The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  “Are you worried about the store?” I say.

  I visited the store a few times as a little kid, back when my dad would still occasionally stop by to see how Uncle Ronnie and the store were doing. Mostly what I remember is swiveling on stools, waiting for something to happen. A customer would come in with a vacuum, and Uncle Ronnie and my father would rush over, lean over the thing, and inspect it like their mother had done so many years before. Vacuums take away the dirt and the ugly and make things look like new. But the dirt goes somewhere.

  “What are you doing up?” my father says.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  “Join the club,” he says.

  When I was really little, right after Grandma Shirley died, my dad used to come into my room at night, lie down on the floor, and cry. I would pat him on the head and say, “Don’t cry, Daddy,” and sometimes he’d stop crying. I don’t really remember her, but I remember that. He did it for a full week until my mother walked in, caught him crying, and told him to stop it; he was scaring me. I wasn’t scared, though. I just wanted him to stop being sad. Sometimes when your grown-ups are sad, their sadness feels even heavier than your own.

  Later, when I asked my mother how Grandma Shirley died, she froze and said, “Can you do Mommy a big favor, Ashley?”

  “Okay!”

  “Don’t ask Daddy that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You see how sad he is, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’ll make it worse.”

  “But why can’t you tell me?”

  “Just… Just let Daddy tell you when he’s ready.”

  But I guess he’s never been ready, and I’ve never worked up the balls to ask. Whatever it is, I know it isn’t something like cancer or a heart attack, because people talk about people who die of those things. He and Uncle Ronnie don’t talk about her much at all.

  After a few too many beers one night, Uncle Ronnie told me that their mother used to close the shop and take them out of school and buy them ice cream and drive them up into the hills or along the coast for hours, talking to them about their friends at school or civil rights or their father who died in the war. Other times, he said she would lock herself in her bedroom for several days straight, and even if they pounded on the door and screamed “I’m hungry!” she wouldn’t come out. They almost lost the store multiple times.

  I imagine it would be hard to grow up with a mother like that—a mother who loved you hard and then retreated, like the flow and crash and ebb of a wave, so you never quite knew whether you were floating or drowning. My mother said that to cope with his mother, my father hid in himself; then for a while he hid at Darla’s, until finally my mother met him and yelled at him to come out. But how do you take a turtle and tell it overnight to be a dolphin?

  This is exactly what she screamed at my dad during one of their fights.

  “You’re being a turtle, but I need you to be a dolphin, Craig.”

  My father and I sit across the couch from each other, and I try to make sense of the man in front of me.

  “You never tell me anything about before we were born,” I say.

  “Did I ever tell you that my mother used to take us fishing?” my dad says.

  “No.”

  He tells me how his mother used to pile them into the truck when they should’ve been in school and drive them up or down the coast. There the three of them would sit, fishing lines in a row, until something bit and the others would whoop and holler, cheerleading as he or she reeled it in. Grandma Shirley had grown up in the South, with brothers, and had grown up fishing with her brothers until she moved far away, had my dad and Ronnie, and eventually picked up where she’d left off. They’d bring home the day’s catch in a cooler, fish guts and scales stinking up the tiny kitchen with its homemade curtains, Grandma Shirley humming as she brined.

  “I stopped wanting to go,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Wanted to be in school. I liked school.”

  Grandma Shirley taught both boys everything there was to know about vacuums. Ronnie took to it, but I guess my dad wanted more school, something different, somewhere away. Anyway, Grandma Shirley used that vacuum money to send my father to a fancy college and then to grad school, while Uncle Ronnie stayed home and worked on fixing what was broken.

  Sometimes I think we gave my father a good excuse to run farther away from his bad memories. Maybe this is where Jo gets it from. Turtles have shells, which are these very complicated structures meant to protect them from the world around them, but shells also hide your heart. Shells can blind you to beauty, even when you’re right in the middle of it.

  “How did Grandma Shirley die?” I ask quietly.

  My father pretends like he didn’t hear me and turns up the volume. The distance between us is exactly one shell.

  * * *

  In the end, it’s not fire that gets to Grandma Shirley’s store but the looters.

  This is what they take:

  Broken Hoovers, Bissells, Sanitaires, and Mieles

  Newly refurbished Hoovers, Bissells, Sanitaires, and Mieles

  Ronnie’s prized, brand-new, fancy Dyson that won the International Design Fair last year, bought special from the catalog

  The cash register and the entire safe

  The brand-new Apple computer Morgan used to do her homework after school

  The toilet paper and paper towels from the small restroom?!

  En masse, the looters push into the dream that my grandma built with her calloused brown hands in a city of angels. They pull these things out through the door and the broken window, stepping over all the broken glass.

  This is what they leave:

  The curtains that she sewed by hand in the waiting room

  The baby pictures of me and Jo and Morgan and Tanya that Grandma Shirley nailed, hands shaking, into the wall, and Uncle Ronnie kept

  The pictures of all the youth sports teams she’d sponsored over the years, the boys and girls in them long grown—at least one of whom tried to scream above the looters to “Stop! Stop this now!”

  My father’s life was built in part on vacuums, but I’ve rarely seen my parents use one.

  A few years ago, while Lucia was cleaning up, our old vacuum let out a loud, unsettling roar and then a series of death gasps. My mother argued that it was time to finally get a new one.

  “No, not yet,” my dad said.

  What I remember most is the way my father bent over the vacuum for hours like he was doing open-heart surgery, or scaling a fish. Looking very much at home.

  CHAPTER 15

  MORGAN WAILS LIKE somebody’s died, and I guess maybe she’s kinda got a point, ’cause that store was an important part of all of us. Right now, I feel it a little more like a missing appendage, and she feels it like a ruptured spleen or a punctured lung. My dad walks around dazed, as though something pulsing and vital has been ripped from inside.

  “Everyone’s okay,” my dad says, like he’s trying to convince himself.

  “Everyone’s not okay!” Morgan screams.

  “I’m gonna go pick Ronnie up.” My father searches around for his keys.

  “Lemme come with you,” Morgan says.

  “No. You stay here,” he says, and heads out the door.

  After days of burning, there’s a heavy smoke cover that’s descended upon the city. Outside feels like a heavy comforter I want to kick off. But inside feels oppressive in its own way too, with Morgan’s sad wafting through and filling up every room. Finally, in spite of the news warnings about the shitty air quality, I decide to go for a run, lungs be damned.

  For the most part, ours is the kind of neighborhood where teenage girls feel safe running. Just a few weeks ago, I got sprayed by a skunk. My parents were out of town, and when I called her, Jo said to bathe in tomato sauce. It looked like a horror movie when I popped up out of the tub. It didn’t work, though, because after that, instead of skunk, I smelled like SpaghettiOs. Skunks as
ide, there was a brief period of time before I was born when people were afraid of a band of crazy white people in quiet canyons, but I’m not a famous person, and those murders weren’t in our canyons. Usually, I’m more afraid of the mountain lions or rabid coyotes than people. I don’t expect to run into my mother, who maybe scares me a bit too.

  My mother is in her jogging clothes and sweaty, but she’s also having a secret cigarette. She took up smoking when she and my dad were having marital problems a few years back and quit when I guess they decided things weren’t so bad after all. My mom and dad spent the better part of two years yelling nastiness at each other throughout the house, him cornering her, her cornering him, until I grew to hate angles and all the anger they could store. It’s like for years at a time they barely talked to each other, or they talked only enough to fight. Whenever Jo and I would try to stop their fighting, they would tell us it was none of our business. But they were fighting so loud we couldn’t sleep, so it kinda was. Jo said of their fights, “Different monsters, same shadows.” And yet somehow they didn’t give up on each other. Anyway, I didn’t even know my mother still had cigarettes around. That’s how I know she’s really worried about Jo, even if she refuses to do anything about it.

  “You’re smoking,” I say.

  She takes a last drag and extinguishes it under her road-battered Nikes.

  “Nasty habit,” she says. “Don’t let me catch you doing it.”

  “I hear it makes your morning shits great, though.”

  My mother looks at me quizzically. “What on earth…?”

  “Never mind,” I say.

  “The Parkers came over early this morning,” she says slowly. “They were very angry. Somebody shot out their tires last night. Do you happen to know anything about that?”

  It takes everything in me not to burst out laughing. I shake my head.

  “That’s what I thought. I told them my daughter would never do anything like that,” she says, and then we both start to laugh.

  We’re almost to the house when we see the straggly coyote and her cubs walking across the street. They amble along, sniffing at trash cans. My neighbor’s Pomeranian barks at them from the window and the mama coyote’s ears perk up, but for the most part she seems unbothered.

  My mother splays her arm protectively across my chest, like we’re in a car coming to an abrupt halt. Coyotes don’t bother you, mostly, but anybody with sense knows not to mess with a mother and her babies.

  “Stop. Don’t move,” my mother says, and it’s the closest I’ve felt to her in years.

  * * *

  Uncle Ronnie’s only a little banged up. There’s a cut across his forehead from the glass that shattered as the looters burst inside. As they surged forth, he tumbled backward over the window ledge and sprained his arm, which is in a sling. He rests his back across a giant heating pad but has a big bag of frozen peas folded across his shoulder. Morgan sits next to him on the couch, looking dutiful and forlorn.

  My mother gently places her hand on Uncle Ronnie’s shoulder as she walks by. “I’m glad you’re okay, Ronnie.”

  “Thanks, Val.” He places his hand on top of hers and pats it. Then my mother disappears into the house to shower.

  “You’re covered in sweat.” Morgan crinkles up her nose at me, and I pretend to wring my shirt out on her.

  “Come here, babygirl.” Uncle Ronnie reaches out his arms and hugs me so that the bag of peas smashes into my face. “Let me hug my favorite niece.”

  “Am I really your favorite?” I say.

  “You’re the one who’s here right now.” He belly laughs, then grimaces. “So… yes.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” I say.

  “Daddy, do you need new peas?” Morgan says, and I laugh ’cause it’s kinda funny, but nobody else seems to think so.

  “You know, if I was younger, I could’ve taken every last one of those punks,” he says.

  I imagine poor Ronnie sprawled out on the floor as the looters rushed past him, taking everything he’d worked so hard to get.

  “I held on to that Dyson for as long as I could, though, I’ll tell you that,” Uncle Ronnie says. “I grabbed ahold of that motherfucker’s leg and didn’t let go… Well, at least not until he kicked me in the face.”

  “He could’ve killed you.” My dad’s voice wobbles like he could cry. I didn’t even know he was in the room.

  Uncle Ronnie looks as though he wants to argue with him, but maybe it’s something about the way Daddy says it, like a declaration of love instead of a punch to the face, that makes Uncle Ronnie instead say softly, “I suppose he could’ve.”

  “I’ma get you new peas,” Morgan says, and runs toward the kitchen.

  On the news, the anchor announces that troops are coming into the city to help the National Guard—thousands of soldiers, army and Marines, with their armored vehicles that scream war. It’s the first time the military’s been sent to a city to quell disorder since the 1968 MLK assassination riots. The last time the military was in Los Angeles like this was in 1894 for the Pullman Strike, which started in Chicago and spread countrywide to involve almost a quarter of a million railway workers. For months, they shut down railroads across the country and crippled businesses, including the US Postal Service. Then the government sent in the army, and thirty people ended up getting killed.

  The news shows the troops tumbling out of their Humvees, ready and green like plastic toy soldiers.

  “Well, will you look at that,” Uncle Ronnie scoffs.

  * * *

  While Morgan and Uncle Ronnie talk about the store, I feel guilty that my personal crisis is that it’s a few hours before prom and there’s nobody available to do my hair. Patrice, my hairdresser, is six feet tall and pecan-colored, with Flo-Jo nails that she’ll dig into your scalp like a rake as she washes your hair. It hurts, but it also feels like she’s scratching the bad away. There aren’t many black hairdressers near us, so to find Patrice my mother and father went through the entire phone book calling places in the area and asking almost apologetically, “Do you do black hair?”

  Patrice is always late and never apologizes for it, but she’s very good at what she does, so I don’t complain to her face. When the relaxer starts to burn away my kinks and I cry out, “It’s burning!” Patrice screams like a coach, “Just hold on, we’re almost there, girl!”

  Earlier this morning, when I tried to call the shop to confirm the appointment, it went straight to voice mail. So I tried again, and again. There’s a slight chance the store is gone, burned down, looted, and disappeared. I tried calling Patrice’s home number, but I got the dull beep of a disconnected line. The power’s out in large portions of South Central, according to the news.

  My mother tries calling several other black hair salons in the phone book, but the story’s the same: answering-machine messages saying they’re closed until further notice.

  “I’ll do it,” Morgan says.

  She sits me down in the kitchen and parts my hair into thin lines with a rattail comb. Her hands are impatient, and I try not to scream as she jams the weight of the blow-dryer comb into my head like it’s a dive bomber.

  “You’re hurting me,” I say.

  “Sorry,” she says, and tugs a little softer.

  She sticks the hot comb atop our kitchen stove. It’s the only hot comb we have in the house, old and slightly rusted, with a green wooden handle that my dad recovered from his mother’s stuff when she died. With the hum of the dryer gone, it’s me and Morgan alone together.

  “Pops used to say the store was my inheritance. And I was like, whatever, because vacuums are fucking vacuums, you know? They’re not exactly glamorous. But I did love that store. I grew up in it.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say.

  “Me too.” She sighs.

  “The Parkers asked my mom about the car,” I say.

  Morgan presses my head into her stomach. As she runs the comb over my edges, I can feel her stomach gurg
le in my skull.

  “What she say?” Morgan blows on the comb.

  “I think she knew we did it,” I say. “But she told them we would never do such a thing.”

  “Yo momma ain’t no snitch!” Morgan says, and we laugh hard until she accidentally burns the top of my ear.

  * * *

  Lucia enters the kitchen and begins to straighten up to the beat of the yellow Walkman on her hip. She carries around a spray bottle of bleach like it’s a six-shooter and this is the Old West.

  “You smell like bleach,” I say.

  She points the bottle right at me, and I stagger back like I’ve been shot.

  She sings a song by this Tejana and moves around the kitchen shaking her butt. Her date with Jose from Western Union is tonight.

  “Maybe you two will get married after all,” I say. If he marries her, maybe she’ll stay nearby.

  “I’ve already been married,” Lucia says. “I don’t need to get married again. But love? Love is good.”

  “If you stay here and move in with him, I can come visit you,” I say.

  She laughs. “Babygirl, let’s see if I like him first.”

  “Well, then why are you going out with him if you’re just gonna leave soon?”

  “Can’t I have a little fun before I leave, mija? Dating doesn’t have to mean you get married. Sometimes it can just be to have a good time with a pretty face.” She laughs again.

  Umberto and Roberto have grown into men while their mother raised me. I’ve charted their growth alongside my own, something adult metastatic in us—the ripening of our bodies, the ever deepening of their voices when they call the house phone: “Hello, Miss Ashley. May I speak to Lucia, please?”

  I wonder if they would trade their nice school and guitar lessons and textbooks for this moment in the kitchen with their mother, curls wild, dancing. Maybe by now she’s an ache they’ve learned to live with.

  She goes over to the radio on the wall and tunes it to the station she’s listening to on the Walkman. The Tejana’s voice bounces around our tiled kitchen.