BIRTHDAY

We all sat around fussing, and fussing at each other's fussing; letting coffee grow cold and then making fresh coffee and then leaving that, too. A birthday cake was resting on the heavy oak table which sat in the middle of the oversized room. I knew that we were going to have to start the birthday dinner pretty soon, with or without Imani. Ernie was, despite a house full of people, and for the first time that I could remember, lying down on the plush double bed she and her daughter, Iree, shared. Iree had braided Ernie's loose gray hair into short squared-off braids. Ernie is from one of those Watusi tribes or something because she's so long and thin, but that evening, she looked kind of shriveled and showed all of her seventy and then some years. Her loom was empty, no cloth hanging from its harnesses, and no thread winding through the shuttles. "She got to do this one without me," Ernie had resolutely said and then lay down with her back to all of us.

The house only had one room besides the bathroom and the room we were in. That was Imani's room which sat off to the south side and was always full of sun, but didn't have much furniture, except for one oversized chest with a round mirror in the middle that Imani almost always seemed to cover with one of Ernestine's cloths, and a thin flat mattress laying in the corner. The room that we were in was the size of some people's whole house. It had a kitchen to one side and a bed and loom in the ell foot on the far side next to Imani's door and a shiny oak table that could sit eight people real comfortable and twelve with a bit of squeeze.

Al, as always, was sitting up stiff at the table. Al and me, we've been together over twenty-five years now but he's got that chocolate "good black don't crack" skin and seems like he's been able to hold back the years more than any of us. Mico, his given name is Jeremiah, but we all call him Mico, was right across the way lounging in the overstuffed dark green sofa, looking and acting all salt and pepper, cantankerous as ever. Iree would perch on a chair, then stand up and pace and perch again. She's got these dark brown eyes that sit out from her head kind of bulb-like and make you want to turn away when she aims them at you. Well not me, I'm used to it, but lots a folks say those eyes give them the creeps. I find her pretty, too thin like Ernie, her adopted mama, was at that age. About once an hour she'd go to the door and say, more to herself than any of us, "It's so warm and nice, just perfect for today. I guess I'll walk around outside for a little."

Most times she didn't go outside. She'd start towards the door and then seem to forget where she was going and turn right around and sit back down. Now though, she was resting on the end of her mother's bed rubbing Ernie's feet and looking hard into the woman's smoke grey sightless eyes. Ernestine is and isn't Iree's mother. Iree was daughter of Ernie's then best friend Sibyl, who died when Iree was about four years old. Her brain just exploded, not the whole brain but, you know, some kind of cyst that burst inside and bled her to death. Iree was there when it happened, some say that's what made her so strange, marked her having to show her mother through the door to the next journey. Anyway, Ernie who's been raising or helping to raise somebody's children, her mama's, her brother, Jeremiah's, even mine, since she was maybe thirteen years old, just naturally took Iree in with no authority but her own, "I know what's best for this child. She's a special one."

Good thing she did too because something happened in the birthing time of Iree and she's got epilepsy, falls out anywhere and sometimes stays in a coma for three, four days. Didn't show up bad till after the mother died, but then she'd get to falling out and foaming at the mouth. Scares me, but Ernie acts like it's just ordinary, like some people having hay fever or getting the flu every winter.

Imani had disappeared two days before her seventeenth birthday. We were there to bring her back and see her safely home in the light of a moon which hung pale and puny from the dark, clear, northern sky. As the night wore on, one by one, we began to call her back.

Iree moved closer to us and was now sitting as still as I ever saw her sit, balanced on the edge of the couch talking softly, about how Imani was so reliable, sure to always turn up at the bottom of a long hill or opening the front door before Iree's feet even touched the bottom step, bursting on her mother, smothering her with laughter and chatter and hugs. Al went on for what seemed to be the ten hundred thousandth time about how he'd been spooked by her eyes from the first day he'd seen them stare back at him, too clear and probing for any nine-day-old baby, and how it was just like her to do something like this on her birthday. Mico retold his story about the first domino game that Imani won, beating Jonah in only three rounds, and how Jonah kept banging his hands on the table claiming that somebody must have played bogus 'cause "couldn't no seven-year-old child, especially a girl-child, possibly win no bones against me without cheating or outside assistance." So she had to do it o more times that night, just to shush him up. And me, well I remembered helping her come in, kind of holding the door open for her, if you will.