Gizzard.!
the love magic that drew Lovey and my father together in the first place. She says my father is the son she never had and, when my mother died, she couldn't bear his sorrow. So after enough time had passed, she burnt some herbs in a dish, ate some chicken hearts off the ashes, and rolled some pinto beans in the palm of her hand to see which way they fell. Apparently they fell in Lovey's direction. According to Grandma Tern, chicken hearts make you want to be in love and chicken gizzards make you horny. I think the livers do something also, but I can't remember exactly what, so I avoid them in case it's something bad. Chicken hearts and gizzards are my father and Lovey's favorite foods. They roll them in flour and fry them in butter and olive oil with hot sauce and minced garlic. Then they sit at the kitchen table and eat them with their fingers, looking doe,eyed and slant-wise at each other as they chew, the grease running down their hands and lips. It seems to me that a lot of Grandma's magic and superstition revolves around innards.
• My father and Lovey had a baby boy when I was nine years old. By the time he was nine, he was taller than me and now that he's eighteen, I spend all my time looking up at the underside of my brother's chin. His name is Beauregard Trevor, but he goes by Beau. My father and Lovey are throwing him a big barbecue to eel, ebrate his graduation from high school. He called me at work, at Earl's Sure Clean Drycleaners, to tell me about it. I was putting a man's suit on a hanger, holding the phone against my ear with my shoulder. "It's my graduation party, ]incy. Mom and Dad are having a FAMILY party. Everyone's coming." That meam all of Lovey's relatives would be there and that I was expected to come anyway--even though being in the same room with Lovey's aunts and sisters always made me feel like one ofGrandma Tern's pimo beans, bouncing around in the palm of a giant's hand, small and hard and plain, forever at risk of being dropped and stepped on. They are women who throw their heads back when they laugh, hair flying, hands on their wide hips, big legs spread and solid beneath them, breasts bouncing and, likely as not, hanging out of their shirts with one baby or another attached at the nipple. I'm a small gray mouse skittering in their shadows. "Even Uncle Lloyd is coming," Beau told me, which was saying something because Lovey's youngest brother, Lloyd, was as awkward, fumbling, and uneasy with his female kin as I was. At reunions, Lloyd and I were two moons caught in the overpow, Winter 2004¡05
107