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Authors: Victoria Christopher Murray

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BOOK: The Deal, the Dance, and the Devil
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Without looking, I reached to the side to press the electronic button for the window that I’d cracked open. But there wasn’t a button, just a handle.

What?

Oh!

I’d forgotten—this wasn’t the Lexus. I guessed it was going to take me longer than two weeks to get used to this bare-boned car.

Pausing for a moment, I debated whether or not I really wanted to get out. Yeah, the streets were familiar and some memories were good. But once I stepped into my mother’s place, the craziness that I was trying to forget would be replaced by some other kind of madness.

Still, I slid out and strolled toward the house as if I wasn’t fuming. At the front door, I tested the knob, and, like always, the door opened. Why did my mother keep doing this? In this neighborhood, people lived behind doors that held five, six, seven locks. But though my mother had her own security devices, fifty percent of the time she didn’t use them.

I guessed she wasn’t too worried. Criminals would turn right around if they came to this door. It sounded like a riot up in here with the television blasting SpongeBob and my
nephews Taquan, Shuquan, and Rashaun screaming as if they were competing with the TV. The three boys ran and jumped through a maze of furniture, toys, and clothes, shrieking the whole time. It took a moment for them to notice me.

“Auntie Evia! Auntie Evia!”

“Hey, y’all.” I hugged my nephews as they scrambled around my legs. “Who’s watching you guys?”

Without a word, the three pointed to the couch. I hadn’t even noticed my oldest nephew sitting with one of the newest electronics games between his hands.

“Hey, Apollo,” I said, tossing my purse onto the sofa next to my only nephew who didn’t have a rhyming name.

Even though I had greeted Apollo pleasantly, the fourteen-year-old didn’t part his lips. Didn’t acknowledge my presence in any kind of way. I wanted to slap him upside his head, but what good would that do? It wasn’t like he had any home training.

“Evia?” My mother sauntered into the room, wiping her eyes and fluffing out the matted side of her Halle Berry—style pixie cut; I guessed I’d interrupted her nap.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said, adding
“Surprise!”
to my tone.

She was surprised, all right. “What are you doing here?” she kind of growled.

Marilyn Evans was still two years away from fifty, yet she looked ten years older. Maybe it was because she had lived a rock-hard life. According to Marilyn (which is what my brother, sister, and I called her because she said she was too young to have anyone calling her Mama), her difficult days began the moment she was born in Hardtimes, Mississippi.

Yup! Hardtimes. Although she was never able to show it to us on a map, my mother actually wanted us to believe that she was born in that city Stevie Wonder sang about. (Though recently, she changed her story—now, she was born in Kosciusko because of Oprah.)

Anyway, I didn’t know much about my mother’s Southern roots. Only that she’d escaped (her word) when she’d had enough money to flee. (Again, her word.) She was fifteen and her savings were supposed to carry her and her lofty dreams straight to New York City, where she planned to live like her favorite TV character, Mary Tyler Moore. But naïveté and poor planning got Marilyn as far as Washington, D.C.

Undaunted, Marilyn decided to settle in the nation’s capital for as long as it took to earn the rest of the money for that ticket to New York—two weeks, tops.

Two weeks, two months, two years, two decades, and more had passed. I guessed she never garnered enough to make the two-hundred-mile ride up I-95. And it didn’t help that four months after she arrived in D.C., she found herself pregnant—with me.

“I came by to see you,” I answered her. Leaning over to hug her, I paused when she pulled away and dipped into one of the matching winged chairs that we’d bought for her last Christmas.

“Came by to see me?” She tapped a cigarette from the packet. “Why?”

It wasn’t hard to understand my mother’s attitude. Even though I came to this neighborhood every Sunday for church, I hardly ever stopped by to visit. There were lots of reasons why the telephone worked best for me and Marilyn.

She said, “So, you not gonna answer my question? You just gonna sit there?”

“I’m sorry,” I began, “I came by because … I was kinda in the neighborhood.”

She raised her eyebrows, took a hard puff on her cigarette, then stared, as if she was waiting for me to take back that lie.

“Give me that!” Rashaun, the youngest, screamed as he chased his brothers. But the four-year-old was no match for the six- and eight-year-olds who tore through the living room.

I glanced at my mother, sure that at any moment she was going to shut the whole thing down. But she leaned back, her cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, and her eyes squinted, as if she were trying to see the cartoons on the television screen.

So, I took over. “Y’all need to settle down.”

That got my mother talking, “This ain’t your house, Evia; leave ’em boys alone,” she scolded me. “Let those boys be boys.”

There it was—my mother’s brilliant child-rearing philosophy. Boys will be boys.

That’s why out of the three who had come out of her womb, I was the only one with any kind of good sense, and she couldn’t take credit for that. My home training came from Big Mama, her mother, who, thank God, had followed Marilyn to D.C. in time to teach me about life, love, and God.

I took a breath before I asked, “Where’s Cashmere?” thinking that talking about my sister would take me and Marilyn to safer ground. “Why she got you watching her kids today?” Even though I’d tried not to say that with an attitude, my feelings were clear. I couldn’t help it though, because where
was
my sister? It wasn’t like Cashmere had a job or was looking for one. She’d told me plenty of times that she preferred to live off the system because the money she got was almost as much as she could make at any job that she would get without her high school diploma. If that was her philosophy, why wasn’t she here?

“I’m not watching them,” my mother explained. “They moved back here three weeks ago. If you would call or come by, you’d know this.”

Oh, Lawd!

My mother said, “It’s the same ole stuff, but this time, Lamont actually hit her.”

Oh, Lawd!

“He’s still accusing her of sleeping with Bubba,” she explained.

Bubba. That was Rashaun’s father … I think.

Marilyn said, “So I told her to get up on out of there and come home so that I could take care of her and the kids.”

Triple oh, Lawd! How was my mother gonna take care of Cashmere and her kids when she could barely take care of herself?

I needed another change of subject! So I said, “Have you heard from Snake?”

“I wish y’all would stop calling my boy that. That is not the name I gave him.”

So, to please my mother, I said, “I’m sorry. What’s up with Twin?”

Marilyn smiled, as if that was better. She was serious, and she’d been serious when she’d named him, too. No, my brother was not a twin, had never been a twin—there was only one child inside her womb when Twin was born. But she’d
wanted
twins. So …

I shook my head again. You couldn’t get more ghetto than that—except for maybe Cashmere—and her middle name: Three. Marilyn had almost named her three o’ clock because … well, you know.

“Anyway,” I said, “so, Twin’s good?”

Her smile went away. “Good if you call the po-lice picking him up good.”

I rolled my eyes. “He’s in jail.” I wasn’t asking a question, just clarifying. Not that I needed clarity. Of course my brother was in jail. He couldn’t seem to stay out for longer than five months at a time.

Marilyn said, “Yeah, but it wasn’t his fault.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. Someone planted those drugs on him.

“It was a setup,” she said, pushing herself out of the chair and ambling through the maze that her grandchildren had set up with their toys. At the window, she lit a new cigarette and peeked outside. “But I told Twin I’m not getting him out this time. He needs to stop messing with those boys on the corner. They ain’t nothing but bad news; always getting him in trouble.”

I didn’t feel the need to tell my mother that Snake was the leader of that gang who hung out at the corner. She knew that. But if she wanted to live in denial, it wasn’t my place to ask her to pack up and move.

“Whose car you driving? Is it a rental or something?”

For the smallest moment, I considered telling her what the “or something” was, but if I mentioned the voluntary repossession, I’d have to explain everything else. And Adam and I had agreed to keep all of this bad news to ourselves. Not that Adam had to worry about what I would say to my mother—I would never discuss grown folks business with her.

So about the car, all I said was, “Yeah.”

That was good enough for Marilyn. She turned away from the window, her scowl now gone. She smiled with a molasses sweetness, sat down, and whispered, “You think you might be able to give me my money a little early this month? I really need it.”

There were lots of things that troubled me about those words, especially “my money.” I guess to Marilyn, that’s what it was. Adam and I were a regular supplement to her monthly disability check. My mother had been disabled for years—though I never could figure out her exact disability. The one time I asked her what was wrong with her, she told me, “It’s mental. I can’t get my mind to work on working.”

Oh … kay.

Still, she was my mother, so once we were able, we did what
we could to help her. Our first plan was to move her into one of the Maryland suburbs. But she didn’t want to have a thing to do with Upper Marlboro or Waldorf or any other place that wasn’t Barry Farm.

“These are my people here,” she’d told me and Adam when we’d taken her out to dinner, all excited about the house we’d found for her. “I don’t want to be messing with those bougie folks out in PG County.” She shook her head. “Hmph, those black people think they got it better than everyone else.”

Well, those black folks
did
have it better than her, but I wasn’t into begging anyone to take my money. Still, I couldn’t leave my mother out there like that, so Adam and I started sending her a little check—five hundred dollars—on the regular.

My mother cut into my thoughts. “I only need the money ’cause y’all didn’t send anything last month.”

No … we hadn’t.

“And I really need it. You think you’ll be able to double up?”

I didn’t say anything, but my mother didn’t notice.

She kept on, “I’ve got to get Twin out of jail.”

I frowned. “I thought you were going to leave him there?”

Her shoulders hunched as she huffed, “With some money, I can get him out before the weekend. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t do that?”

I wanted to tell her that she’d be the right kind of mother, teaching her son that there were always consequences associated with dumb-ass decisions. But I didn’t say anything because I’d never be able to convince her that Twin was a casualty of her boys-will-be-boys child-rearing philosophy.

“Plus,” my mother continued her case, “I’ve got to help out Cashmere.” I’m sure her pause was meant to be dramatic, because when she spoke again there was a slight tremor in her
voice. “What kind of grandmother would I be if I didn’t take care of my grandkids? And with Christmas coming up and everything,” she sniffed, “these boys don’t have anything.”

Whether it was planned or not, that got me. Not because I approved of my brother’s or sister’s lifestyle. Sometimes I didn’t care about them because through their choices they showed me that they hardly cared about themselves.

But for better or for worse, I did care about my mother. I didn’t want her worrying about anything.

“So?” she said. Her eyes were wide with expectation.

“I don’t know what happened last month.” I stood as I told that lie. “We’ll get that money to you.”

Her smile was back. “Okay. You got anything on you right now?”

I knew exactly how much I had. But still I opened my purse and gave my mother everything—eighteen dollars.

This time when I leaned in to kiss her good-bye, Marilyn held me close. “I really do appreciate you and Adam,” she whispered.

I knew that was the truth. But my mother’s gratitude did not make me feel any better. By the time I kissed my nephews—even Apollo—good-bye, I was feeling sufficiently worse than when I walked in thirty minutes before.

Chapter 3

I
WAS HOPING THAT BY THE
time the four-year-old Kia sputtered through the hills of D.C.’s gold coast, I would’ve found some kind of peace with what had gone down with Shay-Shaunté today. But when I pulled into our three-car garage and stepped inside our home, there was no serenity, not even in the silence.

Maybe it wasn’t calm that I was seeking. I wanted normalcy—the chatter of my children. I wanted the self-absorption of my teenagers and even the broodiness of my ten-year-old. I needed my children to readjust the tempo of my day.

It was Thursday, though, their late afternoon with school activities and Ethan’s golf practice. But a quick glance at my watch told me that I wouldn’t have too long to wait.

I dumped my bag inside the mudroom, then trekked through the house without taking off my shoes. Even though we had a rule—no shoes to ruin the cream-colored carpet—I
didn’t feel like abiding by any kind of tenet today, not even one that I’d set down as the law.

There wasn’t a single sound in the four-thousand-square-foot space, but still I heard my husband. That’s how it was with us—I could feel his heartbeat, and I moved straight to where he was.

I stood at the archway, watching Adam for a moment. He took care of the family finances in this wide-open space lined with overstuffed bookcases, with an oversized mahogany desk in the center. Against the wall, there were a bunch of folding chairs—one for each of the children, plus me.

“I want the twins and Ethan to learn about money,” Adam often said. “They’re growing up very differently than we did. They’ll have money, and they need to learn how to use it wisely.”

BOOK: The Deal, the Dance, and the Devil
12.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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