Dead to Her(23)
“Would you like some breakfast, ma’am?” Zelda was over at the walk-in refrigerator, having somehow already been to the store, unpacking individual cartons of odious coconut water, lining them up on the side shelf in pride of place. “I’m going to make Mr. Radford some eggs and home fries.” She was behaving perfectly normally, no hint of how she’d stared down at Keisha the night before. Keisha’s skin prickled as she remembered her still shadow. The brazenness with which she’d been watched.
“It’s too early for me.” She looked at the housekeeper as she meekly emptied the bags. “How did you sleep?”
“Oh, I always sleep like the dead.”
“Really?” Keisha poured herself coffee from the machine. “I was sure I saw you last night. At your window. It was late. I went into the garden for some air. Cream, please.”
“You must be mistaken, ma’am. I was in bed early.” Zelda put the carton of cream on the large island. “Would you like a jug?”
“This is fine.” You lying spying bitch, Keisha thought, even as she said, “It must have been a trick of the light then.” She flashed her best razor smile. What was the woman’s problem? She didn’t like Keisha? So what? It wasn’t her job to like her.
How old was Zelda? she wondered. Old. Fifties, at least. Maybe even over sixty. How long had she worked here? Billy probably had told her, but Keisha often found her thoughts drifting away when Billy was talking. She tried to remember. Twenty years? Or was it more? Had she loved Eleanor too? Did she think Keisha was an insult to the first Mrs. Radford’s memory? Eleanor, Eleanor, Eleanor. The wife who would not be forced from this house, even in a coffin.
But Eleanor was gone and Zelda would get used to it. Now that it was morning and the sun was shining gloriously bright, Keisha was feeling too zesty to let the housekeeper and her nighttime antics bother her, so she took her coffee and her laptop out to the sunroom by the terrace.
She opened up a tab to her Gmail with dread, knowing what she was going to find. There was a message from Dolly sent a couple of days before—“Hope you’re having fun! Is he dead yet?” followed by a couple of cry-laugh emojis and then “Miss ya!” and some kisses. There were three emails from Uncle Yahuba. All wanting money. She had to be a good niece. She knew what she had to do: various levels of implied threat. She sighed and closed them down. How was she supposed to send them money? She had a new credit card, true, but it wasn’t as if Billy was filling her bank account with cash. Why couldn’t they be patient? Why couldn’t they all just leave her alone?
They knew how to play her, how to draw on her insecurities and her dark, confused moods. As ever, the echo of Auntie Ayo’s words, spoken when Keisha was just six years old, not long after they took her in, when she’d seen the ghostly boy, haunted her. You got yourself cursed blood, KeKe, it’s there in the cards, no good will come of you, KeKe. Her mother’s nickname for her, all she remembered of her really. Keisha Kelani, my KeKe. Auntie Ayo and Uncle Yahuba had even taken that from her, and now it was synonymous with her cursed blood.
Was that true or simply something Auntie Ayo had said to stop her blabbing her mouth off at school about the boy? She didn’t want to think about the boy. The boy had never been there. She knew that. They’d told her. The boy was an error of her crazy mind. The boy was the first sign that she was wrong, a bad seed, unbalanced. She deleted the emails. Her family were thousands of miles away. She didn’t want to think about them today. They could wait. They didn’t have a choice.
“Honey?” Billy’s voice, that of the master of the house, echoed through to her. “Hey honey?”
“Coming!” she answered, light and frothy. A good wife. Keep him sweet. She grabbed her coffee and went to the breakfast room, where she found him still drenched in sweat from the treadmill.
“You’re up early,” he said, through his mouthful of eggs and fried potato.
“It’s such a beautiful day.” Keisha took a seat opposite him. “Shame to miss it.” Zelda brought her some orange juice and a croissant even though she’d said she didn’t want breakfast, and then disappeared again, taking the empty carton of coconut water on the table away. Billy always downed it in one long swallow, Keisha noted. Maybe he didn’t much care for the flavor of it either, no matter what he said.
She peeled off the edge of her croissant, not really sure what to do with it as there was no butter or jam on the table, and ate it dry while watching him shovel his food into his mouth. His cheeks were flushed redder than normal, bursting veined beetroots on his face—had he run farther and faster to make up for his inadequacies in the bedroom? Trying to recover his masculinity?
“You’re supposed to dip it in your coffee,” he said, staring at her as crumbs fell down her top. “Like the French do. That’s how Eleanor did it.” He returned to his plate for a moment, easing his irritation with another mouthful of eggs. The pastry stuck to the roof of Keisha’s mouth, and she cringed once more with her ignorance and the hurt of the open comparison with Eleanor.
“Sorry,” she muttered, before tearing off another piece and carefully dipping it into her drink.
“You’ll learn. Anyway, we need to think about our Fourth of July party.” Billy finally rested his fork. “You want to organize it?” He smiled at her as if this were some great offering of trust in her wifely abilities.