imagined my mother sitting in the car looking at her watch. Maybe she
would come looking for me.
Grandfather final y emerged from the house fol owed by a woman who carried a squirming baby. She was older than I was but younger than my mother. Her curls, held back with silver clips, were dinted where she had fastened the rol ers.
“What is it, Luster?” she asked.
Grandfather said, “I want you to give this young lady directions to the King Center. She’s lost, and you know that I am forgetful.”
“Since when have you been forgetful?” she said in a tone that was half daughter and half something else. She shifted the squirming baby from one hip to the other. The baby, a boy, was chubby with a shiny face. He cooed at me.
“Look at him,” his mother said. “Flirting already.”
“Let me hold him,” Grandfather said. “His name is Anthony.”
I have thought back on this moment, as I have on many such moments of my life, and wondered why it is that I have been so careful with other people’s secrets. My grandfather spoke to me for only a minute or so before deciding that I was the type of person to keep quiet and pretend to be a stranger before his new wife and son. At the time, I was a little bit flattered to be the sentinel of information. My grandfather’s wife, pointing the way to the King Center, thought she was happy. She thought she knew her husband, but I knew things that she didn’t.
She was like my own mother, who thought she knew me but didn’t know that I’d seen Marcus again, just for a couple hours, in Jamal Dixon’s rec room. We drank peppermint schnapps this time, and I had to close my eyes against the same poster of Jayne Kennedy. She didn’t know that Ronalda and I took pee-in-a-cup pregnancy tests every month, and she didn’t know that I memorized James’s unlisted home number and cal ed sometimes just to hear Chaurisse’s voice. I suppose Mother and I were almost even now. Before the day I poured jel y beans onto the carpet, I had thought that I knew my mother, too. But when she and James confronted me about Marcus, she acted like the girl half of a couple and treated me like a disposable friend.
After the woman finished talking and pointing, I thanked her and walked away.
“Good-bye, sir,” I said to my grandfather, who had picked up his clippers again and was chopping hard at the bushes. He didn’t say good-bye, but he gave a swift, efficient nod of his head. The flying twigs and leaves surrounded him like a swarm.
BACK AT THE CAR, my mother was antsy, swiveling her head, biting her lips. She thought of herself as looking like her mother. Having never met my grandmother or seen a picture, I had to take her word for it. But in this agitated state, I could see that she took after her father as wel . She had his same chin, a little weak but stubborn, and her shoulders carried the same slump of sadness. If I were to ask her, she would say that it’s because they both lost Flora, but my guess is that it also comes from having lost each other.
“Did you talk to him?” she wanted to know.
“I said ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ same as last year.”
She nodded, waiting for whatever was coming next.
“That’s it,” I said.
“Dana,” my mother said. “Don’t lie to me, okay?” She didn’t say it as a threat, but just as an instruction. “You have to tel me the truth. I need information.”
For a moment, I hesitated. It was as though tel ing my mother what I had seen would have negated the moment I shared with my grandfather. It excited me to think of the minute or so I stood there sharing a secret that he couldn’t share with his young wife, the mother of his wiggly baby.
“Nothing happened.”
“Something happened,” my mother said, starting the car. “Don’t lie to me. I can’t have you lying to me.” Her voice was different now; she was trying to reason with me. “Just tel me.”
“We talked for a minute,” I said.
“Did he recognize you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Listen. Think about this. If he recognized you, if he knew who you were, it wasn’t that he knew you were yourself, Dana. If he knew you, he thought about you as my child.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Tel me,” my mother said. “Did he ask your name?”
“No, ma’am.” I sighed. “He didn’t.”
“Exactly,” my mother said. “Now tel me what happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“It’s good for us to share what we know,” my mother said.
“It’s what makes us close.”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“Then what took you so long?”
“I wasn’t gone a long time.”
My mother hit the steering wheel with the heels of her hands. “Why are you doing this to me? Is it because I
