If You Come Softly

by Jacqueline Woodson

  “I had nice friends at Jefferson.”

  Marion and my father had decided to send me to private school in May, when the New York Times reported that Thomas Jefferson had the lowest reading levels and college acceptance rate in all of New York City.

  “But none of those friends will get into college,” Marion said.

  “The only reason Percy has a ninety-eight percent college acceptance rate is because the kids are rich. Their parents buy them good grades.”

  Marion frowned. “That doesn’t happen.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “No one can buy you a high SAT score, Elisha. No one can buy you a high reading level.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her and smiled. “Things have changed, Marion.”

  All of my brothers and sisters had gone to Jefferson High. And from there, they had all gotten into decent universities. When I argued this, my mother said, That was a long time ago, before we had money to send you to private school. Things have changed.

  “Not that much,” she said now, rising to clear the table. “I made some apple tarts for dessert. Your favorite. Maybe in your junior year you can have the boy over for tarts and tea.”

  I handed her my plate. “Marion,” I said. “If—”

  “I know, I know, Elisha. If there was a boy, which there isn‘t, he wouldn’t be apple tart and tea kind.”

  Chapter 3

  HE LOVED THE LIGHT IN HIS MAMA’S KITCHEN. THE yellow stained-glass panes across the top of the windows buttered the room a soft gold-even now, in the early evening with the rain coming down hard outside.

  “Your daddy left a message,” his mama said. “Said he had to go out to L.A. Be back Sunday night. Left a number.”

  “Guess I’m spending the week here then.” Jeremiah glanced out the kitchen window. There was no light on in his father’s apartment. He was glad he didn’t have to make a decision. Every night it was the same thing. You gonna stay here? You gonna stay here? His mama and daddy’s voices beating against the side of his head, begging him as if they were really saying, Choose me. No, choose me. For the hundredth time, no, maybe the thousandth time, he wished he had a brother or sister—somebody to go up against them with. Someone to help relieve some of the stuff they put him through. How long would it have to be like this anyway? Two addresses. Two phone numbers. Two bedrooms.

  Jeremiah sighed and sat down at the kitchen table and watched his mama fuss with pots and pans. She was making spaghetti sauce-the way they liked it with lots of peppers and onions and no meat. A long time ago, she’d given up red meat. Little by little Jeremiah gave it up too. Every once in a while, he found himself craving a burger with ketchup and mayo the way he used to like it. But it had been a long time since he’d eaten one. It would probably make him sick to his stomach now. He let his basketball roll back and forth between his feet for a few minutes then kicked it gently into the corner.

  “You hungry?”

  Jeremiah nodded. The kitchen smelled like garlic and tomatoes. “I guess so.”

  His mother looked at him a moment. She was pretty-his mama was. He’d always thought so. She wore her hair short, tied her head up with pretty scarves. Tonight she was wearing an orange and yellow one, wrapped high like a turban. Her skin was dark like his and smooth. People said they had the same mouth-wide and soft. And the same eyes. His eyes were light brown like hers and people were always asking them if they were wearing contact lenses. Now his mother smiled, shaking her head. She pressed her fingers to her lips.

  “What?” Jeremiah said, feeling his own face break into a smile. This evening, his mama was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with Vassar printed across the front. She had gone there, had studied literature and film. The summer after she graduated, she took a film course at NYU that his father was teaching. She had heard of him—had even seen a couple of his movies. They dated a long time before they married. I wanted to be sure he was the right man, his mother used to say.

  She didn’t have much to say about his daddy anymore.

  “You gonna tell me how your first day was or am I going to have to guess.”

  “You gonna have to guess,” Jeremiah said.

  His mother turned back to the stove and stirred the sauce once more. Jeremiah watched her lift spaghetti from the colander onto the blue plates they always ate off. The plates had been a wedding gift from his grandmother—his father’s mother. Sometimes the memory of her crept up quickly—unexpected—like somebody sneaking up behind you in the dark. He missed his grandmother more than anything. In February it would be five years since she passed. Jeremiah twirled the saltshaker absently, wondering how long it took before you stopped missing someone.

  “I was thinking about Grandma just now,” he said.

  “Yeah? What were you thinking?”

  “Just about her. She came into my mind.” He bit his bottom lip. “Remember that time she was interviewed about Daddy?”

  His mama smiled. It was a sad smile, full of good and bad memories. Jeremiah was sorry he had even started talking about his grandma. Sometimes he forgot that Grandma was his father’s mother.

  Mama put the plates of spaghetti down on the table. “Which time?” she asked.

  “I don’t remember the show. I think it was around the time of the first Oscar nomination. Remember, she wore that bright red dress and that silly necklace I’d made her—the one made out of bottle tops?”

  His mama smiled.

  “She said that even though he was a big-time moviemaker, she had changed his diapers and she could tell everyone listening that Daddy’s poop smelled just as bad as anybody else’s. Later on, she’d told me she wanted to use the other word, but it would have gotten bleeped out and she wanted to make sure the American audience got the message.”

  “I thought Norman was going to lose it for sure.”

  “Me and Grandma laughed about that for a long time,” he said softly.

  Jeremiah ran his fingers slowly across the table. Outside he could hear little girls singing, “Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim...” He swallowed. When he had looked into that girl’s eyes today, he saw something familiar in them. A little bit of himself there. Where was she now?

  “Want some wine, high-school boy?” She poured a glass of red wine for herself and waited.

  Jeremiah sighed, knowing his mama was trying to change the subject. I miss you, Grandma. You would be able to tell me, wouldn’t you? You’d be able to make everything all right.

  “Pinot Noir,” she said. “Supposed to be a good vintage-1993 from the Napa Valley.”

  Before they separated, his mother and father had gone to the wine country. When they came home, his mama filled him in on everything she’d learned about wine, and together they sat sipping various wines and comparing them. He wasn’t really allowed to drink yet, but his mother still offered and told him everything she knew about certain wines. She said she wanted him to be knowledgeable when the time came to choose one.

  “Nah. 1993 wasn’t great for Pinot Noirs. If you had a Cabernet or even a Petite Syrah then maybe.”

  His mama smiled.

  They were quiet for a moment. Jeremiah watched her dance a hot loaf of bread from the oven to the table and wondered again how his father could have just fallen for someone else. Yeah, over and over, his father had tried to explain it to him, and each time Jeremiah thought he finally understood. But then he’d come home some evening and find his mother sitting in front of the television in the empty living room and his heart would tighten inside his chest. She looked lonely and lost sitting in the half-light.

  “Mama? You ever planning on writing another book?”

  It seemed a long time ago when he would come home to find her writing in her study. She had written three novels and had always said she wanted to write ten in her lifetime. And for a while, Jeremiah thought she’d do it. But after his father l
eft, she had stopped writing and Jeremiah rarely found her in her study anymore.

  She sat down across from him and frowned. “What makes you ask that?”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “Just wondering.”

  “Well, eat instead of wondering.” After a moment, she said, “It takes time, you know.”

  “But you have lots of time and I ... I just never see you in the study anymore.”

  “I haven’t felt much in the mood for writing anything lately.” She glanced at him then back down at her plate, drumming her fingers on the table the way she did when she was annoyed. “When you have so much real drama in your life, it’s hard to think about fiction. I’m taking some me time now. Figure with what I have saved and this house being paid for and Norman paying for your school, we’ll be okay.” She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own. “Okay, honey?”

  Jeremiah nodded but didn’t say anything.

  Some mornings he woke up remembering little things-like the way his father’s arm looked when it was draped across his mama’s shoulder or his father and mother hugging by the kitchen sink, the water still running from the dishes one of them had been washing.

  He wondered where that stuff went to, where love went to, how a person could just love somebody one day and boom-the next day love somebody else.

  “Tell me about Percy, Miah.”

  “It’s okay. You know. It’s a school. Uniform’s really the only thing makes it much different from Tech. It’s whiter. Much whiter. But I figured that.”

  “They think you’re on scholarship?”

  Jeremiah shrugged and stared down at his plate. “Nobody said anything stupid.”

  “Some people going to think that, you know. Don’t let them get to you.”

  “I won‘t—I mean, I know. But I kind of rather have them think that than know the truth, right?”

  His mother nodded. “Yeah, honey-but it’s okay if they know the truth. I’m not saying you have to strut it. But you don’t have to be ashamed of it either.”

  The truth was he was Norman Roselind’s son. And anyone who had ever stepped foot inside a movie theater or picked up a paper knew who Norman Roselind was. Yeah, he was proud of his father and the movies he’d made. But sometimes he just wanted to be Miah. And the truth was, his mother had gotten a lot of attention for her three books-you said her name, Nelia Roselind, and people knew it. Norman and Nelia—they had even been on the cover of a couple of magazines. One magazine had called them “most romantic.” Jeremiah twirled the spaghetti around on his fork. He wondered what the magazines would say now-or what they had already said. A long time ago, he had stopped reading them, too afraid to find some nasty gossip about his family somewhere between their pages.

  “I walk into Percy and it’s like I can reinvent myself or something, you know? Without Daddy’s movies and your books. Just me.”

  “Well, don’t go reinventing yourself too much. It’s okay to be our son. Remember Brooklyn Tech—people knew who you were there and you got along fine.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” At Tech, some people treated him strange and some people treated him okay. His homeboys, the guys he’d grown up with, they were cool, had always been cool. But new kids, well, sometimes they just acted weird, like he was some untouchable god or something. He hated that.

  If things had turned out different, he would have stayed at Tech. If this. If that. Would his life always be filled with “ifs?” If his parents were still together. If Lois Ann had never been born. If that girl had told him her name.

  Percy Academy was one of the most expensive schools in New York City. Nobody knew if that meant it was one of the best. Jeremiah didn’t think so. It had been his father’s idea. Jeremiah would have been fine staying at Brooklyn Tech, which was right in the hood and where he’d gone to ninth grade. Or even Stuyvesant. He knew some brothers there. But his father had insisted on a private school, talking about Jeremiah being his only son and all and wanting the best for him. Jeremiah had finished his first year at Tech, had made the varsity team and gotten straight A’s. Then summer came and his father moved across the street and started talking about better schools. Jeremiah knew it was his guilt talking. But he wanted to make his daddy happy too.

  One Friday afternoon, his father showed up at the door talking about taking Jeremiah on a tour of Percy, a school he’d read about in the Times. Jeremiah looked down at his plate of spaghetti now, remembering how quickly he climbed into his daddy’s car. That afternoon, when he looked up at his window, his mama was standing there, looking down at them. It was the beginning of choosing between them. He’d gone to Percy for his daddy-but everything else, not eating meat, coming to her house first after school, not cursing or acting the fool (too much)-that was for Mama.

  The guy who showed them around had gone on and on about the small classes and how Jeremiah would “blossom” in such an environment. Like he was some sort of flower or something. A rose is a rose is a rose is a Jeremiah Roselind. That’s what his mother used to say to him when he was little. That was a long time ago. Now he was fifteen. Fifteen. Sixteen was probably something, but fifteen—fifteen was a place between here and nowhere.

  “Earth calling Miah.” His mama was snapping her fingers in front of his face. Jeremiah smiled and took a big forkful of spaghetti.

  “Coach there used to play for the Knicks. Way back in the day. Said even before he saw me play he’d heard about my game from Coach Thomas.”

  His mother raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Thomas called him?”

  Jeremiah nodded. Thomas had coached him at Tech, but he went further back than that. He and Jeremiah’s mama had dated in high school.

  “Coach said they’ve been waiting for a point guard to get to Percy for years.” He smiled. “You think Thomas laid it on kind of thick?”

  “Thomas knows a good point guard when he sees one. And besides that, I don’t think he’d be lying for me—not after all these years.”

  “And after you broke his heart.”

  His mother waved her hand at him. “We were just a couple of years older than you are now. Shoot! We’ve both had our hearts broken dozens of times since then. You’ll see.”

  What was her name? That girl in the hallway with the thick black hair. And those pretty eyes. The way she’d looked at him. Then she looked back—over her shoulder. He was looking too, waiting to see if she’d tell him her name. He liked the way she looked at him. It was different. She didn’t seem scared or anything.

  “This is good.” Jeremiah pointed his fork at the pasta.

  His mama eyed him. “Listen to your good mood talking. You never say anything’s good.”

  “I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  “That leaf must be some kind of pretty. What’s her name?”

  Jeremiah shook his head. Sometimes he felt like glass in front of his mama-like something she could look right through and see straight to the other side of.

  “Nobody, Ma. I’m for real. I just like the spaghetti tonight.”

  “Well then-thank you. I’m glad you like it.” They laughed and ate silently for a few moments. It felt good tonight, sitting across from her. Easy. Later maybe, if the rain stopped, he’d go shoot some hoops with Carlton—find out what was happening at Tech. But right now, sitting in the kitchen like this was enough.

  “They’ll probably have you hitting those books pretty hard at Percy.”

  “I guess.”

  “You should give your daddy a call later on.”

  Jeremiah nodded, feeling the easiness leave him. “I will.”

  He hated this. Had hated it from day one. What kind of family lived across the street from each other? And this apartment—all nine rooms of it. His homeboys had always called it a little mansion. It seemed too big with just the two of them in it now, the guests’ rooms and his daddy’s empty study collecting dust. When he was still living
here, his daddy had company all the time-people coming in from out of town for film shoots, friends from college who had moved to the West Coast, actors and directors. Somebody was always showing up and staying a night or two. There were pictures all over the house of Jeremiah with this actor or that director. His daddy was well known in the movie industry-his last movie had earned him two Oscar nominations. Jeremiah remembered how beautiful his mama looked in her gown and how handsome and happy his daddy was that night. His daddy had even taken him shopping for a tuxedo, and even though it felt stiff and strange, he felt grown-up walking along the red carpet in front of his parents.

  “You talk to him lately?” Jeremiah asked now.

  His mama looked annoyed. “I don’t have boo to say to that man. And he doesn’t have boo to say to me.”

  “Boo!” Jeremiah said. He was teasing but maybe not too. They were his parents and he was stuck with them in all of their ridiculousness. Almost a year now since his daddy moved across the street. And it wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t moved in with Lois Ann King, who Jeremiah had known almost all his life. For twelve years they’d been living on this block. And for twelve years Lois Ann had been living across the street. And now his daddy was living with her. He would never go over there if it wasn’t for the stupid courts saying he had to spend equal time in both places.

  “Soon as this slow-moving divorce is final—I’m sure he’ll be moving out west anyway. He can take his Lois Ann and move to kingdom come for all I care.”

  “He’s not gonna move out west,” Jeremiah said softly.

  His mother looked at him. “Don’t be so sure, honey.”

  “He wouldn’t leave me here and I wouldn’t go with him.” He pushed his plate of spaghetti away. He wasn’t hungry anymore. Just tired. Tired of everything. Sometimes he wanted to scream—just stand in the middle of the street and holler. Three years and he’d be so far away from here, it was gonna leave everybody’s head spinning.

  But that was a whole three years away. Tomorrow, if he saw that girl, he was going to ask her name.