Pushing Pause

by Celeste O. Norfleet

  “I don’t want your little NBA change, my papi can buy and sell your ass…” she snapped back.

  I turned and took one last look at them, glad at least that I was out of it. I turned back around and walked home. By the time I got there, I saw my dad’s car parked out front. I was surprised to see it, because it was still early and he never came home early before, when it was just me and Mom.

  I was just about to walk in the front door when I heard yelling coming from the back, so I walked around the side and found my dad and Courtney arguing. Apparently she was pissed ’cause she’d found out that he was stepping out on her. All I could do was smile. Some things never change.

  “Fine, there she is, you talk to her,” Courtney said.

  My dad turned. “Are you all right?” he asked, acting all concerned.

  “Yes, fine, why?” I said.

  “You left the office suddenly, I called here and you weren’t here, where did you go?”

  “I went to Grandmom’s house and then to Freeman.”

  “You’re gonna have to start accounting for your whereabouts. I want to know where you are every minute of the day. You can’t just walk in and out of here like this.”

  I wanted to laugh at his so-called parental rampage, but I didn’t. “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  “That’s gonna have to wait,” Courtney said, “I made an early dinner and it’s ready now.” She turned to her kids in the pool. “I told y’all to get out of there ten minutes ago, didn’t I? Now, come on, get out of there now.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “You need to eat,” my dad said.

  “I ate at my grandmom’s house.”

  “Fine,” Courtney said to me, then turned back to her kids. “Junior, Jason, come on, let’s go inside, it’s time to eat. Get out of the pool now.”

  “Aw, do we have to?” the oldest moaned, soaking wet from playing in the pool. “I don’t want to eat your food, it’s nasty. I want pizza.”

  “Yeah, pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza…” the little one began, and so started the usual nerve-racking chanting. “Pizza, pizza, pizza…”

  “No pizza, so get out of there now,” she said to them, then turned to me. “By the way, Kenisha, it cost two hundred and fifty dollars to get the pool cleaned and have the chemicals added.”

  I glanced over and nodded. “They did a good job.”

  “You see, you see. This is what I have to put up with, and I’m sick and tired of it. We could have saved damn near three hundred dollars if she had done what I told her.”

  “Shut up, Courtney,” I said.

  “You gonna let her talk to me like that? Get out of that pool now,” she said to the boys.

  “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza…”

  “Kenisha, apologize, now,” my dad said firmly.

  “Fine, I’m sorry that I just found out that Jade is my sister and that my father knew and didn’t tell me.”

  My dad’s face froze. Priceless.

  “What kind of apology was that?” Courtney asked.

  I didn’t say anything, I just stared at my dad.

  “Your grandmother told you.”

  “She shouldn’t have had to. But no, she didn’t, Jade told me. Why didn’t you?”

  “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza…”

  “What is she talking about?” Courtney asked, then screamed to them about getting out of the pool again.

  “I’m talking about the fact that I have an older sister, Jade, and for some reason I assumed that she was my cousin.”

  “What?” Courtney asked, looking at my father. “Jade is Kenisha’s sister? You told me that she was her cousin. Well, I hope she’s not moving in here, too. Come on, y’all, let’s eat. Get out that water, now.” She walked away, grabbed up towels and wrapped them around the kids, then marched the kids to the back door.

  “We can talk over dinner,” my dad said.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, just come inside, then.”

  “I’ll wait here for you.”

  He nodded and went inside with the rest of his family.

  I sat down on a lounge chair, pulled out my cell and called my girls.

  It was funny, I couldn’t live without my cell before, but in the past few days I hadn’t even seen it. I had over fifty messages, but I decided to call Jalisa and Diamond first. I needed to find out when our friendship had broken down. I got them into a three-way conversation.

  “Hey,” I said evenly when they connected. They both started talking at once.

  “Where you been, are you all right, where are you, we been calling you for days, we were worried when nobody heard from you, how’s you grandmother, are you in Virginia or in D.C., we need to talk to you, where are you now?”

  “I’m at my dad and his girlfriend’s house.”

  “What?” they both said.

  “My dad moved his girlfriend into our old house. They have two kids together and another one on the way.”

  “What?” Diamond repeated.

  “Are you serious?” Jalisa said.

  “Yeah, I’m serious,” I said.

  “But he’s married to your mom,” Jalisa said.

  “No, he’s a widow now,” Diamond stated.

  “All this was before my mom died. We moved out so that he could move her in,” I said.

  “How could that happen?” Diamond asked.

  “They were divorcing, right?” Jalisa said.

  “No, they were never married, I didn’t know until we moved to D.C.”

  The line was quiet for a brief moment as we all processed the information. “We got something to tell you,” Jalisa said slowly.

  “We know you gonna be pissed off, but you’re gonna find out anyway,” Diamond added, “so…”

  “But we didn’t know how to tell you before,” Jalisa added.

  “Just tell her,” Diamond said to Jalisa.

  “Chili’s pregnant again,” Jalisa said.

  “What is this, number two or three?” I asked absently.

  “There’s more, it’s about the father…” Diamond began, “…we heard that it was LaVon.”

  “Y’all knew they were sleeping together, but nobody thought I might want to know,” I said angrily. They didn’t say anything. “Y’all ain’t tell me. Why, y’all supposed to be my girls?”

  “How were we supposed to tell you that?” Jalisa said.

  “’Cause you were so happy with LaVon, talking about the NBA and everything and how large y’all were gonna be.”

  “So y’all were jealous of us.”

  “No,” they both said firmly, ending that thought.

  “We were happy for you until we found out…”

  “We didn’t know how to tell you,” Jalisa continued, “and you were already pissed at Diamond ’cause Chili lied to you, trying to hide the fact that she was…”

  “Did you see them together?” I asked.

  “I did,” Diamond said, “right before her birthday I saw them going into his house, kissing. At first I thought it was you and I was gonna call out, but then…”

  “Me, too,” Jalisa said slowly. “I was hanging out in the projection booth and they came in separately but sat together and started making out in the back.”

  “Is that all?” I asked, expecting more.

  “But her baby might not even be his.”

  “Yeah, you know how Chili is.”

  “It is his,” I said.

  “You already heard?” they both asked.

  “Yeah, by accident, I was over LaVon’s house earlier when she left a message for him. I heard it.”

  “Are you okay?” they asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “So how far along is she, I wonder?”

  “She said three months, and she’s gonna have it this time.”

  “So you can figure that they must have been together when you and LaVon were, I mean, what I’m saying is…”

  “Don’t even trip about that. I gue
ss I knew before that he was getting with somebody else, that was when Chili told me that it was you, Diamond, but whatever.”

  “So you pissed off at us, right?”

  “Yeah, we supposed to be girls, we supposed to have each other’s back, and y’all knew but didn’t even say anything to me. That was wrong.” The line went silent again and suddenly I felt so tired.

  “So what now?” Jalisa asked.

  “I guess we’re not girls anymore,” Diamond said.

  I looked up and saw my dad standing at the back door. I guess it was time to get that drama over with next.

  “I gotta go,” I said, and hung up, but just as I closed my cell it rang.

  “Hey, I was gonna call you,” LaVon said.

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “See, all that stuff before, that was nothing, don’t even think about that crazy stuff. Chili just messing up.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “Listen, we need to talk. I know I was wrong and all when we was together at you grandmother’s house, I must have been tripping or something. But I’m sorry. I get it. We can slow down, a’ight.”

  “That’s not even necessary anymore,” I told him.

  “So now you pissed off, right?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “A’ight, so let me explain, then…”

  “You know what, I’m busy right now, LaVon, later.”

  I hung up, then looked up and saw my father coming outside toward me. He sat down next to me.

  “Jade is my sister,” I said. He didn’t answer. “Did you hear me, I said that Jade is my sister.”

  “She’s your half sister, yes.”

  “So why didn’t I know?”

  “You were too young.”

  “I’m fifteen years old.”

  “You were too young at the time, it would have been confusing. She lived with your grandmother, it was better that way.”

  “Better for who? It’s the twenty-first century, not 1910. Things have relaxed in family morality. There are such things as blended families. What was so confusing?”

  “My mother was married before she married my father. She had a son, my half brother, and he was white like her. Older, bigger, he teased me mercilessly and she never said a word, just to be a big boy and stop complaining. So I did. Every time my father left the house to go to work, I was mentally abused by him. Then my dad left her, and after that, my brother could do no wrong. As the youngest I was scorned, belittled, ridiculed, teased and mocked. My father left and they took it out on me. The firstborn was her favorite, and I didn’t want that for you. And as far as Jade was concerned, what’s done is done.”

  “But all that had nothing to do with me and Jade.”

  “I didn’t want that for you, I was protecting you. Your mother loved Jade…”

  “Yes, she did, and she loved me, too, I knew that, I know that. I felt it, I feel it even now. She’s dead and I still feel her love around me. She never would have done that to me, to us. You should have trusted her.”

  “I couldn’t take that chance.”

  “Couldn’t you see it broke her heart to separate us, the guilt, the pain, it killed her inside. No wonder she couldn’t sleep and took the pills. And you didn’t marry her, why, because your own parents broke up and your father left you in that mess.”

  He started crying, whimpering like a baby. I reached out to him and held him. “She was so perfect, my Barbie doll. I loved her so much, but she changed, she changed…the pills and everything, she didn’t talk to me, she should have told me…”

  “I lost out on having a sister and you lost out on having a wife.”

  He sat up and leaned away. “What’s done is done.” He glanced at the back door. “I have a new family now.”

  “Is that all you have to say? Mom’s dead and all you have to say is what’s done is done. I guess your mother was right, I should be a big girl and stop complaining, right? Except only this time you’re keeping the youngest and throwing me away.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Pushing Pause

  “I tried to shake off the craziness. But I saw myself going down the path of self-destruction. Maybe Mom was right all along, we are who we are, unchanged by it all, following one path.”

  —myspace.com

  Pushed out, kicked out, betrayed, ignored…

  Enough.

  I went back to my grandmother’s house. There was nobody there, so I just went upstairs. I had been running around all day and I was tired, plus I hadn’t really slept in I don’t know how long. All I wanted was to make all this go away, make it like it was before, but I knew I couldn’t.

  Everything and everyone was gone.

  Mom, Dad, LaVon, my friends, there was no one I could depend on anymore. I was alone for the first time in my life. I had nothing, no home, no boyfriend, no friends and no family. I sat on the bed just staring across the room.

  There were still a few boxes that I’d never unpacked sitting in the corner of my room. One was the box my mother had asked me to take to her room the first day we got there. I had forgotten all about it. So since it didn’t matter anymore, I got up and sat it on the bed and opened it up and started going through it.

  Inside were large manila envelopes labeled James, Barbra, Kenisha and Jade. I pulled them out and set them aside. The bottom of the box was filled with pill bottles.

  I pulled each one out and stared at the labels, prescriptions from a lot of different doctors. They had refill dates for the next six months. How could she have done this to herself, to me? The question hung in the air. It would never be answered.

  I was so tired.

  I opened the first bottle and poured out the tiny pills in the palm of my hand. They looked so small and innocent like little candy buttons. I opened the second bottle. Baby blue and larger. Then the third bottle with pink ones, and the fourth one contained pale octagons. The last one was the largest, but some of them had already been broken in half.

  I looked at them in my hand, about eighty or ninety.

  I felt alone and empty and tempted.

  “You’re not gonna do anything stupid, are you?”

  I looked up and saw Jade standing in my doorway. She was staring at me, expecting an answer. I didn’t feel like talking, so I just ignored her. “’Cause if you are, I’d like to know now. Surprises just aren’t what they used to be.” I looked down at my hand.

  “What’s going on?” somebody asked behind her.

  I heard a man’s voice and I looked up again. There was someone standing behind Jade, her mysterious boyfriend, I assumed. I didn’t care, I looked back at my hand.

  “Hey, little sister, what you got there?” he asked, coming into the room.

  “This is Kenisha, Ty.”

  “So this is Kenisha. How you doing?”

  “If you’ve come to see the show, just sit down and shut up,” I said, pouring more pills into the palm of my hand.

  “Put them away,” Jade ordered firmly.

  “Oh, now you gonna come off with sisterly concern, please. You should be the last person to want to stop me. Just think, no more Kenisha.”

  She walked over and sat on my bed. I still didn’t look up at her. “True, I’d have the third floor to myself again and I wouldn’t have to listen to your loud snoring anymore.” She picked up a few of the bottles and read the labels. “For depression. For pain relief. For anxiety. For stress. For congestion. For motion sickness and for nothing at all. You have all these symptoms?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I have all that.”

  “So what are you gonna do, Kenisha?”

  “Do you know what happened?” I asked, looking at her.

  She looked at me strangely. “With Mom and your dad, his name was Jaden, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know something happened, I just don’t know what.”

  “My father died. He was hit by a drunk driver.”

  “Was Mom there?”
>
  “He pushed her out of the way but couldn’t move fast enough to save himself. So he was killed instead of her.”

  “He risked his life to save her.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was real love.”

  “Yeah, I think it was, too,” she said.

  “Then what?” I asked.

  “I was only three years old, Kenisha, I don’t really remember.”

  “But you know what happened though. Mom told you.”

  “Mom got over it and married your dad.”

  “No, she didn’t. Jade, tell me the truth, please, for once can someone please treat me like a person and tell me the truth?”

  “Now that you’re acting like a person and not like a snobbish brat…the truth,” she said. I nodded, steeling myself for whatever. “Mom and my father met in college freshman year. He was seventeen, she was sixteen. After they had me they stayed together and planned to finish college, then get married. But something happened, they got into an argument about it or something and she ran out. He followed her. She didn’t see the car coming, he did. He pushed her out of the way.”

  “Then she met my dad?” I asked.

  “No, the argument was about James.”

  “Mom was seeing my dad while she was with your father, right?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Your dad had money and was popular because he was a former football player. She was working for his company part-time, and I guess they hooked up.”

  “Your dad died, and Mom just went off with my dad.”

  She nodded. “How come you didn’t come with her?”

  She smirked. “I did at first, I even lived at the house. We shared a bedroom. Then I had to leave, I don’t really know why. But she snuck me over to the house almost every day. And then James found out and told her that it was either him or me. She chose him.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said, knowing that she was lying, “I told him, didn’t I? I remember now. We fought about the doll and I told my dad you took my doll from me.” Jade didn’t say anything. “That was when you stopped coming over, I remember now.” She stood up to leave. “Wait,” I said, “it was me, right, I told my dad about you, didn’t I? It was me that got you kicked out and made Mom choose.”