Memphis(58)

Uncle Bird’s voice was unmistakable. He had a sharp Chicago slant to his vowels. Ma. Pa. I had spent years listening to him and my dad talk on the phone long into the night, the both of them howling like hyenas. My father’s Chicago accent blossoming on those calls: mane instead of man.

Daddy wore his tan Marine Corps uniform, his cap in his hands. My uncle Bird, Daddy’s clone except a head shorter, wore a black leather jacket and balanced a toothpick between his pursed lips. Even though they stood before me, it was hard for me to register what I was seeing.

Six years. It had been six years since I had seen Daddy. Every time I thought of him, more often than I wanted to admit, I had pushed the memory away from me. Picked up a pencil. Lost myself on the page. But here he was, in front of me. And he looked so heartbreakingly familiar, down on one knee, rubbing our dog’s belly.

“Hey, girl,” he cooed. He glanced up at me.

It hurt to look at his smile.

We stared at each other for a long time. No words came; I didn’t smile back.

He shifted his focus to my mom, who stood in the parlor with her arms folded over each other. “So, you’re alive,” she said. Mama was cold rage. She glared at him. I suspect that if her eyes could have turned into bullets, she would have let them.

Uncle Bird walked over and kissed Mama, sheepishly, lightly, on the cheek. He took off his leather cap and held it in his hands, shuffled his feet. “It was hell getting here, Meer,” he said.

“I bet,” said my Auntie August. I could see that she still kept an eye on the Remington she’d left by the door.

Uncle Bird pointed his cap at Daddy, who was still stroking Wolf, but his eyes were trained on me and Mama. “And it was all because this nigga didn’t kill enough Hajis in the first damn war.”

“Don’t say that,” I snapped.

History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave. Mornings in class with Mr. Harrison had taught me that Americans had reduced the world’s most elite soldiers to a single word: Jap. I had grown up hearing my father’s Marine friends, even Uncle Mazz, use Haji. I wasn’t having any of it in this house. I was prepared to deal with the fallout, the blowback of sassing an elder and kin, but—To hell with it, I thought. I wasn’t having any of that low ignorance up in my house. Especially not from him.

“Niece!” My uncle crossed the room in a few wide strides, lifted me off the floor, and spun me before setting me down. Felt like something my daddy would have done, should have done, except that neither of us seemed able to bridge the six years of near-silence that lay heavy between us. My anger subsided in my uncle’s embrace. He smelled like him, his brother. I took a deep whiff of sandalwood, cigarettes, and shoe polish.

“Looking just like your daddy. Look at them long spider legs. And you dark as night, girl,” he said.

I blushed.

“And what the hell is wrong with that?” Auntie August rested the shotgun against the front door.

Uncle Bird raised his hands in capitulation. “Not a damn thing. The girl is beautiful. It is well known that North women can stop traffic. Speaking of, you wouldn’t believe the traffic out of Virginia. Nothing I ever seen before. Standstill. Hell, our drive took us all day, all night.

“Now, Meer.” My uncle turned to face Mama. “I know you and my brother got, um, words need saying. That’s fine. But a cup of coffee? Slice of one of your pies? What you say?”

Mama refused to brew Daddy any coffee, so Auntie August put on a pot. Mama’s silent rage was understandable. She had raised us for six years without any help from him. Three Christmases back, she had opened an envelope filled with five one-hundred-dollar bills and sent it right back to him with a note that read, “Our sorrow is priceless.”

I, too, was stalwart in my contempt. All of us now seated at the kitchen booth, I held my mug and sipped my coffee, never taking a raised eyebrow off Daddy, seated across from me. As a girl, I had loved him more than I loved drawing. At fifteen, I realized he had brought us nothing but pain. And recently he had scared Mya near to death so that the girl wouldn’t move for three days. In my brewing antipathy, I had figured that if the planes fell, it was somehow his fault.

Mama’s arms never left their crossed position. Her eyes were daggers. She sat next to me at our round table and glared at Daddy. Uncle Bird and Auntie August were busy brewing coffee and chain-smoking by the stove.

Silence grew around us, heavy with my mother’s and my unspoken accusations. It was a wonder how Mya stayed asleep with all the earlier commotion in the parlor. It was the first the girl had slept in some days, so Mama had decided not to wake her.

Mya had been near comatose those three days. Days before, when she had refused to move, I took the television that usually sat on top of the microwave, unplugged it, brought it into the quilting room, and put on her favorite show. Mya was just a small brown face in a cocoon of blankets. She did not rouse when I maneuvered the television set so it rested in her eyesight. Even Sailor Moon’s opening theme song did not rouse her.

Uncle Bird was the only person who seemed at ease. He played house. Cigarette in his mouth, he served Mama a cup of hot coffee, asked if she wanted any cream.

“She takes hers black, lot of sugar,” Daddy said quickly, sounding grateful to have something to say. The intimacy of his voice unsettled me.

Then Mama did something so heroic. She reached across the Formica kitchen table, took a long cigarette from August’s pack, lit it, and exhaled a plume of smoke in Daddy’s face.