Family of Lies (9 page)

T
HE DAY ME AND MY GRANDMOTHER MOVED INTO MY DADDY’S CONDO
was the happiest day of my life since my mama died, and it was also the saddest. Some of my friends were happy for me; some were not. I couldn’t believe how the people I’d known all my life could do so much hating.

“I guess you think you better than the rest of us now, huh?” Debbie Martin asked, looking around the spacious living room in the condo. She and her brother Marcus had taken the bus over that Saturday morning in February just to be nosy.

“I don’t know why you think that,” I snapped. I noticed how Marcus kept walking from room to room and looking at all the new stuff we had. He was nineteen and had been in and out of jail since he was fourteen. His specialty was breaking and entering. He had broken into half of the apartments in our old building. Last year he stole a blue suit from the man in the apartment next to ours. Then he had the nerve to wear the same suit to the man’s birthday party a few days later. But Marcus had a few morals. He didn’t rob elderly people, little kids, disabled people, or his close friends. When he knew of a good thing, he told his thug friends and they did the robbing. I didn’t have to worry about him setting us up to get ripped off. Our new building had a security guard on duty twenty-four hours a day, cameras everywhere you looked, and an alarm system. That’s why I didn’t mind him casing our place. We were on the eighteenth floor anyway and unless his friends could fly or crawl up the side of our building, I wasn’t worried. But I was worried about the way Debbie was talking.

“Girl, I can smell the money your daddy spent on all this stuff,” she went on. “I don’t even know how to act around you now.” Debbie didn’t try to hide the fact that she was jealous. The pinched look on her face and the way she kept rolling her eyes said it all. “I bet don’t nothing but white folks live up in this bitch-ass
palace
,” she added nastily, walking around the room, lifting pillows off the couch and feeling the drapes.

“So? I had white friends before. You and me both used to hang out with white girls,” I reminded her.

“Bah! The ones we used to hang with was rednecks. Living with the kind of muckety-muck peckerwoods that live in buildings like this is a whole different ballgame. The first time something get stole, they’ll be accusing you and calling you a nigger.”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “I’ll worry about that when and if it happens,” I said with a laugh.

“Dang! Sarah C, you done come waaaay up in the world!” Marcus exclaimed, strutting back into the room. “That bathroom is hella cool! It’s so spick-and-span, smell so rosy, I was surprised my pee didn’t melt the commode!”

I was glad when Grandma Lilly came into the room from taking her bath in the bathroom connected to her bedroom. We had
three
bathrooms now. I was also glad my grandmother had on one of the fancy robes she had bought when my daddy took us shopping a few days ago.

“Debbie, Marcus, it’s time for you kids to get to stepping,” my grandmother advised, looking at her new watch. “You two don’t need to be out in this neighborhood past a certain hour drawing attention. Especially you, Marcus. Look at all them tattoos up and down your neck! These white folks will call the cops for sure.”

“All right, Miss Cooper. Thanks for inviting us over here,” Debbie said in a wounded voice. “This is the kind of place I can get real comfortable in,” she added, looking around the room some more.

Debbie and Marcus shuffled toward the door, and I walked them out to the elevator. They gave me a hug and each one “borrowed” a hundred dollars from me. My daddy had already started giving me a huge weekly allowance, so my friends expected to share it with me. Every time I got with my friends now, they expected me to pay for everything and I did, from a trip to the movies to a shopping spree in all of the high-end stores in several different malls all in the same day. For one thing, I didn’t want them to think I was stingy. And for another thing, I didn’t want to lose my connection to the world I knew best. Of the few people Daddy had introduced me to so far, I didn’t feel comfortable with them at all. I’d met some of the people who worked for him, some of his friends, but I hadn’t met his wife yet.

“My wife is a lovely woman. But she still needs a little more time to get used to this,” Daddy had told me last night when I asked him for the tenth time when he was going to let me and Grandma Lilly meet his wife. “We’ll all sit down and enjoy a wonderful down-home dinner together at my house.” I noticed he always got a dreamy look on his face when he mentioned his wife.

I wasn’t really that anxious to meet the woman, but I knew that the sooner I did the better. I didn’t expect her to welcome me into her life with open arms after what my mama had done to her. But I was going to try my best to be nice and friendly. Anyway, I was a lot more interested in seeing Daddy’s big house than I was his wife. I think my grandmother felt the same way.

“I’ll be glad when your daddy’s wife is ready to meet us. I can’t wait to tell the folks at bingo about your daddy’s mansion,” Grandma Lilly had said more than once.

Grandma Lilly never got the chance to see my daddy’s mansion or meet the “lovely woman” Daddy was so crazy about. Three days before we were supposed to do that, my beloved grandmother went to sleep and never woke up. I didn’t know she was already dead before I returned to school that Tuesday morning in February, the day after the President’s Day holiday. We’d only been in our new home a couple of weeks. When I got home that night around eight (I’d treated some friends to a movie and dinner after school) and found her still in bed, I knew immediately that something was wrong. My hands were shaking so hard I kept dropping the telephone when I attempted to call my daddy. A woman answered.

“Is this Mrs. Lomax?” I asked in a loud voice. I knew Daddy had a housekeeper and since I’d never spoken to my new stepmother, I didn’t know her voice.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Lomax.”

“Um, I’d like to speak to Mr. Lomax, please.”

“Who are you and why are you calling here for my husband?”

Since this lady sounded so gruff, I lowered my voice to a whimper. “Uh . . . I’m his daughter, ma’am.”

“Oh,” she said. She didn’t sound so gruff now. But she sounded disappointed.

“I need to talk to my daddy right away. It’s real important,” I bleated. My stepmother didn’t say another word. She didn’t even give me a chance to explain why I was calling. About a minute later, my daddy was on the line.

“Lomax speaking. How can I help you?” he said, sounding distant and businesslike. I guess his wife didn’t even tell him that it was
me
calling!

“Daddy, it’s me,” I sobbed. “Grandma Lilly won’t wake up.”

“Sarah? Is your grandmother ill?”

“I don’t know. I just got home a little while ago and it looks like she didn’t get out of bed today. She’s just laying there with her eyes closed. And . . . and she’s real cold and stiff, and she’s not breathing.”

“Oh my God! Don’t you move! I’ll be right there!”

I
HAD PUT OFF MEETING
S
ARAH AS LONG AS
I
COULD.
B
UT WHEN
K
ENNETH
brought her to the house the night her grandmother died, I had no choice. I groaned when I saw her suitcases. My finding out that she existed had been traumatic enough. Her moving in with us meant that I’d have to see her every day, talk to her every day, and worst of all, be her “mother” every day. This whole mess had become unspeakable and unbearable. I didn’t know how I was going to get through this latest development. How I managed to smile at her was a mystery to me. But I did. I even hugged her as soon as she entered the living room.

“Sarah, I’ve been so anxious to meet you,” I declared. I had to hold my breath to keep from smelling that loud cheap hairspray she had saturated her hair with. With her thick curly brown hair and her boxy, corduroy jumper and flat-heeled loafers, she looked like a black Orphan Annie. Why she was dressed in such a pitiful outfit was a mystery to me. What I couldn’t understand was with all the money Kenneth was giving her these days, why was she still shopping in dollar stores?

“Yeah,” she muttered, giving me a distant look.

“It’s just that I’ve been so busy and sick these past few weeks,” I lied. Every time Kenneth had attempted to arrange a meeting, I’d feigned one ailment after another. And he didn’t dare dispute my claim. He didn’t want to lose me (and Lord knows I didn’t want to lose him), so he bent over backward to keep me happy.

Having Cash and his wife under the same roof now gave me more leverage. Whenever a dispute came up between me and Kenneth, they took my side and Kenneth backed down real quick. He knew he had to if he wanted to keep me happy. That was why he didn’t even bat an eye when I told him I was thinking about bringing my cousin Bohannon Harper up from Houston so he could work at one of the stores. Cash and Bo were about ten years younger than me, but we’d always been close. I was the big sister they had always wanted and they were the brothers I used to pray for. Cash was a jackass, but Bo was a sweet, hardworking man who was just as easy to manipulate as Cash. That was fine for me, but other people took advantage of Bo’s easygoing manner too. His wife, Gladys, was a greedy bitch who had him working two jobs to keep her happy. From the complaints I had heard from my poor cousin, even that wasn’t working out. I had to do something for him.

The more of my family members I had around me—the acceptable ones, of course—the easier it was going to be for me to deal with Kenneth’s child. Now that Kenneth had put his daughter in his will, I had to work overtime to make sure she didn’t get what was mine. But last night when I called up Bo and asked him again if he wanted to move to California and work for Kenneth, he told me his wife had suddenly become a “changed woman” and he wanted to stay in Houston to work on his marriage. “I appreciate your generous offer, though, cuz. And I appreciate how you always put family first,” he told me before we ended our conversation.

I used to look forward to family affairs. But that was a long time ago. Now that I had an unfaithful husband and an inconvenient stepdaughter, the word
family
had become like a double-edged sword in my book. I would never look at family the way I used to. That’s why it was so important for me to keep Cash and Bo in my life.

But Kenneth and Sarah were not the only family members I resented these days. I didn’t keep in touch too much with most of my blood relatives either, especially my sisters. Those jealous hussies couldn’t stand the fact that I’d married a wealthy man, and they were still struggling just to make ends meet. It didn’t matter how generous I was to them. They were never satisfied. Last year when I went to Houston, I bought my baby sister Darla a brand-new Altima so she would have a way to go out and look for a job. She let her man talk her into using her car to go visit his mama in Chicago, and he never returned. Since she had let the insurance lapse and she had put the boyfriend’s name on the pink slip, there was nothing she could do. The car was his and she had to go back to riding her bike or using public transportation. When I refused to buy her another car, she stopped speaking to me. My other sisters eventually stopped speaking to me when I stopped sending them designer outfits and money. So now the only family members I helped were the ones who were still loyal to me.

Six months ago, when I went home for my mother’s funeral, two of my sisters didn’t even show up to pay their respects. Nellie, my middle sister, moseyed into the church twenty minutes late. She started whispering into her cell phone as soon as she plopped her bony ass down on the pew next to me. Not once did she shed a tear, and she didn’t turn her phone off until the pallbearers had hauled our mother’s coffin out to the hearse. That really pissed me off.

After my mother’s funeral, I decided I didn’t want to attend another one any time soon unless I had no choice. The minute Kenneth told me that Sarah’s grandmother had suddenly passed, I knew that this was one I wouldn’t be able to get out of.

“Sarah, I am so sorry about your grandmother,” I told her with my arms still around her. “I only wish I could have met her before she died.”

Sarah exhaled and moved back a few steps. “I wish you could have met her too.” She was talking to me but looking at her daddy.

“Uh, Sarah, your stepmother has had a very busy schedule lately and she’s been a little sick,” Kenneth blubbered, mopping sweat off his face with a white handkerchief. “But she’s feeling much better now, so I’m sure she’s going to rearrange a few things on her schedule. Then she can spend time with you and help you get settled in.” He paused and forced a smile. “Now let’s get you upstairs and unpacked so you can pick out something to wear to your granny’s funeral on Saturday.”

Now here I was sitting on the front pew just a few feet from that old woman’s casket. I had only looked at her a few times, and that had been all I could stand. Nothing freaked me out like being in the presence of a dead body. I couldn’t believe how many people actually touched that old woman’s remains. And a few even had the nerve to lean down and kiss her—even Sarah! I couldn’t tell you what all that preacher babbled about or what songs that sorry off-key choir sang. It was all gibberish to me. My mind was a thousand miles away. Well, actually, my mind was only a few miles away. I was wondering what Tony was doing across town. I glanced at my watch and let out a loud sigh.

“Are you all right, sweetheart? You look uncomfortable,” Kenneth whispered.

“I’m fine. But you know how I feel about funerals,” I whispered back.

Sarah occupied the spot on the other side of Kenneth, boo-hooing up a storm. I had been crying a lot, too, but for a different reason. Having that child living in my house was going to be the biggest challenge of my life. Every time I looked at her, I would be reminded of Kenneth’s betrayal.