Black Cake(61)
What was Benny doing all the way out here on the East Coast, anyway? Did she even have any friends in New York? Did she understand friendship the way he and Benny’s mother did? And what about loyalty? The girl had moved here without even sending them her new address, just because Bert and Eleanor hadn’t been able to pretend that everything was all right with them. She had let go of them that easily. Did she have any idea what it had taken for them to build a life for her and her brother?
It took work to keep tabs on Benny. For the second time in a row, Bert had told his wife he was going to a meeting out of state, but how many work commitments could a lawyer licensed only in the state of California claim to have outside of California in the space of a year? Their state had been the first to develop proper anti-stalking laws. If he weren’t Benny’s father, he’d accuse his own self of stalking his daughter. But Bert had needed to see Benny with his own two eyes. And he didn’t want to say anything to Eleanor about this until he could figure out what to say to Benny.
He watched as Benny helped an elderly woman on with her coat. Look at how gentle she was. His daughter still had a good dose of respect in her. She had always been a bighearted child. But something had changed. After they’d argued that Thanksgiving, Bert was surprised to come back into the living room to find that Benny had left the house, dismayed when she didn’t come back for dinner, with all those people coming over, no less, and later, angry that she didn’t even call to apologize. It just wasn’t Benny’s way. Never used to be, at any rate.
That day, Benny had accused Bert of not being open-minded, but Benny was the one who had grown more closed, less patient in recent years, less willing to face the questions of others. She had run off because she couldn’t face Bert and her mother, couldn’t accept that they had their doubts. And when had anyone in their family ever worried about whether other people approved?
Where would they be today if Bert had been afraid to go to law classes at night, the only black man and the oldest student in the group? Where would he be today if he’d been afraid to move to a state with all those waxy-looking plants and rattlesnakes and earthquakes and chirpy-talking people? Where would he be today if he had been afraid to raise a family with a woman who could not permit herself to have a past? Who could not permit Bert to have a past? He wondered, sometimes, about his uncle and cousins back on the island. Wished he could pick up the phone and find out how they were doing. But a move like that could ruin his life.
Bert shifted in his seat and poked at the spot where he’d been having that pain. As he watched his daughter now, as she nodded and smiled at the woman, he found himself nodding along. He was worrying too much, wasn’t he? She was still his Benny, just look at her. She was still young. She would find her way, she would get her life back on track. She would come back to him and her mother, someday, his beautiful baby girl.
My Baby Girl
On the day that Bert Bennett was laid to rest, Benny’s left arm was in a sling against her bruised ribs and one of her eyes was swollen shut. A bandage covered half of her face. Bicycle accident, she’d told the driver who picked her up at the airport the day before. Ah, he said in that way that service professionals do.
The same driver picked her up at the hotel before the funeral. He took the seatbelt and helped Benny pull it into position. It was already heating up outside but Benny rolled down the window, breathing in the smell of sun-baked sidewalks and jasmine flowers and tilled soil and a whiff of salt on the breeze coming in from the west. The smell of home.
The cemetery went back to the time when Los Angeles had fewer than thirty thousand people and the county was more farmland than not. It had been SoCal’s first such facility, with broad, grassy lawns that called to mind the kind of place where you might have laid out a picnic blanket. It made Benny think of those barbecues her parents used to organize in the park near the house. She would help her dad attach balloons to the trees with pieces of paper that read Bennett Bash and they’d be out there with a bunch of other families until the sun went down.
Benny could imagine slipping off her shoes now and strolling barefoot across the grass until she found her father’s burial site. But she would not be getting out of the car today. She touched her hand to the wound on her cheek.
She asked the driver to follow the road through the grounds until she saw the crowd of bowed heads, all shades of skin, all sizes of black and navy suits and dresses. Her father had been a popular man, a successful man, a pillar of the black community. He’d been known as a bridge builder, a man of tolerance, but the last time Benny saw him, two years earlier, her father had refused to listen.
Her parents had always taught her that the greater your capacity to love, the better you could be as a person. But when Benny tried to remind them of this principle, her father put up a wall, stood up, and walked out on her. That quickly, her daddy had turned his back on her. And Benny never did see her father again.
Benny caught sight of her brother as the crowd began to break up. He was walking toward a line of parked cars, his arm around their mother, his head lowered toward hers. Ma was wearing a sunny, fluttery dress, her father’s favorite. The color made Benny smile, even as the tears slid down her face.
Benny watched her brother open a car door for their mother, watched him keep his hand on her arm until she had settled onto the seat. Byron used to be that protective of Benny, too.