Just Like Home(27)

“We hope not,” the short white policeman says, giving Vera and her father a smile that’s as reassuring as any lie. “Why don’t we send these two ladies inside, and you can tell us about the last time you saw Laurence?”

Vera’s father grips her shoulders far too tightly but she doesn’t make a sound. After a few seconds, he lets her go.

“Come on inside, Vee,” Daphne says, snapping her fingers. By the time Vera reaches the doorway, her mother’s already inside and out of sight.

Vera knows she’s supposed to go to the kitchen, where her mother will ask her to help with some fiddly, menial aspect of dinner preparation to keep her busy without actually involving her too much in the cooking process. She’ll be tasked with shelling peas or picking thyme leaves from their woody stems, or brushing the dirt from mushrooms with a dry, wadded-up paper towel. Vera knows she’s supposed to do this without being asked.

But Daphne’s already in the kitchen, banging pots and pans around to fill the house with the noise of her displeasure, and it’ll be a few minutes before she notices that she’s alone in there. So Vera lingers just inside the shade of the front door, listening to her father’s conversation with the police.

The short white police officer is speaking. He’s discarded his slow, syrupy talking-to-a-little-kid voice, trading it for gruff directness. “You and Laurence spend a lot of time together outside work?” he asks.

“Not really,” Vera’s father replies. “He was a little young for me to be socializing with, and I’ve got the wife and kid at home, and all.”

“He ever talk to you about his extracurriculars?” This is the high, nasal voice of the tall Black police officer, and it’s the exact same voice he used to speak to Vera before. Because of this, she decides she likes him. “He have a girlfriend, maybe?”

“Oh, I think he had a few,” Vera’s father says, and the three men laugh in a way that makes Vera’s toes curl inside her shoes. One of them mutters the words hound dog, and then they all laugh again.

Vera is holding her breath, leaning as close to the doorframe as she can while staying out of sight, which is why she doesn’t hear her mother coming up behind her. She about jumps out of her skin at the weight of Daphne’s hand at the nape of her neck. Her mother’s grip is tight enough to hurt; the throb of it turns Vera on her heels and steers her toward the kitchen, shoes squeaking on the hardwood.

Vera doesn’t bother to apologize, and her mother doesn’t bother to admonish her. They both already know everything that would need to be said. They go into the kitchen and work in tense silence. Vera sits on a stool that is too tall for her, pulling the tails off shrimp, swinging her feet until her mother tells her to stop kicking the counter because she’ll leave scuffs.

“You shouldn’t be wearing your shoes in the house anyway,” Daphne says. She’s chopping an onion with slow, deliberate strokes of her big kitchen knife, the one that Vera is still not allowed to use. Daphne’s eyes don’t water at the fumes from the onion, but Vera’s do.

“You didn’t give me a chance to take them off,” Vera mutters into her bowl of shrimp tails.

This is a mistake. It’s true, and it’s sound reasoning, but it’s still backtalk. Vera’s mother looks up with sharp, angry eyes that promise a bad night ahead for Vera, the kind of night that involves a tense dissection of her behavior over the dinner table. Vera glares back at her with the courage of a girl who knows that she will be punished, and who knows that her punishment will be unjust—but before either of them can say anything, the front door slams.

They both wait for Vera’s father’s heavy footfalls to fill the house, but the sound doesn’t come. Not for a long time. When it finally does, it’s as slow and deliberate as a pulse.

Francis leans against the kitchen doorframe for a few moments, the way he must have leaned against the front door after he closed it.

His face is gray, his breath labored. He’s got one hand pressed tight to his chest. He looks up at Daphne, and there’s something on his face that Vera doesn’t recognize, something desperate. His eyes are glazed. He is breathing hard through his nose, and sweat darkens the collar of his shirt. Vera has never seen him like this before—he’s like a small, broken, found thing that will need to be fed from an eyedropper and held under a lightbulb for warmth.

Vera is holding a shrimp in the palm of her hand and she reminds herself over and over not to squeeze it in her fist.

“Dad?” It comes out as a whisper, but he hears her. His eyes flash up to meet hers, and there is something animal in them, something raw and ragged.

“Do you want to sit down?” Daphne asks.

He shakes his head hard, like he’s trying to dislodge something from his ears. “No,” he says, and then again, more softly, “no. I’m fine.”

Daphne’s mouth twists a little, tucking itself into a sympathetic frown. “I don’t think so. Vera, go to your room.”

“But—”

“Now. Your father and I need to have a conversation.” Daphne sets down the big knife and wipes her hands on a kitchen towel.

Vera drops the shrimp in her hand onto the countertop. She slides off the stool and leaves the kitchen, her steps heavy and reluctant. When she reaches her father, still braced in the doorway, she pauses.