Love Her Tender
by Amy Barnes
When Mama ran away for the last time, we found her shoeless and wearing her favorite orange and pink floral housecoat with the snaps askew and her Priscilla pompadour hair pinned up with autumn leaves and cassette-ribbon snarls of Elvis songs.
“I’ve got a new job at the Ford plant and will be home soon. For good this time,” Daddy told me from a payphone in El Paso the day I found her pounding on the music store glass. I could hear thousand-mile tears in his voice. I had only seen him cry one time when he cradled my baby brother in a blue blanket before lowering him into a tiny white coffin.
“That’s good news,” Mama said when I told her Daddy was coming home.
She and I made a sign that read Welcome Home Bill/Dad! to hang on the front door. Mama sewed him a midnight blue velvet and sequin costume. It hung on their closet door for weeks, a stand-in man, her handprints hugging at the fabric. She stayed home all those days waiting for him.
When Daddy returned, he serenaded her with Elvis out his truck window.
After dinner Mama brought out the jumpsuit, wrapped in glitter tissue paper.
“Try this on,” she asked.
He zipped up the jumpsuit the best he could. I could tell he was holding his breath.
“You look so handsome, just like Elvis,” she said.
“You know he started as a truck driver?” he asked. “He drove for Crown Electric, but Priscilla needed him home too.”
Mama smiled.
“You’re my Elvis. Do you know where Aaron is? I need to sing him to sleep.”
“I’m home now, Adele. Let’s dance,” he said.
No one did the dishes that night and I heard Elvis crooning until the wee hours.
The next day, Mama made pancakes and dabbed Jean Naté on her wrists and neck. There was no invisible baby in her arms to sing to sleep, no search for a soothing lullaby, or rewinding cassette tapes over and over again until she heard music she thought Aaron might love.
“Have a great day!” she said to us both.
I kissed her forehead and locked all the locks on our split-level ranch doors because that was my job. Daddy drove to the plant to put together cars and I walked to school to put together numbers and words. The last thing I heard from the house was Are You Lonesome? playing on a loop.
I returned that afternoon, she was gone and Daddy was home, wearing his homemade sparkly costume again. The shelf where we kept the cassettes was nearly empty and he was shouting Elvis lyrics at their wedding picture.
“Where do you think she is?” he asked me.
“Maybe the cemetery. That’s where she usually goes,” I answered.
We got in his new sky-blue Ford Crown Victoria and rolled down the windows to start the search. He put in the one Elvis tape she left behind, turned up the volume, but only drew neighbors.
“She went that way,” our next-door neighbor pointed.
We followed a faded gray cassette-ribbon trail on the sidewalk until we saw Mama outside the abandoned Shell, spinning in circles with her house dress flapping like the Out of Order gas pump signs.
Daddy pulled into the gas station parking lot with an Elvis ballad blaring.
She didn’t look up.
“Stay in your seat,” he told me.
Shimmying toward her, he moved across the parking lot stage like an aging Elvis zipped into a too-small costume.
She still didn’t look up.
He struck an Elvis pose like a roadside statue, one arm and hand dramatically raised over his head, and sang a lullaby in his deep bass voice.
She finally saw him, finally heard him.
“Oh, there you are,” she said.
Ragged cassette ribbons encircled her wrists and neck like silent jewelry. Broken plastic tape cases peeked out of her pockets. Daddy mouthed I love you tender, and they half danced, half staggered to the car.
He opened the door for her and she obediently got in the back seat with me.
“Mama, are you okay?” I asked.
“Is that Elvis singing, Lisa?”
“Yes, Mama. It is.”
We drove home with music echoing into the neighborhood, Mama’s arm out her window, cassette-tape pennants fluttering.
Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of Child Craft (Belle Point Press), Ambrotypes (word west press), and Mother Figures (ELJ Editions). Her words have appeared in many publications, including The Citron Review, JMWW, trampset, Flash Frog, No Contact Mag, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney's, Southern Living, SmokeLong Quarterly, and others. She's been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and long-listed for Wigleaf50 in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She's a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn coeditor, Ruby Lit assistant editor and reads for The MacGuffin, Best Small Fictions, Mason Jar Press, and Narratively. Find her on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky at @amygcb.