I had elbows. My hair would turn to needles that,
dropping, would let my only babies and
a few friends grow.
If I walked out, could I become a pine
among the pines, standing tall and aloof,
sun reaching through me and
my closest kin, casting shadows up to the sky?”
Someone coughs behind me and I turn.
“My little poet,” Dad says, and I get up, hugging him.
“You heard me?” There is always that small bit of shy I find grown up when I go to Daddy Sunday morning, replaced by a wide grin and free laughter by the time I leave in the afternoon. But like jasmine weed on a fence, it snakes up again by Wednesday, calls and texts too weak to keep its leaves from spreading open, its tendrils from catching hold of my heart.
“Heard. Felt. Loved.” Dad picks up my bag and grunts as though it’s filled with concrete blocks. “You gonna put that one down on paper for the camp application?”
“Um… I haven’t decided,” I say, stalling. Mercifully, he changes the topic.
“So, y’all fighting on the beach now.”
“You heard about that?”
“Word travels.” He strides toward the house. He’s not tall, but he holds his back extra straight, extra sure. He doesn’t ever look like he’s rushing, but sometimes I feel like I have to hurry just to keep pace. “You see they protesting it downtown, now. You keepin’ outta that?”
“Of course.”
“Good. I don’t want you getting in problems. Who started it?”
I roll my eyes. “Faith.”
“Why her?”
“Toons gets stupid around her and he don’t think straight.”
“Isn’t he with Paulette?”
I nod. The way he talks, you’d think Dad knew these people from when they were small. Maybe he does, from my stories. Maybe he knows them better than he knows me.
“Well, once y’all made it away safe.”
“Nia almost got left behind,” I say.
“She did? She’s that slow?”
“The guy was fast.” We’re at the house now. Dad turns up the driveway, stepping over and around fallen guavas that litter the ground, half-nibbled by critters that have hidden themselves, for now. I breathe in deep and feel at home. The fermenting scent of guavas is one thing Dad’s place has in common with Pinder Street.
“Don’t get into it with those people.” Dad unlocks the door and the smell of cake barrels out. “You know that’s private land.”
“Since when?”
“Always. They left it open, and it sat empty so long nobody thought they’d ever build out that way. Now the owner sell it, everyone up in arms.”
“It’s not empty. The church is still there, and there’s activities and meetings there pretty much every day.”
“Church? Oh, that’s what that old place is now?”
“Always was. You’d know if you ever came through to see me.” I kick off my shoes and welcome the quiet. No Toons thundering in, no Angel laughing and Sammy murmuring. No tap tap tap. It’s bliss.
“Not always, babes. Used to be a bunch of things. But times change. Anyway, listen.” He steps into the kitchen. “Back to the matter at hand. You fill out the form for camp?”
I follow him, inhaling the scent of butter and slow-roasted sugar. The room is alive with sunshine, the sink piled high with bowls and spoons. “That’s duff you makin?”
“Guava pound cake.” He opens the oven door and slides a knife into the loaf’s soft center, then eases the blade out, holding it up to the light. “It’s an opportunity. You like to write, even though I’ve never seen any of these mysterious poems on paper.” He drops the sticky knife into the sink, then closes the oven again. “Five more minutes.”
I cross my arms and lean back against the counter. “You ga be there?”
“I already told you,” he says impatiently, “I’m on the admissions committee, not teaching.”
“Cause if my one and only daddy was there…”
“I’m serious, KeeKee.” His voice is firm.
I don’t get my father sometimes. He’ll be smooth and easygoing one minute, then all business the next. “I don’t think my poems would work.”
“You have any of them with you?”
“I left them home.”
“You should have brought them,” he says seriously, missing my sarcasm. “I’d drive you over there, but this cake…”
There it is. There’s always some excuse why he can’t come to Pinder Street. Suddenly the spacious kitchen feels too small. “I could go in the studio?”
“Sure.”
As I step out the back door, he lets out a sigh that fills the air and pushes out past me, following me through the grove of trees to the shack he uses as a studio. Let him be disappointed. He’s not the only one.
I push the door open and sink onto his favorite carved stool. I’ve been sitting on it from the time I needed to be hoisted up onto it. I run my hand over the smooth sides, left pinky finding the knot in the wood that used to be a tree, right forefinger slipping into the old split. He might as well have come out and said it: Angel won’t let him come around. If someone wants something bad enough, though, they go ahead, even without permission.
Why doesn’t he get me? Why doesn’t he understand that when I put my poetry down on a page, the words wilt and flop sideways, flowers cut and left out of water too long? Maybe if he came to see me at home, he’d understand that there’s more, too—that there’s weight to leaving behind a world of people who count on me, who need me to serve them grits in the morning and do their laundry in the afternoon, make tea for them when they show up broken in the deep of night. How could he really know if my poems are good when he doesn’t know where I come from? Does he even know me?
NIA
It’s still and hot in the kitchen. Around us, Pinder Street is fragrant with Sunday meals, the scent of baked chops, ribs and rice, roasted potato, macaroni, and coconut bread drifting in through our windows. Our heat is ironic; the oven is empty and stone cold. I turn back to the old gray computer monitor, but I just can’t focus on the protest story with the smell of all that food cooking everywhere but in our house. I get up, leaning on the counter.
“Mummy, when we getting more gas for the stove?”
My mother sets down a plate of sandwiches on the table. A rubbery finger of sausage pokes out at me from between the bread. I open the cupboard. Two cans of tuna, a tin of corned beef, tea, salt, a little rice, that washed-out fruit cocktail with desperate chunks of pear and peach suffocating in sugar syrup. The arms of my old glasses press into the side of my face. I slide them off. Maybe if I squint, the options will look better. A jar of mayonnaise catches my eye from the back of the cupboard. I grab it like a life raft.
“Hallelujah.”
Mummy looks over at me, then down at the jar. “What you mean by that?”
I flash her a smile. “Just feeling holy on a Sunday afternoon.”
“Put it back.” Mummy slides the hot sauce in my direction and selects a sandwich, nibbling at the crust.