as well, some of whom I recognized from the street corners.
Now he picks at his food.
I know what he’s thinking. White people know they don’t have no business serving fried chicken.
“Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to,” he sings from the old-school music I listen to on FM98 sometimes, and I reprimand him though I want to laugh. Grandma Martha stops me.
“Let him be a child,” she says. “You only have a few more years of it left. You better enjoy it because then they’re old and”—she gestures around the long table—“well, you’re left by your lonesome,” she finishes.
“You have us,” I whisper.
“Oh, sure,” she says. “I only meant, when I bought this table, I imagined I’d have my children around it forever, surrounding me, into my old age, but—” her face loosens and drags and then she picks it back up in a flash. “But here’s to new connections.” She lifts her glass of soda water, and I lift the gin and tonic I crafted, and King lifts his chocolate milk, and we clink them all together and I catch him smiling.
That night as I’m turning down her bed, Grandma Martha asks me to sit on the wicker bedroom bench across from her.
“This is so nice.” She extends her legs and pulls them back in in soft motions. She’s taken her medical alert system off and placed it on her dresser.
“Yeah, I mean your house is out of this world,” I say. The bedroom is immaculate, and about the size of my old apartment. There’s a cream-colored chaise lounge in the corner, a fireplace with a white marble mantel, a gold-framed mirror to my left.
“I’m not talking about that,” she says. “I’m talking about you.” She dips her hand down toward the room where King is staying. “The family. The life you built. King is so cared for, he’s so happy. I tried to do that with your dad, but I don’t think I got it right. I spoiled him is the thing,” she goes on. “He never had to work for anything, and look where it got him; I only hear from him every few months, and even then it’s just a five-minute call. Every year it’s a different woman. I never thought your mother was the right one, but . . .” she trails off, then starts right back up again, “at least there was you to care for.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t around more, when you were growing up. You needed that influence, but I was trying to be a good wife. I was too caught up with the times. You know things were so different back then, but the child, the child just needs love. The child doesn’t see color, that’s what I’d always tell your grandfather but he couldn’t grasp it.”
If she wants forgiveness, I’m not ready to extend it, and I don’t say a word. I’m here though, and that’s something.
“And your father,” she goes on. “I never told anyone this, there was such a stigma around infertility back then, but it took me years to conceive him. It was terrible, heart-wrenching, almost wrecked my marriage from the inside out. I thought we wouldn’t make it through, but then, I came out with this perfect little baby.” She shakes her head at the memory. “That’s why I clung to him so.”
“Anyway,” she scrunches her face up in delight, “when I was a little girl, we’d run through the fields at night with our gentlemen callers, slip our hands in theirs. They’d try for second base, and we’d allow it, but we’d make them fight. Everybody looked up to Daddy. Even men his own age didn’t call him by his first name. Mr. Dufrene, they said. And the boys, well, they all wanted to be seen with a Dufrene girl.” She smiles. “All of them,” she repeats. “They’d start sniffing around once we turned thirteen, and after that we were never alone.”
I had brought the dinner’s gin and tonic upstairs with me, and I’m grateful for that decision now. I take a few sips; I wasn’t prepared for the stroll down memory lane is all.
She points to her jewelry box, and I lean over toward her bureau and pass it to her. She lifts a diamond necklace from it.
“You like this?” she asks.
“Very much,” I say. My mama had found religion in her New Age church and since then she’d say we had different strains of ourselves in the universe, like there was me here sitting with Grandma Martha, but there was the other version of myself who had finished college in four years, not seven, who didn’t eat mint chocolate chip ice cream at night, who married the right man, or at least divorced King’s daddy sooner. There was the version of myself who knew how beautiful I was, how smart, how kind. A version of myself who didn’t need an alarm clock because she had ambition ringing through her bones, and that woman attended balls where she wore that diamond necklace.
“It’s yours,” Grandma Martha says now.
“No, no way in the world,” I say shaking my head. “I could never. That’s not what this is,” I add just to be clear.
She stretches her cheeks in a quiet smile. “I was going to give it to you anyway. It will look so nice against your beautiful brown skin, and the other grandchildren, well, they don’t deserve the pot I piss in to be frank.”
I laugh. “But Grandma Martha, I saw the photo of you at your husband’s, at Grandfather’s, swearing in,” I correct myself. “You wore it then and it was beautiful. You might want to remember it that way.”
She shakes her head. “There will be a time coming real soon when I’ll be beneath the dirt and you’ll be above it, and there’s no jewelry in the world that’s going to spring me back up again, now is there?”
I don’t know what to say to that. She talks like this sometimes and I don’t like it. I hadn’t grown up with her but I am getting used to leaning on her, more and more each year.
“All right, Grandma.” I stand and kiss her cheek. “I’m just a floor away.”
I turn down her lights.
I check in on King on my way to my own room.
He’s unpacking his shirts, hanging them in the closet, but he looks like he’s been crying.
I pull him toward the bed and sit down beside him.
“It’s going to be all right,” I say.
“No, it’s not,” he says, twisting his dredlocks in a frenzy like he does when he’s concentrating or nervous, or sad. “I’m telling you, I have a bad feeling about this house. Didn’t you feel it when you walked in? It’s like walking into a refrigerator and shutting the door behind you.” He starts to whisper. “I have a bad feeling about her.” He nods in Grandma’s direction.
“About your great-grandmother?” I ask. “She’s family.”
“Not all kinfolk is skinfolk,” he says.
I laugh at that. “Boy, it’s supposed to be the other way around.”
“Nah, think about it, Mama.”
“Look,” I say. “Give it a month? If you don’t like it after that, we can figure out our next steps.”
He pauses.
“Fine, Mama,” he says.
He’s
