by JM Holmes
The three of us move with ease and quickness. It’s efficient. No pageantry. Whit does take a few pictures of us together in Pops’ old clothes for her various apps. I strike dumb poses to make her laugh.
Big Al says he’ll ship the stuff to us at cost, so we leave him a signed Rose Bowl poster with all the Huskies’ signatures. He is a U Dub fan like everyone else in this state. He loved my pops, even gave him and his brother-in-law a job cleaning office buildings after the football money dried up. Maybe he still loves him, in his own way, like we do.
Dee is the type who would’ve objected to the gift, claimed the poster for herself, made the room hot. She was a social worker for years and maybe it made her tough. Now she’s unemployed and has been living off the NFL life-insurance checks since Pops died. I plan to ask Whit about the checks, make sure the money is getting to her, but when I bring Dee up, she gets defensive.
Once I started drinking and carrying on, I grew to like Dee. She keeps a .30 cal. revolver on her at all times, like she’s about to break through the swinging doors of a saloon and apprehend an outlaw. I’ve seen her put all six rounds into the ten ring from twenty yards. I respect her for that. Still, I want to tell Whit I hope she inherits just the right amount of her mother, not a fingernail more. I don’t want to wait too long to tell her.
WE GET BACK to the La Quinta late in the afternoon. The day is hot, summer sun still high. There is no sign of Dee. Mom calls her behavior childish but then backs off and tries to finesse the situation. My mom is a schoolteacher and has always been good with kids. She decides my sister and I need some alone time and leaves the hotel to give us space, disappearing into the strip-mall wasteland near the hotel. We crank the AC and watch High School Musical.
I talk to Whit about school for a while. She says she hates it, every single fucking subject. She was suspended for throwing a textbook at a racist redneck boy, then for spitting on another one, and again for cussing out a teacher she thought was racist. She lies close to me, her eyes slanted like all the women on my pops’ side—face wide and flat with smooth skin. Dee looks different, has those big eyes, full of changes.
Whit says her mom isn’t answering her texts, asks me to hit her up. I do, then I put my arm around her and she tucks her chin against my chest.
“What was that girl’s name?” I ask.
“What girl?”
“The one that climbed the light.” I watch her face for a reaction. I’m thinking about Whit climbing. We all have our edges. Dee and I are two pills away from ours, or two pills safe from it. I kiss the top of Whit’s head. I hated her blond highlights, am glad that her weave is black now.
“Hannah.” She keeps her eyes on the TV. “I didn’t know her well.”
“Still.” I turn the volume down. “You gotta think about it.”
“My mom talks like that sometimes,” she says.
“Like what?” I ask.
She picks at her gaudy nails with rhinestones in the polish. “I don’t know.” She is backing out on me. I keep silent and just let her lie still awhile. “She cries a lot.” Whit is too big to really curl up, but she brings her knees in tighter. “Sometimes she says no one will ever love her again,” Whit says. She tilts her head to face me and I don’t know how to respond.
The pills in my pocket feel like mints in the cellophane wrap. At thirty dollars apiece, I’ve seen houses get pawned clean for the high. It’s the only drug that’s ever pushed me to a place where hunger—real, spiritual, or otherwise—doesn’t exist, like a pocketful of Tibet.
When I visited Dee and Whit over Thanksgiving, instead of spending time with my sister like I should have, I got faded on Crown Royal with Dee and hit the Strip with some artist types I knew from Cornell. I took the benzos Dee’d given me and lived a second life. I threw up in the sand and drove home. Dee tucked me in on the couch and cranked the heat to eighty like we weren’t in the fucking desert.
I rock Whit awkwardly. “Were you scared?” I feel like a shrink. I can’t picture Dee crying, can’t separate that image from the woman cussing at the storage unit.
“Those lights are really high,” she says. “And nobody saw her do it. Some kids just found the body.”
Neither of us saw our father die. Whit got the news by phone. Mom showed up on campus after one of my Black Studies classes. When she told me, I dropped my books on the ground. My muscles forgot how to work.
We text and call Dee on and off for the next few hours, and when it hits nine and we still haven’t heard from her, Whit is too restless to stay put. I tell her we can go check in with Madea, Dee’s mom, to see if she’s heard from her. Really, I just want to enlist some help that isn’t my mom ’cause she’ll stress heavy.
Mom returns quick and hands over the keys. She asks us to bring back some red beans and rice, Madea’s signature, laughs, then is silent. I give her a hug and say I’ll see what the universe tells us. She likes when I act mystical. In those moments, she thinks I’m smarter than I am.
I figure Dee might’ve trekked back to her childhood house. Hungover folks know how to find a friendly couch. After we get on the highway, I ask Whit where she thinks her mom would go. She says Dee’s got too many people in Tacoma to really know. Then we are quiet for a while, and I start talking about jambalaya the same way I’d describe a woman’s body. She calls me a fatty. She used to call Pops that too. We go silent again. The night is clear like most summer nights before August. I don’t know what ghosts Tacoma holds for her, what corners and takeout spots can put her in the jail of memory.
My mom still has a house in Rhode Island, where I grew up, same state she ran away from Pops to. She dug out a life for us there—paycheck to paycheck, rental to rental, bailing out the sinking ship that was Pops’ legacy. Now she’s moved out of Pawtucket and has a fat mortgage. She’s had some boyfriends. None could wake her up, except one that turned out to be racist. Naturally, that shit ceased. Her mom, my nonna, lived with us too, helping with the finances. She and Mom still live together, Nonna helping to pay a mortgage she never wanted. In time, I expect my mom will want the same, to move in with me. When the thought strikes, I wish I’d done something different with my life.
Every time I visit I drive home late, after the bars close, on city streets turned to soup by ocean fog, and I think about Whit and Dee. I don’t know who needs more and who needs it first and if I even have it to give. I slow the car to a crawl and peer through the milky windshield—waiting for an emotional sucker punch.
DEE ISN’T AROUND, but Madea does want to feed us. Whit tries to stay in the car, but her cousins harass her until she gets out. Fred, Madea’s second husband, Dee’s step-pops, joins us. We crowd into the small kitchen to make plates. Whit takes only rice, none of the stewed tripe, pretending to be skinny—none of our kin is skinny. The kitchen smells like you could get spicy just standing in it. Her uncle Lenny, Dee’s brother, and her cousins sit at the table too. I haven’t seen them since the funeral. No one says grace. Whit doesn’t bow her head to say a private prayer like Pops would’ve.
“You don’t like the food?” Fred asks, mouth full.
“I’m not hungry,” Whit says.
“Bullshit,” Fred says.
“Leave her be,” I say. If I’d popped one of the Percs, I’d be mellowed out. Instead, I fidget as Whit stares out at nothing.
“Tripe is good for the joints,” Fred says.
I wonder if he knows that he’s an idiot who doesn’t make any damn sense. I wait for the “roots” talk.
Fred slurps the stewed tripe like noodles. “A man don’t know his roots don’t know hisself,” he says.
“Be quiet,” Madea says.
Fred inhales the fat. It goes straight to his brain. He’s never liked Dee, who is a reminder of her pops, Madea’s wild ex. When Fred would give her a hard time for being hungover, she’d say, You just wish anything about you was hung.
Lenny leans his paunchy, bald-headed self back and takes stock of my sister. “Looks like she
eatin’ fine to me,” he says.
“Pookey!” Madea yells.
“What?” he says. “She don’t look like no Make a Wish kid.”
Whit clears her throat and glares at her uncle for a second. “Least I’m not bald,” she says.
Lenny winks and goes back to work on his plate. Whit checks her phone below the table like a kid in class.
“Anyone hear from Dee?” I say.
The table goes silent. Madea’s expression is tender, but I can tell she’s mad.
“Ma put her out,” Lenny says.
“Nobody is gonna threaten me in my house,” Fred adds.
Madea gives him a look that could boil a potato. I don’t know if it’s ’cause the house is Madea’s or because he’s on one.
Whit tries to stone-face him too, but she can’t and drops her eyes, pushes her plate away and crosses her arms.
“Threats?” I say.
Fred keeps eating. His face looks like a chocolate cream pie. It is just so fat. He tries to be gentler toward Whit. “A woman needs to eat, honey,” he says. “No man like a scarecrow.”
I am thinking about Dee and the words slip out before I can stop them. “You’re fuckin’ slow,” I say.
Madea puts her silverware down. Fred keeps chewing, but deliberate. One of Whit’s cousins laughs and Whit tries to keep a straight face.
“Just cruise the Way and she’ll turn up,” Lenny says. “She likes that place Brother’s.”
“I know this is a tough trip for you, boy,” Fred says, coddling and demeaning all at once. I want to put a fist through his face. I stand to bus my plate instead. I take Whit’s too and imagine slipping out to meet Dee, to get drunk and sleep in.
Madea finds me in the kitchen. “Fred talks a lot of noise,” she says, “but Dee was acting crazy and I can’t have that in my house. Not with the kids here.” She turns the water in the sink on low so she can talk without being heard at the table. “She was falling asleep on herself and mumbling about shooting.”
“Shooting what?” I ask.
Madea starts washing the dishes. She keeps the place plastic-over-the-furniture clean. “I don’t know, just shooting. She wasn’t making no sense.”
“So you put her out?”
“I was worried about my babies,” she says. “What choice did I have?”
I can think of a few but I know how steady she’s been for her family and for how long.
“Giovanni, I’ve given that child all the love I can give her.” She continues to wash dishes and I can tell she’s going to tell me Dee’s life story, the way moms do when their children have become strangers. “And the things she did to your father—”
Whit enters the kitchen and I’m spared. She sizes up the situation. “Start the car,” I say, and hand her the keys. She hugs Madea and goes, happy to be gone.
“We’ll find her,” I say. I hug Madea too.
“You know that situation in Vegas is not what your father would’ve wanted—” Madea starts.
“Yeah.” I step out of the hug and cut her off. She wants to get something in my head, but I’m tired of people putting my pops’ dirty laundry on broadcast.
“Whitney always has a home here,” Madea says, and the tone of it chills me.
On the stairs, walking toward the door, I give in—one pill, chewed quick to avoid the bitter taste. Since the moment I put them in my pocket, I was always going to.
BROTHER’S IS NEARLY empty when we get there. The eleven-thirty crowd on a Wednesday is weak. There is no sign of Dee. Some well-dressed white dudes sip brews slow. It is dark and the music is nothing I recognize. ’Cause of Whit’s age, the bartender makes us take a table. Whit’s shirt bulges when she sits. I watch to see if she fixes it or covers her stomach with a hand. She does neither and pulls out her phone.
I tell her what Madea said about Dee.
“Don’t let Madea play you,” she says. Whit’s right about that, but it’s also a deflection.
“What did your mom say about that girl Hannah?” I deflect too.
“She said black people don’t kill themselves.” Whit stares square at me. That sounds more like the Dee I know.
I go to the bar, order a beer and a Sprite, and ask the bartender about Dee, describe her.
“Yeah, she was here,” he says, “calling all of us fims or something.” He hands me the beer, then starts pouring the soda. “She’s a loud one.”
I ask him if he knows where she went and he shakes his head. Then I ask when she left.
“Do I look like her babysitter?” he says.
“You served her, though. She was drunk and you kept serving her, right?”
Whit motions for me to come sit down. As soon as my ass hits the seat, I take a large sip of my beer.
Whit starts typing on her phone. “What’d he say?” she asks.
“Your mom messaged me a minute ago.” I take out my own phone and pretend to read a message. “She went back to the hotel,” I lie.
Whit eases her body farther into the booth and takes an ice cube in her mouth. She looks again like the girl I used to push in the shopping cart at Target, way too big for it but smiling so wide, her eyes became accent marks. I’m not going to be the one to tell her to grow up, especially if she grows up to be like Dee or me.
“You want some cherries?” I know the answer already.
At the bar, my hand is in my pocket again, fingering another pill. I am pushing into that crescendo where you don’t want the music to stop.
When I’m back at the booth, Whit picks up her phone again, swallows the cherry she’s eating, and makes a call. From the register near the bar, Rihanna’s voice breaks out, small and tinny: Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough…
I laugh until I see Whit’s face has gone blank.
“You liar,” she says to me. She gets up and starts for the register.
I call her name. She speaks to the bartender and he hands over a cell phone.
“Whitney!” I say, sounding like my pops.
She walks right past me and heads for the door, then turns around and holds up the phone the bartender gave her. “Mom couldn’t have reached you,” she says. She is outside before I move an inch.
POPS WAS THE glue. Without him, I can’t imagine us finding anything worth building together. Whit speaks in hyperbole—“Oh my God, slit my wrists now,” or “Just drown me.” I give her speeches about debasing the English language, but she says some funny shit too, like calling white girls mayonnaise inhalers. She puts ranch on everything, though, like Pops used to. I don’t tell her that ranch dressing is mostly mayo. Instead I laugh with her and point out fat white people at the chain restaurants. They probably point right back at our black asses.
I write poems and rap with some local groups in Ithaca. Neither thing has made me any money and probably never will. Dee watches cop shows and goes clubbing. Our connection feels like a list of facts rather than a family. I send Whit necklaces and funny cards for her birthday. She says “I love you” on the phone and in her thank-you notes and posts pictures of us together on her social-media accounts. She posts old pictures of us with Pops too. We are all living on his memory—Dee on the insurance money, Whit on the love, me on a legacy I don’t fully understand. A Nigerian in my class back at Cornell said that Americans expect too much of their fathers. In the moment, I hated her for it. But even in death, we still are expecting salvation.
Over Thanksgiving break, when I picked Whit up from school, she paraded me around to meet her teachers. Really, she wanted all the people she had beef with to see her giant brother. I told her I wasn’t going to stare down a bunch of ninth-graders, but when I saw the way they turned their noses up at her and called her Juwanna Mann, I roasted them, telling them they couldn’t even model for Braille catalogs so stop the cute shit and read a book. I wanted to love her like a brother should.
OUTSIDE, THE BROTHER’S parking lot is empty and I yell Whit’s name a few times, fake angry like I yell at my students. Then I
get angry for real. It’s an hour until last call, but searching bars isn’t going to find Dee. Whit knows the city and as Dee’s kid is no dummy, but I can’t get past the images of her getting harassed by a pervert. Throughout that week in Vegas, I saw strangers leer at her the same way I leered at women alien to me—without a filter. I could’ve been in a hundred fights that week.
If I call my mom, her anxiety will flare up, and then I’ll panic and that won’t solve shit. I call Whit a few times but she ignores the calls. I think about yelling in a voice mail that her mom could be in the hospital, or dead, or arrested, but I don’t want to put that in the universe. I’m walking fast down the ave., rationalizing—there is no way Dee brought her gun to Washington. She wouldn’t pay to check a bag. I toy with the pills in my pocket, pinching the plastic. My hands are sticky and cold.
My mom calls and I ignore it. She’ll call again. Her life is something you could set a clock to. The last time I was back in RI, I came in so late that she was up already. She grabbed me before I could make it down the hall to my room. I recited some poetry to set her at ease—Don’t be afraid, the gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer. She asked me why I loved the poem so much. I was waterlogged from killing myself slow and didn’t have much to offer. The next day, before she went to work, she left a printed copy of the poem on the kitchen counter next to the note she wrote every day. The notes were always filled with things she wanted me to do around the house, regrouting tiles and cleaning gutters, moving small shrubs or stones, simple things. I wondered what she’d found in the poem, if she’d found any of herself in those lines or if, like my nonna, she thought I was simply a sad man without a reason.
When Whit visited, they baked together and invented recipes. My mom showed her how to make pizzelles. Whit liked using the pizzelle iron.
I take out my phone to call my mom, then stop. Think about calling the cops, but I never have and never will. The image of Whit wandering alone almost makes me reconsider.
