by Tayari Jones
Keisha said, “You remember when they used to say that Church’s Chicken was owned by the KKK?”
I laughed. “That was an urban legend.”
“What’s that?”
“A lie.”
Keisha laughed. “It was probably KFC that started it.”
Dwayne walked over with a heaping brown tray. “Here it is.” He set the food on the table and slid into the booth beside Keisha. I had scooted close to the wall to make room for him, but now I eased myself toward the middle.
My mother used to say that when you have a daughter, you lose your husband. This was, of course, before she lost her husband for real. She’d say this after church, laughing, when people would comment that Hermione and I were such daddy’s girls. We’d each hold one of his hands and Mama would walk behind, reminding us girls to stand up straight or warning us not to ruin our stockings.
Keisha pulled a glistening ear of corn out of its greasy plastic sheath and plopped it on her paper plate. She sighed, picked up the corn, held it to her mouth without biting it. She put it down and sighed again.
“What’s up?” Dwayne asked her.
“I just have a lot on my mind,” Keisha said. “I lost my appetite.”
“Things on your mind like what?” Dwayne winked at me.
“I failed my GED,” she said.
“Will they let you take it again?”
She nodded with a little-girl pout. Her braids, festooned with glass orbs, covered the left side of her face like a beaded curtain.
“Aria will tutor you and you’ll pass it. Right, baby?”
“I told her she would pass it the next time.”
“See,” Dwayne said, and tapped her shoulder with his.
Keisha flicked the braids over her shoulder and smiled like she believed him.
“Eat,” he said. “Chicken is brain food.”
She smiled without showing teeth and pulled the fried skin from a chicken thigh. Under the table I felt Dwayne’s hand on my knee.
He bit into his own drumstick. “The KKK know they make some good chicken.”
“That’s an urban legend,” Keisha told him.
“Straight?” Dwayne said. “That’s good. Now I don’t have to feel guilty.”
“You so crazy,” she said to him. “Move over so I can get out. I need to go to the ladies’ room.”
While she was gone, Dwayne leaned across the table. “How old is that kid?”
“Seventeen.”
“She looks fifteen. I hate to see young girls pregnant like that. It’s depressing.”
“There are worse things that could happen,” I said.
“And she doesn’t even have her GED?”
“She’ll get it next time.”
“But you know what I mean. What chance does she have?”
Keisha came back to the table wearing a fresh coat of lipstick. Dwayne told her that she looked very pretty.
“Do you have kids?” she asked Dwayne.
He took two bites of slaw before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said. “A little boy.”
I wished he hadn’t told her. It cheapened Dwayne somehow, his having a little boy living in another state.
“How old were you when he was born?”
“Eighteen,” Dwayne said without looking at her. He held an ear of corn by its wooden stick and gnawed at it.
“Are you a part of his life?”
“I try to be,” Dwayne said.
“That’s good,” Keisha said. “That’s good.” She rooted around in the box of chicken and found a wing. Pulling it apart, she said, “A lot of people have kids young. It’s not like I’m the only person this ever happened to.”
We dropped Keisha at home after eight o’clock. She was flushed, happy, and tired, like kids after a day at Six Flags.
“I wish I didn’t have to go to work,” she said. “If you ever get hungry late at night, come to Subway. The one on Abernathy. I’ll hook you up with a twelve-inch.”
“Cool,” Dwayne said. “I like the roast beef.”
We sat in the car and waited for her to make her way into the apartment. She blinked the lights on and off to let us know that she was in safe.
“Seems like you should have to get some sort of license before you have a child,” Dwayne said. “She’s a nice kid and all of that. But can you imagine if she was your mother?”
“She might do okay,” I said, suddenly protective of Keisha. Dwayne had no idea what it was like to be a teenage girl, to be evaluated constantly by strangers and people you loved. When you are a young woman of a certain age, people older than you and some of your peers are always looking at you sideways, deciding if you are fast, if you are easy, if you were the kind of girl who was born to break her mother’s heart.
“Look at you,” I said. “You had a kid young too.”
“It’s different for a man.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“But it is. A seventeen-year-old girl that’s a mother is in a lot worse shape than a seventeen-year-old guy that’s a father.”
“What about Trey’s mother.”
“What about her?”
“I mean, what’s her story? What is her life like?”
“Charla? I don’t really want to talk about her. That’s all over and done with.”
“All right,” I said, thinking that I probably knew more about her than was good for me anyway. She was his first girlfriend; he’d taken her to the prom. The boutonniere she’d given him was dried and dead in the box with his aunt Iola’s ring. Charla and Dwayne weren’t related, but they had cousins in common. That’s how things are in little towns. Charla was the kind of woman that Dwayne didn’t have to explain things to. They sang from the same hymnbook in church. When her daddy passed, Dwayne’s own father was one of the pallbearers. I only asked because I wondered where she was right now. I wondered if her ambitions included Dwayne.
He shrugged. “Trey is happy where he’s at. I send money every month. Charla has never, not once, taken me to court. I take care of my boy; I see him when I can.”
“When we get married,” I said, “you could send for him if you wanted to.”
He leaned over and kissed me. “Why would I want to do that? Mix his life all up? Trey’s happy where he’s at.”
“But are you happy, Dwayne?”
“Grown men don’t get to be happy.”
After we had picked up a video from Blockbuster, we drove over to my house. Rod’s Honda was parked on the curb. “It’s Cosby time,” Dwayne said.
I swatted him on the arm. “Don’t make fun of them. I like Rod; he’s cool.”
“He looks gay with that ponytail.”
I shushed him as I slid my key in the lock. Opening the front door, we found that Rochelle and Rod had beat us to the TV in the living room.
“Hey, Penny,” Rochelle said, rising from the Huey Newton Seat that she had dragged in for the night. She took my face and kissed it. She tiptoed, hugging Dwayne, pressing her cheek to his. Dwayne jerked his head upward in a gesture to Rod, who replied with a weak wave.
“Want to watch a movie with us? We just started looking at it. We can rewind.”
I stole a glance at the television screen. The movie was black-and-white and the characters looked European and depressed. “Thanks, but we are going to watch something in my room.”
“We’re going to watch Rocky III,” Dwayne said, shaking the plastic video case at them. “I like to see some action.”
“Have fun,” Rochelle said, waving us away.
Dwayne was still chuckling when we closed the door to my bedroom. “I just like messing with them. Did you see Rod’s face when I said what we was going to watch? That brother is too uptight for me.”
I slid the video into the mouth of the VCR and sat on the bed beside Dwayne. I didn’t care much what we watched; I just enjoyed sitting in the dark with him. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and I rested my head on his chest, listening to his bass-drum heart.
“Your mother called me today,” he said.
“What did she say?” I tried to make my voice casual, but the muscles in my shoulders kinked tight.
“Nothing. She just wanted to say hello.”
I didn’t like the idea of my mother talking to Dwayne without my supervision. What if she said something to him about what a good man he was not to leave me despite my problems? I could see her telling him this, since she made a point to tell it to me at least once a week. “Don’t talk to my mother when she calls you. Just let the machine pick up.”
“How come? Don’t you think I need to be friendly with my mother-in-law?”
“I just don’t like the idea of her being in our relationship, okay? Just trust me on this one. I know her better than you.”
“You make your mother out to be such a big bad wolf, but she seems like a nice lady to me.”
“She’s not. You’ve got to take my word for it.”
After the first twenty or so minutes of the movie Dwayne said, “You know what I said in the car about not wanting to talk about Charla?”
“Yeah.”
“I was just thinking about the way that might have sounded. I don’t want to talk about her, but it’s not like I still have feelings for her. She was my girl back in high school, but that was a long time ago.”
“I understand.”
He rubbed his hair with the flat parts of his hands. “Charla. That girl. She called me about six months ago to tell me that she was getting married to some dude in the service. I tell her I’m happy for her. What the hell else am I supposed to say? So I’m saying congratulations over and over.”
I moved my head from his chest, propping myself up on my elbow so I could look at him. Behind me on the television screen a boxer spit out a bloody mouthpiece.
“She says that she is going to send me some paperwork that she wanted me to sign so that her new husband can adopt Trey. The dude is going to give Trey his name and everything.
“I didn’t know what to say to her. She called me up asking it all casual, telling me this is just so that Trey can get health benefits and things like that. But I’m not crazy. I know that when you sign a paper saying someone else can adopt your kid, it means that you are giving up your whole parental-rights situation.” He shut his eyes and shook his head.
“So what did you say?”
“Hell, no.”
“And what did she say?”
“She told me that I was being selfish.”
His chest heaved as he scraped his lower lip with his teeth. “I don’t want to lay all this on you.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re getting married. We don’t have separate problems anymore.”
“There is no way I can say this without it coming out wrong.”
“Just say it.”
“When we first got engaged, before you lost the baby . . .”
My heart splashed in my chest. My pulse beat in my ears. This was not a conversation I wanted to have. This was not information I wanted to know.
“When me and you were having our baby, I went ahead and signed the papers.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because it seemed like she was right. I was being selfish. Here I was, getting mad because some other dude wanted Trey to have his name. Trey didn’t even have my name. Well, he’s Dwayne the third, but he has Charla’s last name. And when I thought that I was about to have another baby, and I was getting to go ahead with my life, I decided to stop tripping and just get out of Charla’s way.”
I covered my mouth with my hands. “Dwayne, I wish you hadn’t done that.”
He shrugged and pulled me back down so that my head rested on his warm chest again. “It’s okay.” He stroked my hair. “We’ll have our kids anyway. We’ll do it right.”
“Can’t you call her and tell her you changed your mind?”
“I didn’t change my mind,” he said, lifting my chin so that he could kiss me. Dwayne shifted our weight so that I lay flat on my back. Without ending the kiss, he unfastened my blouse.
This was his way of talking without talking, saying that things were going to be all right, that he wasn’t angry with me. But I knew things that he didn’t know.
“Wait a second,” I said, moving his hand, speaking through his kisses. “But what about Trey? You can’t just give him up, swap him out for a baby we haven’t even had yet.”
Dwayne moved away from me and lay back on the pillows. “He’s my son, but at the same time he’s not mine all the way. I grew up with my mother, father, sister, all in the same house. I’m not Trey’s father the way my old man is my daddy. I don’t know if I can really be a father with me and Charla not being together. With me living out here and him being back in Anniston. So this other dude wants to be Trey’s dad. He wants to be Charla’s husband. I feel like I’m just getting in the way.”
I moved to touch him then. It was my turn to talk without talking. If telling him my secret would have given Trey back to Dwayne, I would have stared down my fear of losing and told him everything that the doctor had told me, but there was nothing I could do to reconnect the two of them, Dwayne II and Dwayne III.
Sooner or later he would have to know about the failings of my body. But on that particular moment on that particular night, I would offer him everything that I knew to give. I knew what it was like to look at your kin and not feel what you know you should. More than anyone, I understood why a person would want to make a new family, to create a new ring of relations, new possibilities for love and acceptance. If I couldn’t give Dwayne exactly what he wanted, I could offer him empathy, the thing that connected us from the beginning.
Following my lead, Dwayne undressed us both in a determined and melancholy silence. He reached for my nightstand where I kept the condoms, but he didn’t open the tiny drawer. Instead, he picked up the remote control and made the television louder to camouflage our noise for the benefit of Rochelle and Rod, watching their foreign film in the living room. Dwayne turned back to me and looked into my face. He raised his eyebrows, asking for permission. I closed my eyes against his question.
“Why does it seem so sad?” he said.
“It’s hard to lose someone.”
He stroked my face, kissing my shut eyes, then my forehead, then my mouth. I was touched by his tenderness and his earnest caresses. Making love is different when you are trying to make a baby. Dwayne was open to me in a way that he had never been before. He looked in my face as we moved together. He whispered that he loved me. I stared at the water-stained ceiling, listening to the noise of us, the noise of the television, and the noise of the night.
Chapter Eleven
Phinazee’s, the barbershop, is in a good location that has stayed pretty good for the last forty years. It’s on Lee Street, just a couple of blocks from the expressway—near where the east-west freeway crosses the north-south one. It’s convenient for anyone who wants a haircut bad enough. Mr. Phinazee likes to brag that in almost fifty years of business—when his father ran the business to when Earl himself took over—there has never been a robbery. “It’s because we are part of this community,” he said. “I let my little girl work in here by herself,” he said.
The little girl he is talking about is his thirty-four-year-old daughter, Colette, who more than works in the family business, she runs the place, although her daddy keeps all the paperwork in his own name. Before Little Link was born, Coco was heir apparent for the shop, which had grown to accommodate four chairs. It only made sense. Nobody said it out loud, but she could cut heads better than her daddy ever did. On top of that, she was gifted on the business end of things. She changed Phinazee’s to keep up with what the college students wanted without alienating the neighborhood types. A sign above the pricing sheet said “Locktician Available Upon Request.” She let her daddy come in on Wednesdays to take care of the old heads who wanted scissor cuts and hot-lather shaves.
When Little Link was born, Mr. Phinazee called his lawy
er to change his will. When he dies, Phinazee’s will be handed down from father to son as it was in the previous generation. Even Hermione, who has no love for Coco and vice versa, protested that this wasn’t right. Mr. Phinazee listened to my sister and added a codicil indicating that Coco would always have the right to work there and if Little Link dies first and childless, Coco would be next in line.
“What if Link doesn’t want to be a barber?” Hermione asked.
Mr. Phinazee said, “Every man wants to be his own boss.”
“What if you die tomorrow?” Coco asked. “Who will sign the checks?”
“Baby,” Mr. Phinazee said, “I’m healthy. And I thought of that already. You’ll hold power of attorney until he’s old enough. And don’t be down in the mouth, Colette. I love you. I’ve taken good care of you, too, in my will.”
Coco didn’t greet me when I came into the shop. She lifted her head at the jangle of the brass bells, but she didn’t smile or say hello. Her silence is understandable, I guess. In addition to her anger about the lost inheritance, she was in her early twenties when Hermione married her father, and it must have been difficult to accept as a stepmother a kid she used to babysit. Even still, Coco knows enough about our family to know that we lived under extenuating circumstances. She was there the day of the accident. She was the one who answered the police’s call. She should know as well as anyone that none of us can be held completely responsible for the things that we have done.
Despite Coco’s territorial behavior and the general negative vibe, Phinazee’s was a historic landmark for my family as well. Daddy once worked here sweeping up clots of hair, washing toilets, and polishing the plate-glass window. Whenever I am in the shop, I picture him there wearing worn but clean clothes. This is an image concocted entirely from my imagination, I know, but it is as real to me as anything else.
Walking in the shop on a Saturday morning, I was glad to see that business was good. All three barbers were busy and five men waited for their turn in the chairs. I looked around to see what had been added since the last time I had come by, almost a year ago. Coco was always building, improving things. I made note of the credit card logo in the window. A glass case displayed shampoos and oils.
