Charlene's Choice

by Tasha Hart

  “Who’s the spoobie,” the older woman hisses in what I’m sure she thinks is a whisper.

  “That’s Logan. He’s a friend.”

  “What’s a spoobie?” I murmur.

  “It’s mom’s word for…” Charlene grimaces.

  “White folks, Logan.” Those yellowed eyes lock on me. “Spoobies is white folks.”

  “Alright, mama, come on. Let’s get you home, okay?” Without even questioning, I jog to the car and pull open the back door. As if she were handling a child, Charlene coaxes her mother up and helps her teeter unsteadily across the sidewalk.

  The thing that keeps surprising me is how calm Charlene’s tone is as she handles her mother. This woman is not the most cooperative, and Charlene just guides her along with patience and care. It’s actually pretty dazzling to see. If this is how she handles this kind of situation, she must really be something.

  “This is a nice car,” Mrs. Johnson blurts as we roll her into the back seat.

  “Thanks,” I say. Charlene has tucked herself into the back with her mother and cradles her mom’s head in her lap. I can’t read her face, but she looks more resigned than anything. As soon as we start moving, the situation gets more complicated.

  “I’m gonna be sick, Char.”

  “Hang on, mama.” Then she looks up at me, “how quickly can you get us home?”

  “Pretty quickly,” I say.

  I don’t exactly run the stop signs, but if a cop saw me, they might disagree. Charlene is giving me directions over my shoulder and trying to keep her mother from ruining the upholstery in my back seat. If we can manage it, she’ll deserve a trophy.

  What I keep thinking is: she doesn’t have to do this. I can understand the duty she feels, but watching the complaining woman curled on her side in the back, I keep asking myself if I would have the same fortitude in this situation. The more I look at Charlene, the more impressed I become. She’s balancing a lot and manages to do it with a pretty amazing amount of grace.

  “This is it!” We pull to a stop out front of an apartment building not a moment too soon. The backdoor swings open, Mrs. Johnson lurches forward and paints the sidewalk. It’s not pretty.

  “That was close,” I mutter under my breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlene calls out as her mother finishes up. “This is awful.”

  “Hey,” I get her to look me in the eye. “This is nothing. It’s okay.” And it really is. I have no doubt this is awful for her, but the way she’s handling it fills me with admiration. I would do anything for this woman.

  It’s a good thing I think that, because manhandling a drunk lady up several flights of stairs is no picnic. It seems like every elevator in this part of the city is out of service. For her part, Charlene’s mother seems bound and determined to make the climb difficult for us, despite the fact that she keeps protesting that she’s helping.

  Isn’t that always the way it is with drunk people? I find myself thinking back to Tyler on the night I met Charlene, and it’s not pretty. Still, if he hadn’t made such a mess of himself, I might never have gotten to know the woman beside me. Maybe I should send him a card, wherever he is. We get to the landing, and I can see a door cracked open and two girls peeking out.

  “Hey, Reema, get the door to mama’s room open, okay?” Charlene directs one of the girls.

  “’Kay.” She bounds off, and the door swings open. I don’t know what I expected, but the place is spotless. Clearly, Charlene has been over recently.

  “Man, it’s good to be home,” slurs out of Mrs. Johnson, and then it’s like the lights get turned out. The woman goes dead weight, in a full-on pass out.

  “Well,” I say, “at least we made it up the stairs.”

  Putting mama to bed becomes my job, so Charlene can run the show getting her sisters ready for school. They’re probably going to miss the first hour, but that’s not terrible, all things considered. The bedroom is up another flight of steps, so I just lift Mrs. Johnson and carry her.

  I roll the drunk woman into bed and pull the sheets up. She settles into a snore as soon as her head hits the pillow. Taking a moment to look at her, it dawns on me that this woman is probably only in her early forties. No wonder Charlene was in such a panic this morning–I’m looking at the portrait of exactly what she doesn’t want to become.

  “I’m ready!” I turn around to see an absolutely adorable little girl standing with her arms up in her best “ta-da” pose. This kid has Charlene’s smile, and is cuter than a room full of kittens.

  “That’s a pretty dress! Did you pick that out?” She nods, beaming at me. “Well, it’s very nice.”

  “F’ank you.”

  “You want to go down and see if your sisters are as ready as you are?”

  “Uh huh!” Without hesitation, she takes my hand. Almost on its own, a thought flashes across my mind: I could get used to this. It almost makes me stop, as I look down at the little girl swinging her arm. Part of me nearly chases the thought away, but then I really lean back and let it settle over me.

  It’s true in a way I never expected, but suddenly it seems entirely natural. I could really get used to this.

  Fourteen

  Charlene

  Logan’s just coming down the stairs from taking mama up to bed when Reema gives me the Eye. “Who even is this guy, anyway?” Reema talks intentionally loud so Logan will hear.

  “Got your backpack?” I ignore her question. This thing with Logan is feeling pretty serious pretty fast, but I don’t want to go scaring him with the whole meet-the-family routine. It’s only because he’d been so damn stubborn about helping me out earlier that he’s here at all.

  Under normal circumstances, I never would have chosen to rush this part. My sisters are too important to me, and Logan… well, he’s become important to me, too, even more than I’ve admitted aloud. But I know this is the kind of thing that makes some men freeze and run, and I want to give him the option of a little anonymity.

  Also, there’s a part of me that wants to protect Reema, in case this isn’t quite as serious as Logan’s made it sound. As I’ve been hoping. Sure, maybe I’m protecting myself just as much.

  Logan, though—he’s not one for pumping the brakes. “I’m Char’s boyfriend.” He’s all smiling and confident. Like he’s proud of it, and even prouder that he knows I won’t disagree.

  I don’t.

  Reema, however, gives him a dubious set of elevator eyes, hums with a degree of shade you normally only get out of grown-ass women, and I know she’s thinking, Yeah, we’ll see.

  Precocious, this one.

  “Go get on your shoes,” I tell her, giving her a nudge so that she’ll scoot. “You wanna be late for school?”

  Luckily, she doesn’t resist and finishes getting all her gear together. Logan, bless him, takes Layla under the arms and holds her expertly on his hip. She’s less dubious about him than Reema, seems already to be warming up and babbling with sleepy glee in his ear.

  “Are we taking Layla?” I ask him, curious.

  “She’s blacked out,” Logan says in a low voice, nodding upstairs. “I don’t think it’s safe to leave the baby without someone who’s not in a state to look after her.”

  “We’ll need a car seat if we’re taking her,” I tell him, expecting him to blanch at the thought of loading up a booster in the back of his flashy Beemer, but he only shrugs and holds out his hand.

  “Do you have a key to your mom’s car? I could load the seat in while your sister gets ready.”

  It isn’t empty talk, either. By the time I finish getting Reema all ready, Logan has nearly got the whole seat installed, though it’s a little crooked. I shift him aside with a bump of my hip against his leg, finish getting the seat all buckled in, and together Logan and I settle Layla into it nice and snug.

  “I nearly had it figured out myself,” he says, proud, as he gets into the driver’s seat and Reema climbs in the back, next to Layla.

  “Yeah, nearly,” I t
ease.

  We get Reema to school, thank God, and I think Logan is going to turn back toward my mama’s house but instead he starts taking us uptown. “You lost?” I ask him.

  “I thought we might do some shopping,” he says, easy as anything.

  “Shopping?”

  “Would you like that, Layla?” He glances into his rear-view mirror and flashes a cheesy smile at the toddler. She isn’t visible, of course, in the turned-back car seat, but he still has this goofy look on his face, and I realize this guy must love kids. It’s the kind of thing you can’t fake, even to make yourself look good to a girl, and it’s also the kind of thing that makes me dangerously weak in the knees.

  So does a guy who’s not afraid to drop money on my family, which it turns out is also part of Logan’s thing. We spend the day out and about with Layla, going to toy stores and bookstores and picking up things for her and Reema both. When there’s something that catches Layla’s eye or that she coos over, Logan doesn’t so much as glance at the price tag. He just drops it in our basket.

  It all makes me a little suspicious, if I’m honest, but I’m not about to turn down anything for my sisters. When the shopping’s done it’s past lunchtime, and Logan takes Layla and me to a nice little bistro, sets her carefully in one of the restaurant high chairs, keeping his shoe on the low crossbar to make sure the rickety thing doesn’t overbalance even with her most enthusiastic wiggles and lurches, and even helps me feed her applesauce. After that, we spend a little while in the park, and Layla runs unsteadily around with some other toddlers for a while and then crashes hard in her seat when we make it back to the car.

  By that time, it’s the end of the school day, so we pick Reema up and go to dinner.

  “My treat,” Logan insists.

  The dinner and the sack full of goodies he bought her have gone quite a long way toward warming Reema up to Logan, and by the time the big milkshake she ordered makes it to the table she’s gotten positively chummy with him. She asks questions about his job, mostly about murder cases even though he’s tried to explain that isn’t really the kind of law his firm practices. Still, he answers her about as patiently as I’d have been able to in his shoes, and for a long time I don’t even have to jump into the conversation at all. I can just watch and listen fondly as he holds his own against Reema’s cross-interrogation.

  Uh-oh, I can’t help but think when he catches me staring, drops me a wink and a smile. These are some big feelings I’m having. Normally I’d be worried to catch myself feeling this kind of way this early, but something tells me it’s not the kind of thing Logan would mind.

  Just then, my phone buzzes with a text. My heart sinks when I see it’s from Mom.

  Where the hell did you go with my babies?

  Fifteen

  Logan

  “So, how many years did you have to go to school to be a lawyer?” Reema and I are hanging out on the landing outside their apartment, giving Charlene and her mother room to talk.

  “Well, let’s see. You’re in what, seventh grade?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Okay, so after high school, it was another seven years.” She leans back, pulling on the railing to the stairs. “So, if you wanted to go into law, you’re looking at probably another twelve years of school.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You bet,” I say.

  “But that’s double what I am right now! You mean I’d have to stay in school for that long?”

  “And that’s just to get the degree. Then you have to find a firm, work hard. It took me a while to make full partner.”

  She’s smiling and shaking her head at the prospect of that much school. I can understand. At her age, all I wanted to do was get as far away from school as possible. It’s hard to remember how I talked myself into the time it took to get my degree. There was probably a girl involved. “You think you might want to study law?”

  “Not if it takes that long! Maybe I’ll be a doctor instead.”

  “I’ve got bad news for you, Reema.”

  We get cut short by a particularly loud burst from inside the apartment, and Reema gets quiet. Suddenly, she looks a lot older than her twelve years. Almost weary with what daily life must be like.

  “Hey,” I say, and she looks at me. “You’re doing a great job with Layla.”

  “You really think so?” Just the tiniest hint of that sparkle comes back into her.

  “Oh, yeah. Watching you with her is something else. She’s lucky to have you.”

  Reema doesn’t say anything. She just tugs on the railing again, beaming. I get the sense that encouragement is in pretty short supply in this apartment.

  “I don’t give a damn if he paid for all of that shit, I don’t want a stranger hanging around my kids.” They must be getting closer to the door, because the words are getting clearer.

  “He’s not a stranger, mama.”

  “The hell he ain’t!” The door yanks open, but Mrs. Johnson is still looking back at her daughter. “Anybody I don’t know is a stranger to my kids. Full stop. Now, the next time you want to pull this kind of shit, at least have the common fucking sense to text me where you are.”

  This woman is a far cry from the sloppy mess I saw this morning. She’s in a titanic rage. All the ire on her face turns to Reema, who has gone completely still. “I bet you haven’t even started your homework, have you?”

  Reema just shakes her head. The chatty young lady who had been gabbing all through dinner has been reduced to a silent little girl.

  “Of course, you haven’t. Get your ass inside this apartment.”

  “Calm down,” I say as Reema flashes past her mother. “We were just talking, there’s no need to yell.” My voice is calm, but it’s a struggle to keep it there.

  “Don’t you tell me to calm down. You don’t know my kids, you don’t know my life, so what you need to do is mind your goddamn business.”

  “Back off, mama.” Charlene shoves past her mother to stand out on the landing with me.

  “Watch it Charlene,” her mother points at the two of us. “Just because you think you’re grown doesn’t mean you can talk to me however you want.”

  “Logan bought us some things, and a nice meal. That’s all.”

  “The hell it is!” She’s spitting now, she’s yelling so loud. “I got eyes, and I can see what’s going on. If you had any sense, you’d see it too. He’s just some rich-ass spoobie slumming it down here, looking at the black folks, trying to get himself a piece of ass.”

  My blood pressure is up, and I squeeze the railing to keep from raising my voice.

  “That’s not fair, mama!”

  “Yeah, well, life’s not fair Charlene! The sooner you figure that out, the better. If you had any sense, you wouldn’t let this asshole buy you shit. He’s just trying to get in your pants.”

  “That’s not true.” My voice is quiet, but hard enough that it cuts through the shouting. “I have nothing but respect for your daughter, and I’m not going anywhere.” That last bit surprised everyone in the stairwell, myself included.

  “Mama,” Charlene’s voice is shaking with her effort to keep from shouting. “All Logan was doing was helping. Do you remember him driving you home from the street this morning? No, because you were stone-ass drunk.”

  “That’s not—” But Charlene cuts her mother off.

  “You were so passed out, he had to carry you up and put you in the bed.” She points at me to illustrate the point, “He did that. And then, he spent the whole day helping out with the girls and treating them to things they never get. All while you laid up there, sleeping off a drunk.”

  Charlene’s mother goes to say something, but just keeps opening and closing her mouth. The words aren’t coming.

  “Mrs. Johnson, it’s been a long day. I think everyone just needs a little space to settle down.”

  When she speaks again, her voice is quiet, and sharp as a knife. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I got
my eye on you. Remember that shit.”

  With that, she slams the door, leaving Charlene and I out on the landing. It only now occurs to me that the neighbors must all have their ears pressed against their doors. There’s never any anonymity in this city.

  Charlene stares hard at the floor, and I just put a hand on her shoulder. Neither of us feel like talking, and I can’t imagine what we would have to say after that anyway. Say what you want about Mrs. Johnson, she really knows how to put a button on things.

  Sixteen

  Charlene

  After that, Logan takes me home. We don’t talk. He doesn’t even switch on the radio for noise, though I wish he would, just for something to distract me from the silence. All the sound we can hear is the hiss of the car vents and the sigh of the tires rolling over the road beneath us.

  I’m not sure if Logan’s being quiet because he thinks I want him to stay silent, or if he genuinely doesn’t have anything to say. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse. Part of me had been hoping that as soon as were alone in his car, he’d take the opportunity to reassure me, to argue against all the things I know he heard my mama saying. The things she’d said right in front of him, even. Why wouldn’t he defend himself now? Now that she wasn’t around anymore and he could say whatever he was thinking, and I would believe him?

  Except that I’m scared I know why he isn’t defending himself.

  Maybe my momma is right about him, after all.

  If Logan is only slumming, it means he isn’t serious about this—about me. It means he sees himself as a kind of tourist, even an anthropologist, and that this thing he and I have has the expiration date of a gallon of milk. Or, he might be interested in stringing me along for a while. Something fun, no strings attached. Never looking into making a future with me.

  With a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, I remember the pill he’d brought me along with breakfast. At the time, it had felt like such a kind errand to run, an acknowledgment of my dreams and desires. Like he really respected my timeline and had gone out of his way to anticipate my needs.