by Mia Mckenzie
Kenny and Charlotte are all matchy again, in sea-green golf shirts and aviator sunglasses. Kenny is already on his phone and barely looks up to say hello. Charlotte is bouncy and cheerful. “Good morning, ladies,” she says. “I brought flowers from our garden.” She holds a vase filled with spring blossoms out to Vicky, who just stares at them.
“What am I gonna do with these?”
“I thought you and Faye might enjoy them.”
“Aunt Faye doesn’t like flowers.”
Which is a total lie. There are no less than three flower-filled vases in the house at this moment.
“No one doesn’t like flowers, Victoria,” Charlotte says.
Vicky shrugs and puts the vase on the coffee table.
“What’s going on with your hair?” Charlotte asks, after eyeing the kid for a moment.
Vicky frowns. “What do you mean ‘going on with’ it?”
“I just mean, you have a different hairstyle every time we see you,” she says. “What are these? Some sort of cornrolls?”
CornWHAT?
“They’re Bantu knots,” the kid says.
Charlotte examines Vicky’s hairdo at length, then says, “I kind of like it. It’s quirky.”
Vicky glares at Charlotte, then looks at her father. “Can you please tell your wife to stop giving me her racist opinions about my hair?”
Kenny doesn’t even look up from his phone.
Charlotte looks confused, then exasperated. “I said I like it. It was a compliment. How is that racist?”
“You said you kind of like it,” Vicky corrects her. “That’s not a compliment. And it’s my hair. I’m sick of having to hear what you think about it. You’re not Black.”
“Only Black people can have opinions about hairstyles?” Charlotte asks. “Isn’t that rac—”
Skreech. Nope. Nuh-uh. “No,” I say before she can get the word out. “It’s really not.”
The sound of my voice seems to get Kenny’s attention. He looks up from his phone. When he sees all of our faces, he frowns. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”
Charlotte is looking at me, and I think she’s trying to decide if she wants to argue with me about this. I can almost hear the I CAN’T BE RACIST, I’M MARRIED TO A BLACK MAN on the tip of her tongue. But, finally, she sighs and says, “Fine. Sorry. Forget I said anything.”
“Said anything about what?” Kenny asks.
This nigga. Ugh.
“About my hair,” Vicky says. “She’s always complaining about it. Ever since I chopped out that relaxer she made me get.”
“Made you?” Charlotte asks, incredulous. “I seem to remember you saying you liked it because it made you look more like your mother.”
“I never said that!”
“You did so!” She looks at her husband. “Didn’t she, Kenneth?”
Kenny shrugs. “I don’t know.”
Charlotte looks like she wants to grab him and shake him hard. She turns back to Vicky. “I guess it’s just easier to blame me for everything.”
“I only blame you for stuff that’s your fault.”
“Nothing is ever your fault, is it, Victoria?” She shakes her head. “Your mother wouldn’t be pleased with the way you’ve been acting lately.”
Vicky turns as red as a Black girl can. “Don’t talk about my mother,” she says through clenched teeth.
I look at Kenny, like, Are you really just going to stand there not saying shit? He frowns, like, Yeah, I was, but I guess I won’t if you’re going to look at me like that about it.
“Let it go, Char,” he says.
“She’s the one who—”
“Jesus Christ, Charlotte. She’s twelve. Just let it go, alright?”
Charlotte looks like she can’t believe the words that are coming out of his mouth, which makes me think he probably never checks her ass. I think about my mother and how she never checked my father. Charlotte’s nowhere near as bad as he was, but still. If you’re not going to have your kid’s back, maybe don’t have a kid in the first place?
“Where’s your stuff, Vicky?” Kenny asks.
“Upstairs.”
“Upstairs, packed? Or not packed?”
“Not,” Vicky says.
Charlotte throws her hands up in the air. “Great. That’s just great. So, now we have to wait for her to pack? Again?”
“If you don’t want to wait, just go to the car,” Kenny suggests.
“Waiting in the car is still waiting, Kenneth!”
I follow Vicky upstairs to her room.
“Ugh!” she says, shutting the door loudly behind us. “I hate her so much!”
Honestly? I feel the teensiest bit bad for Charlotte. Yes, she’s sort of terrible. We can all agree on that. But Vicky’s maybe harder on her than is absolutely necessary. On the other hand: Our people have endured enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining, and police brutality, and Charlotte’s people have not. So. She’ll be aight.
Vicky opens her closet and pulls out the oversized backpack she always takes to Bala Cynwyd. She refuses to leave anything but the barest essentials at her father’s house, even though she has her own room there, so she always has to haul everything else she needs back and forth. It seems like a huge hassle, but I guess whatever point she’s making matters more to her than convenience.
“I swear to God,” she says, opening the backpack, “I’m going to wait until no one’s looking and trip her down the stairs.”
I’m sure she doesn’t mean it, but—not gonna lie—she sounds a teensy bit serious. I wait for her to say psych or something, but she doesn’t. She just grabs her laptop and slips it into her bag.
“You’re not really going to do that, right?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I’m just kidding.” But she doesn’t laugh.
So…this might be the moment in the After School Special when the viewer realizes there is a capital P problem. Because for all her talk about the helpfulness of therapy, this is the second time she’s “joked” with a straight face about injuring her stepmother. Which: I get it. I really do. I’ve only been around Charlotte maybe an hour total and I’ve already fantasized at least half a dozen times about karate-chopping her in the neck. But still. I don’t want Vicky to do anything crazy. Like, what if the kid just snaps one day and tosses a hairdryer into Charlotte’s bubble bath, becoming one of those tween murderers they make bad TV movies about, thanks to a neglectful pseudo-parent who didn’t take the signs seriously enough? I don’t want to be that person! On the other hand, what if I go all Danny Tanner at the end of a Full House episode in which D.J. has done something irresponsible, cue up some “very important lesson” music, and end up coming off as a bummer for no reason, because Vicky really was just joking? I don’t want to be that person, either! But, like…I have to say something, right?
I watch Vicky pack her things, nodding and agreeing while she calls Charlotte everything but her Christian name. Once she’s all packed, she sits on the end of the bed with her arms folded. “I’m not going to go down for a few more minutes. Just to annoy them.”
“Aight, cool,” I say. “Um, listen, Vicky. About that whole tripping-Charlotte-down-the-stairs thing? I know you were just joking, but…is there something we should talk about?”
“Like what?”
OH, I DON’T KNOW, YOUR SEETHING ANGER, PERHAPS?
“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“With what?”
“Just…generally.”
She looks like she’s thinking about it. After a long moment, she says, “I’m as okay as I can be.”
And, honestly, I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
We hear Faye’s voice downstairs. I feel a flutter of nerves in my stomach.
“I guess we better go back down,” Vicky says.
&n
bsp; Faye is in the kitchen with Kenny and he’s whispering something to her before we come in. When he sees us, he smiles. “Ready, baby girl?”
“No.”
He frowns. “Charlotte’s in the car. Let’s hit it.”
Vicky groans.
“Call me if you need anything, Vicky,” Faye tells her.
“Same,” I say.
Vicky trudges out, her father trailing behind.
When they’re gone, Faye says, “I give it an hour before she calls one of us asking to be picked up.”
“It sucks she has to go over there. She really hates it.”
“I know,” Faye says, sighing. “But Kenny’s her father. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
We stand there in silence for a few seconds. It’s not the comfortable silence of last night in the car. It’s that awkward shit again. Finally, I’m like: “I better get going.”
“Fun plans for the day?” she asks.
“Um, yeah,” I say. “Super fun plans. With some cool friends of mine. You know how it is.”
“Great,” she says. “Well. Enjoy.”
I start walking toward the door. I’m halfway there when I realize I want to stay. Yes, kissing Faye was a mistake. I would undo it if I could. But I wouldn’t undo holding her hand as we moved through the club. I wouldn’t undo sharing memories of being young in Philly. I don’t want to go back to awkward! So, I decide to do something I rarely do: behave like a well-adjusted adult. I turn back to her. I say: “Actually, I don’t have any fun plans. I was just gonna go back to my room and read magazines and maybe take a nap. I’d be willing to forego all that if you wanted to hang out and do platonic stuff.”
She smiles. “Okay. Maybe you can help me with something?”
* * *
—
We’re sitting in the backyard, in the soil beside the little vegetable garden. The afternoon sun is warming the bare skin of our forearms and casting a glow in Faye’s hair as we dig holes for the tomato plants that Vicky and I brought over from Miss Vena. I’m not dressed for gardening. My jeans are too tight, and they’re getting really dirty from the knees down. But I barely notice, because Faye is telling me that Cynthia liked Charlotte, that they were “almost what you’d call friends.”
“You’re messing with me.”
“I’m not.”
“But why?”
“Cynthia had a higher tolerance for white lady nonsense,” she says. “So, I think she was able to see and appreciate things about Charlotte that maybe you and I can’t.”
“For instance?”
“Charlotte is very outgoing. Very open to friendship. She’s the kind of person who invites people to Thanksgiving dinner after meeting them only once, because she knows they don’t have anywhere else to go. She’s generous and welcoming and she really likes people. Cynthia appreciated that, for some reason, even though she wasn’t very into people herself. Charlotte visited Cynthia a lot when she was sick. Much more than Kenny did.”
I think about what Slade said, about how Cynthia only had one or two visitors near the end, and I start to doubt the accuracy of his intel.
“How’d you get Kenny to give you joint custody of Vicky?” I ask, suddenly realizing I’ve never asked her or Vicky that before.
“Blackmail.”
I look up from the hole I’m digging. “I’m going to need you to say more.”
She’s quiet for a moment, her eyes thoughtful. I think she’s trying to decide whether or not she really wants to tell me. I wasn’t expecting the answer to be anything juicy, but now I’m thinking it might be.
“Just between us,” she says. “You can’t tell Vicky.”
“Okay.”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“We already established I don’t have anything else to do, right?”
She smiles. I watch her place a tomato plant in a deep hole and start covering the roots with soil. “Kenny had a huge crush on me when we were kids. He used to send me love notes in junior high. I always thought he was…well…how he is: dull. Even when he was thirteen, he was dull.”
“I can see that.”
“Cynthia and Kenny ended up at Carnegie Mellon at the same time and that’s when they first got together. My sister liked boring men, so they were a perfect match.”
“All men are boring,” I interject.
“Maybe,” says Faye, “when compared to women. Compared to one another, some men are less boring than others.”
I want to ask her if she thinks Nick is less boring than other men. I don’t, though.
“They broke up after college, and Cynthia married someone else. Then, after her divorce, she and Kenny got together again. And eventually got married. Over the years, I had reason to think Kenny’s crush on me never went away.”
“What reason?”
“He always found a way to seat himself next to me at gatherings. Sometimes I’d catch him gazing at me, when no one was paying attention. But he never said anything or did anything. And he did seem to love Cynthia. So, I ignored it.” She smooths the soil around the tomato plant, pats it gently. “When my sister was sick, when she knew she wasn’t going to beat the cancer, she told Kenny that she wanted me to have custody of Vicky. They’d been divorced for years by then and Kenny was already remarried. He works constantly and Cynthia realized that it wasn’t a good idea to have Charlotte raising her child. She liked Charlotte, but not that much.”
“That’s a relief, at least.”
She nods. “Right. But Kenny wouldn’t agree. So, after Cynthia died, Vicky went to live with them. A few months later, I was at my apartment, wasting time on Facebook, when I saw an ad for one of those realtor websites. I clicked on it randomly, and ended up looking at houses for sale, for no other reason than to pass the time on a Sunday morning. That’s when I saw this house and recognized the address. My mother and sister and I lived in this house for three years. It was the only time in our lives we had something that felt like stability. We had community when we were here. Safety. Consistency. For a while, anyway.”
As she talks, I look back at the house and out at the yard and try to imagine her and Cynthia running around, screaming and laughing and feeling safe. I think about Cynthia at ten and eleven, when I knew her, how grown up she always acted, how independent. She made money babysitting some of the younger kids after camp and on weekends. I thought it was so cool to be paid to babysit, especially since I was almost the same age as her and still got babysat. Now, I wonder if she wasn’t acting grown up, if she was one of those kids who had to be grown up, for real, because being a kid wasn’t an option. I think about myself at eleven, independent in the ways I had to be as an under-protected child, and I feel a connection to Cynthia again, and to Faye.
“So, you bought this house because of…nostalgia?”
“I guess that’s one way of putting it,” she says. “Unfortunately, nostalgia isn’t a very sound financial consideration. You can’t pay for updated plumbing or lead abatement with memories. But owning this house felt right then. And it still does most of the time.”
“Because you’re happy here?”
“Yes. I have Vicky and our little vegetable patch. I have Angie right up the street. I have plant sharing with Vena. A relatively short commute to work with students I like, for the most part.”
I notice she doesn’t mention Nick. I resist the urge to make it mean something.
“And now you, too,” she adds, “just a few blocks away and willing to help me plant tomatoes.” She smiles at me. I smile back. We sit there smiling at each other for what feels like a long moment and then she looks away, patting the dirt around an already-planted tomato vine that doesn’t really need any more attention.
I think about Vicky and Faye in this house and, for a brief moment, I imagine myself here with them. Not just v
isiting. Living here, belonging with them. It’s sort of a nice thought, at first, but then I feel this weird pain in my chest, like a stabbing, so I stop.
“So, what happened?” I ask Faye. “With Kenny?”
“Right. Kenny. Well, one evening, a couple of months after I moved in, Kenny came by. Vicky had left one of her textbooks here when she was sleeping over and he came to pick it up on his way home from work. I was looking for the textbook when I caught him gazing at me again, the way he always used to. This time he did not look away.” She glances at me, and there’s a look in her eyes.
“No,” I say. “You didn’t. Oh my God.”
“I did.”
“You slept with Kenny?”
“Yes.”
“So you could blackmail him into giving you custody?”
“Not exactly,” she says. “I mean, yes, it occurred to me that I could have sex with him and then threaten to tell his wife. That’s mostly why I did it. But I’d also just broken up with Nick. It wasn’t permanent, obviously, but I didn’t know that then. And I was missing a certain kind of closeness.”
“You were lonely.”
“In a particular way, yes. And I’ve known Kenny since I was in seventh grade. He was familiar in a way that felt comforting at that moment. So.” She shrugs. “I fucked him.”
This is maybe the moment I start to fall in love with Faye. Because here is a woman who would smash the boringest nigga on earth, who happens to be the ex-husband of her dead sister, in order to blackmail him into giving her what she wants, which isn’t money or a bigger house, but custody of her troubled adolescent niece, and it’s so wrong and, at the same time, so perfectly right, that I almost can’t even deal.
“So, then what happened? You threatened to tell Charlotte unless he shared custody of Vicky?”
“Yes.”
“And he gave in?”
“Yes. But by that time Vicky had been living with them for half a year, and she was miserable. I think Kenny was already starting to see that it wasn’t a great idea. He’s not as oblivious to Charlotte’s nonsense as he seems to be. I think he’d figured out Vicky would be better off here. He’s not a perfect father. But he has his good moments.”
