“Go on in the living room,” I said. “I’l bring it out.”
James headed in the direction of the living room, but Raleigh looked over his shoulder.
“My mother’s not home,” I said.
He gave a disappointed little nod and fol owed my father.
Both James and Raleigh preferred my mother’s company to mine, and I couldn’t quite blame them. They belonged to her. Al three of us did, real y.
In the summer, the four of us enjoyed smal parties on our patio. Knowing the neighbors never complained about the music when James’s wax-slick car was out front, my mother cranked up the console stereo in the living room, so the sounds of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes streamed through the dusty screen door, mingling with James’s cigarette smoke, which kept mosquitoes away. My mother would try to dance with James first, knowing that he wouldn’t. She might twirl around shaking her pretty shoulders and gorgeous hair, cal ing his name, until James would say to Raleigh, “Dance with this beautiful woman for me.”
My job was to keep the glasses fil ed with ice and to mix the gin-and-tonics. With a paring knife, I carved perfect twists of lime. When I dropped the curving rind into my father’s glass, he would kiss my fingers.
While my mother was dancing with Raleigh, she kept her eyes firmly on James. When Raleigh held her waist, she let her torso fal backward, her hair leading the way, laughing until she righted herself quickly. She and I had the same hair, but I hadn’t learned yet to make it move for me. When the music stopped, Raleigh let my mother go, his arms fal ing to his sides. I kept my eyes peeled for that moment, so I could be there, ready with an icy glass for his empty hand.
Mother would leave the dancing area — just a smal space between the rusting railing and the wire patio set — to sit on James’s lap and wrap her arms around his neck. Raleigh usual y sank to the concrete floor where he had just been dancing and leaned himself against the railing, not caring about the rust marks on his shirt. I would sit beside him, leaning my head on his chest. My mother, taking a big drink from James’s gin-andtonic, would look over the rim of the glass and say, “Raleigh, you may be white on the outside, but when the music starts you are one hundred percent American Negro.”
Then Raleigh would blush as red as my mother’s shiny toenails and I wondered what it felt like to live inside such disloyal skin.
The last song was always Bobby Caldwel . When he sang, “Makes me do for love what I would not do,” my mother would close her eyes, and James would touch her eyelids. On those summer nights, my parents lived in a space al by themselves, breathing only each other’s air. I sat beside Raleigh, breathing normal y, and he sat beside me, so stil , as though he were taking in no air at al .
But on the evening that my father came to talk to me about life, my mother wasn’t home, so Raleigh sat on the vinyl couch, drinking water and fooling with the 35mm camera strung around his neck with a red strap. This was before he was serious, when James encouraged his photography because it was a good tie-in for the limo business. They could offer marrying couples a package: photos and a ride.
“Can I get you something else?” I said, hoping James would drink his ice water and leave before Marcus came to pick me up.
“No,” he said. “Not unless you want something for yourself.”
“No,” I said, “I’m fine. What about you, Raleigh? You need something?”
“I need a tripod.”
“Sorry,” I said. “No tripods today.”
My father said, “Just sit down. I want to talk to you. You don’t mind if old Raleigh is in here when we talk, do you?”
“Is there something wrong?”
I can’t say for sure if the talk that came next was prompted by the little circle of skin showing below my col ar bone or if he had visited for the very purpose of explaining to me the benefits of chastity, but he told me again to sit down. I did, with a glance at the clock and a certain busyness of breath.
“Sir?” I said.
“Don’t cal me sir. I feel like an overseer when you cal me sir.”
Raleigh chuckled. “You can cal me sir whenever you want.”
“You going somewhere tonight?” James asked me.
I knew I couldn’t lie. The makeup I could have explained away but not the keyhole blouse. I shrugged. “Sort of.”
“With who?”
“Some people I know. They have a car.”
“Does your mama know about this?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Would you lie to me, Dana?” James said.
“No, sir,” I said, leaning on the last word.
“Jim-Bo,” Raleigh said, “lighten up.” Then he said to me, “We’ve had a couple of drinks. Pour us a couple glasses of that cucumber water, whatever the hel that is. It doesn’t have alcohol, does it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just water mostly.”
“Then we need that,” Raleigh said.
I popped up from my chair, just to escape my father, who was staring at the keyhole like he’d only now noticed that I had developed into a teenager. I’d had my breasts for five years now and my period for four.
