Rhyme & Reason

by Nia Forrester

  “I always liked him,” her mother said.

  “Who? Deuce?”

  “Yes. I always liked him. He’s very humble. And terrified of your father, which I find … so … endearing.”

  Zora resisted the urge to smile.

  It was true. Deuce was terrified of her father.

  Something about his imposing size, and the formidable darkness of his skin, coupled with the thick Senegalese accent intimidated most men. Just to understand what he was saying, one had to lean in a little to listen more closely. And that slight bow of the head while they tried to decipher what he was saying, was close enough to a gesture of supplication to make most other men appear smaller.

  I feel like he would snap my neck if he knew what I did to you last night, Deuce whispered in her ear once when he came to pick her up and her father had answered the door.

  As they walked back to the SUV parked at the curb, her father had watched their progress from the front stoop, and waited while Deuce opened the passenger-side door and helped Zora in.

  He would snap your neck, Zora said. Because what you did to me was pretty …

  You be quiet. You loved second of it.

  “Your father liked him too,” her mother said now.

  “I never got that impression.”

  “Of course, he did, Zora. The fact that he even let him in the house was evidence enough of that.”

  “Well, that’s basically irrelevant now.”

  “Why is it …?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to talk about that really. I just … Deuce’s mother has cancer. Breast cancer. Stage III.”

  “Oh no.” Her mother put a hand to her chest. “Zora. That must be …”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t sound good. And I can tell he’s scared about it, and … and I want to be there for him, but …”

  “But what?” Her mother shrugged. “You want to be there for him, so be there.”

  She could have mentioned then that Deuce had a girlfriend, but something held her back. Something like maybe the secret hope that he wouldn’t have one for long.

  “Come over here,” her mother said. “Sit next to me. Your hair looks like it’s about to take over your entire head.”

  Grinning, Zora went to sit not next to her, but at her mother’s feet, between her open knees. She submitted when her mother combed through the loose ends of her cornrows with her fingers, parting the kinky mass and re-braiding the ends.

  “You’re so beautiful, Zora. When you wear your hair like this, it takes away from your beautiful eyes … and those gorgeous cheekbones.”

  “How is it that when you’re complimenting me, you manage to make it sound like you’re praising yourself?” Zora laughed.

  “Is it wrong for me to feel proud that I have beautiful children?”

  “I don’t know. You read the Qur’an more than I do. Is it?”

  “Well, I don’t believe it is. I have to show you some new pictures I got from your brother by the way. The way he looks, I don’t think he’ll be returning from France anytime soon.”

  “I can’t imagine why he’d want to stay there. All that discrimination against Muslims, women being ostracized for wearing hijab…”

  “These are not new tests for our religion. Things like that have been happening for hundreds and hundreds of years. I have no doubt we’ll weather this storm as well.”

  Zora felt her mother shrug.

  “In the pictures Ousmane sent me, there was a cute little redheaded girl …” she continued, letting her voice trail off.

  “Ooh! Scandal,” Zora joked. “Is she his girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. There were other people in the pictures. But she was always standing next to him, always very close.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to tell you something,” Zora said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Did Daddy see the pictures?”

  “No. I didn’t show them to him.”

  Zora didn’t ask why. They were all always trying to live up to her father’s unspoken expectations. Perhaps her father would believe as her mother had, that the redheaded girl was Ousmane’s girlfriend, and be disappointed.

  “Anyway …” Her mother’s voice became airy again, just as she completed one braid and began on the next. “I have beautiful children. Ousmane looked so … regal standing there with his new friends. He was the tallest one, the darkest, the most striking.

  “I remember when you were babies. Both of you, your eyes were enormous, and liquid and black as raisins. People stared at you like they couldn’t believe you were real. Ousmane always cried when he got that kind of scrutiny. You always stared right back. Curious and defiant, even then.”

  Smiling, and closing her eyes to the sensation of her mother’s fingers working in her hair, Zora said nothing. She never tired of her mother’s stories about when she and Ousmane were younger. The obvious joy she got from being their mother was like a warm blanket that covered Zora wherever she went. She drew confidence and strength from the knowledge of her mother’s love.

  Thinking about that made her think of Deuce and how ambivalent he had always seemed about his mother. The love was there, of course, but he sometimes hinted that the respect hadn’t always been.

  Even before she knew him, Zora vaguely remembered stories in the blogs about his mother and her never-ending war against Deuce’s father. Not one single accomplishment of Chris Scaife Sr.’s could pass unremarked upon by Sheryl Leakes, who the Black celebrity press liked to refer to sardonically as Scaife Baby Momma #1. The label had a snide classist ring to it, reminding the world that she was not the kind of woman that most men would want to make their wife.

  It didn’t help that when she had something to say, Sheryl’s remarks were usually negative, or at a minimum passive-aggressive. Maybe Zora had never derided Deuce’s mother because she could see without even knowing the woman, that true dislike probably wasn’t what motivated those comments; they were more like … love taps. Gestures by someone who didn’t quite know how to communicate vulnerability or hurt.

  But even so, having her as a mother would have been challenging, to say the least.

  “There! All done.”

  Zora put a hand to her nape, now free of the ticklish brush of her hair. Her head felt lighter.

  “Thanks, Mommy,” she said.

  “Let’s go have some coffee.” Her mother tapped her on the shoulder. “And I bought a strawberry shortcake at Whole Foods. Your visit is just the excuse I need to eat a slice of it.”

  ~~~

  Lazy from a far-too-large slice of cake and a mug of jasmine tea, Zora dozed in the front room for the rest of the afternoon. Next to her, her phone lay silent. She pretended not to be looking at it every so often, but by the time the light outside began to soften and fade, she admitted it. She had been hoping to hear from Deuce.

  Of course, if his girlfriend had been through something as traumatic as a robbery, it was understandable that he would be tied up. But a text wasn’t too much to ask, was it? She had been trying not to think about the night before—the way he felt, the way he looked at her, the sound of his voice … It was like all those months of separation had never even happened.

  But Deuce had always been able to do that to her—make her forget herself and the world, and everything and everyone else in it.

  When she moved to California for school, it was strange. It was both a torture and a relief being away from him. Part of her wondered whether when she chose a school so far away, it would relieve some of the urgency and immediacy that seemed to permeate their relationship. With Deuce it was, I want more … now, always, now.

  The night before she made her final choice, she and her father had dinner together alone, because her mother had an overnight shift at the hospital. Dinners alone with her father were always a little awkward. They both struggled for things to say to the other, unlike her brother who was completely at ease in their father’s company and comfortably moved the conversation from sc
hool to politics to family news.

  This time though, she and her father had the convenient subject of her furthering her education to discuss. They talked about the kind of law she might ultimately practice, and the possibility that she might not practice at all but instead work in public policy. Her father talked about having known the Justice Minister in Senegal since he was a child and Zora pretended to be interested in the possibility of a summer working at the Ministry of Justice in Dakar.

  It would take you a long way from your friend, her father said, taking a bite of his food. And for a long time.

  That was the way he referred to Deuce, as her “friend.” Because she wasn’t, strictly speaking, supposed to have “boyfriends.” But Deuce had been a fixture that summer, after all. He was the “friend” who showed up often, exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes and then spirited her away.

  California would as well, Zora had responded, looking down at her plate.

  That might be good, her father said.

  Why good? She knew she sounded defensive.

  And also, she knew in that moment that though she had been pretending to be on the fence about it, she was leaning in favor of her “safe school”, the one she had applied to late, to appease Deuce who hated that all her initial choices had been out West.

  The Qur’an says, ‘He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them’. Tranquility. Not excitement. Not … unrest.

  Zora had swallowed hard.

  She remembered how accused she felt in that moment. Accused, and exposed. And stunned that her father, who she believed did not know her well at all, would be the one doing the exposing.

  There had been a part of her, a tiny part that wondered whether Deuce would be the distraction, the reason she wandered off the path she believed she wanted for her life. Rashad, her ex-boyfriend, and one of the people who knew her best had said as much.

  He’ll make you lose your way.

  Zora believed now that she chose UCLA at least partly to prove her father wrong. She chose a school thousands of miles away to prove her father and herself and Rashad wrong. Deuce would derail nothing.

  “Look who’s here!”

  Her father’s booming voice pulled Zora back to the present, and she leapt up from the window-seat, more in alarm than in eagerness to see him. But from the look on his face, it was clear he interpreted it as the latter and was pleased at that.

  He opened his arms and Zora walked into them. Her best friend in high school, a smart-mouth named Tamra had once said of Zora’s father, “now that’s the original man right there. He takin’ us all the way back to Africa.” And it was true. He had a square jaw, broad nose and thick lips, so perfectly symmetrical they looked drawn by the pen of a master artist. His eyebrows were thick and smooth, his skin obsidian. His voice put James Earl Jones to shame.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Zora received and returned his embrace.

  Over her shoulder, she was aware of her mother having emerged from the kitchen to observe their greeting.

  “You’re here,” she said. “We can eat dinner, then.”

  “Yes. Good. I’m hungry,” her father said. He released Zora and looked around. “Where’s Asif?”

  “Filming or something,” Zora said. “He told me to let you know he’d make it another time.”

  Her father nodded. “Well … Give me a moment to get cleaned up, and we can eat.”

  He left the room as abruptly as he had entered it, heading upstairs. Zora was left looking at her mother, both of them mildly perplexed—as they always seemed to be—at the rapid entry and exit of the man they loved just as profoundly as they failed to understand him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The front door lock clicked quietly into place as Deuce slipped out of his apartment and into the hallway. Exhaling, he tossed his suit-jacket over his shoulder and made his way toward the elevators. The building was still quiet at this hour, but soon parents and young children would come spilling out of the apartments on both sides of the hall, heading to the neighborhood’s schools and overpriced daycare centers.

  When he first moved in, Deuce endured the curious glances of many of his neighbors, who he knew were wondering how someone so young could afford—on his own—as pricey a building as this one. The typical residents were young corporate types, most of them in their mid-thirties and still in the glow of newly-acquired wealth.

  A cute blonde chick had asked him in the elevator one morning whether she had seen him somewhere before. Because money alone did not buy a person entrée into addresses such as this. One needed references of the highest caliber, people with recognizable names to vouch for you.

  On television or something?

  She was fishing, of course, and maybe even flirting a little bit. But after having been in a relationship with Zora, Deuce no longer found it difficult to ignore signals from flirtatious women.

  Nope, he’d responded. I don’t think so.

  Though it was possible that she had seen his picture on the blogs or something.

  I work in music, he added, deciding to end the suspense.

  If she knew that he was in the entertainment business, it would satisfy her curiosity. And it had. She nodded as though that made perfect sense.

  A month ago, a Black couple had moved in on his floor. A brother who Deuce learned from one of the doormen was a journalist with The New York Times, and his wife, a pretty sister, thin and graceful as a gazelle, and their twin girls, about three-years-old. The relief Deuce felt at their arrival had been ludicrous, and he couldn’t help but think of Zora again, and how she told him once when they first met that she almost always scanned a room when she entered it, looking for other Black folks.

  And if there are none, I look for Latinx people, then Southeast Asian, Asian … I pretty much run down the line until I find a person of color, she said.

  That’s insane, Deuce told her at the time. All skin-folk ain’t kinfolk.

  I know. But that’s just how I am, I guess, she’d shrugged. Always searching for my tribe.

  But the conversation had planted something in his consciousness, and now he looked as well. He even revived scenes from kindergarten, elementary, middle and then high school, realizing how few people of color had been in his daily life unless he was with his father. Some genres of music were, of course, dominated by Black folks, now at almost every level.

  But Deuce still remembered a time when people thought of his father as an anomaly—Black dudes were supposed to be the ones making the music, not owning the music, not running the companies that pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars. Scaife Enterprises, the company that bore his father’s name and his, was one of a few trailblazers in that way.

  He was heading over there now, early, because he had been out of the office without an explanation; and though he didn’t know for sure, he suspected that Jamal Turner would have gotten wind from someone that he hadn’t been around. Since going to get Regan at the precinct in the early hours of Sunday morning, he hadn’t left his apartment at all. She spent Sunday clinging to him, alternately crying, sleeping restlessly and shaking like a leaf in his arms. And on Monday, she hadn’t been much better.

  If Deuce left her to go take a piss, she sat up in a panic. So, they’d been in bed all day, watching movies and Netflix series that he had to carefully curate so nothing would trigger her memories of the robbery. He arranged by phone for her locks to be changed and the new keys delivered; he made them breakfast, and ordered Chinese takeout, and tried not to count the hours since he’d been with Zee nor worry about what she must be thinking.

  Leaving Regan alone long enough to make a private call had been next to impossible since when she slept, he couldn’t help but do the same. And when he went to take a shower and considered taking his phone with him, the idea felt seedy and unbecoming of his relationship with Zee and what it meant.

  Now, it was Tuesday, and Regan seemed okay enough for him to leave her at his place and head back to w
ork.

  As soon as the elevator hit the ground floor and he exited, Deuce nodded his ‘good morning’ to his building’s reception staff and fished out his phone. The only calls he’d made in the past few days were to his sole staff-person at SE, his mother, and Kal, so he had to scroll down quite a bit to get to Zora’s name.

  Her phone rang once, then went to voicemail, and he muttered a curse. Either she was still sleeping and reached over instinctively to reject the call, or she was awake and just didn’t want to talk to him. He hoped it was the former, but the idea that it might be the latter had him so jumpy, he called Kal instead, hoping the distraction would talk him down from the urge to do something stupid, like head uptown to Zora’s apartment and bang on her door so she would see him.

  Kal answered immediately, even though it was just past four in the morning in his part of the country. He would be getting ready to run, like he did every morning. During his drives to the track where he met his coach, was when he and Deuce usually had a chance to catch up. This morning, as on every other morning, Kal sounded like he’d been up for hours.

  “Yo, man, what’s good?”

  “Headed back to work,” Deuce told him.

  “You pry ol’ girl off your leg?”

  “C’mon, man. Ain’t e’rybody cut out for staring down the wrong end of a gun.”

  “My bad. Am I being insensitive?”

  Kal had never met Regan, but he had seen pictures of her and without him saying, Deuce knew what he was thinking—that she was a step backwards.

  Regan looked like every other chick he had been with before Zora. Like she was unduly preoccupied with her appearance, and more than likely shallow. When Deuce first told Kal about her, and that she was a model-actress-waitress, or waitress-model-actress, he could practically hear Kal’s eyes rolling at the other end of the call.