“I don’t want see one,” she said. “I just wanted to be invited somewhere.”
“I go places with my mother,” I said. “But not any place special.”
Ronalda looked at me as though she couldn’t imagine an unspecial mother-daughter outing. It was like I had told her that I had money, but not the kind you could spend.
“Real y,” I said.
Ronalda put her hand in my hair again. “Did you bring a brush?”
I knelt on the tile floor between her knees while Ronalda sat up on the desk pul ing the brush through my hair. Al my life people have wanted to play in my head. On the very first day of first grade, the teacher took me into the lounge and undid my ponytails. Ronalda wanted to know if I was tender-headed. I murmured that I wasn’t, resting my face on her thigh.
“Tel me what you were about to tel me,” she said. The bristles against my scalp felt firm and good. I knew she was probably brushing out my curls, but I didn’t ask her to stop. “Tel me. Tel me about your mother.”
It was as though she had pul ed the truth out of my head. “I’m il egitimate.”
“Join the club,” said Ronalda.
“No,” I said. “It’s worse. I’m a secret.”
“Oh,” Ronalda said. “You’re an outside child?”
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“That’s okay,” she said. “A lot of people are.”
I let go of a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it. I twisted to look at her, but if she knew something important had passed between us, her face didn’t show it.
I asked her, “Was your father married to your stepmother when you were born?”
She shook her head. “No. They got together back when they were both living in Indy. He got her pregnant the night before he left to go to Notre Dame.”
“At least he claims you. I wonder sometimes what would happen to me if my mother passed away. I wonder if my father would take me in.”
She stopped brushing. The floor was cold under me, but I could feel the warmth of Ronalda’s thigh through her jeans. I wanted another of the sweet wine coolers, but I couldn’t ask for it because I had somehow forgotten how to speak.
“Don’t cry,” Ronalda said. “I have a secret, too. My mother’s not real y dead. I just tel people that. She’s alive, she’s just negligent.” She pronounced the word careful y, as though she were reading it from a legal document. “The principal at my school cal ed child services on her. She left me by myself for two weeks. While she was gone is when I broke my leg, trying to wear heels, and there was no one to come and pick me up at the school. The principal put two and two together and the next thing I knew, my daddy drove al the way to Indy and carried me back to Atlanta with him. He drove al night and it was snowing bad, bad, bad.”
“Where was your mama gone to?”
“I don’t know. She even took the hot comb. I asked her when she was coming back and she said, ‘Tomorrow,’ but I knew she was lying when she started putting my little brother’s stuff in a bag, too.
“She loved that little boy like nothing in the world. Before he was born, she used to drink, drink, drink! She even drank Crown Royal when she was pregnant with me. I’m lucky I didn’t get born cross-eyed, retarded, or something. But after Corey, it was like she fel stupid in love with him. She cut out the drinking, stopped slapping people around. She even made hot cocoa a couple of times on Sundays. Before Corey, I thought that my mama just didn’t like kids, but when Corey was born and I saw the way she carried on about him, I saw that it wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, she just didn’t like me.”
“She likes you,” I said. “She’s your mother. Everybody’s mother likes them.”
“I think maybe she loves me,” Ronalda said. “I mean, she kept food in the fridge and a roof over my head. But she never liked me. Now, my little brother, she could just eat him up. That’s why she took him with her when she left.”
“It’s not like that,” I told her. “You get equal love.”
“Do you have a brother?” Ronalda asked.
I said no.
“If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she wil show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you wil never get over it. You wil be lonely for the rest of your life.”
I had no response for her. I didn’t know how my mother would react to a boy in our lives, but I knew that my father always wanted a son. James was at our apartment when Laverne went into labor with Chaurisse, six weeks early. Raleigh came to the house, and James stood up from my mother’s table, leaving his pound cake half-eaten. My mother tel s me that she fel on her knees beside my bassinette and prayed that Laverne not give birth to a boy. “A healthy daughter is what I asked the Lord to give. That wouldn’t put too much pul on his heart.”
“My father has another kid, but a girl,” I said. “With his wife.”
“Count your blessings,” Ronalda said. “And hope they don’t have any more kids. You don’t want to go through what I been through.”
I tried to tel myself that she was right, that I was lucky. But second best is second best, no matter the reason why.
To Ronalda I said, “Let’s have another cooler.”
