“What was I?”
“What?”
“You always talk about Jo, but how was I? As a baby, I mean.”
She pauses for a moment to think, almost like she’s forgotten. Or at least it feels like that.
“You were a happy baby. Quiet… I left you in the back seat of the car once. I’d gone inside the house and started to unload the groceries and everything. Your sister was the one who remembered. We rushed to the car thinking you would be crying or upset or something, but when we opened the door, you smiled, and I felt like the shittiest mom ever.”
“You’re not shitty.”
She pats me on the thigh. “I know…”
* * *
My parents and grandparents have made it so that Jo and I know nothing. We know nothing of crack or gangs or poverty. We know nothing of welfare or Section 8 housing or food stamps or social workers. We know nothing of schools with metal detectors and security but no books. We know nothing of homegoings or small coffins. We know nothing of hunger. We are, according to my father, spoiled rotten little brats.
Once, Jo and I got into a really bad fight because I stole her favorite shirt, which she didn’t even wear anymore, from her closet, and when she went to push me, we tussled and I bit her until I drew blood in an itty-bitty red rainbow across her palm. I still had mostly baby teeth then. She pulled her hand back in shock, examining her wound. After we’d both briefly peered down at it in awe, she used her injured hand to slap me across the face, hard.
“Stay out of my room! Stay out of my stuff!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, as though she were possessed. “It’s mine!”
“You spoiled rotten little brats.” My father appeared out of nowhere, as if summoned by this demon child. He dragged us by our arms down the stairs and out the house as we tried to hit each other and hollered, “She started it!”
“Where are we going?” we yelled as he stuffed us into the car, but once we got on the road, none of us said a word.
My father drove us somewhere not that far away and parked in front of a house the size of our garage. A citrus tree dropped its flesh in the front yard. A group of girls jumped rope. There was the clack clack clack of round barrettes, the sound of little black girls in fits of flight. I think maybe it was a dangerous neighborhood, but you wouldn’t have known it at that moment.
“Seven of us in there. Me, my mother, my grandmother, my aunt Minnie, my two cousins, and your uncle Ronnie. That was the first house we lived in here, before we could afford to buy our own,” he said. “I ate fast, because I had to, to make sure I got enough. I’d never even had my own room until I was done with grad school. Never had my own nothing. Shoes, socks, underwear, toys, you name it. We shared everything.”
He grew quiet, and I sat there trying to understand him. It must’ve been summer, because I remember that, through the window, the concrete wiggled like steam rising.
“Everything?” Jo asked.
* * *
Lucia is in the kitchen chopping peppers when we get home from Jo’s. As she chops, she tells my father a story.
“They kidnapped and killed all of them. The women and children, too,” she says. “Usually when they do that, they burn down the village so there’s nothing left, but not this time. This time they just left it empty.”
My dad, Craig, was in the US Foreign Service in Honduras and speaks perfect Spanish. Now he’s in international finance. He’s tall and handsome, and his hair is turning into silver strands that shimmer in the right light. Before he goes to work, he slicks his curls down into a rigid wave, hair waiting to be surfed. In the company brochure, he’s the lone black man in a glass boardroom, smiling, front and center. Sometimes while Lucia’s making dinner, he’ll join her in the kitchen, and they talk about their childhoods.
“Who did they kidnap and kill?” I want to ask, but before I can, my mother interrupts as she barges into the kitchen.
“Your daughter is a real piece of work.” She slams her purse down on the counter, and Lucia and my father look up, startled.
She doesn’t understand anything they’re saying in the slightest, so for all she knows, she interrupted a conversation about a soccer game.
“What’d you do?” My dad looks over at me.
“I cut my foot on a beer bottle; look.” I raise my foot to show him. The pain runs along my sole like a fault line.
“Not her,” my mother says. “The other one.”
She recounts the evening’s events, but in her version we ate pig slop for dinner and Harrison was raised by wolves who let him nearly die of lockjaw, and poor sad wayward Jo is his prey. Then Jo stomped right on her own mother’s foot and slammed the door in our faces before we could even say goodbye. And as we were going back to the car, we witnessed a police beating, because that’s the kind of neighborhood his daughter wishes to live in these days. All of which, I suppose, isn’t entirely untrue, but it’s also not entirely true. We all sew a few sequins on our stories to make them shine brighter.
“I thought the slop was pretty good,” I offer.
“Be quiet, Ashley,” my mother says as my father pours her a glass of wine. Being the only black person in the brochure at the office is stressful. Sometimes my parents get mistaken for their own assistants, or people think they’ve stumbled into the wrong meetings, or their assistants think they know better than my parents do and it becomes a whole thing, even though both of them are amazing at what they do, or they wouldn’t have gotten where they are to begin with. Like Grandma Opal said, “You have to be better.” That’s why they drink, Jo says.
“Did you do anything?” my father asks.
“About what?”
“The police and the kids.”
“What should we have done?”
“You said they were little kids?”
“I don’t know what they did or didn’t do. And I wasn’t going to jeopardize our safety to find out. We’re still black. Besides, that’s not the point. What if Jo and that man have kids in that neighborhood? I mean, they’re probably not gonna be moving anywhere better anytime soon. And even if they move somewhere else, things are changing, but people are still ignorant. If people say or do nasty things to them or to their kids, what’s he gonna do about it? Jo’s a smart girl—too smart for this shit. She needs to get her ass back in school. What if people think she’s her own kids’ nanny?”
Lucia looks up at this and makes a face but doesn’t say anything. Then she looks over at me. I’ve already started to nibble on the chicken going into the enchiladas. She slaps my hand out of it.
My father scratches above his eyebrow and opens his mouth as if to say something that never comes out.
“You should have been there,” my mother finally says.
“I couldn’t get out in time, Val. Things were too busy,” my dad says.
“They always are.”
My mother leaves the room, clutching her wineglass, my father at her heels. They’re off to argue about Jo, which is a lot of what they do these days. Although before it was Jo, it was other stuff. Jo says they’re so busy trying to be perfect for everybody else that all they have left for each other is the messy. Lucia turns to me and passes me a knife.