The Milk of Human Kindness

by Lori L. Lake

As they disappeared from my view, I heard Nora explain to Dee, “My momma and Genean’s grandmamier were sisters...” I remained outside staring out at our rental car, trying to figure out why being home felt so alien. Everything was unbearably familiar, yet so foreign. The air was still, as if the entire neighborhood was waiting for me to tell my secret. Or waiting for me to go inside so they could steal my shit. With that thought in mind, I hurried down the steps to retrieve our luggage.

  After lining the luggage up on the sidewalk, I picked lint off the driver’s seat, cleaned the rearview mirror with a tissue, folded the car rental agreement neatly and placed it in the glove compartment, fully aware that I was avoiding something. Hell, I was avoiding everything. But it was unfair of me to leave Dee in the house with a bunch of people she didn’t know. I picked up both bags and started down the driveway. A tall young man in pressed, baggy jeans and neatly clipped hair stepped out onto the porch with a huge grin on his face.

  Gone was the acne-plagued skin of years before. The body that had always been thin, but out of shape, now looked tight and strong. He, unlike my mother, seemed to have grown two feet taller in my absence.

  “Hey bro, when did you get in?” I called out, feeling lighthearted for the first time since starting this trip.

  “Last night. Look at you, girl.” He made a big pretense of looking me up and down as he sauntered down the drive to meet me. “Where’d you pick up them hips?”

  “That’s from good eatin’.”

  “Uh huh. I wonder about what you been eatin’ out there in Southern California.” I hit him in the chest and blushed furiously. I had always had the impression that Terrell suspected I was gay. Even if he did, I didn’t think he would tell my mother. The same way I didn’t tell her when I caught him in bed with some neighborhood girl when he was 16. He was my little brother, and when you have a mom who worked and went to school at the same time, you learned to take care of each other.

  I grinned up at him as warmth and familiarity stole over my body. “So you’re getting married, huh?”

  “Yeah, she can’t wait to meet you, but she’s sort of shy. You know, afraid you all won’t like her.”

  “So you have Momma invite Nora and Ann over?” I popped him on the arm. “You so smart.”

  He laughed and shrugged. “She’ll have to meet them at some point. We’re a package deal.” The humor in his eyes changed to affection as he looked down at me. “So, what about you? When are you going to start thinking about settling down?”

  I smiled and felt my ears heat up. This was my brother, and here I felt like I was talking to a stranger. “Let’s get you nice and tied up first, then we can worry about me.”

  He lifted our bags as if they were two sack lunches. “Come on, girl, let’s get inside before they eat up all the food and Dee and Erica along with it.”

  I nodded and slowly followed Terrell into the house. He left the bags by the dining room doorway and hurried to his seat. Dee was already seated at the table, looking glassy-eyed at the food. Two cakes graced the table in front of her, leaving barely enough room for her large white plate. One was a two-layer chocolate, and I imagined I could smell its tart chocolaty frosting from my place at the front door. A large ham and a chicken sat to her left near another plate, presumably mine. Potato salad, candied yams, string beans, mashed potatoes, homemade macaroni and cheese, stuffing, the golden brown tops of dinner rolls, and a humongous gravy boat filled the rest of the table. My mother sat at the head of the table with Ann and Dee to the right of her and Nora, Terrell, and the person I assumed to be my brother’s fiancé to the left. The expectant look on their faces made me nervous until I realized that they were simply waiting for me to sit down.

  “Y’all go on and eat,” I said to no one in particular, “I’m just going to drop these in the bedroom.” Without much more than a glance back, I struggled momentarily with the bags before heading toward the bedroom that had been mine for so many years. Gone was the waterbed of my teen years. Gone were all the Nancy Drew books that had lined the bookshelves I had made myself. And gone was the old sewing machine I’d used as a desk to do homework on. I dropped the bags and sank down to the edge of the bed. Apparently my mother had gotten herself a new bed because the one that I was sitting on now had been in her room for years. I grimaced at the floral design and the teal green walls. The carpets looked freshly cleaned, and there were no pictures on the wall. This was a guest room now.

  The sounds of plates clacking and people talking brought me out of my reverie. I felt horrible that I had left Dee out there by herself, but it was all I could do not to run from this place that held so many of my childhood dreams.

  I rose and reluctantly returned to the dining room just as Nora, around a mouthful of something, proudly told Dee, “To bad you don’t get to meet my brother, John. He has a lot of white friends.”

  “Oh really? Where is he today?” Dee asked as if Nora had just said John was a Capricorn.

  “He works a lot. He’ll be at the wedding though.” Nora waved her hand in the air dismissively as if John’s working too much was something she didn’t understand but tolerated. She turned to her sister. “Ann, where’s Calvin’s black self?”

  I winced. I love my cousin Nora dearly, but I had forgotten about her propensity for using the darkness of Calvin’s skin as an insult.

  “Calvin is my other brother,” Nora explained, and I was shocked at the slight note of pride in her voice. “You need to meet him, too. I bet you’ve never seen anyone as black as him.”

  “Actually,” Dee said, “I believe Genean showed me pictures of him. I thought he was quite handsome.” Nora and Ann looked at Dee as if waiting for the punch line.

  Ann finally said, “Are you sure you’re talking about my brother, Calvin? Real tall, dark, pink lips, nappy hair?”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure she said it was her cousin Calvin.”

  Nora laughed. ”Girl, how long you staying for? We might have to hook y’all up.”

  I took that as my cue to step into the fray. “So where is my plate?” I said aloud, even though I knew where my plate was and that it would already have food on it.

  “Right here next to Momma,” Terrell said, pointing with his fork. Everyone in my family talked with their mouth full. It was the only way we could have conversations around the dinner table, especially if my mother or aunt were cooking. You couldn’t help but shove food in, so it was either talk with food in your mouth or don’t talk at all.

  For the first time, since I had sat down at the table, I noticed the fine-boned, light-skinned girl sitting to my brother’s left. She was shyly picking at the food on her plate and cutting her cornbread with her fork. I looked over at Dee. Her fair complexion and blue eyes made her stand out as she picked up a turkey leg and bit into it with her eyes closed.

  “Can you pass me the gravy, please?” Dee said to my brother, mouth completely full, eyes focused on her plate. I couldn’t have felt more proud if she had simply reached over everyone’s plate and grabbed that gravy boat herself.

  Cousin Ann stabbed in Erica’s general direction with her knife. “Girl, I thought Terrell said your family was from the south. Don’t you know how to eat cornbread?” Erica laughed nervously and looked to my brother for help.

  “Ann, leave her be,” my mother said sternly, fork halfway to her mouth. “She can eat how she wants.”

  “Yes’m,” Ann said and concentrated on eating her own food. I looked around the table. A lull in the conversation allowed my mind to wander to the woman who was not sitting at the table with us. My Great Aunt Joan, Ann and Nora’s mother, had fought cancer for years before it finally took her life. It dawned on me then; with my grandmamier living in Georgia, and Aunt Joan gone, my mother had become the matriarch of our family. I looked at the meticulously coiffed silvery hair and did some quick math in my head. 56 years old now. She seemed too young for such role.

  “How old are you, Ann?” I asked.

  “32,” Ann sa
id around her food. “Why?”

  “Just thinking about Aunt Joan is all. Trying to remember how old she would be.”

  “Momma would be about 66, wouldn’t she, Nora?”

  “Yeah, 66 or 67.”

  I nodded. My mom was the same age as my aunt had been when she died. What if something had happened to her before I had a chance to talk to her? What if she never knew why I avoided coming home? I looked on as she used her knife to slip butter into the middle of a piece of cornbread before crumbling it and mixing it into her collard greens. How thin and small her hands looked. I blinked back tears just as she looked up.

  “What’s wrong, G?” she asked. I cursed the emotional tears that, over the last few weeks, crept over me like a ghost. I focused on the warmth of Dee’s hand on my leg as she expertly continued to eat while trying to comfort me under the table. Dee had a long history of groping her girlfriends under the table. The thought choked a watery giggle from my throat.

  “I’m just glad to be here, Momma.”

  Loudly, Nora said, “We’re glad you’re here too, girl,” and any annoyance I had felt with her vanished under the love I saw in her face. It made me feel…well, horrible. Dinner forks clanked and conversation resumed. I could hear Dee’s voice every so often, but I was too lost in my own thoughts to discern what was being said. Nausea swept over me as I pushed food around on my plate in the hopes that no one would notice that I wasn’t eating.

  A small push to my thigh made me pay attention to the last part of what my mother was saying. “Since your grandmamier’s plane lands about an hour before I have to meet with the caterer, would you and Dee mind picking her up tomorrow?”

  “Of course not, Momma.” My mother stared at me for a moment, and I busied myself buttering a roll I knew I would not eat. My stomach still churned slowly over the miniscule food that I forced myself to eat on the plane. The rest of the meal passed, though I barely have any memory of it, other than accepting cream and sugar when coffee was served to me, and laughing when the musical tones of Dee’s amusement penetrated the fog of anxiety that had enshrouded me.

  Just before 10:00, I walked my brother, Erica, Ann, and Nora to the door along with my mother and stood outside to wave goodbye to them with promises of catching up the following day. I stood on my mother’s porch and felt like a traitor. This had been my home once. Now I felt like a guest who had overstayed her welcome.

  My mother looked at me quizzically. “You want to go out back and sit a bit before we turn in?”

  I nodded and followed her back through the living room with its new furniture and nearly white carpet. We found Dee in the kitchen washing dishes much to my mother’s chagrin.

  “Oh, no, Dee, don’t you worry about that. Why don’t you come out back with us? I’ll load the dishwasher up before I go to bed, and Mrs. Nelson will unload it in the morning.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Nelson?” I asked, my curiosity momentarily quelling my fear.

  “She’s the lady who comes in every other day to tidy up.”

  “You have a …wait a minute. Since when could we afford a housekeeper? When Terrell and I were here you made us…” I could feel my eyes grow wide…”Oh, I see how you are. Using child labor and stuff. What kind of mess is that?”

  Dee laughed. “My mother got someone to help her after all of us kids moved away too. You two go on out back. I enjoy washing dishes. It helps me to unwind.”

  “I’m the same way,” my mother said as she patted Dee on the back.

  “You’re the same way?” I feigned anger. “What do you know about washing dishes? ’Cause near as I can figure, you haven’t washed dishes since 1981.”

  “Girl, come on here.” My mother laughed, put a mug of hot coffee in my hands, and pushed me toward the double doors that we had utilized to go out into the backyard for all of my childhood. Gone were the rustic stairs I had tumbled down and up so many times that I still carried some of the scars. A deck the size of the bedroom I had occupied now dwarfed the backyard. My mother sat on a rocking swing and patted the space next to her.

  It was cold out and shockingly quiet. I could hear water running and the jangle of silverware as it was dropped into a drainer. “It’s really quiet tonight.”

  “More quiet than San Diego?”

  “Yeah, we live downtown.

  “Really? Near Horton Plaza?”

  I smiled as I remembered how thrilled my mother was with Horton Plaza when she came to visit. “Yeah, sorta.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Mom…” I said softly. “Momma, I need to tell you something.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I…it’s about Dee and…” I paused struggling to remember why it was necessary for me to have this conversation, at this very moment.

  “What about Dee? Is she alright?”

  “Yeah. Yes, she’s fine. She just…well we’ve been trying to um... She wants to have a child. And no, before you ask, there is no man in her life.”

  “Really? Well, I can’t say as I would willingly become a single parent but…I am really glad things worked out that way.” My mother chuckled.

  This was harder than I’d imagined. I took her hands in mine. “She won’t be a single parent, Momma,” I said, and then rushed to continue. “We’ve been together for nearly four years. She’s my lover. We decided we would have a ceremony next month in Hawaii, and I was hoping you would come…. if you want to. And it isn’t just her who wanted a baby—it’s me, too.” I had to turn away to catch my breath. Oakland once again seemed to wait in silence. I heard her inhale before she snatched her hands from my grasp. The swing jerked as she stood and, with her back to me, stared off the deck in the direction of the orange trees I had gleefully raided as a child.

  “I’m still the same person you…”

  “Don’t you tell me who you are. I know who you are.”

  I drew in a breath. It had been a long time since I’d heard my mother so angry. Certainly not since I had become an adult.

  “Is that what this is about? What it’s been about all this time?” Her voice seemed hurt, bewildered.

  “What …”

  “You haven’t been home in five years, Genean. Five years. At first I thought you didn’t want to come here…that you were ashamed of where you were from.”

  “Ashamed? Ashamed?” Tears of frustration and anger prickled at the back of my eyes. “I was never ashamed. Oakland made me who I am.”

  She turned to me then, her eyes flashing. “You stopped coming home because you’re gay?”

  “Yes. No. I never intended on not telling you but…there never seemed to be the right time.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I came down for your graduation? Why not then? You obviously were together then. Telling me I could have your bed and you would sleep with Dee! Do you know how guilty I felt about that?”

  “Momma, please. Listen to me.”

  “No, you listen to me! When did I ever give you the impression I would love you any less because of who you sleep with?”

  I held up my hands in placation and spoke softly. “That’s just it, Momma. I don’t just sleep with her. I wake with her. I eat with her. I want to start a family with her. I love her with everything I am.”

  My mother was silent for a moment. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”

  “I know, but it’s really important to me that I get this right. I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you, but part of the reason was because I was afraid you would think… well you always seemed to think that my relationships weren’t…real. You know, introducing them as my little friend. Momma, Dee is so much more than that. She’s my wife.”

  I let the silence that followed last as long as she needed it to.” Was I wrong?” The humor in her voice was shocking after the solemnity of the last few moments.

  “About what?”

  “About your little male friends. You were never serious about any of them. They were never around for longer than six months.�
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  “No I suppose you weren’t, but…Dee is different, Momma. We have a commitment. That’s why we want to have a ceremony.”

  “Does your brother know?”

  “No, and I’m not going to tell him until after he comes back from his honeymoon. This is his time. I don’t want to steal his thunder.”

  “Well, I think he suspects. He’s made comments about you and Dee for a few years now.”

  “You’re kidding? Come to think of it, he said something outside when we came in. I thought he was just being his normal crude self. And you still never suspected?”

  “To be honest, no. Because I thought if there was something important to you, you would always tell me. I thought you knew you could always tell me anything.”

  I stood up and touched her hand. She was a bit too thin now. When had that happened? When had her hair become nearly as silver as my grandmamier’s? I remembered wide hips and immaculately groomed nails, mocha-colored skin that always glowed, and that nice wonderful smile that wasn’t diminished for one moment by the braces she got.

  “I’m moving back to Atlanta in May,” she said.

  I sucked in a breath. “What? Why? You said you would never go back!”

  “I know, but your grandmamier is getting older and I’m worried they’re not taking as good a care of her as they should.”

  “But what about your job?”

  “I’ve been there 34 years, Genean. I’ll be eligible for my full retirement benefits next year. In Atlanta, I could afford to fix up your grandmamier’s house, put a ramp in for her, all sorts of things. Besides, with you and Terrell gone, there isn’t much left for me here.”

  My heart fluttered against my ribcage. She was leaving…in less than a year. I had been a two-hour flight away from her and now, now it felt like she would be halfway around the world.

  “You don’t want to just move Grandmamier here?”

  “No, she would be more comfortable in her own home, and besides, Atlanta has changed a lot since I lived there as a kid.”

  The distant city lights made the tops of the orange trees glow, as if their leaves were dipped in silver. “Atlanta is a long ways away,” I said, not looking away from the trees.