The Black Kids(92)

Jo walks over and puts her arms around my father, who has tears in his eyes. “Thank you, Daddy.”

Afterward, we all go to Ronnie’s house, my grandma’s house, which still smells of lemons.

The mint-green paint I remember is faded and peeling in several places. The wood trim needs to be replaced. Still, the house is proud, the yard tidy, save for a few scattered fallen lemons. Uncle Ronnie’s not like some people who, after their divorces, let their houses fall apart like their marriages.

“I’m gonna miss this place,” Ronnie says.

Ronnie’s decided he’s going to rent the house out while he and Morgan figure things out in Vegas.

“You don’t have to go,” my father says. “This is your home. Here.”

But I think maybe Ronnie’s decided now it’s his turn to run away.

Our grown-ups go over the insurance paperwork on a dining-room set that looks like it’s been there since my father and uncle were boys kicking each other under the table while doing homework.

A big burn mark shaped like a lake mars the polished wood in the middle. Jo runs her fingers along its edges.

“That’s from when your father was ten and he tried to make a tuna casserole for dinner, but he put it down on the table fresh out the oven without putting something under it,” Morgan says.

She knows all the stories that Jo and I do not. Morgan’s lived in our fathers’ old memories her entire life. I wonder how cramped that must’ve been, growing up with ghosts.

I try to picture my father and uncle as they must’ve been, two little black boys who had to fend for themselves while their mother either worked too hard or lay up in her room, too depressed.

“It’s too quiet in here,” Ronnie says, as though he can hear my thoughts.

He walks over to the record player and puts something on; a swell of strings and wah-wahs before a familiar voice rings out high and clear even through the elderly speakers.

Ronnie and my father both start singing along, moving their bodies percussively and mumbling through the lyrics until they get to the chorus, which they sing loudly so that it echoes off the small walls in passable harmony.

Curtis Mayfield sings about brotherhood, literal and figurative, about black people loving themselves and loving each other.

“Shit, Craig, remember when Mama…”

The both of them start laughing superhard, even though it’s an unfinished thought.

“Go outside,” my father says.

“We’re not ten,” Morgan says.

“Don’t matter,” Ronnie says. “Here.”

He reaches into a hidey-hole in the kitchen containing a seemingly endless supply of hoarded plastic bags, gives us each two, and tells us to pick all the lemons we can from the trees.

“Maybe in Vegas, your dad’ll be able to sing for a living,” I say to Morgan. “Plenty of places for him to audition there.”

“I don’t know,” Morgan says. “He’s kinda old for that now…”

“But maybe?” I say.

“Yeah. You never know…” Jo drifts off elsewhere.

“Do you remember Grandma Shirley at all?” I ask.

Jo surprises me by actually answering. “She was good at chess and smelled like baby powder and wasn’t a good cook. I remember I didn’t like her cooking when we would come over. Daddy said she was too impatient to be a good cook.”

She laughs.

“I didn’t know you remembered her at all.”

“It’s just small things. I was too little to remember that much… Oh! Once, I broke this fancy vase that had belonged to her mother, and Daddy started to yell at me about it, but I remember she didn’t. Instead she held me in her arms while I cried and told me we could put it back together. The two of us.”

“I see her walking around sometimes,” Morgan says after a long pause. “Grandma Shirley, I mean.”

“What? Like Casper?”

“I know what I see.” Morgan pouts, and I think she may actually be serious.

“But does she look like Casper or like a person? Is she a good ghost or a scary ghost?”

Movies and television have taught me that ghosts are people with unfinished business, like in Ghost. Maybe we’re Grandma Shirley’s unfinished business. Maybe our family’s a little like the vase Jo broke, and somehow all of us have to put it back together. From inside the house, I hear Uncle Ronnie and my father laughing together, deep brotherly belly laughs.

Instead of responding to me, Morgan hits me with a lemon, and I duck and hit her right back. Then she, Jo, and I run around the yard pelting one another and laughing while the fruit cracks open on our bodies, flies buzzing around us, our clothes soaked in bittersweet.



* * *




When we get home from Uncle Ronnie’s, Lucia tells me she’s going back to Guatemala to visit Umberto and Roberto. She hasn’t booked a return flight, hasn’t figured out what happens after that.

Lucia has told me all about the beauty of Guatemala—the sun-soaked days spent searching for Mayan artifacts with her cousins; the colorful carpets made of sawdust and flowers and painstakingly worked on by artisans and families alike for the Holy Week processions through colonial ruins; nights spent camping out with her friends on actual volcanoes; standing on the roof of her house in the middle of a lightning storm and looking around in wonder—but all we ever hear about is the blood. Three years ago, an American nun was gang-raped and tortured. Two years ago, an American innkeeper there was beaten and all but decapitated. And this year, a guerrilla married to an American was tortured to death. The only reason it even made the news here is because there was some connection to the United States. Damarís used to squint her eyes at the television whenever these awful things would make their way to our newscasts and say to Lucia, “It’s the Americans.”