Such a Fun Age(52)

Mrs. Chamberlain said, “Oh no, Emira, you don’t have to do that—”

“No, it’s okay, I got her.” Emira ascended the stairs and passed Peter and a bartender carrying paper towels and cleaning bottles in their hands. When she made it to the kitchen, she heard Walter say, “That was incredible!”

In the upstairs bathroom, Emira sat Briar down on the toilet seat and closed the door behind her. Briar did that nervous and uneven breathing Emira saw other children do when they skinned their knees or popped their balloons. It was alarming to know that this type of crying had been inside Briar all along, that she’d always been capable of it and just chosen not to.

“Hey.” Emira took a washcloth and began to wet it with warm water from the sink. “Hey, mama, it’s okay. Look at me.” She wiped Briar’s mouth and neck as Briar gasped for air so hard her whole body trembled every few seconds. “I’m sorry, big girl. That’s no fun to throw up. But hey, I think I caught it all. Your dress is still clean.”

Briar started to whimper as she touched her dress at the hem. “These is itchy,” she said.

“Yeah.” Emira took Briar’s fingers and wiped each one down with the towel. “This dress isn’t really my favorite either.”

“I don’t—I don’t like . . .” Briar calmed herself enough to point at the ceiling with her free hand and say, “I don’t like when Catherine bees the favorite.”

Emira stopped. She hung the washcloth on the side of the sink and sat back on her heels. “What did you say?”

“I don’t—I don’t like when Catherine bees the littlest favorite to Mama. I don’t like that.” Briar had stopped crying and she said this with a calm and specific certainty, both that she had explained it correctly and that this was in fact how she felt.

Emira pressed her lips together. “B, you know what?” As she formulated her words, Emira held Briar’s knees in both of her hands and thought, This is the littlest your knees will ever be. “You can have . . . favorite ice cream. Or favorite cereal. But guess what? When you have a family, everyone is the same. Do you have a family?”

Briar put her fingers in her mouth. “Yesh.”

“Do you have a mama?”

“Yesh.”

“And a dada?”

“Yesh.”

“And a sister?”

“Yesh.”

“Exactly, that’s your family. And in families, everyone is always the same.”

Briar touched her shoulders. “How come?”

“Well . . .”

In Emira’s family, Justyne was so obviously the favorite, but Emira was her brother’s favorite and so it seemed to even out. Her mother favored Alfie when it came to Christmas gifts, and her father favored Emira when it came to birthdays and phone calls. Emira didn’t figure this out until high school, but Briar was doing so at the tender age of three. Emira looked at the little person on the toilet and felt as if she were pushing an enormous boat out into the ocean. She slumped as if the situation were completely out of her hands and said, “’Cause that’s what family means. Family means no favorites.”

Mr. Chamberlain knocked twice and the cracked door swung open. When Briar saw her father she frowned and said, “Hi.”

By the time Emira came back downstairs, the bartenders were clearing away plates and everyone was gathering in the living room for dessert. Kelley made a very theatrical show of putting his own plate into the sink upstairs, and helping the two hired women push the dining room chairs back underneath the table. A few bites into a sugary strawberry-rhubarb pie, Prudence began to have a breakdown about needing more whipped cream (this marked the third time, in Emira’s opinion, that Prudence had reached number three). Cleo started to cry as well, and then Rachel stood to slip on her jacket. Rachel explained that she was meeting a man-friend in town and would be back in a few hours. She tapped Briar on the nose and said, “I’m off like a prom dress,” before heading for the door. Emira took the moment to squeeze Kelley’s arm. “We should probably get going, too.”

After awkward and stunted good-byes inside the Chamberlain house, Emira had all those feelings of leaving a movie theater and realizing that it was dark outside and that it had been for some time. The snow crunched underneath her feet as she stood next to Kelley and waited for their Uber. In a pink T-shirt and white bedtime leggings, Briar waved from Peter’s arms at the top of the stoop. Emira waved back and mouthed, Bye, pickle. Inside the Uber, Kelley and Emira didn’t speak.

Kelley stared out the window and rubbed his chin. As the silence settled in, Kelley started to remind Emira of the type of person on the train who cussed out loud when there was a delay. There was always that one passenger who seemed to believe that the train had been delayed only for them, as if no one else was inconvenienced and late. And as time went on, they became angrier at the fact that they couldn’t speak to a manager, rather than bothered by the delay itself. The car rolled along in the glittery snow, and for the first time since they’d been dating, Emira felt that Kelley was acting particularly white.

Before they reached his apartment, Kelley told the driver that he could stop on the block before his street. He said to Emira, “I need one last drink,” and reached to open the car door.

Emira followed Kelley into the kind of bar that Shaunie would have been tickled by, particularly at nine p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. There were three white men with gray and black beards seated in the center of the dimly lit bar, and a vacant pool table in a wood-paneled back room. One man was eating alone—chicken and something green—as he kept his eyes on the TV screen attached to the wall above the cash register. On the long wall opposite were pictures of John Wayne, Pennsylvania license plates, and other sepia-colored cowboys. Emira could hear low folk music, and just above it, a referee from the large television screen blowing a whistle and throwing a yellow flag. She took her coat off and hung it up next to a longhorn skull mounted on the wall.