by Kitt, Sandra
Dallas drained the rest of the wine and leaned forward to set the glass on the coffee table. She wasn’t surprised that Valerie was interested in Alex Marco. As a matter of fact, she wouldn’t be surprised if Alex was interested in Val. But the realization made Dallas oddly defensive. And a little let down.
“Then … he’s not married?”
Valerie stretched, arching her back in sexy abandonment. “I don’t know.” She yawned with indifference, getting up from her chair. “I’ll have to ask him the next time I see him.”
The next time, Dallas considered.
“Are you going to be okay out on the sofa tonight?”
“Do I have a choice?” Dallas asked, getting up and taking the hint from Val. “I always sleep here.”
“That sofa is so old … I don’t know how comfortable it is.”
“I’ll be okay. Does this mean you’re not going to tell me any more about Alex?”
Valerie shook her head. “It means there’s nothing more to tell, and I’m tired. I want to go to bed.”
“We used to talk until three in the morning and not worry about it.”
“Yeah, well … that’s when we were young and didn’t have to worry about jobs, kids, or hangovers.”
“Speak for yourself. I only had one glass of wine. I better go say good night to Megan.”
Dallas took the two used wineglasses and left them in the kitchen sink on her way down the hall to Megan’s bedroom. The door was half-open and she knocked softly and waited to make sure her godchild was still awake before entering.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
It always surprised Dallas that Megan’s room was so neat and orderly. Unlike her tendency to leave things about other parts of the house, her bedroom, while filled with the necessary accoutrements of any adolescent girl, had a place for everything. Most of the room was taken up with a twin-size canopy bed, draped with an eyelet lace awning that matched the mattress skirting and window curtains. There was a small desk and chair, a red-enameled trunk Dallas knew to be filled with games and unused toys, but the top of which provided another place to sit with two toss pillows for cushions. There was a bulletin board on one wall hung with necklaces, and ribbons won for spelling bees, school track meets, a science fair, and perfect attendance the year before.
Dallas smiled as she briefly glanced around and then approached the bed. Megan was sitting with her knees drawn up so that her thighs provided the perfect surface against which to balance her diary. She closed it, but didn’t attempt to hide it as Dallas sat on the side of the bed. She reached out and tapped the top of the book. She had given it to Megan on her last birthday the previous August.
“I hope you’re not writing terrible things about your mother or me.”
“Uh-uh.” Megan shook her head. “I’m writing about my boyfriend.”
Dallas suppressed her surprise. She smiled in interest and pretended that her godchild had not just said something that struck fear in her heart. “You have a boyfriend? Since when?”
“Well, he’s not really my boyfriend. But I like him a lot and I think he likes me. He’s going with one of my friends right now.”
“Ummm,” Dallas murmured, trying to think of something constructive to say, and wondering if Valerie had any idea of Megan’s interest in the opposite sex. “Is he in one of your classes?”
“He’s in the eighth grade.”
Worse than she thought. He was old enough to already have had experience with girls. “What’s his name?”
“Jared. Isn’t that a cool name?”
“Does your mother know?”
Megan grimaced and shrugged. “No. You’re not going to tell her, are you? Please don’t. She’d tell me something like I’m too young, or I shouldn’t be thinking about boys.”
“Megan, you’re not being fair. You know that things we discuss I don’t take back to your mother. But I’m going to tell you the same thing. You are too young.”
“You think I’m going to let some boy have his way with me and then I’ll have a baby, right?”
Her observation was so accurate that Dallas could only stare at Megan Marie in amazement. “It … it can happen,” she finally responded weakly. This was not a conversation she wanted to be having. It was not her place.
“It happened to my mother,” Megan said.
This was stated as a matter of fact. Dallas was a little frightened that she could be so nonchalant about it.
“Your mother was a lot older and could take care of herself. You’re still a child.”
“I know that,” Megan said. “I’m not going to do anything stupid,” she said with an impatient twist of her mouth, as if anyone should know that she knew better.
“You tell me you have a boyfriend, you know about girls getting into trouble, and I’m not supposed to worry? You’re giving me a heart attack even as I sit here, Megan,” she said.
“Well, when did you start dating?”
Fourteen, Dallas remembered. But she had no intention of admitting that.
“I was older than twelve,” she said firmly. “Now kiss me good night and turn out the light.” She began to remove to the nearby desk other items of entertainment that Megan had on the bed with her. A library book, her Walkman. The reassuring presence of two teddy bears.
“Aunt Dallas …” Megan began, slipping the diary under her pillow and sliding down in the bed. “Did my mother tell you about that man she was talking to at the funeral? He had funny gray hair, but he wasn’t old. Alex.”
Dallas didn’t respond right away. Nor did she stop in her unnecessary movements about Megan’s room. She didn’t want the little girl to see she was nervous.
“Your mother introduced him to me. Why do you want to know?”
“I was just wondering if he was going to start dating my mom.”
Dallas felt a tightening of her stomach muscles. She remembered the interest between the two of them. She had felt like an intruder.
“Would that bother you?”
“I don’t know. She’s not going to ask what I think anyway. But the last guy was such a creep. I didn’t like him.”
“What did you think of Alex?”
Megan tilted her head thoughtfully. “He seemed okay. He talked to me and was kind of friendly. I think he’s going to ask her out on a date.”
“Do you mind when your mother goes out with men?”
“I guess not. She’s real pretty and I know men like her a lot, but … I guess I’m hoping she’ll find someone and maybe they’ll get married …”
“And you can have a father?” Dallas finished smoothly.
Megan didn’t answer directly, but from her curled fetal position that made her look small beneath the covers, she stared poignantly at Dallas as if afraid to voice her wishes … or her fears.
“Do you know who my father is?” Megan asked very quietly.
Dallas was not surprised that the child would explore any avenue that would give her information, and she was relieved that she didn’t have to lie. She shook her head. “No, I don’t. I’m being honest with you, Megan. I really don’t know.”
“Mommy won’t tell me.”
“Did you ever think it might be really hard for her to tell you? She could be afraid to. Maybe she’s trying to find the right way to tell you. Maybe by not telling you she’s protecting you from something. There can be lots of reasons. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t want you to know, or that she’s just being mean.
“Now, you go to sleep and stop worrying about it. Remember that your mom and grandmother, your aunts and uncle, love you. I love you, too …”
“Okay,” Megan murmured, the comfort of Dallas’s words and the safety of knowing she was loved relaxing her into sleep. “Thanks for letting me come into the city to stay with you. Thanks for bringing me home. I had a good time.”
“Me, too. We’ll do it again, soon. Sleep tight.”
“I will. Night, Aunt Dallas. I love you.”
&nb
sp; Dallas couldn’t settle down. She lay awake in the dark quiet of Valerie’s house and considered how the unfortunate death of Nicholas Marco had set in motion the stirring up of everyone’s past ghosts, hers and Valerie’s, and brought Alex Marco back into her life. Well, maybe not exactly into her life.
In fleeting moments she’d wondered why, in all the years she’d known Vin, Nicholas, and Lillian Marco, none of them had ever mentioned Alex. She only knew that he was connected to the family, certainly by name … but how? And why had Vin Marco been ready to rip Alex’s heart out at Nicholas’s service?
“Dallas? Are you still awake?” Valerie whispered.
Dallas jumped. She was more asleep than she’d realized. She turned her head in the direction of the voice. She hadn’t heard Valerie coming down the hall, and she was a pale ghost standing next to the large bookcase at the entrance of the living room.
“Yeah, I am. What’s wrong?”
Valerie entered the room, heading unerringly back to the chair she’d occupied just an hour earlier. She hugged herself, but Dallas couldn’t see Valerie’s face.
“I put my foot in it, didn’t I?”
“What are you talking about?”
“All that stuff before about babies and being pregnant. I just didn’t think.”
A heaviness pressed down on Dallas, and made her feel as if she were sinking into the mattress. She was no longer wounded the way she had been when she thought that having a baby would save her marriage to Hayden.
“It was almost four years ago, Val. I’m okay.”
Valerie sighed, the sound drifting in the darkness of the room. “Isn’t this funny? You were the one who was never going to get married, and I was the one who wanted to find someone rich who’d take care of me. Boy, were we off!”
“Surprise …” Dallas murmured dryly.
“Don’t worry. There are lots of great black men out there. You’ll find someone else. There’s still plenty of time for you to have kids.”
“What if he’s not black?” Dallas asked rhetorically.
“Well, he doesn’t have to be, but I think someone black is best for you.”
“Thank you …”
“I’m serious. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I remember what used to happen in school when we were dating.”
“I was married to a black man. It still didn’t work. Maybe color has nothing to do with love, Val. Besides, I’m not even sure I want to marry again.”
“Look at the two of us. Intelligent, gorgeous”—Dallas chuckled softly—“and alone. Nothing worked out the way we planned. Don’t you feel like you don’t have any control over your life?”
Dallas shifted on the hard, thin mattress of the pullout sleeper and lay flat on her back. She stared at the ceiling, absently following the shadows and distorted outlines. “All the time …”
There was a momentary silence as both women shifted through their own thoughts.
“God … I can’t believe Nick’s dead …”
“You’re not going to start that again, are you?” Dallas asked, bemused.
“No … no. I guess I overreacted,” Valerie admitted thoughtfully. “But Nicky dying like that just made me feel like … like you can’t depend on anything. Anything could happen at any time. Do you realize, he’s the first of our friends to die. It just feels … strange, that’s all. Like, it could happen to any of us at any time.”
“Life’s unpredictable that way,” Dallas responded, but she wasn’t thinking about death.
“Anyway, you know me. I’m always blurting something out without thinking …”
“I know you weren’t referring to me. If I thought you were, I’d slap you silly.”
There was a pause, and then a guffaw of laughter from Valerie. It was abruptly cut off as she clamped her hand over her mouth, remembering the late hour, and that her daughter was asleep. The laughter turned to giggles, and Dallas joined in.
“And I know you’d do it, too. You did it once, and now I can’t remember over what …”
“You said I probably couldn’t go to the school varsity dance because there was no one who would take me. You said … none of the white boys were going to date me. You were right.”
“Oh, my God …” Valerie moaned in horror. “Did I really say that?”
“You certainly did. I remember wondering if they didn’t want to date me because I was chunky … or because I was black. I was afraid to ask. But it made me mad that you told me at all. I was waiting for you to say … well, if I couldn’t go, you wouldn’t go.”
“And I didn’t.”
Dallas chuckled silently. “You were so glad that Brian Gladstone asked you to go I don’t think you noticed how I felt.”
Valerie got up and climbed onto the edge of the sofa bed and placed her hand on Dallas’s arm. “Dallas, I’m so sorry. Sometimes I can be so thoughtless.”
“Look, we were fourteen years old. What did either of us know? Anyway, as I recall you said Brian was a real shit.”
“Yeah, and the party was a drag. But you still wanted to be there.”
Dallas nodded. “I still wanted to be there.”
She sat up in bed, and although they couldn’t see each other’s features clearly, Dallas knew that Valerie would understand what she was going to say next.
“It was sometimes hard being your friend, you know.”
“I guess it was,” Valerie acknowledged quietly. “But you know what? I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t.”
They impulsively hugged. Like they used to do after a fight and they’d made up, and they’d promised never to disagree again. There was no need for further conversation. Valerie got up and returned to her room for the night.
Dallas recalled that when she was a little girl she used to love her bedroom. It had always felt squirreled away at the back of the house, like a secret hideaway. It only came to her later that she may have been put there because it was over the kitchen and not as quiet as the room Dean had. Like servant’s quarters, she’d once thought. But she’d found advantages.
The room was always warm in winter, and the smells from Eleanor’s cooking from the kitchen below were comforting. Eleanor was a good cook, and that was one of the reasons that made Dallas feel safe in the house, although she’d never been able to figure out why. Her father played classical music, sometimes jazz, on the countertop radio, often lulling her to sleep. After a while she discovered that eavesdropping was possible if she lay in bed quietly at night, or in the early morning, when her parents were in the kitchen discussing family matters or personal business.
Nowadays she didn’t bother. She was far removed from their daily lives. Dallas now saw to it, for her peace of mind, that her visits were timed to be at reasonable intervals—but brief. The weekend before, when she’d returned Megan home after a visit with her in Manhattan, Dallas had not bothered to notify her parents of her presence on the Island. But Megan’s questions about the identity of her father now spurred Dallas into her own familial thoughts.
She shifted in the bed and heard the kitchen door leading to the garage close. Dallas heard the engine of one of the two family cars gun to life, idling in the cold morning air, and then slowly backing down the driveway. She climbed out of the bed that had been hers until she was eighteen and had left for college. It was the only thing in the room that was still the same. Everything else had been removed.
Eleanor had taken it over and made it into a combination library, sewing and storage room. Dallas was careful not to step into a basket filled with professional correspondence to Eleanor, or to disturb a pile of pattern magazines. It was no longer her room, but just a place to sleep when she visited. All traces of her existence as a member of the family had been packed away.
The first time she’d come home from college during a semester break and seen that her room had been stripped of her things, Dallas had felt a sensation of displacement. Like when she was five years old, and didn’t know what was going to happen to her afte
r her mother had died. Where she was going to belong, or who would want her.
Every time she visited she felt strange being back. She was careful to make sure she left everything as she found it. Eleanor would notice, otherwise. In the hallway leading to the staircase was the “mug shot” wall, or so she and Dean had called the gallery, when they were kids, of family portraits that lined the corridor. She stopped for a moment to straighten the one studio picture that had ever been taken of them as a family. Three distinct brown faces, with Dean clearly the product of the older two. And the tan face that was her own.
“Morning …” Dallas murmured, entering the kitchen quietly in her socked feet. She headed directly for a yellow kettle, which she filled with tap water and set on a burner of the stove to boil.
“Morning …” came back the distracted reply from the man seated at the table behind her. “What are you doing up so early?” he asked in that morning croak of a person who takes a long time to start to function. He sipped from a mug of coffee and turned a page in his newspaper.
Dallas, finding the tea canister empty, began a search through the cabinets for a box of new bags. “I wanted a chance to see you before you left for the campus.”
Another page slowly turned.
“You missed Ellie. She left a few minutes ago.”
“I know. I heard the car from upstairs.”
“What did you want to see me about? Still thinking about buying the apartment you’ve been living in?”
With a sigh of frustration she gave up her search for tea. She turned the flame off under the kettle and walked to the refrigerator. Pulling the door open, she took out a container of juice.
“Daddy, I meant I wanted to hear about you. Like … how are you doing? What’s happening at school? A father-daughter talk,” Dallas explained as she poured the juice and placed two slices of bread into the toaster. She made a place setting for herself and sat at the table opposite him. He was still buried behind the news, and Dallas playfully rattled the pages. “Hel-lo,” she said in a singsong tone.
Her father lowered the paper and shook his head at her. “You’re determined to get in my face. It’s too early to talk politics, I read your last article and it was pretty good. And I like your hair short like that. You look sophisticated and grown-up.”
