Black Cake(5)

“Benny, Benny,” was all he could say when she picked up the phone. Byron stopped, his throat tight. He could hear noise in the background. Music and chatter and plates. Restaurant sounds. And then Benny, saying, “Byron? Byron?”

“Benny, I…”

But Benny had already understood.

“Oh, no, Byron!”

Then Byron got off the phone after breaking the news to her and began to think of all the other phone calls he would need to make, the arrangements, the sense of his mother being gone, the memories of his father’s passing, the awareness of all those miles and years between Benny and the rest of them, and he felt the resentment toward his sister flooding back.

Dammit, Benny.

As he drives up to his mother’s house now, he sees a rental car in the driveway.

Benny.

Byron walks through the kitchen door, kicks off his shoes, and stands still in his socks, listening. Silence. He walks down the hallway, peers through the window into the backyard, looks into Benny’s old room, but no Benny.

Of course.

He continues down to his parents’ room. There she is, lying in the middle of the bed, wrapped in the comforter like a giant egg roll, snoring lightly. She used to do that when she was little, pounce on the bed between Ma and Dad, peel the cover off Dad and roll. A Benny roll! Dad would yell every time, as if she didn’t do the same thing every single Sunday morning. Benny used to have this way of making everyone giggle, of making a person feel light. But it hasn’t been that way for a long time.

There’s that feeling again. A mean feeling. Byron wants to rush over to the bed and shake Benny awake. Then the next second, he just feels sad. His phone buzzes. He looks down. There’s a reminder. Mr. Mitch is on his way.





Mr. Mitch





When Mr. Mitch gets to the house, Benedetta shakes his hand and takes his jacket. Byron brings out cups of coffee and biscuits from the kitchen and unplugs his mother’s telephone line. Eleanor’s children still aren’t talking to each other, but now the daughter doesn’t seem as edgy. Mr. Mitch is still struck by how much Eleanor’s children resemble their father, one the color of mahogany, the other the color of wet straw, both looking a bit like stubborn toddlers at the moment, their beautiful heads held high, their mouths turned down at the sides.

Benedetta folds her six-foot-tall frame into the couch and hugs a large cushion to her middle. Again, like a child. He wouldn’t have expected that of such a regal-looking woman. Byron leans forward from where he is sitting, his elbows resting on his knees. Mr. Mitch opens his laptop and calls up the audio file. They really have no idea, do they? They think this is all about them. He clicks play.





Byron





The sound of his mother’s voice splits him down the middle.

B and B, my children.

The sound of her voice.

Please forgive me for not telling you any of this before. Things were different when I was your age. Things were different for women, especially if you were from the islands.

Byron’s parents always said the islands as if they were the only ones in the world. There are roughly two thousand islands in the world’s oceans and that’s not counting the millions of other bits of land surrounded by seas and other bodies of water.

Byron hears his mother stopping to catch her breath and clenches his fists. B and B, I wanted to sit down with you and explain some things but I’m running out of time and I can’t go without letting you know how all of this happened.

“How all of what happened?” Benny says. Mr. Mitch taps the keyboard on his laptop, pauses the audio recording.

Byron shakes his head. Nothing has ever happened to them, nothing at all. And that’s saying a whole lot for a black family in America. Before their parents died, their only real family drama was Benny, freaking out Ma and Dad because she’d insisted on filling them in on the details of her love life. Couldn’t she just have brought home her girlfriend that year and let that settle into their parents’ heads a bit? Then, if she’d ended up dating some guy another year, she could have explained the switch. A slow reveal. Their parents could have handled that. They would have adjusted, eventually.

But, no, Benny was Benny. Always needing attention, always needing approval, ever since college. She was no longer the easygoing baby sister she used to be. Benny had become this person who didn’t leave room for dialogue. Either you were with her or you were against her. If Byron had behaved that way, if Byron had walked away every time someone hadn’t agreed with him, hadn’t accepted him right away, hadn’t treated him fairly, where would he be today?

Not that Byron can really complain. He loves his work, he was born to be an ocean scientist. He’s damn good at it, too, even if he’s been passed over for the director’s position at the institute. He’s much better paid than he would be as director, anyway, thanks to his public appearances and books and film consulting. More than three times better paid, actually, but he likes to keep that between himself and the tax man.

Byron didn’t set out to be the African American social media darling of ocean sciences, but he’s going to get as much mileage out of it as he can. He’s just put in for the director’s position again, even though he knows his colleague Marc is hoping to get it, too.

Chances are, Byron thinks, he will hear the same old reasoning from the founders. That the center needs Byron out there as its ambassador, that Byron has brought unprecedented attention to the institute’s work, that he’s helped it to get more funding and greater say-so in international meetings than it would have mustered otherwise.