Pushing Pause

by Celeste O. Norfleet

  “I know, I’m seriously screwed, all my college courses, my extracurricular activities, and even my recommendations. I won’t know any of those new teachers. How are they gonna recommend me?”

  “It’ll work out,” Jalisa promised.

  “How? No, Jalisa, it won’t work out. This is messed up.” I started to walk around, too restless to stay in one place. I grabbed my purse off the rail.

  “Kenisha, where you going?”

  “I gotta go, I’ll see you later.”

  I walked over to LaVon’s house, but his sister told me that he was out and wouldn’t be back until late. Figures, the one time I needed him, he was unavailable.

  By the time I got home, they were working on filling up the third truck. My world disappeared into the back of the truck in less then five and a half hours. Everything I knew was gone. I walked into the empty house and saw the bare walls and realized that this wasn’t just a bad dream. This was a nightmare. I was being kicked out of the only house I ever knew. I went upstairs to my bedroom, it was empty. I closed the door.

  I walked over and sat on the once cushioned window seat with my eyes closed as my mom’s voice echoed through the empty house. I heard her calling me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to it anymore. Whatever had happened between her and my dad didn’t involve me.

  “Kenisha,” she called out again, then I heard her walking up the steps and down the hall toward my bedroom, her heels clicking on the hardwood floors like chattering teeth. She called my name a few more times before she came to the door. She knocked once, then entered.

  “Kenisha,” she said, poking her head in and spotting me across the empty open space. “Come on, Kenisha, we need to leave now.”

  “I’m not going,” I said, knowing it sounded childish, but I didn’t care anymore. “I’m staying.”

  “Come on, Kenisha, we don’t have time for this.”

  “No,” I said adamantly.

  She walked over and sat down beside me. “Kenisha, I know you’re upset and I know that right now you don’t understand everything that’s going on, but just trust me. I need to leave here and I’m not leaving you by yourself.”

  “I won’t be by myself. Dad will be here in a few. I’ll stay with him.”

  She looked hurt, then reached up and wiped the tear on my cheek. “Honey, we gotta go.”

  “No, you go, I’m staying,” I said stubbornly.

  “You can’t stay, Kenisha.”

  “Why not? This is my house, too. Why can’t I stay?”

  She sighed heavily. I could hear the twisted knot in her throat as she gurgled, then started crying. “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I messed up bad. But I thought…I’m so sorry.”

  “What, what is it?” I asked as I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. She broke down completely. We sat there in each other’s arms, crying until we were cried dry.

  Later she stood and walked to the open door. “We have to go now, your dad will be here soon.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to see this house anymore. We went downstairs, walked outside, got in her car and drove off. We led, the trucks followed. That was that.

  CHAPTER 9

  A New Home

  “Why is it that it always seems to take longer to get where you really want to be and shorter to be where you really don’t want to get? Life seems like an eternity sometimes then other times it goes by in a flash.”

  —myspace.com

  I plugged my earbuds in, turned away and stared out the window and saw the last of my world dissolve in a blur behind me. I felt queasy, sick to my stomach and my head was spinning like a merry-go-round. Everything I knew was now gone and there was nothing I could do about it. For the first time in my life I hated my father.

  “Kenisha…” my mom said. When I didn’t answer, she looked over, then tugged at the cord around my neck, pulling an earpod out. “Kenisha.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said before she could start talking about this new life she had planned for me.

  “We need to talk.”

  “Why, is something gonna change? If we do talk, will they put everything back in our house? Will Dad change his mind?” “No.”

  “So why talk?”

  “It might help you feel better.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Kenisha, bottom line is we need to stick together. We can’t alienate each other.” I didn’t respond. “You act like we’re moving to the other side of the universe. The Metro goes right into Virginia, and your grandmother lives just a few blocks away. You’ll still see your girlfriends.”

  “What about LaVon?”

  “LaVon isn’t the only boy in the world. There are plenty of guys in D.C. As a matter of fact, your grandmother’s next-door neighbor, Terrence Butler, is a very nice young man. He’s going into his freshman year at Howard, majoring in engineering. He’s very smart. He graduated high school early and even attended…”

  “Are you doing his PR now, Mom?”

  “What?”

  “You’re going on and on about some guy like he’s some kind of saint. He’s probably just another wannabe drugged-up gangster hoodrat.”

  “A what?”

  “A hoodrat, you know, someone who lives in the hood.”

  “Not everybody who lives in D.C. is a wannabe drugged-up gangster hoodrat. I don’t know where you get that.”

  “The news, they be killing each other all over the place. Every time you turn it on, somebody shot somebody else. I’d be surprised if there was anybody left in Chocolate City.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper or hear on television. The media has a tendency to seek out the worst in our people. There are some very nice people in D.C. Just like there are wannabe drugged-out gangster hoodrats in the pricey exclusive suburbs of Virginia and Maryland and Boston and London and every place else. Where a person comes from isn’t who that person is, you should know that by now.”

  “But every night somebody has shot up some nightclub or did a drive-by. D.C. is nothing but hood city and anybody who’s from there is just a hoodrat.”

  “Including me?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t say that. I mean, there are exceptions, like you and grandmom.”

  “Oh, thanks, I’m an exception now.”

  “Yeah, you know what I mean,” I said.

  “And Jade, is she an exception, too?”

  “Jade, I don’t know yet, the jury’s still out on her.”

  “Uh-huh, okay, we’ll see,” she said in that haughty I-know-best voice she always used whenever she thought she knew something I didn’t. “Just do me a favor. Don’t judge everything and everyone by what you think you know. My mother always said that appearances matter, and I’m not so sure that’s true. You’d be surprised,” she said, more to herself than to me. “It’s the beautiful people that have the wickedest lies.”

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking about my dad, beautiful people and wicked lies. He had everything, a wife and daughter, a business, a great house and on paper he looked like a saint, but here I was moving out anyway. Mom was right, so much for appearances.

  So I’ve been thinking about my family all morning.

  Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, my grandmother and my cousin and all, but the thing is, I really don’t know them. I mean, I know them, but I really don’t know them. I have all these half-faded memories of when I was a kid and all, but that’s it.

  My mom stopped taking me over there to visit years ago. Then on my birthday a few years back, I think her and my grandmother must have had some kind of argument, ’cause they stopped talking for a while, but that’s all I know.

  But before that, I remember that she would always go and get my cousin, Jade, and she would come over to the house and we’d spend all afternoon together shopping at the mall or hanging out at the movies or at the park. Then my mom would take her back home and we’d do the same thing all over again the next da
y. Then it stopped, no reason, it just stopped.

  Now I run into Jade sometimes at the dance studio. We used to chat a little bit at first, but both of us knew we had nothing much in common, so we just basically said hi or nodded and let it go at that.

  My cousin Jade was three years older than me and went to Howard University in the city. She was on campus, I think, but she still lived with our grandmother sometimes, but nobody ever talked about her mother. I didn’t know why. She had been my mom’s other sister, Hannah Mae, the oldest, who died of a drug overdose. But as I said, nobody ever talked about her mother.

  So forty-five minutes later, we pulled up in Old City D.C. in front of a three-story, stone facade building with dark green shutters. The house looked small and cramped and I wondered how all of us were gonna fit in there. But at least it had grass, even if it was only on three sides. The fourth side was attached to the house next door. It definitely wasn’t what I remembered.

  Spewed with dramatically colored rosebushes, the rest of the lawn was being cut by a guy wearing an untucked white T-shirt, jeans, sneaks and wired earbuds plugged in both ears. He looked up as we drove up, then turned and went back to work on the side.

  The house was on the corner, and we parked right in front. Then one of the trucks pulled up behind us. The other two had turned off a while ago, just before we left Virginia. I got out of the car, stumbled and almost tripped ’cause I was looking up at the house. It seemed a whole lot smaller than I remembered, but even still, it was almost twice as big as the other houses on the block.

  So I walked up to the front door. It was closed and the curtains were drawn tight. It looked like nobody was even home. So I turned to check out what my mom was doing, then I heard the front door open. I turned around again.

  A gray-haired woman, petite, the same size as my mom, walked out on the open front porch. She looked me up and down. “So aren’t you going to say hello and give your grandmother a hug?” she said, half smiling, like cracking her face made it hurt.

  “Hi, Grandmom,” I said mechanically.

  We hugged awkwardly, then she held on to my hand and really checked me out. “Girl, you’re the spitting image of your mother but tall just like your daddy.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not sure if I was supposed to consider that a compliment or not. Somehow I doubted it.

  “Where’s your mom?” she asked, still staring at me.

  “Hi, Momma, it’s been a long time. You look good,” my mom said, forcing a smile as she walked up onto the porch. We both turned to see my mom carrying a box.

  “You’re late, you said you’d be here an hour ago.”

  “It took longer than I expected. The movers are ready to get started.”

  “All right, then, let’s get this done. You take your old bedroom and Kenisha can have the third floor with Jade.”

  “Is Jade here?” my mom asked.

  “No, she went out a few minutes ago. She’ll be back later.”

  “Kenisha, do me a favor and take this upstairs,” my mom said, then handed me the box she was carrying. “After that you can go check out your bedroom. It’s the third floor back.”

  “A’ight. Where you want this at?”

  “What was that?” my grandmother asked me as I grabbed the box from my mother.

  I looked at her, figuring she must be losing her hearing or something. “I said a’ight,” I repeated, louder.

  “I’m not deaf, Kenisha. I am, however, surprised by your atrocious grammar. Your guttural vernacular is bad enough, but your syntax is intolerable. You see, around here we speak proper English, none of that slang Ebonics stuff. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you understand me?” she repeated more crisply.

  “Yes, I understand you,” I said coolly.

  “And watch your attitude, young lady. In this house everyone and everything matters.”

  “Yes,” I said. I took the box and just as I did, I saw the guy who was mowing the lawn walking up. I knew he must have heard what my grandmother had just said. Pity, ’cause he was cute, too.

  So I went inside pissed. As soon as the door closed behind me, I heard my grandmother talking to my mom about my manners, or as she said, my lack thereof. My mom was just nodding and saying nothing to defend me. At thirty-four she was acting like she was ten years old again.

  So once inside, I looked around quickly and the first thing I noticed was that the place smelled old and musty, like it had been shut up for years. I walked into the front living room and took a look around. It was bigger than I thought and it had these seriously old pictures of all these people on the walls. Portraits, none of them smiling.

  I kept looking around, realizing that I didn’t remember any of it. The sofa and chairs all had plastic wrapped on them and so did the lamps and throw pillows. I chuckled to myself ’cause it looked so stupid. What was she expecting, a thunderstorm inside?

  I peeked into the dining room. It was big and like the living room it had really high ceilings.

  I went back to the foyer, then over to the stairs. Up two floors I peeked into the first bedroom. I assumed it was mine ’cause it was completely empty. I sat the box on the floor and checked it out.

  It was big; the floors were hardwood, not the perfect new polished kind I used to have in my old house. These floors were old and thick. They creaked when I walked and there were a few nails sticking up along the baseboard. The ceiling was high with the same detailing. I’m not saying it was nice, but it could have been worse.

  There were these big bay windows on one end and a serious built-in armoire with mirrored doors on the other. I went over to the window and looked out. On the third floor in a neighborhood surrounded by two-story houses, I could almost see ten blocks away, but it was mainly treetops and telephone lines.

  I went over and checked out the armoire. It was nice but small. So I looked around for more closet space ’cause there was no way all my clothes were gonna fit in there. There was another door so I went over, opened it and looked inside. It was a walk-in closet, but it already had clothes on one half. I started checking out some of the wardrobe, figuring that it was Jade’s. She had some decent stuff, considering.

  So off that room there was another door. I looked inside and saw that it was the bathroom. I guess we had to share. There was another door, so I checked it out. It was Jade’s room. I went in and looked around then all of a sudden I felt like a snoop, so I went back to my room and closed the doors behind me.

  I heard my mom and my grandmother talking downstairs on the second floor. They were loud, almost arguing, but I couldn’t really make out what they were talking about, different house, same old drama.

  I went over and looked out the window again. The lawn mower guy was walking around out back. I couldn’t see him clearly, so I tried to open the window, but it was stuck. I knelt closer to sit down on the window seat to try and get a better view.

  “Kenisha.”

  I turned around and saw Jade standing in my doorway.

  “Hey,” she said, not particularly smiling.

  I smiled anyway, I guess from relief. It had been a long time since Jade and I spoke, but she still looked the same and even after seeing her onstage dancing the other night she looked the same as I remembered before. “Hey,” I said, “I saw you the other night at Freeman dancing with Gayle Harmon. I wanted to catch up with you, but I had to leave. You looked incredible up there.”

  “Thanks,” she said coldly. “We have to share the closet and bathroom and I usually take a shower in the morning,” she said. I nodded silently. “Also I cleared the bottom two drawers in the vanity and I use the first sink, you can take the other one by the window. There was a medicine cabinet on that side. I never use it, so it’s already empty, so just put your stuff in there. I’ll be moving back into the dorms at the end of the month, so all this is temporary.” She waited a second, then turned to leave.

  “Jade,” I heard myself saying before I could st
op, “thank you.” She nodded but didn’t bother turning around. I heard the wood creak as she walked down the hall and headed back downstairs. Why in the world was I thanking her? I asked myself.

  I went back downstairs a few minutes later and sat out on the back stoop to avoid the mess going on inside with the movers. I sat and watched the lawn mower guy put the stuff away in the big shed out back. I was right, he was cute. He had these seriously light-colored eyes with this sweet caramel-colored skin and light brown kinky hair with blondish tips. But the thing that hit me was that he was seriously nicely built ’cause he had taken his T-shirt off and had tucked it into his back pocket. He had serious LL Cool J biceps, triceps and abs and a totally flat stomach with this sweet little tattoo on his upper arm. I couldn’t really make out what it was, but it looked like a butterfly, but that didn’t sound right.

  So I was staring at him like I had no sense at all, trying to figure out what the tattoo was, then he turned and started watching me watch him. By this time I was totally in la-la land, not paying attention and wishing stupid-ass LaVon was built like that and not the skinny stick that he was. So he smiled and nodded and I suddenly realized that I’d been gawking and that he had seen me. Aw, man, I hated looking like a fool, especially around cute guys.

  First I tripped getting out of the car, then I got blasted by my grandmother on my vernacular and now I sat there staring probably with my tongue hanging out. Whatever. So he started to walk over, smiling like he knew something I didn’t.

  “Hey,” he said, grinning with perfectly straight teeth and this serious deep dimple in the side of his face.

  “Hey,” I said, acting like I hadn’t been staring him down.

  “I haven’t seen you around here before, you moving in with Mrs. King?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, sparkling with conversation.

  He nodded and leaned in. “Don’t let her spook you, she acts cold and mean, but she’s really not. It’s the retired librarian still in her, I think. I’ve been doing her lawn and shoveling her snow for years, she’s all right, you just have to get to know her.”