The Black Kids(78)

“Where is she?” he asks.

Jo rushes down the stairs and practically throws herself into Harrison’s arms as though none of the rest of us are here, and even if nothing else makes sense right now, the two of them fit together in each other’s arms like the halves of a locket. It seems to me that’s love, but what the hell do I know?

“You were supposed to keep her safe,” my father says to Harrison.

“I was sleeping, and when I woke up, she was just gone.” Harrison looks to be almost on the verge of tears. He awkwardly holds out his hand to shake my father’s and my father doesn’t shake it back, but sighs and heads back to the living room, Jo and Harrison following behind.

After hearing about Grandma Shirley, we’re drained and full of so much sad that we don’t have the space to argue, so instead we order pizza. We eat on paper plates in front of the television, watching a helicopter fly over South Central. The fires are almost out. Now, instead of Vietnam, it looks a little like the pictures in the history books of London after the Blitz. The newscasters bemoan the fate of several architecturally significant buildings that perished or were damaged in the flames like the Bullocks Wilshire, which people care about ’cause it used to serve famous people back in the day and it’s in movies and stuff, but honestly it’s kinda ugly.

After dinner, Jo and Harrison perform one of their songs for us with a guitar that Jo had in the garage from exactly two years of lessons, and Uncle Ronnie finds the harmony and joins in. Morgan rests her heavy-ass head against me so that her stray curls tickle my cheek and go up my nose. Across the room, my dad reaches over to grab my mother’s hand while they listen.



* * *




It’s decided that Harrison will sleep in the actual guest room, which is way on the other side of the house. Uncle Ronnie’s gonna sleep in Jo’s room so he can call out to one of us for assistance if he needs it. Jo tries to argue that since they’re married, she and Harrison should stay in the same bedroom, but my parents say that Jo and Harrison are very lucky that they even let Harrison in the house given the situation, much less stay the night, and it’s their house, their rules, which is how they shut down anything and everything—including marital bed-sharing, apparently. It’s also decided that Jo, Morgan, and I are gonna share my bed. I am not consulted on any of these decisions.

Morgan says, “But I’m a guest.”

“You’re not a guest, you’re a cousin,” Jo says with a pout, and it’s settled.

While Jo brushes her teeth, Morgan and I tumble into my bed. My cousin and I haven’t shared a bed in forever, not since that first time she and Tonya came to visit and we had the fight that resulted in the unfortunate biting. Her feet are freezing. I tell her so, and she places them on my calves until I yelp and she giggles.

“I’m sorry we’re not close,” I say. “I wish we were closer.”

“It’s not your fault,” Morgan says. “It’s just family history.”

“How did our grandmother die?” I ask Morgan. “Nobody’s ever told me that part.”

So she does.

My father’s mother killed herself on a Sunday several years after I was born. The day before, Uncle Ronnie and the family had been over to dinner. Morgan said that, according to her sister, Tanya, my grandmother hadn’t seemed that different. She’d made Uncle Ronnie’s favorite dinner—lamb chops with a peach glaze, black-eyed peas, and broccoli. She’d yelled at Tanya to eat her broccoli. She seemed happy enough; the store was struggling, but wasn’t it always? When they were getting ready to leave, she begged them to stay a bit later, Morgan remembers. Ronnie and the girls wanted to stay, but Auntie Eudora reminded him that the girls had to sing in church the next morning. Morgan remembers them arguing over it in the car on the way home. Eudora was defensive. Hadn’t Grandma Shirley always been the push and pull of a wave? Ronnie was a grown man now. Time to think of his life, his happiness, his family. Besides, where was my father in all of this? We had the money to deal with this sort of thing, and we never came around. Why did Ronnie and Eudora always have to be the ones to deal with her? The next day my grandmother tidied up her entire house, put on her finest outfit, and pinned her hair into a chignon with her favorite hairpin. Then she shot herself with one of my late grandfather’s old pistols.

Anyhow, as Morgan tells it, Ronnie kinda blamed my dad and my dad kinda blamed Ronnie, and that’s how we fell apart.

I think of Jo, and how she seems to go back and forth like a seismograph, extreme in kinda the exact way everybody describes Grandma Shirley.

“We gotta be careful, you know,” Morgan whispers, and taps on her head. “It might be in us, too.”



* * *




Later, after our grown-ups have fallen asleep, Jo finally crawls into bed with Morgan and me, and the three of us gleam together under the moonlight.

“She kicks,” I warn Morgan.

“Good thing she’s next to you.”

We laugh, and eventually the room goes quiet except for the faint howl of a coyote outside, followed a few seconds later by a whole chorus of them.

“Jo?” Morgan cuts through the silence.

“Yeah?”

“We’re here. We’re alive, and we got each other. We keep surviving. That’s not nothing, right?” Morgan whispers.