At the Bottom of it All

The U-Haul James reserved had been rented to someone else. He and his brother, Ryan, were going to move the last of his father’s things out of their childhood home. At the counter, the clerk, a white man with a brown mustache that draped over his nonexistent upper lip, told him some tale about it being back to school season, how they’d overbooked their vehicles. James looked over Ryan’s shoulder and out the storefront window at all the trucks sitting in the lot.

“What’s happening with all those out there then?” James said, trying his best to hold back the venom quickly racing toward his tongue.

“Well, all those are reserved,” the clerk said.

James gripped his car keys tightly. In moments like this the soft voice of his mother resonated in his head. He recalled sitting in the bathroom as she ran Let’s Jam! through his hair. Through the mirror he watched her mouth form each word. You’ve got to be on your game at all times, James. White people always looking for an excuse. Always trying to catch you slippin’— even the one you call your friends. He could see her deep brown eyes staring at him. The hard point of her nails gently pressing against his skin as she studied the results of her grooming. In that moment, he could hear her voice, nonchalant, telling him that even a drop in the water like this could cause ripples.

Ryan placed an arm around James’s shoulder. “Okay, no problem. So, what can you do for us?”

“I could call the customers on the reservation list and see if we could switch things around?”

Yeah, how about you call me first then? James thought. The clerk checked his watch. it was almost lunch, James assumed, and the clerk was probably trying to go on break.

“Would it be possible to give us a reduced rate and take a van?” Ryan had taken over the conversation. James shrugged away from his grip and watched from behind, arms crossed. “Sure. That works just fine!” the clerk said as if he were the customer. He handed over the paperwork for the van.

“Thanks, we appreciate it.” Ryan slid the signed papers back across the table. *

About six months ago, Renee, their mother, passed away. It happened while she was shopping at the Meijer on 28th Street one evening. The woman who found her said that their mother was lifting a case of water bottles into her car and the next minute she was flat on the ground, the hefty case slamming atop her chest with a loud thud.

When James found out she was in the hospital he was overseas in Japan doing a summer long fellowship studying Kintsukuroi. His mother was the one who instilled a love for art in him. One year in middle school, she returned home from a business trip with a Raku style vase. It was a simple hand-thrown piece with a glossy black color and a surface rough like sandpaper. It sat atop the center island of the kitchen where it stayed for as long as he could remember. There had been a flower for every color of the rainbow in that vase at one point or another.

In high school, James practically lived in the art room of his school. While he wasn’t the best at painting or drawing, he excelled in ceramics. He loved the tactile feel of clay spinning round a wheel. How it glided effortlessly against his fingers, and in turn, how his hands could form the material into whatever shape he desired. It was in that room that he learned the quiet power that weight could have, how even a small change in pressure could fundamentally change a piece’s shape. Once hardened and placed in the kiln, the pieces he made stayed the way they were. Unlike relationships with other people where things morphed and changed in a seemingly random manner, he liked how his art had definition, an end point where they only way for things to change was to make them anew or break what was old.

It was Ryan who told him about their mother. James hadn’t had a real conversation with him in a few months. When they did talk, it was exclusively through text messages, but it was mainly a one-sided conversation. A picture of Malik, James’s nephew, at a birthday party or Roz, Ryan’s fiancée, destroying the living room with one of her crafting projects. James never had much to say in reply. Not because he wasn’t doing anything—he kept himself busy with a plethora of art projects at any given time—but he never had much of an inclination to share them with his brother. So, when Ryan called instead texted, he knew something was up. Through the static of his cellphone’s receiver Ryan said, “you need to come home.”

The doctors tried to save their mother, but after a week of minimal improvement she flatlined. The hospital room that James sat in with Ryan, and his father, Clive, was so silent that he couldn’t help but notice it. The doctor told them what they already knew, that unfortunately, things like this happen sometimes. He kept talking, but James could tell no one was really listening. Ryan paced around the room rubbing his head. His father broke, full on tears streaming down his face; he cursed; he yelled; he left the room. James had never his father, who had always been a well-composed man, like that before. He’d certainly seen him cry—he was known to be a serial crier while watching movies—but when it came down to real life things? His father kept his cards close to his chest.

All James could focus on was hum the fluorescent lights made. The doctor could have said anything after, I regret to inform you, for all he knew. Of course, James did know what came after and that's what made it worse. He felt there was a cruel inevitability associated with issues around death, as if there was a script that everyone followed during these conversations and never deviated from, even for a beat.

*

They were given a U-Haul van with a two-door trunk. James let Ryan drive so that he could sit back, smoke a cigarette, and forget about what just happened. In the van, they sat in silence watching the farmland go by in a wash of brown, yellow, and green.

“You know, there’s a closer U-Haul in the city, right?” Ryan said.

“What the fuck was that in there?” James said.

“What was what?”

“Don’t play dumb, you know what I’m talking about.”

Ryan switched lanes and turned the radio down a few notches. “You need to chill. That shit back there? Not worth it. You know that.”

“Right, so you’re just going to let them walk all over you? You can be the court jester if you want. Not me.”

“Causing a scene doesn’t make you hard. It just makes you look like another nigga.” “Just ‘cause Mom was talking all that mess growing up doesn’t make it right. That’s some bullshit and you know it. I don’t owe that white man shit. I’m the customer.” He tossed his cigarette out the window. “I have a degree. What the fuck is he doing? Working at U-Haul.” Ryan laughed, but James could tell it wasn’t a real laugh, more like one of those laughs you make when you don’t want to open a can of worms.

James knew what he said was low, that Ryan didn’t have a degree either. Ryan worked late nights at a local distribution center for Meijer. All James knew about his brother’s job was that he loaded and unloaded boxes from trucks. Ryan’s grip on the steering wheel tightened. His hands were much bigger than James’s, a bit darker too. He must have gotten them from his father, James thought.

They sat in silence for a long while.

Up ahead, a flock of birds undulated in the sky. They moved in wide-sweeping motions, a giant black blob with blue speckles of sky where their bodies didn’t meet. James wondered how they all were able to communicate so effortlessly.

“So, are you still ‘hanging out’ with that accountant?”

“Yeah, she’s still around,” James said. Ryan was always wondering about the women in his life. Asking if this friend was more than a “friend.” Or when he planned on bringing a girl over for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

“Damn, J, sounds like you found the one,” he teased. “But for real, I see those pictures you post. It seems like you’re into her. She’s pretty.”

“She is, but we don’t really talk about shit.”

“Well, what would you want to talk about with her, then?”

“I don’t know, anything. My work? What’s happening in the world? We might as well be blowing hot air at each other when we’re together.”

“You can change that,” Ryan said.

Ryan turned onto the off ramp near Division and came to a stop at the streetlight next to the Shell gas station. James watched a homeless man wearing all red make his way down the crosswalk and over the Shell entrance. The light turned green and they were off.

“You know, J, it’s okay to show people you care about shit. Sometimes saying it is the only way they’ll know.”

At the bottom of it all, James knew that what Ryan was saying was true. That if you kept a piece in the kiln for too long, you could cause irreparable damage, morph it into something you didn’t recognize. Or worse, that it could explode without a chance of being salvaged. *

James called Ryan his brother, but technically they were half-brothers. Same mother, different father. This distinction didn’t matter much to James except when it came to talking about his father. James didn’t know if he should refer to him as “dad” in the presence of Ryan or if he should just use Clive. He didn’t know what it was like to have a stepfather, to be at the seamline of the expectations of two men states apart.

James didn’t know much about Ryan’s father, Perry, just that he lived in New York in a placed called Middletown which didn’t sound like a place at all. When they were younger, Ryan would split his time between living with their mom in Grand Rapids and his dad in Middletown, but when Ryan was in high school, he stayed put with their mother. There were gaps in James’s memory about Ryan, and the older they got, the more James felt unease about those holes. He knew that they needed to be filled, that he had to try to know his brother, but he felt as if he was starting in the middle of a race. Ryan was eight years his senior, he’d seen much more of James’s life.

James never cared to ask his mother about her life in Middletown prior to meeting his father. To him, it didn’t matter what she was up to prior to him being born. What he did know about Perry was that he was a relatively poor and sickly man who couldn’t work and lived off disability checks.

In fact, prior to the funeral, the one memory James had of Perry he wasn’t even sure was real. One year, while he, Ryan, their mother, and his father were visiting relatives in New York City, they went Middletown so Ryan could pick up a few things he’d forgotten on his trip back to Michigan. They pulled up to a house. James could not remember what it looked like, but he could feel it. This happened from time to time, memories from his childhood took on unfamiliar shapes as if he were throwing pottery with his eyes closed. He could feel their shapes, but they were unrecognizable. Inside that shape of a house, he recalled meeting Perry in the living room. He sat in a large recliner chair in the shade of darkness despite the sun shining through the thin curtains. In his mind however, Perry was nothing more than a silhouette of a man. *

The old house was in the Heritage Hills district just off Wealthy Street and Cherry. A classic turn of turn the century Prairie-style home with a brick foundation and a light-yellow paintjob covering the top half of the structure. James got out of the car and took a deep breath. The lawn had been perfectly maintained. Despite fall being in full effect, the leaves that skated across the neighborhood streets were absent here, stuffed uniformly into large paper bags at the corner of the driveway. It was the same house he grew up, but it was missing the things that made it feel like home. The “Ward Family” lawn sign they’d gotten from in-laws was gone. A black outline stained the cement driveway where their basketball hoop used to be. Even the two spindles on the porch railing that James broke one summer throwing the football with friends had been replaced.

“I remember when we first moved here. You were a little dude, so you probably don’t remember. Mom got out of the car and said that the colors of house reminded her of oil and vinegar,” Ryan said.

Ryan was right, James didn’t remember that. Over the past few months he had begun to forget her voice. He hated how easy it was; two and half decades of hearing it and now, less than a year later, it was nothing more than a whisper from across the room.

“What did she sound like?” James said. It was like the question willed itself out of his thoughts.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, was she happy about it or was she trippin’?”

James wanted to know how she felt about the house, but even more than that he wanted Ryan to describe their mother’s voice to him. He wondered if his brother would highlight the same things: the slight lisp she had acquired over the last few years from getting dentures; the way she invented new syllables when she pronounced words like coffee; how she elongated phrases to emphasize her glee when talking with someone she didn’t really want to talk to on the phone, ohhh! How are youuu?

“Hmm.” Ryan leaned against the porch column. “Well, she must have liked it, otherwise you and I both know it still wouldn’t be the same color.”

Ryan unlocked the front door and James walked into the house. Inside, sunlight pouring in from the large living room windows revealed the ecosystem of dust floating through the lifeless rooms. Most of the furniture was gone. Either moved, sold, or given to the Salvation Army. The few pieces that did remain: the floral couch in the living room, a coffee table, dining rooms chairs scattered throughout the main floor were all draped with sheets that made them like Halloween ghosts.

“Home sweet home…” Ryan said. He walked into the kitchen and placed his keys, phone, and wallet on the center island.

The dinning room was a skeleton of what it used to be. The bare beige walls used to hold prints of Kandinsky paintings. A large china cabinet once loomed adjacent to the entranceway. It not only housed sets of china that his parents had collected over the years, but also a variety of statues their mother bought from flea markets and hobby stores. Angels, a Santa Claus, a Nativity scene. The statues she found were often characters depicted as white and she would paint their skin varying shades of brown. From time to time their mother would ask them to help on one of these projects. She would put construction paper over the table and tell them to paint within the line, and whoever did the best job would get a surprise.

Walking up the stairs toward the second floor, the walls where family photographs used to be were barren, even the nails that held their smiling faces up were now taken out, holes filled. The fifth step still made a sharp creak when James stepped on it, but the fear of his mother hearing him return early in the morning after a night out was gone. His bedroom had nothing more than a few boxes, none of which were his own. He leaned against the door frame and surveyed the room. If he thought hard enough, he could envision what used to be here: the Basquiat poster his father brought him from the MoMA one year. The sculpture of Harry Potter he made in middle school that blew up in the kiln. The family photograph of them in Cancún one summer, Ryan’s teeth eclipsed by green braces.

“I’m going to start moving boxes into the van!” Ryan yelled from downstairs. The sound of Ryan’s voice reverberated against the emptiness of the house. His footsteps moving across the hardwood floor took James back to the last year he remembered living with his brother. James was ten at the time, and before each day of school he’d sneak down into the basement to Ryan’s room play games on Ryan’s PlayStation. Back then, Ryan was the epitome of masculinity. His body was ripe with muscles from hours spent at the gym. His room, covered in posters of rappers: 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Notorious B.I.G. Underneath his bedframe, he kept car magazines where the vehicles never seemed to be in the foreground. Instead, the covers were a menagerie of sweaty, bikini-clad women in various poses atop car hoods. He drove a red 2002 Pontiac Firebird with an aftermarket spoiler on the back. In the house, Ryan wore almost exclusively wifebeaters that hugged against his torso and revealed a tattoo he’d gotten sprawled across his arm that Clive hated.

The door slammed as Ryan went out to the van; the house rumbled in response. James walked out into the hallway and peered through the window facing the front lawn. Outside, he could see Ryan taking out the hand-truck. He was brought back to an argument his father and Ryan had when he was a kid. From the corner of the upstairs rafters, James remembered watching his father go in on Ryan. He told him that he needed to figure out his life. That he was eighteen, barely getting through high school, and had no prospects in sight. That this house was an opportunity to change himself. From above, James recalled how big his father and brother looked. They were like two giants in a shouting match. He didn’t remember Ryan’s words from back then just the rumble of the door, the revving of a car engine speeding away. *

They started in the basement and moved up floor by floor. They packed box after box into the van in silence. Despite having moved more than a few times since leaving this house, James could never shake the unease he felt about how easy it was to move a life. How systematic one could be in compartmentalizing their existence into small cardboard boxes that fit uniformly in the trunk of a van. After a few hours of carting boxes from the house to the condo they were almost done.

In his parent’s room, James found a box that read “FRAGILE” in large red letters. He turned it around looking for any sign of what the contents were inside. Nothing. He tried picking it up, but the oblong shape and heft of it made it awkward to handle. He pushed it to the side of the room to move later with Ryan.

“Remember how you used to sleep on the floor over there like every night?” Ryan said walking into the room, two tallboys of beer in hand. “You were so afraid of the dark.” He stood next to James, his arms crossed as if he were thinking about something. “I don’t even know what I was scared of.” James said.

James opened the windows on the wall adjacent from the door. A cool breeze slinked in from outside riling the curtains into a slow dance. James hadn’t thought about those times in years.

“Man, it got so bad that I remember Clive forbid you from doing it.” Ryan sat on the open windowsill and cracked open a beer. It made a soft hiss as foam rose to the rim. He gestured to the unopened can next to his feet. “Want one?”

James took the other beer and pulled back the pop tab. He took a long drag. It was cold, bitter, and refreshing. He sat against the wall next to his brother and stared out at the empty room.

“I clowned on you for so long about that,” Ryan said.

“Yeah, until I started coming downstairs and sleeping in your bed. You didn’t say shit then.” James nudged Ryan’s calf.

“You’d knock on my door asking if you could sleep in my bed. You were so scrawny back then.”

James thought of those nights with his brother. If lingered on those memories it was almost as if he could be transported back in time. He could feel the shape of his brother; the rustling of the sheets as Ryan tossed and turned in the night; the coolness of the room when Ryan hogged all the covers; the gentle rumble of his brother’s snores.

“I think that was the closest I’ve ever felt to you,” James said.

“I guess so.”

“Not like that, stupid,” James said.

Ryan laughed.

James wondered if Ryan could sense what he was getting at, fill in the seamlines with the words he could not say in that moment. He wondered if that was the reason Ryan wasn’t responding. Their mother was the kind of person to wear her heart on her sleeve. James could have been leaving a room for a moment and she would say, I love you. For him, however, that was never easy.

“How about we moved the last few of these boxes then?” Ryan drained the rest of his beer and got up from the windowsill.

James showed Ryan the box he moved into the corner. First, Ryan tried picking it up, but it was no use.

“Looks like it’s a two-man job,” James said. He put his beer down and crouched to pick up one side of the box.

Ryan took hold of the other side and they hoisted it up to their chests. The box felt much heavier to James now that it was off the ground. Ryan didn’t seem phased by the weight. The two scuttled across the bedroom floor and into the hallway. James would go down the steps first with Ryan calling out “step!” as James descended.

“You sure you’re good going first? It easier when you’re second down,” Ryan said. James adjusted the box in his grip and started down the steps. “Jesus, what the fuck is even in this box?”

Step! Step! Step! Ryan yelled. It was going fine until James misjudged the distance between the final few steps and over extended his leg. His foot planted squarely two steps below where it should have been, and he crumbled to the ground. Ryan tried to catchup to the distance but fumbled to get a solid grip. The box crashed onto the steps and slid the remaining few feet to the entrance way. The contents inside let out a series of breaking screams as the box connected with the hardwood.

“Shit! Are you okay, J?” Ryan said. He glided down the stairs and extended a hand to James.

James took his hand and got to his feet. “Yeah, I’m fine,” James said.

The box was mostly intact, but one edge had been crushed on the fall and a series of fresh folds snaked throughout the cardboard.

“Well, we might as well see what’s broken,” James said.

Ryan nodded in response.

James sliced open the top of the box with his car key and carefully moved back the flaps. Inside, there was an assortment of plates, framed pictures, and bowls all wrapped in moving paper. In the righthand corner of the box, a large cylinder was wrapped in moving paper and bubble wrap. James picked up the cylinder and carefully unwrapped it from the bubble wrap. It felt heavy, but like a weight he’d held before. James could tell that the piece was broken. Pieces shifted around as he removed the bubble wrap and tore away a section of paper. The gash revealed a black surface broken into three pieces—two halves and a smaller shard that connected the two at the rim. It was their mother’s vase.

James pulled away the rest of the paper and held the pieces in his hand. Following his mother’s funeral, he returned to Japan to finish the fellowship he’d started. Most of his day consisted of throwing new pieces for a small store in Mashiko. From time to time, locals would stop by with old pots, plates, cups, and a variety of other ceramics that they wanted repaired. The shop owner—an old Japanese woman with the sharpest bob James had ever seen—was known for her skill in golden repair. Kintsukuroi. Even though James was there to learn more about her craftmanship she never let him repair any pottery. Customers brought in the pieces. James prepared the golden lacquer and the owner’s workstation, and then the owner would repair the pieces. He’d started the fellowship in hopes of bringing back a new piece for his mother. One of his own creation. Something to show her of his progress, but she was gone, and it felt pointless. After the shop would close for the day, James found himself breaking the pottery he made solely so that he could mend the breakage with golden seams and metal staples. He knew that breaking things solely to piece them together wasn’t what the art form was about. That progress for the sake of progress never ended well.

James laid the broken pieces of the vase out on top of the remaining contents of the box. He hadn’t thought about it in years. He looked past Ryan and into the kitchen. For a moment he could see the vase atop the center island and with it, his mother.

“Mom’s gonna be pissed,” Ryan said.

James looked at his brother and burst into a laugh. Ryan always knew the right thing to say. But then James’s laugh turned to a cry. And his cry turned to a wail. He couldn’t stop it, not this time. Ryan hugged him.

“I really miss her,” James said.

“Me too.”

James could feel the shape of his brother in his arms. He picked up the pieces of the vase one by one, examining the freshly formed fault lines that were made. In his mind he could see the golden lacquer seam forming between the chasm of the pieces.

“We can fix this,” James said.

“How?” Ryan asked.

“In my studio.” James wrapped the pieces up in the bubble wrap and paper. “This weekend.”

*

James showed Ryan around his studio that weekend. It was a small space filled with a wide array of pottery of all shapes and sizes. James’s work bench was caked with a kaleidoscope of colors from years of paint. He watched Ryan walk around the room inspecting all of the pieces that James had made. He’d never invited his brother—or anyone for that matter—into his studio.

Atop the workstation James laid out the three pieces of the vase. He ran his fingers along their edges. The newly formed breaks were sharp enough to cut skin. The vase’s surface felt like sandpaper. For a moment, James could feel Lake Michigan sand running along his fingertips; his mother, a small figure, the shape of her radiating against the summer sun.

James had Ryan mix together the glue while he prepared the lacquer and gold paint. They fit the three pieces together. Once the glue dried, Ryan cut away the excess and carefully applied the clear lacquer coating, filling the broken spaces. James brushed the golden paint along the seam lines of the reformed vase. A large stream of gold ran down from the top of the vase toward the center. Near the middle it erupted into a sea of slender lines, a vein of roots ready to take hold of new life.