I want to stop here for a moment.
I want to stop before we get to Teppie and the river and the summer that changed everything, because there is someone in this story who deserves more than a supporting role, and I have not given her enough pages. I am not sure any number of pages would be enough. But I want to try.
My mother’s name was Joyce Davis.
She was born in the Central Valley, raised in the kind of household where you made do and didn't complain about making do, and she brought that particular Central Valley practicality into everything she did — including motherhood, which she approached with a combination of warmth and no-nonsense competence that I did not fully appreciate until I had children of my own and realized how hard it is to do both at the same time.
She was not a dramatic woman. She was not the kind of mother who made speeches or delivered wisdom in memorable, quotable form. She delivered wisdom the way she delivered everything: in small, consistent, reliable installments that you didn't notice accumulating until one day you looked up and realized you were built out of them.
Here is what she made:
She made the kitchen feel like the center of the world.
Not because it was large or impressive — it wasn't. It was a standard 1970s Stockton kitchen with avocado-green appliances and linoleum flooring and a fluorescent light that buzzed slightly when it first came on in the morning, a sound I associated so completely with her presence that for years after I left home, a buzzing fluorescent light in any room made me feel briefly, inexplicably safe.
She made it the center of the world by being in it. By being in it consistently, reliably, with coffee and a plan and an orientation toward whoever was about to walk through the door.
She had an ability — a genuine gift — for making people feel expected. For making a paper
plate on a kitchen table feel like an invitation rather than convenience. I don't know how she did
it. I only know that I have spent most of my adult life trying to recreate it in my own kitchen with
my own children and I have gotten approximately sixty percent of the way there on my best
days.
She made my friends feel like they belonged. This sounds simple. It isn't.
Rick Morales ate more meals at our kitchen table than I can count. He never said much
about his home situation. He didn't need to. My mother read the situation the way she read
everything — quietly, accurately, without making a production of it — and she simply kept the
seat open. Extra sandwich. Second glass of Kool-Aid without being asked. The specific gift of
being fed without having to ask to be fed, which for a kid who was carrying more than his share
was not a small thing. It was an enormous thing. It was the kind of thing that holds a person
together when other things are pulling them apart.
Dougie she fed out of pure affection and the reasonable suspicion that if she didn't, he
would eat gas station corn dogs until some structural consequence occurred. She called him
'Rock Star' without irony, which delighted him more than anything in the world. She asked him
questions about his plans with a completely straight face. She listened to his answers as though
they were plausible. This was its own form of love.
Jimmy she understood in the particular way that some adults understand difficult young
men — not as problems to be solved but as people in the process of becoming. She was patient
with his edges in a way that asked nothing in return. When he left our table after dinner with his
shoulders slightly lower than when he'd arrived, she noticed but didn't comment. Some things
you help just by witnessing.
And Teppie — who appeared in our kitchen that summer like a weather event,
unexpectedly and then regularly, with her sketchbook and her careful way of eating and her habit
of watching everything — Teppie my mother welcomed without question and without
performance. She just opened the door wider. She just added another plate. She just made the
table big enough for whoever needed to be at it.
She made me brave without trying to.
The buzz-a-bees were her invention, and they were genius. The tickle attack that had no
defense, deployed at precisely the moment it would be most effective and least convenient.
Partly it was just play — she loved play, she took play seriously, she never aged out of the belief
that silliness was a legitimate response to the world. But partly it was tactical. It was a way of
saying: you cannot be too serious in this house. You cannot disappear into your own head so
completely that I can't reach you. I will come in after you if I have to. I will use the buzz-a-bees.
She made me understand, without ever making it a lesson, that a person who could be
tickled was a person still attached to the world. That some things deserved to be taken seriously
and some things deserved to be laughed at, and the wisdom was in knowing which was which.
She gave me music. Not literally — she didn't play an instrument and her singing voice
was approximately one step off from wherever the melody actually was, a quality she
acknowledged cheerfully and without embarrassment. But she gave me music by never once
suggesting that it was a waste of time. By letting me sit beside the radio for hours. By buying the
Walkman when I asked for it with the money I was sure we didn't quite have. By closing the
door on four boys pretending to be KISS and saying 'dinner in twenty minutes' instead of 'cut the
noise.'
That was the permission I needed. Not the record player. Not the tape deck. Just her —
coming to the door, seeing what was happening, and deciding it mattered.
She made ordinary Saturdays feel like enough. That is the thing I miss most.
Not the big holidays. Not the memorable events. The ordinary Saturdays. The floorboard
creak at eight in the morning. The bacon smell under the door. The twenty-foot phone cord and
the Stockton Shuffle. The way she said 'buzz-a-bees' as a threat and meant it as an act of love.
The way she stood at that stove, cast-iron skillet, spatula, coffee, her back to the room and her
attention on everything in it.
She made all of it feel like enough. Not like 'making do.' Like abundance. Like the
particular abundance of an ordinary life that is being properly attended to by someone who
understands its value.
I did not understand its value then. I was seventeen and I was in a hurry and there was a
river and a van and a girl with a sketchbook waiting just outside the edge of everything I knew. I
ate the bacon and I went.
I always went.
She always let me.
Joyce Davis passed on a Tuesday in March of 2018.
She was not supposed to go that year. She had plans. She had grandchildren she was
watching grow up and opinions about all of it and things she still wanted to say and Saturday
mornings she still wanted to be in the middle of.
I was with her at the end. We all were. The way she had always been with us — present,
consistent, making the space feel attended to. I would like to tell you I said everything I needed
to say. I would like to tell you I found the words. I found some of them. I found the important
ones. The rest I am finding now, here, in these pages, which is the only place I know how to put
the things that don't fit anywhere else.
I still hear the floorboard creak.
I will always hear the floorboard creak.
And sometimes, early on a Saturday morning when my own house is quiet and the light is
coming through the curtains at that particular angle, I catch myself listening for her footsteps in
the hall.
She is not there.
But the love she built in this family is. Every meal I make for my kids.
Every time I keep the seat open for a friend who needs it. Every time I let the music play too loud and say 'dinner in twenty minutes' instead of 'cut the noise.'
That's her.
That is entirely, completely her.
Even now. Even still. Even always.
This chapter was not in the original version of this book. I added it because I realized, reading back through everything, that I had written around her the whole time — I had written about the bacon and the buzz-a-bees and the Kool-Aid pitcher and the phone cord, but I had not stopped to say: this was who she was.
This was what she built. This is what I carry. She deserved her own pages. She deserved more pages than I can give her. But these are the ones I have, and they are hers.