We Are Not Like Them(20)

“Can I steal her away, Ms. Nettle? I’m taking my big sister to lunch.” My brother rests his skinny arm on my shoulders. Shaun’s polite in a way that makes me wonder if Momma is watching, listening.

“Well, this is a first!” I tease, in mock surprise. Then I lean over and murmur a thanks for the rescue.

“No, seriously, I want to take you to lunch. Let’s go to Monty’s Fish Fry. Old time’s sake.”

It’s been at least ten years since I’ve been to Monty’s, even though it used to be our Sunday place, all the Wilsons starched and shined, and packed into a booth after church before heading to the Broad Street soup kitchen to serve Sunday dinner to homeless veterans. Suddenly, there’s no place I’d rather be. The comfort of cornmeal-breaded mackerel and four-inch-deep dishes of mac and cheese beckons.

“Let’s do it.”

Once we’re situated at the yellowed Formica table, plates piled high after serving ourselves at the buffet, greasy fingers pulling at fish bones, I take Shaun in, searching for a sign that he’s okay. Of all the worries I have on a constant loop—Gigi’s health, Momma and Daddy’s finances, the end of democracy—I worry the most about my baby brother. He’ll always be that to me. He arrived two days after my seventh birthday and I just knew he was my present—a doll come to life. I carried him everywhere. I used my allowance to buy him his first Lincoln Logs and LEGO sets, and when he decided his freshman year at college that he wanted to major in architecture and design skyscrapers, I was so proud to have inspired his dream.

Shaun’s okay, baby girl. He’s gonna be a-okay. Gigi’s voice is a whisper in my ear.

Shaun is dousing his plate in hot sauce, oblivious.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what? The music? Yeah, this is the jam.”

Shaun starts snapping his fingers and shaking his head along to “Return of the Mack,” which blares from a speaker bolted into the corner of the restaurant. “Seriously, I love this song, man. The nineties! Those were the good old days.”

“Rodney King? O. J. Simpson? That wasn’t the greatest decade for us. There was also your Arsenio Hall haircut. We don’t need to go back there.”

“Ah, man, you tell me what decade was good for Black people. I’m talking about the music, sis. Biggie. Tupac. Wu-Tang. And besides, my haircut was fresh. Why you tryin’ to clown with your Tootie bangs anyway.”

I flick a piece of cornbread at him. “So how was the Landry move yesterday?”

“It was fine, if eight hours of backbreaking work carrying boxes down five flights of stairs is your thing. The woman watched us like a hawk, like we were going to make a run for it with a forty-pound box of her precious china. What really kills me is you show up in work gloves and sweats and these people treat you like you’re a moron. I swear she was talking to me extra slow like I have two brain cells. I wanted to be like, You want to see my SAT scores, bi-atch? But whatever, it’s a paycheck, man. And with Mom and Dad at each other about money all the time…”

“Dad still on Mom about selling the house?”

A dark cloud passes over Shaun’s face, and I’m sorry I pressed the issue.

“Yeah. She’s in denial about it,” he adds.

Of course she is, that’s Momma’s way. How can she face losing our home, the house that has been in our family for three generations? Great-grandpa Dash bought it in 1941 with $8,000 cash he carted to the bank in a brown bag and handed to a banker who said, “Look at this Negro with a bag full of bills. How’d you get all this money?”

“?‘Did I ever tell you about how I would deliver the Philadelphia Tribune door-to-door at five years old?’?” I do my best Gigi impression, attempting to lighten things.

He picks up on the joke with his own Gigi impression. “?‘I was a newswoman before you were, Leroya.’?”

Gigi has only told us this story a thousand times. How she earned enough money as a child to contribute a full $100 to the house fund. She joked that the front door was all hers.

We laugh for a minute before we remember that Gigi is in the hospital, and our worries catch up to us.

“Anyway, it’s my fault if they lose the house. If they hadn’t had to help me…” He takes an aggressive bite of a drumstick, working his stress out on the chicken.

Hearing the pain and guilt in his voice makes my heart hurt. “It’s not your fault, Shaun. It was always only a matter of time before they’d have to sell.”

Never mind Shaun’s legal bills—property taxes were skyrocketing with all the white people who’d fled for the suburbs fifty years ago wanting back into the city. Even with me helping as much as I can, their modest salaries as a janitor and nursing home manager, with all they’d borrowed against the mortgage, mean it’s a lost cause, the coming heartbreak inevitable.

The weight of Shaun’s struggle is obvious, like he’s carrying a backpack of bricks. Every time I ask him how he’s really doing, he says the same thing. “It is what it is.” But it’s clearly taken its toll. I hurry to change the subject. “Did you and Staci meet up last night?”

Staci, with an i, and Shaun have been off and on since high school. I give her credit for sticking by him when he had to leave college, but that’s about it.