Cha-Cha took the pills, swallowed the water, and returned to the bed.
Historically, Cha-Cha and Tina’s sleeping arrangements were designed to accommodate an all-night spoon. Cha-Cha preferred to sleep on his right side, so he claimed the left side of the bed in order to be the big spoon to Tina’s little spoon. Many things had interrupted this arrangement over the years—kids in the bed, sickness or soreness, too hot summer nights, and arguments—but the unspoken agreement between the two of them was that barring the aforementioned, spooning should be afoot come lights out.
Before Cha-Cha could decide how best to get out of spooning while still sleeping on his preferred side, Tina inched her rear end into position, flush against his pelvis. All that was left to complete the formation was for Cha-Cha to drape his arm across her waist. He hesitated, and he was sure Tina interpreted it as resistance, maybe even rejection. He smelled the Avon Haiku perfume that she sprayed onto the crown of her head every day for his benefit. Ever since menopause she’d started using a silk pillowcase so she wouldn’t have to wrap her hair at night.
Then something unexpected happened. An erection. Cha-Cha registered the tingly, nervy sensation and figured he had to pee, but no. It was a different sort of urgency he felt. The real thing. Tina, likely more out of habit than out of genuine interest, shifted her rear against it, just a subtle resettling of her hips. The erection persisted.
Not long ago, sex had still been very much a part of Cha-Cha and Tina’s life. He used to quietly thank God that all of Tina’s extra churching hadn’t shamed away the desire in her. Then Cha-Cha had his accident, and his favorite positions became frustrating, even painful, as his hip healed. He’d once complained to Alice about it, and she’d said, “If the problem is mechanical as opposed to having to do with desire, then you two will figure it out. If Christopher Reeve was still getting off after his accident, you can too.” He now felt embarrassed for sharing his “mechanical” sex issues with Alice. But Tina had been upbeat about it all, and the two of them found a way to make it work. Then Viola moved in, and Cha-Cha felt uncomfortable doing it with his mother only two doors down. There was no way to know whether she was asleep or awake because she kept an erratic schedule. The house on Yarrow had a hallway not half as long as this one, plus the boys’ room shared a wall with Francis and Viola’s room, but Cha-Cha had never heard his parents’ lovemaking, only Francis’s fervent baritone during arguments. It had been two months since Cha-Cha and Tina last made love.
Tina moved against him again, and Cha-Cha thought they could really do it. It might help right everything wrong between them, or at least help him sleep better. He brought his arm around her waist, and Tina rested her hand on top of his. After much post-accident trial and error, they discovered that their traditional sleeping arrangement was also the easiest on Cha-Cha’s hips for sex. Tina had thought being on top might work, but her compact stature belied her heaviness, and Cha-Cha feared his porcelain might crack if she got too spirited. So the spoon became their go-to. He slid his hand underneath Tina’s flannel pajama top and onto her belly, where a smiling scar from a teenage appendectomy ran smooth under his fingers. Tina moved closer still, arched her back just a little, and Cha-Cha knew that she too thought this might be enough to fix it all. Cha-Cha wanted to be strategic, as a hasty grope or shift might ruin everything. He figured his next move should be a reach for either breast or booty, but Tina reached back and grabbed his erection through his boxers. Too soon for that, he knew; he wasn’t ready for a full-on grab, and just as quick as the stiffness had arrived, it subsided. Cha-Cha forced the breath he’d been holding out through his nose and backed away, lest Tina try to revive him.
“Well,” she started. Her voice sounded hopeful.
“Good night,” Cha-Cha said. He nearly barked. He moved a few more inches back and drew up his knees some, effectively breaking the spoon.
Nothing could be solved so easily.
Let Her Say Yes
“Good morning, Bobbie,” Brianne said. She picked him up and sniffed his diaper, tested for wetness with a finger. Finding everything just as dry as she’d left it, she decided to fix him his breakfast before commencing the daily struggle of dressing him. Her shifts ran long and Bobbie’s bedtime was early, so Brianne usually woke up at six to spend quality time with her son. Today she was an hour behind schedule. She’d stayed up late, past 2 A.M., video chatting with Rob.
As soon as Brianne set Bobbie on the sofa he found the remote and pushed the red Power button, the easiest to locate and the only button he had learned to make do what he wanted. Brianne took the remote from him and flipped through channels until she found PBS, where Donnie was on. Though imaginative, the pale, bald four-year-old hero of the show whined too much for Brianne’s liking. Bobbie was obsessed with him. Since he’d discovered the show a few months earlier, a large part of morning quality time now included Brianne stomaching Donnie’s yelping exploits.
She put a mug full of water in the microwave for coffee and looked at her shadowy reflection in the glass door. The skin under her eyes was swollen, and her hair looked smashed on one side because she’d forgotten to wrap it the night before. That was the downside to video chatting. One had to keep up appearances when one would usually be able to look a mess for bed without the person on the other end of the line being any the wiser. Rob had seen Brianne look disheveled before, but everything between them felt new now.
After she and Rob partook in a bit of awkward, pixelated video sex last night, Rob had asked her to move in with him. She had refused. The boy still didn’t have an intuitive bone in his body, so instead of gleaning her feelings and gradually working up to this sort of proposal, he had blurted it out apropos of not much, only a few weeks of being on good terms again. They’d had the same plans in college: get a bachelor’s in nursing, then get a master’s in public health and become a hospital administrator somewhere. Make more money than all four of their parents combined. It would have still worked with a baby, especially because Rob was going into his senior year, but he’d hesitated. Said he wasn’t sure if he was ready to be a father. So she did it all alone. She’d enrolled in night school immediately to get her LPN, just in case she couldn’t go to grad school right away. She’d wanted to stay at Eastern Michigan, maybe work in a local nursing home or somewhere part-time until she finished her BS, but it was too much once Bobbie was born. She needed help watching him, and more money than part-time could offer. She came back to Detroit. A few months after Bobbie’s birth, Rob had been accepted into an MPH program out in Chicago; he said he wanted to be in his son’s life. This was fine with Brianne, but she could not forget those months when she was alone. It had been the darkest, hardest period of her life. She was not was ready to fully forgive him, and had had to move away from the webcam to hide the confusion and annoyance on her face this morning. She told Rob that she didn’t think he wanted her, that he was just excited about finally having a relationship with his son.
“God, Brianne. I know what I want,” he’d said. “I didn’t ask you for joint custody, I asked you to be my girlfriend again.”
“Girlfriend” seemed too casual a term given that they had a child together, given that he wanted her to uproot herself and move to Chicago, where Rob’s rent was double her own and childcare was expensive. He had refused to accept a hard no (Brianne blamed the cyber sex for this), so she said she’d think about it.
“Come sit in your chair,” Brianne called to her son. She always said it despite his not being able to get into the chair on his own. Bobbie tottered over to her, his Donnie pajama pants bunching around his knees, and she lifted him into the highchair. Over his shoulder and through the dining room window Brianne saw her mother emerge from the stairs onto the landing outside. Her mother didn’t see her, so Brianne watched her prepare to knock. Her mother smoothed down her ponytail with one flat palm, pulled at her shirt. Brianne felt an urge to pick up her baby and run into the bedroom like she did to avoid a Jehovah’s Witness,
and like she fantasized doing to her nosey landlord. Then she noticed a McDonald’s bag in her mother’s other hand. The problem with Witnesses and landlords was that they never came bearing breakfast. Brianne thought they should.
“You’re so early,” she said.
“Here.” Her mother handed her the bag of food. “I left the orange juices on the roof of my car. I’ll be right back.”
“Mick Donna! Mick Donna!” Bobbie said. He clapped his hands and pushed his rice cereal a few inches away from him. That an eighteen-month-old could already be so enamored with a food he rarely ate scared Brianne.
When her mother returned, Brianne scrutinized the cheerful expression on her face. She could tell Lelah was straining to keep her eyes bright, the set of her mouth resolute.
“You’re so early,” Brianne said again. “Thanks for the food.”
“I woke up a couple hours ago and just felt like McDonald’s, you know? Breakfast is the only thing they know how to make there, so I figured I’d bring y’all some.”
She wanted something. Brianne could practically smell the question forming in her mother’s mouth. She wants something, but she’s gonna see what kind of mood I’m in first, Brianne thought.
“Gigi, I want the toy,” Bobbie said. He leaned in his highchair, gripped the paper bag and turned it over. Ketchup and jelly packets tumbled to the table.
“Aw, there’s no toys at breakfast, baby. Only in the Happy Meals.”
Brianne watched her mother scoop up the packets and rub Bobbie’s head with them. He giggled.
“You heard about the party at Uncle Cha-Cha’s, right?” Brianne asked. “Auntie Tina said she was having trouble reaching you.”
Her mother spread jelly on half an English muffin and placed the muffin back on its corresponding sausage.
“Yeah I talked to her. She wants us to bring something. I figured I could make macaroni and cheese over here while I watch Bobbie.”
She liked to do this, Brianne knew, find excuses to do things here that she could just as easily have done at home.
“Stop playing with your food, Bobbie,” Brianne said. Her son ignored her and continued to roll a fistful of hash browns into a greasy ball between his palms.
“When you were his age you used to put oatmeal on your face,” her mother said. “Mama caught you doing it and said ‘What’s that girl doing, somebody told her she got eczema?’”
Brianne’s laugh was pained and perfunctory.
“So what’s going on with you?” she asked. “How was your weekend?”
“Good,” her mother said. “I stopped by your auntie Marlene’s last night, hung out with her for a while. Did you stay in town or go to Chicago?”
Brianne finished chewing her sausage biscuit, gulped down her juice.
“I stayed here. We’re going back on Thursday, though.”
“And where do you stay when you go?”
“Mommy.”
“Mommy what? I’m just curious. You’re not too old to have someone know where you are. Nobody’s ever too old for that. It’s common sense.”
Brianne rarely knew where her mother was these days, and she doubted anyone else did either.
“Bobbie stays with Rob, and I’ve been staying with my friend Tawny.”
“Who’s Tawny? I don’t remember any Tawny.”
“You’d remember if you saw her,” Brianne said. “She went to Eastern Michigan with me. She’s tall, light-skinned. Freckles.”
Bobbie, bored with his hash-brown ball, grabbed the sides of his highchair and rocked back and forth. He looked like a sailor stuck in a crow’s nest during a storm. Lelah picked him up and patted his butt.
“He needs to be changed,” Brianne said. “I gave him his bath last night, but he’s still wearing the diaper he slept in.”
“I’ll do all that after you leave,” her mother said. “I don’t know why you go through the trouble every morning like I’m some hired babysitter.”
Brianne did not explain that the “trouble” was part of their morning ritual, a way for her to feel essential to him before so many hours apart. She sat down across from her mother, checked the time on the microwave display. Tawny often talked about her mother in a way that made them seem like girlfriends. Brianne and Lelah were closer in age, but a formality existed between them that Brianne’s growth into adulthood hadn’t shaken. Lelah rarely got Brianne’s jokes, was awkward discussing romance and refused to stop worrying.
“Speaking of babysitters,” Lelah said. “I wanna give you this money back.”
She reached into her bra and pulled out two $20 bills. Brianne eyed the money on the table, now certain that her mother wanted something larger. She imagined her mother putting the money in her bra in the car, practicing the casual way she’d pull it out. Embarrassing.
“If I wanted money from you for this, I’d have asked for it,” her mother said.
“Well I thought you could use it,” Brianne said. “Rob’s got a job lined up consulting for KPMG for when he graduates in May. They gave him a signing bonus, so he gave me extra money this month.”
The name Rob and the words “signing bonus” sounded strange in one sentence, Brianne thought. The goofy boy who used to play too many video games in college had finally grown up.
“Consulting? I thought he was getting a public health master’s.”
“He is. They do that kind too.”
“Oh,” her mother said. “Anyway, I guess I should go ahead and ask what I need to ask you before you run off to the shower.”
Brianne raised her eyebrows, tried to look intrigued instead of terrified.
“I’ve been thinking, I know you want to go back to school for your BA and RN, and you know how I’ve been working this night shift. Between that and being with Bobbie during the day, I’m hardly ever at my place. What if I moved in here? That way we could save on rent, and you could go back to school.”
Brianne had forgotten her mother claimed to be working graveyard. It didn’t seem feasible that she had been working all night and then babysitting for nearly twelve hours a day.
“Who said I was going back to school anytime soon?”
Lelah scrunched her eyebrows in confusion.
“You did, didn’t you? I thought the plan was always go back for the RN as soon as you could. Brianne, you know you can’t be an LPN forever.”
One of the many benefits of the girlfriend quality of Tawny and her mother’s relationship was that they seemed to speak directly to each other, even when angry.
“It hasn’t been forever, Mommy. It’s not even two years yet.”
She wanted to scream at Lelah, remind her that she never went to college, remind her how hard it was with no Yarrow and Granddaddy Francis or Grandma Viola to prop her up. All she had was a mother who never kept more than a few dollars to her name, who held a rigid ball of secrets close to her breast. Brianne stood up and said she had to pee.
Leaning against her bathroom sink, she saw the situation for what it was. Lelah had likely lost her job, finally frittered away her money to the point of eviction. Lelah needed saving, and who but her daughter could provide the sort of lifeline that could keep her pride intact? Brianne turned and looked at herself in the mirror. More than messy hair and puffy eyes, she saw her mother’s high forehead, and skin the color of a father she hardly remembered. From pictures of Vernon in his trim army uniform she knew her slim hips were his, her small, diamond-shaped ears, too. It wasn’t enough to know about any relative, let alone one’s father.
Lelah hadn’t planned on going about it this way; she’d planned to be honest but turned coward as soon as she walked through the door. Better to make Brianne feel as if Lelah was doing her a favor than to admit to being desperate. She wouldn’t blame Brianne for rejecting her now. Only please God let her say yes.
When Brianne returned, Lelah could tell the answer would be no, that her daughter would not have her if she could at all help it. She really had been blessed with a child as mild-ma
nnered as Brianne. She seldom had to even make threats of punishment to get her to do right because guilt was enough to keep Brianne in line. She knew if she could formulate the right words now, she could turn Brianne’s no into a yes.
Lelah opened her mouth to speak, but Brianne blurted out, “I’m moving to Chicago with Rob.”
Lelah said nothing.
“I’m putting my notice in today, but I don’t see the point of paying rent again on the first, and I know my landlord will let me leave. I might not give a full two weeks.”
Brianne paused to look at Lelah, expecting admonishment for short notice to everyone.
“Or, if you want, you can pay next month’s rent and then stay here for a month. I don’t even think I’m gonna take the furniture cause Rob’s place isn’t big enough, plus I’m not trying to pay for a truck. You can sell it all or keep it.”
Bobbie had fallen asleep in Lelah’s arms. He pulled on her shirt collar with one hand and palmed her left breast with the other, a lingering habit from his breast-feeding days.
“What makes you think I don’t have a place?” Lelah asked. She whispered fiercely, so as to not wake her grandson. “Who’s gonna watch Bobbie, huh?”
Brianne took a big breath. She was aware that her mother was breakable, that this right now might break her, and because of this Brianne felt both terrified and strangely energized. Years later she would look back on this early morning as the moment her adult life truly began.
“Me, Mommy, at least until I can find nursing work out there. Then we’ll figure it out.”
“You and Rob,” Lelah said. “You and Rob will figure it out. Right. You can’t just run away from your life, Brianne. You got a good job here, free childcare, and you know how this economy is. Jobs aren’t just falling from the sky.”
“I don’t have a life here. I just have a job. I just work a lot, and none of my friends from college are around, and I don’t have anything to talk about with the ones from high school.”
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