The Black Kids(86)

“I forgot about your working there… Did I ever tell you my first job was at a diner?”

I shake my head.

“It was the summer Robert Kennedy died. A girl from work invited me to this party at her house. I didn’t like her that much, I thought she was annoying, but there was a boy I liked who was going to be there. We got drunk, and she had a Ouija board and tried to talk to Robert Kennedy from the dead.”

“What did he say?”

“?‘Hello.’ That’s it. Just hello.” My mother starts to laugh.

Once we played with a Ouija board at Heather’s to try to talk to her bubbe after she died, but we never found out what her bubbe was trying to say because as soon as the pointer moved, we screamed and ran out of the room.

“What happened to the boy you liked?”

“Nothing.” My mother laughs again. “I was too shy… So what happened at prom?”

“Kimberly called me a nigger and pushed me into a pool in front of the whole school.”

“What? Why?”

“Because of a boy.” I pause before I continue. “I messed up. Really bad.”

I hope she doesn’t ask me more. Instead, she grows silent. My mother seems to be coming undone. If normally her curls are perfectly styled and gelled down, today they’re frizzy and frayed. Her foundation has melted with worry. I notice a puckering of the lips I’ve never noticed before; age. It occurs to me that this is the first time in a long time I’ve told her something about myself without telling Lucia first.

“You remember what happened with her and the pool when you were little?”

“Yeah.”

“Your father and I wondered if maybe we’d made a mistake then. Sending you to that school. Raising you where we were raising you. You want things to be better for your kids. I don’t know which better would’ve been best. We always tried to do what we thought was best for you. Everything was always for you.”

She says it like she’s asking my forgiveness. But she’s still a little defensive, kinda.

“Thank you,” I say, and she nods. I start to walk up the stairs, but before I reach the top, I turn around. “You’re not mad at me?”

“You’re more than your mistakes,” my mother says, and I know that in this particular moment, she’s not really talking to me at all.



* * *




“Hey, Daddy.”

In his office, my father sits surrounded by piles of paperwork and several leather-bound reference books. A few overstuffed file folders threaten to slide off the desk, and I quickly grab them before they can leap to their doom.

“I really do have to get more organized one of these days.” He scratches himself right above his eyebrow.

“You really should let Lucia help you before she leaves.”

“I’m afraid if she straightens up, I won’t know where anything is.” He laughs, and his drugstore reading glasses lift up and slide down his face a tad.

I run my hand along the books in his bookshelf, these giant tomes on international accounting and financial trade and global perspectives on economies in transition, blah blah, numbers numbers. Numbers are easier for some people than people, I think. And yet there are always people behind them.

“I’m sorry about Grandma Shirley,” I say. “I wish you had told me before.”

He peers up above his reading glasses before taking them off. “Every day of my life we lived with the awful things that happened to your grandmother, and then the awful stuff in the news. Right in the middle of my childhood, we’re coming home to watch hoses being set on people our own age for wanting to be equal, and the aftermath of people bombing churches and killing little girls. Girls who were even younger than me then…”

His file folders finally fall onto the ground, but he doesn’t rush to fix them.

“When your sister was born, I remember holding her in my arms and thinking I would do anything I could to keep the world from hurting her. Same with you. I wanted to raise you guys without that stuff in your heads. Not that I was ashamed, or that I thought you should be ashamed. We aren’t the ones who should carry that shame. Just not… weighed down by it, I guess.”

He reaches out to hold my hand as he speaks, and I feel like a little kid again. I don’t remember the last time I held on to him like this. He used to say that when I was first born, I was so small he could hold me in one hand.

“I wanted you guys to get to be happy, carefree, even,” he says.

“We were, sometimes. We are…”

Even when we’re sad or scared, somewhere around the corner there’s a bit of joy.

“Hey, you remember me and Jo when we had to evacuate during the wildfires in that gym?”

He starts to laugh.

There were four deer that walked the school grounds back and forth, as though that same ruddy fireman had told even them this place was safe, but they weren’t quite sure how to be there. Outside, the smoke was an orange screen door around the very sun itself. The deer didn’t run through the grounds or cause any damage; instead, they kept to themselves in the farthest corner of the field, away from people, away from the fire, evacuees like us. A bunch of us kids tried to creep closer, but our adults pulled us by our collars, away.

“Leave them be,” they said.