When I got a look at Ravi sitting there eating my pizza like it was his all along, I saw something in him that I’ve only ever seen in myself.
A sucker.
How could she even get a new man so quick, you ask? Yeah, I was wondering the same thing as I stared at him in a kinda shocked haze, until I realized where I’d seen him before.
He’s the guy she was with in the shadows of the parking lot.
I know it’s him, know it from the salt-and-pepper of his hair, from the bend in his nose, from the smile he flashed to her under the streetlight. Illuminated for a split second, caught in the camera flash of my memory.
Snap.
There you are, new man. In our lives, outside of our house, in the months before my father died under the wheels of our car.
eleven
It’s just a week away from Christmas holidays. Dad’s urn is side-eyeing us from the living room and I’m sitting at the table with Ravi, who turns out to be another Trini guy, because Ma’s man-barometer apparently is broken and has just one setting. He’s not tall like Dad was, but he’s a solid bulk in our dining room. His hair is slicked back off his forehead and I can’t tell his age.
He’s looking at me and I know exactly what he’s thinking.
He’s wondering what kind of problem I’ll be.
I silently send the signal that I’m gonna be the biggest problem he could possibly imagine, but the main issue with that is that he doesn’t seem to have much of an imagination.
We stare at each other like this until Ma comes in. She sets a plate of red beans and rice in front of him. I watch him eat, the beans stewed thick with tomatoes and garlic, just the way I like it best.
“You not hungry?” he asks, nodding to my full plate, which I just pick at. These are the first words he has spoken to me. Unlike most West Indian men I’ve met, he’s not much of a talker.
“No.”
There’s something in my voice that makes my mother look up at me, that makes her pretty brown eyes flash a warning so dire that I have never been able to ignore it. Until now.
“Eat your food,” she says.
I’ve never disobeyed a direct order from her before, but I’ve had it with the two of them. This on top of Imelda and the new BJJ at our gym? Not today, Satan.
“No.” I push away from the table and am out the door before either of them can say boo. I’m quicker than they’d ever imagined. Even though we’re just starting our speed training, I’m like lightning.
At the gym, which is now open again, I sit on a bench in the corner and watch Jason spar with Ricky, both on the card for a tourney in Montreal.
“What’s the matter?” Jason calls from the ring, after they do their rounds. Since I beat his ass at the demo he’s been paying extra attention to me but I haven’t taken the bait. Who wants a guy you can drop with a single push kick? I do have to say, he looks tight these days, so at least he’s learning.
“Leave her be,” says Kru, passing by. He gives me a pat on the shoulder and hands me a bottle of disinfectant and roll of paper towels for the gym equipment. This is no Mr. Miyagi, wax-on-wax-off shit. This is because I haven’t paid membership in months and I’ve got to contribute somehow. I haven’t paid because I lost my job at Foot Locker after I missed a shift due to my last fight, and those uncompromising assholes wrote me out of the schedule. So no scratch for me right now.
I clean instead of training, letting the sharp smell go to my already light head.
When I get home I’m a wraith, a shadow, full of cleaning fumes and nothing else. Ravi’s gone and I don’t hear Ma anywhere. But then there she is, in the kitchen, coming at me from out of nowhere. She slaps me with her open hand, grabs the rolling pin off the counter and strikes me so hard across my shoulders I think my bones will be crushed.
Her voice is low and sharp.
“You be grateful for the food I cook. Be. Grateful. You don’t know what I’ve done to bring you here from Trinidad for a better life. You don’t know what they do to people over there. This is what you say? This is what you do? You can’t respect your elders?”
She raises the pin again and whips it at my head. I duck, because I’m slippery like that. It hits the wall, which only makes her angrier. I stare at the dent it has made, like a right cross with all your power behind it, the ones you make sometimes with your chin untucked because you’re so in the moment that you don’t care about protecting your face. You know you can do damage. And there it is, cracking the sea-green paint of our kitchen, just under the cheap plastic clock that’s been there forever.
She doesn’t cry and neither do I. Because I am grateful. Even when Dad was alive, it was always just the two of us, and everything she does is for me so that I could have the kind of life she didn’t when she was growing up. If I didn’t have Ma, I wouldn’t have anybody. She loves me the way that nobody has ever loved her. She tells me this over and over. She hits me with love and stops before I die from her blows. Even though it would be so easy to do, I don’t block her because she needs this. It’s what I get from sparring, if I’m honest.
You okay? Columbus texts. He must have seen me come in, heard the rolling pin crashing into the wall. I don’t answer because no, genius. No, I’m not.
After Ma disappears into her room and shuts her door, I try to fall asleep. I want to sink into the silence, let it wrap around me, pull me close and down into sleep. But silence has never been my friend. Out of it, a sound can come hurtling at me, something mean and dark, a slap across a cheek, a cry of pain. Cries of other kinds, too, which I never want to hear or think about, even less than the pain-cries.
I wait in the silence, listening for some new shift in my existence. I don’t want to say my heart beats faster or my belly’s full of butterflies, or anything corny like that. I know better and, because of Mr. Abdi, I also know these are lazy descriptions for a feeling that I can’t even put into words. I’m not scared right now or even angry. I’m tired, but I stay up just in case. On the off chance that there’s gonna be something more waiting for me tonight.
twelve
The next morning is Saturday, thank God. So I won’t have to be at school, pretending that every inch of my body isn’t sore. And although I heard Ma leave earlier, there are sounds downstairs that I can’t place. When I emerge from my bedroom in shorts and a tank top, Pammy is in our kitchen, making pancakes. “Hey, Trish. Come eat.”
She holds out a chair for me, so I slink into it and stare at the pancakes. They’re hot, and they’re there. Once I start eating, I can’t seem to stop.
“Christopher might come over for some in a bit. I hope you don’t mind,” she says.