“Let me get you something to drink. How about a Coke?” I open the fridge hoping we actually have Coke.
“Whoa, is all that breast milk?” Riley looks stunned at the rows and rows of plastic bottles piled on the top shelf.
“It is. I told the doctor this was the first time in my life that I’ve ever been over-productive at anything. I’m not so great at getting pregnant, but man, I sure can make milk.”
“Have you tasted it?” It’s such a Riley thing to ask, like she’s interviewing me for a segment on new motherhood.
“Omigod, I did!” I haven’t even admitted this to Kevin, worried he would be too grossed out. “It’s sweet, kinda sour, a little grassy too.”
“Hey, look what I made us!” I grab the warm pan from the stove and carry it over to the table. That’s how Gigi always served miracle bread, right out of the pan. I take off the lid with a flourish like I’m presenting a prize. “Miracle bread!”
It works, a layer of tension melts between us.
Riley grabs greedily at the fork I hand her. “Jenny—I can’t believe you made this, with everything else you have to do.” She tears at a piece of bread and lifts it to her lips. When she swallows, her joy consumes her entire face. I don’t want to make a big deal out of how happy this makes me, so I just move a pile of baby clothes and sit down, place the entire skillet in front of her.
The quiet is comfortable—nice even—as we chew thick sweet bites of the mushy bread. Riley actually moans. “It’s so good, Jen. Gigi would be proud.”
I swallow the lump in my throat with another bite.
“So, Jacksonville, huh?” Riley is still processing, and it makes me a little happy that she seems sad. She’s sad for me to go.
“Yep, I got a job there, too. Or almost.” I go on to explain that Dr. Kudlick came by with the sweater and sneakers I’d left at the office and a cute little outfit for the baby, and mentioned that he had a friend from dental school, with a large practice with offices in Jacksonville and Orlando, looking for an experienced office manager.
“Kevin’s friend can’t afford to pay benefits at the landscaping gig, so one of us has to have health insurance. Chase still needs to see the doctor once a week.”
“Well, Kevin was really lucky to get a good job, and so fast. It’s hard with a record,” Riley says. “Shaun just got let go from the moving company. Said they were downsizing, but he thinks it’s because some speakers went missing and it was easy to pin it on him and get rid of him. He’s sent out twenty résumés in the past two weeks. Hasn’t heard back from anyone.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Riley to help her family deal with all of that, and maybe I’d underestimated the stakes and consequences when it happened. Maybe I hadn’t given her enough credit or support back then. The maybes continue to pile up, a Jenga tower of maybes.
I’ve been replaying our conversation at the hospital, the kind of obsessive reenactments where I say different things, where I’m less defensive and less scared. I go into a spiral where I think I’m a horrible person, a terrible friend. The distance between Riley and me these past couple of months has felt like losing a limb, and I’ll do anything to try to make it right.
“About what we talked about in the car—”
“Jenny, we were both so worked up that morning.”
“No. Stop. You said you want us to talk. I want that too.” I don’t want to pick at our scabs, now that it feels like they’re healing, but there’s no other way. “I get what you were saying, it is real easy for me not to think about race. And I don’t even think about it when I look at you because when I look at you I see this person I’ve loved for like my whole life, my sister. All I can say is I’m here for you. I’m here for all of it. And I might say stupid things when we talk, but I want to talk, keep talking.”
I don’t even know if the words coming out of my mouth make any sense, but I hope Riley can feel what it is I’m trying to get across.
“Thank you,” Riley says quietly. “It’s good to hear you say that. I don’t want us to walk on eggshells around each other. I know I probably haven’t opened up enough about my challenges as a Black woman. Or I don’t know, maybe you haven’t probed enough either?”
There are questions I want to ask Riley, like about her family member who she said was lynched or all the comments on her stories, or all those other things I don’t know about. “I can probe. I’m good at probing. I love to probe.”
Riley laughs. There’s nothing better than making Riley laugh.
This is it, a start, a knot loosening. Given that Riley is the most contained person I’ve ever known, these delicate conversations—calm and kind—are how we can start to rebuild. It might not be such a bad thing after all; maybe we don’t need to rehash every miscommunication or slight in painful detail, or go backward to move forward. We can trust that we will eventually return to normal, that the strength of our shared history is enough to fall back on, to carry us through. I allow myself to feel hopeful that this is exactly what’s happening right now. And that after all of this, we could become even closer.
Chase, who’d fallen asleep, wakes with an angry howl that seems far too fierce for such a tiny person. He brings his right fist up to his face, always the right, and presses it tightly to his earlobe. It’s one of the peculiarities about my baby that I’m loving to discover—like how he smacks his lips so hard when he’s ready to nurse that you can practically hear him in the next room. Or the way he can already turn his head from side to side, even as a six-week-old preemie, which Kevin takes as proof of his early athletic potential. Each day it’s a different Chase; there is something completely new to discover about him, to fall in love with. There have been so many surprises the last few months, most of them terrible, but the one good one is that I love motherhood even more than I thought I would, even more than I would have thought possible.
I pull Chase away from me so I can look down at his scrunched-up little face. His crazy-long lashes are collecting teardrops. “He’ll calm down in a sec. Do you want to hold him?”
“Of course. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. Do I need to wash my hands? I’ll go wash my hands.”
Riley furiously scrubs every inch of her hands like she’s going into surgery. Then she comes and lifts Chase out of my arms, gently, careful to support his wobbly little head. As soon as he’s nestled in the crook of Riley’s elbow he stops crying. She looks down at his chest and cracks up.
I’m confused about why Riley is laughing at my baby until I remember that I’d dressed him in the onesie Lou bought him, in case my mom decided to drop by this afternoon like she said she would. It’s bright Eagles green with “DALLAS SUCKS” written across the chest.
“Let me guess, Lou?”
“Who else? She doesn’t bother to come meet her grandson for almost a month and then she shows up with these obnoxious onesies and a bottle of whiskey, which she says is to help my breastfeeding. I told her that it’s beer that’s supposed to help with breast milk and that it’s an old wives’ tale anyway, so she opened it up and made herself a cocktail.”
Lou didn’t visit Chase once in the hospital, a fact I didn’t bother to confront her with because I knew all she would say was, “You know I don’t do hospitals.” I was too distracted and exhausted to be enraged about it anyway, until the day we finally brought Chase home and I worked out the math. He had been alive for three full weeks and had yet to meet his grandmother, who lived not ten miles away. The anger was all-consuming. Maybe it was a lifetime’s worth. I railed and raged for days, and then I was out for a walk with Chase, taking advantage of the fact that the temperatures had climbed into the fifties, and I almost let him fall out of his stroller. He was so small. I didn’t have him buckled in right, and when I hit a bump, he flopped loose and almost slid to the ground. I frantically swiveled my head around to see if anyone had witnessed what a terrible, inept mother I was. It felt like hours before my heart stopped hammering. It occurred to me right there on
the sidewalk that being a mother meant I would fail a little every day, and this was the first of many mistakes I would make even as I vowed to do my best, to keep him safe and protect him. Hopefully, I wouldn’t fail as spectacularly as Lou did, but for the first time in my life I was willing to sympathize. As soon as I got home, before I could change my mind, I texted her a picture of Chase and told her we were both excited to see her, that we wanted her to come to the house to visit.
Since then Lou’s been better, coming over every few days, even spending the night once, making me a frozen Stouffer’s pizza while I breastfed Chase at two in the morning. She ate frosting with her fingers out of a tub of Betty Crocker and ranted about the new bar she worked at.
“The drinks are fourteen dollars and the damn snobs still only tip a dollar for two drinks, even though each cocktail is like a meal with the cut up cilantro and the egg whites and the smashed up fruit.”
Chase clamped down on my raw nipple and I yelped.
“This is impossible.”
Lou came over and stuffed a pillow under my elbow so I could reposition the baby’s mouth.
“You think this is hard. Try having one of these when you’re seventeen and living alone over a garage. And you had the colic, so you screamed and screamed nonstop. I didn’t sleep for a year. And look what you did to my boobs?” Lou cupped her sagging breasts and then took a swig from her whiskey.
“I didn’t know you breastfed,” I said.
“I sure as hell did. You sapped me dry. Now I’ve got a couple of sun-dried tomatoes. I did a lot of things you don’t give me credit for.”
I never think about seventeen-year-old Lou with a tiny, crying baby, both of us helpless. She probably made the same promises to newborn me that I make to Chase, intense vows I offer up in the dark. Lou loved me as much as she could, as fiercely as I love my own son. It seemed easier to forgive my mother than to hold on to the anger that’s lived inside me like blood and bone since I was a little girl.
“You did your best, Lou. It’s all good, Lou,” I said to my mother… and meant it.
Then I rubbed my hand around the pink edge of Chase’s tiny ear and added a silent wish that he would one day forgive me for all the ways I’ll inevitably screw him up.
Now Chase tries to focus on Riley, then he loses interest and intently works his mouth into strange shapes as if he’s trying to figure out what a person possibly does with a mouth. Riley is a natural with him. She should be a mother. She should know this joy. It’s my greatest wish for my friend.
“Does it make you want one?” I ask.
“A whiskey?” Riley jokes, before she seriously considers my question. “You mean a baby? I don’t know. Maybe someday, when I’m not so busy.”
I don’t want to tell Riley that such a day will never come. Riley will never not be busy. A baby is something you have to make time for. I can sense it—our lives going in different directions. We’ve shared so much, I wanted us to share this too, as childish as that is. Since we were little, I had a stupid fantasy that Riley and I would have babies at the same time, and those little girls would grow up to be best friends, like something out of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Now I worry it may never happen for her and that my friend is too busy, closed off, and might always be alone. The pity that sweeps through me then borders on mean.
But also a fear too, that this is the most important thing in my life and Riley won’t understand what I’m going through. All the things she won’t care about and will have to pretend to be interested in—sleep training, Chase’s first teeth, the specific agony of breastfeeding, how I hate it but never want to give it up.
But I see the way she looks at Chase now and I know it will be okay. She loves my baby, I can tell, and that’s all that matters. No, what really matters is this baby wouldn’t even be here without her. I can give her her money back, but it will still be a debt I can never repay.
I get up to get the check, in my wallet on the counter. When I turnaround, Riley has a look on her face, that I have to tell you something look, and my stomach plummets.
Chapter Seventeen RILEY
Jen slips back into her chair, a slip of paper in her hand. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“You have a look on your face like you’re about to tell me something awful. Is something wrong with Shaun? Your mom?”
“No. It’s nothing bad. It’s just news.” It’s strange recounting my life to Jenny like this, in person, sitting at a table, when she used to just know things about me because I would text her everything as it happened. And even though she’s still the first person I want to tell when something good or happy happens, that’s not where we are right now. I’m still not sure whether we’ll ever get back to that exact place.
“Did you hear about the anchor job?”
“Actually, I did.” Jen isn’t the only one who has big news.
“Annnnndd? Come on, don’t keep me waiting. I saw they announced Candace’s retirement.”
“I got it!” I can feel my mouth form itself into a grin big enough for the billboard I’ll be on soon.
Jenny squeals and hugs me before I can get the rest out—the catch.
“Well, it’s not permanent though. Quinn and I are going to trade off. Scotty’s testing us out… or pitting us against each other. We’ll see.” I rein in my big cheese and my excitement. It’s still too early to celebrate. But I’m closer, closer than ever. And I know exactly why; so does Jen. It sits there between us, the reason for my rather swift promotion: covering the shooting was my big break. It put me on the national stage, just as I hoped it would. I’ve heard from a few network and cable news execs, feelers to keep in touch, invites to lunch or coffee the next time I’m in New York or Atlanta.
“That wasn’t what I was going to tell you though… it’s something else.” In my pause, I see Jen brace herself. I hurry up and blurt it out lest she think this is another big scary talk we need to have.
“I saw Corey! I may still be in love with Corey.” Now I brace myself for her reaction. Part of me doesn’t know how I feel about something until I know how Jenny feels—it’s always been like that. She doesn’t squeal and hug me this time. She looks confused, maybe even a little worried.
“Whoa? That’s huge. Tell me everything.”
I do, I tell her everything. Starting with finally explaining why we broke up in the first place, how he wasn’t the one who broke up with me, how it was me, all me. I ignore that she has the same hurt look on her face as Corey did; otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get it all out.
“I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me?” The pain is in her voice, too.
“Well… you’ve had your own stuff going on the last few weeks. I didn’t want to bother you with the fact that my ex-boyfriend wanted to meet up. And we’ve been in a bad place and—”
“No, I mean back then. Last year. When you broke up with him, when Shaun got arrested. Jesus. If I had known, I could have been with you.”
“You’d just found out that the IVF didn’t work again. You were a mess. I didn’t want to burden you. And also, honestly, I really didn’t want to talk about it. I was trying to shut everyone and everything out. I guess that doesn’t work so well.”
“No, it doesn’t work. It hasn’t been working. Riley… you have to tell me things.”
“I know I do, Jenny.” And I mean that. I really do. I also know that I can no longer be gentle with her. I will have to call her out sometimes. I’ll have to push her to think harder, to get outside her little bubble, a bubble I worry will grow smaller in the Florida suburbs.
“So what now, I mean with Corey?”
I start nervously folding a pile of onesies sitting haphazardly on the table, turning them into neat little squares. “We’ll see. He’s going to come down next month again and we’ll have dinner.”
“That’s great. It’s good you’re open to this. I have a good feeling.”
It is great. Hearing Jen say
it confirms it. This is good. I let myself be excited. Even though I’m scared of so many things, that long distance won’t work, that I will always feel judged for dating a white dude, that if we do decide to have children, he won’t understand what it’s like to raise a Black man in our fucked-up world. I worry about keeping this anchor chair, about being at the top of my game and having to choose between being a big fish in Philadelphia or giving it up to be a little fish in New York and live with Corey. Could I ever ask him to move here to be closer to me? But I’m learning that feelings are okay, or at least unavoidable, even having more than one at once. And right now we’re still in the fun stage, the dirty-texting stage, the weekend visits. But this isn’t something new. We have history, and we will be right back in that serious make-or-break place before we know it. But I want to be optimistic. I want to feel good about something in my life after these months, this year of dread. I deserve it. I’m starting to believe that.
“I might have a white bestie on one side and a white boyfriend on the other. Talk about Oreo. Ugh.”
We Are Not Like Them Page 31