“Can’t you be happy for me?”
“I’m always going to worry about you. Even when I’m happy for you.”
Kim’s face darkened. “Rebecca said you wouldn’t be on board.”
“Rebecca is …”
“She’s my girlfriend.”
That defiance in Kim, burning. She wanted to fight.
“Was it scary?” Deb asked.
Something in Kim faltered. “Was what scary?”
“To discover this about yourself. Was it scary?”
Kim and Deb looked at each other.
“A little bit,” Kim finally said. “Like, I’d always thought other women were pretty, but I didn’t, like, feel anything for them. You know? Not attraction. And I didn’t want to tell anyone. I wanted to figure this out for myself.”
“You didn’t want to tell me?”
“I didn’t know how you and Dad would react.” Uncertainty clouded Kim’s face.
You and Dad.
Deb was relieved that Grant wasn’t with her.
Deb had always found that men took this kind of news differently than women. Men needed to accept it, to first rationalize what it meant to them. Almost as if they worried that by accepting this change, their own sexuality would be threatened.
“You’re not mad at me?” Kim asked.
“For not telling me?”
“For who I am.”
“Of course not.”
But Deb didn’t tell her daughter the worries racing through her mind.
That identifying as bisexual or lesbian would push Kim even further to society’s margins, far beyond where her mixed race already had.
There was more acceptance nowadays of cultures outside of straight and white, but those steps had been hard-fought and reluctantly granted, and could easily be walked back. The DMV (the intersection of DC, Maryland, and Virginia) was wonderfully diverse, but bigotry existed. Maybe it wasn’t overtly shown in marches or demonstrations, but Deb had felt it in subtler ways.
Like the time Grant’s father had asked Deb if it bothered her that she was “basically white. Not like other Asians.”
Deb had heard variations of this statement her entire life, as if there was some general Asian stereotype she didn’t fit. To some, her adoption by a white woman disqualified her. To others, she was too educated compared to other Asians, and still others complained that she wasn’t educated enough. She didn’t speak Vietnamese, and people felt that was ostracizing, and even her studied knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam wasn’t enough to satisfy them.
When you were a minority, Deb had learned, you had to fit into a certain definable context. A satisfying context.
You simply couldn’t just be.
And there was the time a man had muttered, as she walked past him, “Slope.” Deb, a college freshman at the time, had never heard the term and asked a friend what it meant. She remembered her instinct, upon learning the insult, was to wonder what she had done wrong, to replay her walk down that street over and over in her mind. It took Deb a while to realize she didn’t deserve his stupidity or hate. It took longer for her to disregard that instinct for self-examination.
And there was the time a white girlfriend had confessed to her that she’d never let her children date someone from another race. “Not because I’m racist,” her friend had explained, “but it’d just be so hard for them.” As if Deb was supposed to sympathize. As if Deb was supposed to realize the problems she presented. As if racism was her burden, her fault.
There was something about the casualness in all of Deb’s experiences with bigotry that was so ingrained, so deep-seated, that it didn’t seem possible to dislodge, like a stone sunk into the earth. And it didn’t seem fair to Deb that she should be expected to dislodge that stone, to stain her hands with someone else’s dirt.
Kim’s race hadn’t been the kind of pained thorn Deb had experienced, as far as Deb knew anyway. But she was desperately determined to give Kim somewhere safe, a place she could run to. Race and sexuality weren’t the same, but bigotry was bigotry, and Deb was fucking tired of it.
She and Kim had lost so much. It was nice to have something gained, to hear the hope and love beneath Kim’s words.
“What’s Rebecca like?” Deb asked.
“She’s really nice.”
Deb waited.
“Like, really nice, but maybe a little edgier than I am? Like, she wears a lot of black and listens to so much music. You’d be so impressed at how much she knows about music and musicians. And she’s really smart. So smart. We have the best talks. She’s not really into fashion, but she always looks good. Like it’s just part of her, you know? And …”
Her daughter kept talking.
Deb listened, tired but happy that her daughter wanted to talk to her. They talked as light broke through the windows. They talked as a new day began.
CHAPTER
8
CESSY WANTED A distraction, and so she was happier than usual for her monthly trip to Baltimore’s Halfway House for Victims of Sex Trafficking, Domestic Violence, and Other Forms of Modern Human Slavery. She loved volunteering at the Federal Hill home, even if the halfway house needed, in addition to a shorter name, a new everything else. The bars over the windows were rusted, the marble steps cracked, graffiti still visible under the white paint meant to cover it.
“How’s it going, Rose?” Cessy asked as she pulled the stubborn front door closed.
Rose seemed smaller to Cessy, the way she did every visit. Not only in height; her face, hands, everything about her seemed to be turning into a miniaturized version of herself. Cessy knew it wasn’t just because Rose had recently hit seventy. It was the victims, the escapees, their PTSD, often their desperate fight to stave off drugs. The pressures of running the house were crippling.
And Rose ran a strict program, a mix of counseling and community service, tasking the residents with projects ranging from picking up trash to cooking and serving food, to repairing donated clothing.
“It’s going fine,” Rose told her. “All four rooms taken.”
“That a good thing?”
“Eh.”
“Anyone new?”
“One. Want to go up and say hi? That what the bag’s for?” Rose pointed to the plastic shopping bag Cessy carried.
Cessy opened it, showed Rose the contents. “Nothing exciting,” she said. “Just some snacks. The new girl okay with visitors?”
“It’s you, so yes.” Rose studied her, then asked Cessy the same question Rose had asked for the past three months, ever since she’d accidentally seen bruises on Cessy’s shoulder. “Did you leave that asshole son of a bitch?”
“Well, that asshole son of a bitch is dead. So yes.”
Years of working with battered women had hardened Rose. “Good. Cheaper than a divorce.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“Did someone kill him? Figured Hector was getting into stupid shit with stupid people.”
“That’s exactly what happened.”
Rose grunted. “You should have told me what he was doing a lot earlier.”
“Probably.” Something in the conversation bothered Cessy; Rose’s satisfaction with Hector’s death. That attitude didn’t feel right to Cessy, regardless of what Hector had done. Regardless of how Cessy had grown to hate him.