Jo and I are supposed to be from the same tree, but sometimes it feels like she’s off being a willow while the rest of us are sequoias.
* * *
“What you waiting for?” Lucia says. “¡Apúrate!”
I quickly move to the back seat and slide my arms through my dress, Jo’s dress. Outside, I flagellate myself with the towel to wipe the dust off. Lucia brushes my hair the way she did when I was little, and even though I’m old enough to brush it myself, I let her.
“Come in with me.”
“You couldn’t pay me enough.”
But my parents have for a long time. Lucia has been privy to all our history, good and bad, for years. She’s been the bearer of our family secrets for most of her adult life. Lucia’s the only person around whom we don’t have to pretend.
“It’s gonna be like American Gladiators in there.”
“I don’t need front-row seats,” she says.
I step into the heels she brought for me to wear. The pain radiates through my foot.
“Shit, that hurts,” I say.
“That’s what happens when you ditch school, mija.” Lucia kisses my forehead and pushes me forward down the walkway, until the distance between Jo and me is only the sound of a bell.
* * *
“That’s my dress” is the first thing my sister says to me in months. Her hair is back down to her shoulders now. She’s fatter than she was, but maybe that’s what happy looks like.
“Whatever,” I say. “You left it behind.”
“I’m so happy to finally meet you, Ash.” Jo’s husband, Harrison, is a bear of a man, easily seven feet tall, and I suspect he might be an actual giant. I’m not sure if he means to lift me off the ground when he hugs me, but he does. As the ground beneath me drops, for a few seconds I understand everything about the two of them. If Jo was drowning, of course she would choose a man who makes her fly. In his arms, I almost don’t even mind that he’s called me by my nickname entirely too soon. I’ll forgive him this forced familiarity because I don’t want this man to ever set me back down. I close my eyes and I’m a 747, Apollo 11; I can touch the stars and the planets and all that other gaseous shit up there.
“She’ll get her hair caught in the ceiling fan.” I hear my mother’s voice. I open my eyes and there, behind Harrison, my mother sits at what appears to be a card table covered by a tablecloth.
“Jesus, Jo, you don’t even have a real table?” I say.
“Not everybody gets everything handed to them,” Jo says. She totaled not one but two new BMWs in high school.
Harrison sets me back down on the ground.
“Where’s Daddy?” I ask.
“He’s not coming,” my mother says.
“Work, apparently,” Jo says, like she doesn’t believe it. “You smell like chlorine.”
“What happened to your hair?” My mother inspects me. She’s haughty and very tall, but also always wears exquisite sky-high heels so that, according to Grandma Opal, “Don’t nobody look down on her, not ever.”
“Water,” I say.
“I can only handle one problem child at a time.”
“Thanks a lot, Valerie,” Jo says. She loves to call my mother by her name because she knows it pisses her off.
Harrison places a record on their old record player. On its cover, a beautiful lighter-skinned woman with a wispy Afro rocks a space leotard. In her hands are person-size steel chopsticks, and her long brown legs are spread and bent at angles like a spider’s. She looks confident, defiant. She looks like exactly the kind of woman my sister wants to be.
“Do you like Betty Davis?” Harrison asks me, or my mother; I’m not sure.
“Is that her?” I say, picking up the album cover.
“She was married to Miles Davis. Maybe she would’ve been taken more seriously if she hadn’t been. She kicks ass. Listen.”
The music coming out of the speaker is about what you’d expect from a sexy black space lady. She growls and purrs all over funk that sounds like the past and the future all at once. It also sounds like an album you might have sex to—like they might have sex to, which… gross.
When my mother isn’t looking, Harrison smacks Jo’s butt, and she breaks into a grin, the biggest I’ve seen her smile in ages. Their bodies are easy together, like a pair of matching socks folded into each other, worn in slightly different places but made of the same stuff.
For dinner, Harrison has made some sort of chicken dish with potatoes and vegetables, which is much more delicious than anticipated, given that they don’t seem to have much of a kitchen.
“This is great,” I say. “Who knew you could do all this with a Crock-Pot?”
“Harrison did all the real work.” Jo looks over at Harrison adoringly. “He’s a great cook.”
“You chopped up all the vegetables!” he says, and squeezes her shoulder. Blech.
They keep their hands on each other under the table. It’s as though she has to keep touching him, and he her, or they’d be lost. My sister the sock.
“Yes. It’s quite the culinary experience you’ve created here,” my mother says. This is not a compliment. The sweat beads like pearls along her collarbone. Jo’s apartment lacks air-conditioning, and the whole place is already stuffy with the weight of everything unsaid.
There’s a fridge and a sink with some cupboards, but no stove. There’s an archway that separates the art deco kitchen from the living room, but the living room is also a bedroom. It’s a studio, but it gets a lot of light. The sunset feels warm on its walls. Nothing has been remodeled since at least the 1930s or ’40s, and so there are the ghosts of would-be actresses and writers and singers and dancers, of all the people who moved back home, or moved on, or up. Jo and the construction worker have decorated it so that it looks like the inside of a genie’s bottle.
Jo seems more relaxed in her skin around Harrison. Maybe it’s because Harrison sees Jo—not who she used to be, not who she could be, just who she is right now in front of him. Maybe he makes her feel like that’s enough.
Jo retrieves a bottle of champagne from within one of the cabinets. “In honor of our special day.”
My mother purses her lips as Jo pours the champagne into mismatched glasses.
“Ashley’s underage,” my mother says as Jo pours for me.
“I’m pretty sure Ashley’s had a drink or two by now.” She continues to pour.
“Don’t encourage bad behavior,” my mother says.
“You know French kids don’t binge drink. Because it’s not a big deal there.”
“Last I checked, we weren’t French.”
Jo sets the bottle down on the table and raises a glass that reads “Hawaii: The Aloha State.”
“Ohana!” Harrison says, and together we clink.
* * *
“So, who are you, Ashley Bennett?” Harrison runs his tongue over the bit of chicken stuck in his crowded teeth. Jo reaches over and scrapes it off with her nail. My mother looks like she’s going to vomit.