarried when Marcus was in tenth grade and he and Marcus were out of touch. Where’s he going to go? What’s he going to do?
Billie asked why it was her job to shape up an almost twenty-year-old, out-of-control…Black man.
Jesus, Billie, Stu had said. What are you talking about? Marcus is our son.Billie had started crying.
She has wondered every single day if she did the right thing.

In the cavernous garage, Dwight speaks with his boys.
In the parking lot, men pass pot, paper bags and fabrications.
The little tabby slinks from one car to another, sticking to shadows.
Billie stares out the window, watching the men, watching her car. When the cat dashes across the street, Bille wonders who feeds the poor thing.

After Marcus left, something would occasionally disappear while Billie was at work—a couple of hot pads, plates and towels, a saucepan. The little cast-iron waffle maker. It made Billie happy to discover these disappearances. She would grab her old long-haired cat, Snowball, and try to gaze into her eyes, as if through the cat’s eyes she might glimpse Marcus—moving around the living room, gulping orange juice from the carton, using the phone on her desk. Then her anxiety medicine disappeared and Billie changed the locks.
Marcus had picked out Snowball when he was five—the “pure white one.” Billie worried she had not been Black-positive enough—or too much—until Marcus said, like the cookies, mom. Snowballs were his favorites.

“Sorry,” Dwight says. He stares past her, as though her face has some deformity that makes her difficult to look at. “No one here by that name.”
“Not here? He’s not here?”
Dwight shrugs and saunters behind the counter.
“But this is where he works. I mean, he works here, right?”
Dwight shrugs again and purses his lips. He scratches behind his ear. “Sorry.”
“Can’t you just tell me—” her voice is rising. The rushing sound is rolling into her head again.
“Ma’am? I’m going to have to close up, you know? It’s already past time.”
Billie stands in her spot, holding her cookies, staring at Dwight, her head whishing.
Dwight flips through the sheets on his clipboard and rearranges them. He sets it by the telephone. He opens the cash register, removes the cash drawer and stows it in the safe. He does not look at the woman as he carries out his duties. She might as well already be gone.

The problem with the cookie revelation, aside from the fact that Billie could not be sure it really was a Revelation, was that Marietta had brought gingerbread men, shortbread swirls, tree-shaped sugar cookies, rum balls, fudge, and thumbprints, but no snowballs. So Billie had to bake. It had been an arduous, clumsy, almost impossible task, like dancing with your legs bound. First, she had forgotten that snowballs were called Russian Teacakes and she couldn’t find a recipe; she’d had to lie down. Finally, she went after her old binder in the basement.
But, really, what made it hard was doubt: what if the group threw her out? What if Dave left her? And what if she did find Marcus and he wouldn’t speak to her?
What if he was a crackhead?
When the confectioners’ sugar wouldn’t stick, Billie almost gave up.

A man wearing dark blue coveralls and a do-rag ambles in from the garage to steal a look at the white woman. For a moment Billie thinks the man is Marcus and her heart starts clattering. She coughs, and steps to the window to lower herself onto the greasy bench. The young man says something to Dwight in a soft baritone, peeks at the woman again, and slopes back into the garage.
Dwight glances at Billie. He looks at his watch. He rubs his eyes with his thumbs and goes back to his paperwork.
Billie has an urge to follow the do-rag man, but Absolutely No Customers Allowed In Bays. She sits, listening to the ocean, trying to breathe.
She remembers making snowballs when Marcus was three. She was in a hurry—the family was coming and Stu was out of town—and she’d brushed him away. She remembers the spidery little hand all of a sudden flitting over the counter, snatching a hunk of dough and rolling it, raw, in the powdered sugar. It made her laugh, how badly that boy wanted to touch the dough. Little hands, brown velvet, with long, sensitive fingers and delicate bones. She’d always imagined he would play the piano.

“Do you think I might talk to that man?” Billie asks abruptly. Dwight looks up. “Maybe he knows Marcus.”
“Ma’am, I spoke with my workers. No one here by that name.”
“But did you also ask about Shakir?” Billie stumbles over the name.
“Yes, ma’am. No one here by that name.” After a minute, he adds, “Sorry.”

What the group, what Pastor Dave, what Philip and Angela and even Tommy could never understand, was how beautiful Marcus had been. How he looked in his little bassinet at that time of night when no one in the world was awake except the baby and her, how the streetlamp made the sheet, his nightgown, and the whites of his eyes luminous. How, half asleep, it had always surprised her, for a long time it surprised her in the middle of the night, that her baby was Black.
How she loved him. Because he was her baby. Because he was beautiful. Because he was Black.

The music in the garage stops; the air becomes a solid.
“Ma’am?” Dwight’s sculpted face is not unkind. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. I got to lock up.” He looks into the garage and back at Billie. He hopes he doesn’t have to escort her out.
Billie stares at the garage. She imagines rushing in there, but instead she stands up, turns, walks to the doorway, balances the cookies in one hand, and pulls open the heavy door, admitting a frigid draught. She slips out, but before the door closes, Billie pokes her head back in and says, “Thank you. Merry Christmas.”
She stands on the stoop looking both ways, as though about to cross a busy street. The Yukon is bouncing fuzzy reflections, and the street has picked up, parishioners arriving at the Tabernacle. The parking-lot men are also revving up—waving, weaving, throwing slaps and signs and empties. Laughter rings, the throbbing bass booms, and the sonorous voices are merry, but Billie doesn’t hear the music. It’s not for her, and even if it were, her head is full. She thought she knew what to do this time, the right thing to do, the good thing to do.
She sits down on the wet stoop. She’s not leaving. She doesn’t care that she’s getting wet, that she’s intruding, that she doesn’t belong. She’s not going to leave.
The little tabby appears beside the far garage door, and when it trundles open the cat springs inside. Someone sets down a plate of food.
A new beat starts up in the Tabernacle, tinny tambourines and high hymnal harmonies.
Fuck Dave, Billie thinks. The thought shocks her. She never talks like that. But this is as strong as her cookie revelation: Fuck Dave, fuck all of them. She does not want to go to Dave’s service tonight and she does not want to pick up Angela tomorrow and take her to Tommy and Harry’s. She wants to sit in this place in the ice-cold mist.
She wants Marcus to have the snowballs.

A man ducks under the raised garage door. He hesitates, and then walks toward the white woman sitting on the stoop. His rubber-soled boots make small sucking sounds on the wet cement.
Billie hears nothing. She is studying the creased saran wrap, watching red, blue and green water-beads filling and spilling. She is puzzling over whether what she is feeling would be called giving up or letting go. The mist collects in her hair and trickles onto her shoulders. She thinks she has trouble with the concept of letting go. She draws slow breaths, calming the ocean in her head. Not a bad feeling at all, Billie thinks, though she senses that beneath her calm ocean could be the very bad feeling.
The man stops in front of her. The parking-lot revelers shoot quick looks at the tableau on the stoop and look away. Not their business.
Soft, fawn-colored boots swim into Billie’s focus and she raises her head. A sheepskin bucket hat hides the man’s eyes, but his mouth and one cheek catch the streetlight, and Billie’s arms become too weak to lift even a little plate of Christmas cookies.
The hat slants and a hand with beautiful bones and long fingers floats down. He takes the plate and holds it in front of him, like an offering. The hat rises again and inclines, a slight nod; behind him, a sheet of specks, like sifted sugar, drifts through the beam of light.
There is an explosion of laughter as a rumbling truck pulls into the lot. Some shadows bop over to the driver’s window and an can rattles against the curb.
Billie struggles to her feet. The man nods again. Her eyes wet, she can’t make out his expression, but she knows she shouldn’t move.
After a moment, he turns and walks back across the lot. Billie stands beside her stoop, empty hands dangling, and watches him go, tiny dancer, his easy gait keeping time with the Pentecostal rhythms down the street.
Honest John’s office light goes out. Dwight and the do-rag man duck out of the garage. A’ight, Later, Merry Christmas.As the garage door grinds down, the little tabby scampers into the drizzle. Marcus nabs it with one hand and holds it to his chest, rubbing behind its ears with his thumb. When it starts squirming, he lets it go. He swings open the skreaking door of a beat up Oldsmobile, leans inside, lays the plate of cookies on the passenger seat, backs out, removes his lined denim jacket and sheepskin hat, and tosses them in. He slides behind the wheel.
Her hand on her stomach, Billie watches the Oldsmobile ease onto the shining asphalt and accelerate down the street.

The crows are quiet; Honest John’s is dark. Just the throb from the parking lot, laughter from the street, call and response from the Tabernacle down the way.
The little cat trots across the lot, stops to lift a leg and lick, and then streaks onto the street, heading toward the Tabernacle. Billie thinks she’ll follow. Maybe she’ll be lucky enough to join in a few hymns.