Wing Jones(46)

Granny Dee cackles. “Well, this has been a much more delightful afternoon than I was anticipating. You two should join me more often. I’m sure Marcus would appreciate it too.”

Aaron drives us both home. Granny Dee sits in the front and chatters the whole way about how all she really wants is for someone to clear out the weeds in the pathetic patch of grass in front of our house she calls a garden so she can plant some roses. Aaron, of course, says he’ll come by this weekend to do it.

We’re home before my mom and LaoLao. Mom calls from the restaurant and says they’re both working late tonight and Granny Dee and I are on our own for dinner. Granny Dee gives me a wicked smile and orders a pizza. I don’t know where she got the money. We never have money for ordering takeout. Especially not now. But I don’t ask any questions, I just tell her that I want half pepperoni and half Hawaiian.

After we eat, Granny Dee makes me take the empty box to the dumpster at the end of the street. “Our little secret, Wing.”

I know she isn’t just talking about the pizza. She isn’t ready for my mom and LaoLao to know about her visiting Marcus.





CHAPTER 28


It’s been a week since I joined the track team, and I haven’t told my mom or LaoLao about the running. They both work in the afternoons now, usually later, so they don’t know when I get home. Granny Dee made jollof rice tonight. I don’t even know what kind of meat she put in it. Guessing it’s whatever was on sale. She made a big batch too, so I know this is what we’ll be having for the next few days. No more secret pizza deliveries for me.

I spoon the rice into my mouth as fast as I can. I’ve been so hungry ever since I started running.

“Wing,” my mom says lightly. “Slow down, you’ll choke. And please, get your hair out of your face.”

“Mmm-hmm,” agrees Granny Dee.

“Mmm-hmm,” echoes LaoLao, her intonation exactly the same. The two old ladies stare at each other over the dining room table.

Granny Dee swings the lazy Susan toward me. “Eat more rice,” she says.

“Why you want her to be fat?” says LaoLao.

“Wing.” Granny Dee pauses, looks at me, a small smile in her eyes. “Wing is a growing girl. A growing girl who needs lots of energy.”

“She almost sixteen! She already done growing. She grow too much too fast. She so tall! So big! Too big for a girl,” LaoLao retorts, spooning up more rice for herself.

“Mother,” says my mom, her exasperated tone as familiar to me as my own breathing, “I love how tall she is. I wish I was as tall as Wing.” She smiles at me, but LaoLao’s frown deepens.

She unleashes a torrent of Mandarin on my mother, who sits placidly sipping her tea, until LaoLao has seemingly run out of words. She looks expectantly at Mom, waiting for a response.

“Mama,” says my mother, her voice on the knife edge of patience. “You know the rule. If you have something to say at the dinner table, you say it in English.”

I’m not sure what the desired effect of that statement is, but my LaoLao launches into another verbal attack, still in Mandarin.

Granny Dee leans back in her chair, eyebrows raised. “She sure got a set of pipes on her,” she says. She holds her cup out to me. “Now get your granny some more tea.”

LaoLao passes me her cup without pausing in her diatribe. When I don’t immediately take it, she pauses and looks at me. “Tea,” she says, in English. “For me too.”

Considering how similar they are, it really is astounding that my grandmothers don’t get along better.

After dinner, I’m in my room, stretching on the floor. Eliza showed me some new stretches and I’m trying to figure out how to do them without looking stupid. Everything Eliza does looks effortless. She’s flexible and thin and could probably be a gymnast if she weren’t a runner.

I don’t think I could do anything else but run.

My door opens without anyone knocking. Granny Dee steps into the room, her head cocked to the side as she stares at me on the floor.

“What exactly are you supposed to be doing?”

“I’m stretching,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Now close the door. I don’t want anyone else to see.”

“Please,” says Granny Dee. “Close the door, please.” But she closes the door and then comes and sits on the edge of my bed. Her eyes are so bright and mischievous they practically sparkle.

“Here,” she says, pushing on my back, her small hands firm and strong against me, so I’m stretching farther than I was on my own. “I know a thing or two about stretchin’.”

“How?”

She laughs a little, the sound creaky and unused, like a door being opened that hasn’t been opened in a long time. “Just because I move the way I do now doesn’t mean I wasn’t ever young like you, Wing.”

I pull myself up and look at her. Try to imagine what she would have looked like when she was fifteen. There aren’t many pictures of her when she was young; not many of LaoLao either. Granny Dee was born in Ghana and moved here when she was a little girl. She’s never been back to Ghana. I wonder if she remembers it.

“I used to run too, you know. Not like you, I was never as fast as you, but I loved running when I could. Wasn’t considered very ladylike, so I couldn’t do it much, but I loved it, the feel of the wind on my face, the sun on my back, feeling like I could go anywhere. Feeling free.”