FAREWELL, MR. STANFORD by Courtney Sender

“Samuel?”
That’s what the shriveled lady says, as the boy with the bobbling neck walks past her on his way to his first day of seventh grade, keeping all his change to himself.
“Jason,” he says. He mumbles. The sidewalks are cracked and lopsided, and twelve years of crossing north at Barclay and 26th haven’t taught him to navigate without looking down.
“Last year you was Samuel.”
“That was last year.”
The woman shakes her head so quick she feels her brain rattle: the real Jason has a thick neck and wide shoulders, and he always tosses her a quarter. Since these boys could walk, she’s watched the older one reach into his pocket for her, flicking coins off the end of his thumb, smiling up a big white toothful between his purple lips. This June he’d started giving her more money, rolls of money, ones and fives like who cares, so without him today she’ll pester the skinny thing usually attached by the hand to Jason’s smile.
“Nope,” she says. Her spit lands like birdshit on the sidewalk. “You pass by and my hand still empty. That make you Samuel. You tell Jason get his ass on over.”
“I can’t,” says the boy. He is looking everyplace but her eyes, even up at the sky, where the weak Baltimore sun doesn’t give handouts. She reaches toward him, palm-down, because he looks sad, but he backs up fast away from her.
“My brother’s dead,” he says.
She drops her arm. That poor young beautiful boy, dead. A boy like her baby, who at least got to be a man. The already-stripped city streets left with this stringy substitute.
For the first time Samuel looks at her, must be feeling the street cry under his heels. “You can call me Jason now,” he says. His voice scratches like paint off a car.
“Too bad,” she says. “Getting dead, always too bad.” She collects herself. She’s heard worse. Worse being the one alive sometimes, here on the side of this pounded‑up gravel. “You Jason now, boy? Okay with me. So where’s my,” and she holds out her wasted hand, palm‑up.
Samuel scoots on past, like he’s not sure why he stopped here to begin with. He stumbles on a piece of raised sidewalk. His arms flail. The woman doesn’t watch him right himself, she sits down on her dusty stoop, hard because it’s real marble under there. She’s wondering if names are dollar bills, little gifts that might be traded out and passed away.

* * *

“Samuel Xavier Stanford?”
Miss Wilcox has been taking attendance slowly during her first class at Thomas Jefferson Junior/Senior High School, relishing the only thing she’s certain she can do. Teach for America training did not prepare Miss Wilcox for how outwardly uninterested these students would be – or how out of place she would feel, the snowspot on the driveway, though this, she reminds herself, she is too enlightened to think.
“Samuel Xavier Stanford?”
This whole school feels broiled, as if nobody’s cracked a window since May. No one answers to the name. Still, Miss Wilcox has a pretty good idea of who Samuel Xavier Stanford is; her green gradebook holds a hidden roster of photographs. The pictures are small and grainy, but Samuel has an unnaturally long and skinny neck, as if someone has pushed down on his shoulders and pulled up on his head.
A girl she has already called – Mariama Keller – nudges a matching suspect in the ribs.
“Samuel,” Mariama whispers.
The boy mumbles something. Miss Wilcox has been waiting for this student, the kind who will make her life hell all year. She has planned to be stern. “Raise your hand for attendance, Samuel, or I’ll have to ask you to leave the room.”
Samuel turns to Mariama, who bites her lip in apparent sympathy. Miss Wilcox is suddenly remembering hugging her friends good-bye during her Yale graduation last May, listening to Bill Clinton’s commencement address. Now it’s only first period on her first day back in seventh grade; how is she going to make it through the year? Is she going to make it through the year? “I said raise your hand, Samuel.”
“Miss Wilcox,” Samuel says, “my name’s different now.” His white-circled eyes bug out like targets. “My name now,” says Samuel, “it’s Jason.”
A few students laugh, but the sound is short and tense. Mariama says, “That’s not funny.” The sympathy is gone; her voice is flat and hard.
Miss Wilcox tries not to sigh. “You have now wasted five minutes of your classmates’ valuable time, Samuel.” She looks around: two of his classmates are using their valuable time to fall asleep; one is sticking gum under his desk; the rest are whispering to each other, perhaps about her. “You are excused.”
“Excused where?”
Miss Wilcox barely knows. “To the principal’s office,” she guesses. And the boy responds: he slings one worn backpack strap over his bony shoulder, leans heavily to balance the weight, and shuffles from her classroom.
Miss Wilcox knows she shouldn’t do this, but she is needing an ally, so she huffs a little laugh to prove she never believed it for a second, and says, “Jason.”
“Miss,” says Mariama. “His big brother got shot this summer.” Mariama bites her lip. “His big brother Jason.”
Miss Wilcox feels something go tight in her chest and wonders why teacher training didn’t cover what to say. She wonders if she’s supposed to know. “Did he . . . make it?”
Mariama’s silence is so long that Miss Wilcox knows the question has made her seem very white and very sheltered.
Miss Wilcox no longer feels equal to the task of finishing attendance. She tells the students to write their names on a slip of paper, which she will pass around. Apparently, eight of them are named Will Cocks.

* * *

Samuel appears in the doorway outside Principal Freeman’s office, and Mariama lunges. She jostles him to the lockers between the passing students.
“That’s some fucked‑up shit you pulled this morning,” she says.
He crosses his skinny arms. Mariama almost can’t stand to look at this boy, he is so suggestive of and so not similar to his brother, of the thick neck and the easy manner. “It’s not funny.” Of the wide soft steady hands. “It’s fucked.” Of the hole clean through the skull.
“Sorry, Mariama.” He’s so bad at looking her in the eye. Always has been. “I’m serious, though. I’m not trying to be funny.”
“What’s the point, Samuel?” She doesn’t mean for her voice to crack like a window, but it does. Samuel twists one arm forward in its socket, and somehow his hand ends up in hers. For comfort? She considers whether she should thank him or punch him. But first, she looks down at where their two thumbs cross like a stitch. She aches: his hand is the same mud-in‑the-potholes color as Jason’s. Her fingers curl up from inside it like she always imagined they would from Jason’s, someday. “Samuel . . .”
“Jason. Just try it. Jason.”
She looks at him. She tries it, she does. She squints her eyes so his long neck flattens. She tongues open his mouth in her mind, she imagines those perfect teeth behind thick lips. But a passing girl slams into his chest and he stumbles backward into a locker handle; his grip slackens, then jerks away.
“There’s no point, Samuel,” Mariama says, though she wishes there were.
“Everybody wants Jason Stanford still walking around this school, girl. I’m the closest thing we’ve got.” A tossed head on a thin neck, followed by a quick, “Mariama,” but girl is unerasable and embarrasses them both. Does he think he can rent that simple fast vocabulary? It demands a cool grace he’d have to own.
“Don’t be an idiot,” she tells him, out of a kind of distant, sure pity she has never felt before. She recognizes it as an old pity. She feels old and clear-sighted, like the fortuneteller Jason bought the three of them this summer, who’d predicted loss. Mariama had figured it meant loss of her house, and so loss of the kitchen table where through moonlit windows she could sometimes do her homework.
“Well, listen,” Samuel says. “Principal Freeman said I could go home early, but I’ll come drop you off later.”
Mariama thinks she might throw up. When she and Samuel started at Thomas Jefferson last year, her grandma had asked Jason to walk her home. This morning, her grandma had said, You take care of that poor Stanford boy, hear?
“Who asked you to?” she says, and when the bell rings she disappears into the ebbing crowd.

* * *

“Samuel?”
The front door, warped by summer’s humidity, bangs a dent in the living room wall.
“Hi, Momma.”
She walks into the living room in her blue cotton uniform and bare feet. “My sweet boy.” When she lays a hand on his cheek, she can feel his teeth right through the skin. “How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Seems you just left from here.”
“I got out early.”
Momma smiles. Her son’s skin is firm and intact. Beneath her palm she sees him see her uniform, Jaqlyn scripted in raised white thread over her heart; she got dressed up this morning to go back to work. She might have gone today, too – Old Ma Keller said she’d keep an eye on Samuel after school – but here is her baby boy, back home and needing his Momma to keep him safe.
“What happened? You get in trouble or something?” With Samuel home, she notices that the room is dark behind their velour curtains. She draws her hand away from his face to switch on a lamp.
“No,” he says. He is a twitchy, nervous person by nature, from the start a corkscrew twisting, born with her cord around his neck like lyncher’s rope. She fears the things he might have learned this summer. This is how you lie, she imagines Jason whispering to Samuel across the floorboards. Every story open-close. You born, you die, between a big emptiness.
“No, so why are you home?”
“They didn’t like me being Jason.”
Me either, she thinks, though Christ almighty – if her baby apes her eldest, it’s because she taught him to. “Well, you ain’t him, after all.”
“I mean my name, Momma. My new name.”
What can she do? He’s been insisting on the name change since the funeral. Just what she’d wanted for her boys: countless grains of loyalty, sandcastled ever higher. But Jesus Lord Almighty don’t let my baby go the same way. Jesus watch him. You have the blood of one of them, leave me the other.
“You going back to work today, Momma?”
During the school year, she served lunch at the Johns Hopkins cafeteria, where she would smile big and easy – like her firstborn, people said – and, like a fortuneteller, picture her boys there someday. And he was. Jason ended up there, her Jason flatbacked on a table, the Johns Hopkins Hospital where the best doctors in the whole world pressed their latex fingers to his head to stop the bleeding and ended up deep inside his broken throat.
“Not today,” she says.
Jason had charmed her from the start, slipping out of her slick and simple, but now she’s found out she was wrong: he was made of hard, complex work. How much was work behind his pretty smile, how much real, she hopes Jesus will keep it to Himself in Kingdom Come.
“You hafta go to work, Momma,” Samuel says. She calculates: Duane will cover for her another day, she lets him kiss her behind the fridge when she needs more onions. She can feed Samuel one more week on the money under the mattress. She will not turn to food stamps yet. Since June she hasn’t had to think like this, when her big boy Jason came home with money on top of money, from mowing lawns he said. For college he said. She fed him with his money, to keep him strong.
“I start tomorrow anyway,” she says.
This is how you lie, she hears Jason telling Samuel.

* * *

That night, Samuel knows he needs to fall asleep. He will have to sit through an entire day of school tomorrow, and he wants Miss Wilcox to like him this time. He hears his momma snoring familiarly. He wants to go to sleep, but some nagging pulling thing in him says that’s not what he is meant to do.
This room likes waiting. This room likes tall black boys to use the thick black night to escape into, dropping out the first-floor window and landing like a cat in the grass, so soft Samuel never knew for sure how long Jason had been doing it before he noticed. He noticed in June: a branch cracking like a shot. He twisted under his sheets, and beneath one barely-open eyelid identified flatness on Jason’s bed where there should have been Jason. The window was cracked slightly open; through it, Samuel saw his brother’s wide back blend into the night.
Samuel waited with the room that night, awake as the shadow-spackled walls but not scared. In all the months that followed he was never scared for his brother: Jason was strong and smart; in fact – Samuel never told Jason this, he would have rather died than tell Jason this – Samuel thought it was beautiful, how Jason and the night air became the same thing. He felt a sort of pride for his big brother, whom the world loved enough to enfold, and he felt a sort of pride for himself, because Jason was his big brother.
Hours after Samuel watched Jason disappear, a set of fingers curled over the windowsill, followed by a shining white smile. Samuel has spent weeks wondering about that smile: whether his brother knew he would be waiting, or wanted him to be, or whether maybe Jason was just so life-brimming that the smile was a permanent fixture.
Samuel didn’t help his brother inside. He watched as Jason did an easy pull‑up and twisted like a gymnast through the window he nudged open with his chin, dismounting soundlessly on his side on their old rug.
“What’re you doing up?” Jason had whispered, laying a big steady hand on Samuel’s cheek.
“Where were you?” Samuel whispered back. He twitched Jason’s hand away and noticed that his own whisper was more voice than air. He saw the grin falter and knew that Jason was worrying he’d wake their momma.
“Out,” Jason said, the smile back full into his black irises, circled in red like targets, and Samuel smelled the oaky smell that said Jason was sweating.
“Doing what?” Samuel said, but then he feared that Jason would whisper, Mariama, and that thought made his heart shake like a cold car engine, so when Jason ruffled Samuel’s hair and said, “Go to sleep, boy,” Samuel didn’t push him; he obeyed.
But now he wishes he had asked his brother again, and harder. The nagging thing in him pulls at his legs. His kneecaps jiggle. They say he is supposed to get up and walk around the streets. That’s what Jason does.
Here are the clues he has to work with: once, a woman’s laugh, charred, outside his window before Jason said Shhh; once, a man’s accented word, heat; once, muddy sneakers under Jason’s bed and a set of muddy footsteps in the morning, pointing south.
He folds the sheets down from his chin. He walks to the window, but it creaks like an alarm when he tries to raise it. He freezes, listens for his momma snoring; hears the sad and lovely rumble of it, then sneaks into the living room. The front door shuts quietly behind him. He starts walking.

* * *

Though he’s lived here all his life, even the first steps away from his front porch seem alien this late at night. A few paces from home, he glances back: his own front door has sunk into the dark like a brother, indistinguishable from all the other front doors of all the other locked‑up houses on his block. Stoplights turn the empty streets from red-black to yellow-black to green-black, then back again. The air is cool, and so silent that he longs for noise; when he hears noise, a cough from inside a house or a splash of some animal in a gutter, he wishes for silence.
Walking slowly, Samuel arrives at a hand-painted sign on the side of the road, two blocks south of his house. The sign is framed by flowers that are old and flowers that are new. The sign reads: FAREWELL, JASON DAVIS STANFORD. 10/22/94–8/13/11. BELOVED ALWAYS.
He stares at the sign. It is his handwriting, backward-leaning like walking downhill. It is September. He picks up the flowers, which are after all addressed to him: his name, adopted. The new set of flowers is tied with a ribbon signed Momma; the old flowers are tied with a ribbon that says Love, Mariama. He has never gotten flowers signed from a girl with love. When he held Mariama’s hand today, it was small and clammy. He’d thought her buttoned‑up shirt and spread-out teeth were beautiful.
He’s just passed Mariama’s house, on the corner of his street. Is she sleeping now? What would it be like to backtrack, knock on her window, sneak past Old Ma Keller, sit on the edge of her bed? To ask her: Did you hear the shot?
He replaces the flowers from Momma and carries the ones from Mariama, even though he feels stupid carrying flowers, here along Greenmount at three in the morning. He passes Easy Cash Pawn, “WIC Accepted Here,” the liquor store labeled in shadows of stripped lettering, boarded‑up windows, cracked glass, benches stamped “The Greatest City in America.” The bottoms of sawed-off metal fences rise from the sidewalks
He becomes very conscious of his scared heart, which is definitely beating. Jason Davis Stanford, he tells himself. Beloved always. He thinks about that rule he learned in school last year, called double jeopardy. Once you’re innocent, you’re not allowed to be guilty. Once you’re dead, you’re not allowed to be killed. And he’s made himself dead all over.
Jason is dead, he reminds himself. Jason is me.

* * *

Samuel stops walking in the middle of a dark block, twenty minutes from his house. He tries to feel the open artery beneath the city pumping him onto the right patch of dry grass, but all he feels is a cold wind that tells him summer will be over soon, and Jason won’t be here to lend his coat.
“Whatcha doin’ out here, boy?”
A man’s rhythmic accent out of the night to Samuel’s left, which has lit into the outline of a doorway. Samuel’s first reaction is to clutch Mariama’s flowers like a teddy bear, but his second reaction is to drop them. The ribbon comes loose; the petals scatter. He says, “Walking.”
“Who’s that walking?”
Can he say it? He doesn’t know what kind of effect it will have; at school, he’d thought it would be jarring but in the end charming. He’d known it would be safe. “Stanford.”
Somebody laughs from inside the house, a charred, familiar female laugh. He can’t tell whether she’s laughing at the name, or at some other mysterious joke happening in her life.
“Stanford what?”
“Stanford Jason.” He watches the man for a reaction. “Jason Stanford.”
“Jason Stanford,” says the man. His voice is surprised but not stunned; it turns quickly accepting. “I’ll be damned.” Samuel nods. “What, you gonna stand out there all night?”
Samuel tries to read this man. He is white or Hispanic; this Samuel sees not by his coloring, washed off like soap in the dark, but by the single straight line that makes his nose. He is broad in the shoulders but thin around the waist. He must be Jason’s friend; he speaks the language of boy as carelessly as Jason did. Is it possible that he owns a .45? Is it possible that he’d hold it deep against the throat of a friend, pointing up toward a brain firing its last unknown thoughts?
“Well, boy?”
Is it possible that this man knew what was waiting for Jason, and wanted to protect him from it? He might have ruffled Jason’s hair, as Samuel never thought to do. The lights inside the house look warm.
“Yeah,” Samuel says. “Yeah all right, I’m coming.”

* * *

Luis wonders what on God’s gray earth the kid thinks he’s getting at. Why pretend to be somebody as wrecked as Jason Stanford? Doomed and damned: some role model. He wonders if the kid could be looking to buy – not here, boy, closed for business since August.
Zippo’s lying where he left her on the couch by the door. “It’s okay,” Luis tells her, because ever since Jay died she’s lost her swagger. She’s just scared. “Somebody come to visit.”
The so‑called Jason Stanford trips on an uneven floorboard as he steps into the room. Poor ungainly bastard, half his height in the neck, he’s bound to meet a death by strangling: even somebody disposed a different way would look at him and get the idea. Zippo sees the kid through half-closed eyelids and laughs with relief. She has removed her shirt since Luis opened the door; she’s wearing a purple bra that’s mostly lace above a tiny stomach, sweaty skin, and Luis’s rolled‑up boxer shorts.
“Says ’e’s Jason Stanford,” Luis says.
Zippo’s eyes open in wonder, red doughnuts widening around black holes. So-Called extends his hand to shake, and Luis sees in it something of the bigness of his old dead friend. So this is why So-Called has shown up; Jay had mentioned a kid brother once or twice, but always in a way that made Luis not say, When’s he coming by?
Zippo curls her knees up to her chest. The kid drops his hand and sinks into the collapsing cushions beside the window. She straightens her legs and lands them in his lap. Luis tells himself she’s just teasing the kid; he tells himself she hasn’t set her red eyes on another prize. Another upstanding Stanford boy for Zippo: tempt him here and swear he’ll make them rich. We’re no good, Luis can hear her saying. The cops would notice us. But you . . .
But So-Called is a world away from savvy, pretty Jay. So-Called squints his buggy eyes at Zippo’s stomach, and Luis pities the spike of fear the kid must feel as he sees the rubbery black grip and silver frame of a handgun, shoved halfway down the front of her shorts with the handle sticking flat against her navel.
Zippo stretches. Her calf muscles tighten and release; the gun falls heavily toward her thigh. What the hell is she planning? Luis thinks, and then he sees the fear on the kid’s face and knows So-Called will reach to see the muzzle, to gauge its width against the diameter of a ripped-open throat. Luis wants to pat the kid on the back of the neck and tell him it’s okay, honey, you’re just a baby, come back in a few months. I won’t let her ruin you yet.
So-Called doesn’t reach for the gun. He says, “Who are you really?”
“That’s Zippo,” says Luis, pointing, so the kid will know they have his number, they know who Jason Stanford was to him.
So-Called says, “Who?”
Zippo coughs the voice back into her throat. “Ain’t you never heard of your brother’s girlfriend?”

* * *

Zippo watches the boy, seeing how he can’t sit still under her legs, how his big brother could smile this big pretty smile that made you go soft and easy, how this kid smiles like a demented circus freak, how his head sits so high on his long neck that a bullet at the bottom of his throat wouldn’t even make it to his brain.
But Zippo is remembering something, too, which is what the big brother said to her once about the little brother: He won’t end up like me, thank God.
Zippo had said, What do you mean thank God? She’d been offended – like me meant like her, like Luis. Like enough money, like she told Jason: enough to send his little brother to college someday, even when his Momma lost her summer job.
But her big sure Jason had just shoved her flat on her back and wrenched her hands over her head, both her wrists in his one strong fist. He’d held her there, and she’d looked into his bright-veined eyes and felt him waiting. And she, too, she waited for the moment he would slam her arms into the wall behind her head, pin her to the plaster, use his free hand to unhook her shorts.
“What you here for?” she says. She sits up, feeling the hard cold metal slide down her stomach.
“No reason,” the boy says to the gun. He doesn’t know that she bought it to protect Jason – or that it never fired, because he refused to carry it. She likes to have it holstered on her; the coldness makes her feel like she did it, she protected him, and Jason’s still here, just one more time sleeping beside her, two fingers plying her waistband.
“See that?” Luis says. Zippo hears his warning and knows his patience is a fraying string. “No reason.”
“No reason,” Zippo shrugs. She does this to placate Luis for a few more moments, so she has time to examine this boy. When he first walked in, honest to hell she thought he was a miracle. Says ’e’s Jason Stanford, Luis had said, and fuckall she’d thought, Hallelujah.
Zippo circles her hands around the rubber handle by her bare stomach and holds on. He won’t end up like me, she remembers. She wonders. She knows she might be throwing a piece of rope around both their necks, but how many more chances will life give her with her beautiful shattered Jason Stanford?
Zippo lifts her long fingers that end in long nails, and she takes this new Jason’s hand and lays it on the handle. His fist closes around it, an impulse maybe, and he’s careful not to touch her skin but she felt it, pumping through him: life, blood, fire: Jason.
“I see what you’re thinking, Zippo,” says Luis, and with a spike of fear Zippo sees Luis erupt. He kicks the wall so hard plaster goes flying like a bird; Jason releases the gun; his ghostly thumb trailing over Zippo’s ribs; she shudders; Luis throws open the front door. “Get the fuck out, kid.”
Jason heads toward the doorway. As he gets up to go, as if it were August 13th over and over, Zippo grabs for his hand. Don’t leave without the piece, she remembers her lines, and she knows this is Jason because he pulls from her grip and doesn’t look back.

* * *

“What’re you thinking coming here, boy?” the crazed man whispers on the porch.
Jason shared a vocabulary with this man; it’s terrible to know this, to have learned it.
“Nothing,” he answers, and he twists his head to the night and steps out into it.
He isn’t thinking nothing; he’s thinking that he knows, he’s sure he’s always known that Samuel would say help these people, don’t become them. What was Jason doing here? Why sneak out of bed at home, when he had a momma who loved him so much she almost strangled him with it, when he saw Mariama every day at school and she talked those gap teeth at him, when he knew Principal Freeman liked him too much to get him into trouble? When Samuel would have hated it here, would have been scared here – why didn’t Jason give that any thought?
As the house with the gun drops out of sight, he passes the place where one Stanford boy lost his head. He keeps his own head straight, facing north, not seeing the makeshift sign or the shriveled lady sleeping next to it.
Nearing his house, he wishes both Stanford brothers could come home together, just one more time sleep beside each other in their small room. Then Samuel would say to Jason, What the hell, man? Then Samuel would say, Where are you going? Then Samuel would say, just once, the only one who knows enough to say it: Don’t go.
The key in the lock. The door open and shut. He listens for his momma’s snoring, but he can’t hear anything. He climbs the stairs and stands outside her bedroom door, so he can hear a faint, crackling sound he doesn’t recognize. He opens the door.
“Jason,” his momma is moaning in her sleep. She’s curled up like a baby on the sheets, clutching the Johns Hopkins uniform with her embroidered name. He crouches next to the bed and takes her sweating hands in his.
“Yeah, Momma.”
“Jason,” his momma moans.
“I’m right here, Momma.”
His momma bolts upright, flashing the whites around the holes in her eyes, and slides out of bed. She kneels next to him. She clasps her hands over the scrunched‑up sheets.
“We need to pray for your brother,” she says. “We need to pray the Lord is watching over him. We need to pray that Jesus keeps him safe.”
She inclines her head and starts to mumble. Jason weaves his fingers together, and he thinks about all the people he knows who live inside cracked windows, and he thinks about flowers spilling onto city streets, and he thinks about blending into black holes in the air, and his heart moans for Samuel, and he prays Samuel and he prays Samuel and he prays Samuel, my brother why have you forsaken me.

---

Courtney Sender’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Esquire, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review and American Short Fiction.