by Kiley Reid
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “Exactly.”
“And when did it start?”
“Well . . . I started my business in 2009, so—”
“Oh wow, okay.” Kelley smiled across the table. “That’s a brief history.”
“Wait, when did we all meet?” Jodi stepped in. “2011?”
“Rachel, I can’t believe you were the experienced parent back then,” Tamra said.
“Taught you bitches everything I know,” Rachel said.
Imani and Cleo looked at their mother, seeking corroboration that a bad word had been said. Tamra shook her head in confirmation and put a finger to lips.
“You know what?” Peter said. “I want to make a toast.”
Alix thought both Oh Jesus and Thank God. Peter was so good at making things easy and sociable but only in a way that made it seem like a TV show was ending. With all 141 pounds of her being, Alix wished she could just turn this night off.
“I know it wasn’t easy for Alix to leave you ladies,” Peter said. “And believe it or not, I miss you all very much too. As Alix writes her book and her business continues to grow, I’ve seen how much she’s come to lean on you, how much you encourage her, and how much easier you make her life. And Emira, that includes you now too. I’m very happy, or should I say thankful, to be outnumbered by so many amazing women tonight. So here’s to you.”
Everyone raised their glasses and said cheers. Briar managed to get a green bean on her fork by herself. When she held it up and showed it to Walter, he said, “That’s tremendous.”
Sixteen
After Peter made a toast that made Emira so embarrassed she could barely speak, Peter handed Catherine over to Mrs. Chamberlain and the table broke off into smaller conversations. Walter asked Kelley what the heck net neutrality was anyway. Jodi said, “I can’t believe how much she looks like you,” and Mrs. Chamberlain said, “You should see our baby pictures side by side.” Across from Kelley, Briar said to no one, “My tummy doesn’t like that.”
Twice during dinner Kelley had squeezed Emira’s knee, but she hadn’t known what he was saying by it; they were still too new. Was he mad that she hadn’t filled him in on how she’d said they met, the lie she completely forgot that she’d told? Did he think Mrs. Chamberlain was lying when she said they’d met on the train, to cover up that awful night altogether? Was that why he was being so rude about her job and her book? And why would Mrs. Chamberlain tell her it was a history book when it obviously fucking wasn’t? When Mrs. Chamberlain ran out the door on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Emira imagined her going to the library and laying out big, dusty reference books and Post-it notes and maybe even using a magnifying glass. But a book about letter writing? Like—calligraphy and shit? It sounded like the kind of book you saw in the sale section at Barnes & Noble, or in the waiting line when you were shopping at Michaels. But Emira couldn’t wrap her head around this, or the impossible fact that Kelley and Mrs. Chamberlain had once dated each other, let alone known each other out of the context of Emira, because sitting to her right, Tamra began to relentlessly ask questions about Emira’s plans for her career and for the rest of her life.
“So you went to Temple . . .” Tamra said.
“Uh-huh.”
“And then you took some typing classes.”
“Yeah, that’s my other job.”
“Well, if you’re thinking of grad school it’s actually not too late to apply for next fall.”
Had someone told Tamra that Emira wanted to go to grad school? Because no one had told Emira. She’d gone to undergraduate school to figure out what she wanted to do . . . wasn’t graduate school for the students who had succeeded? Emira’s eyes went from Briar, who had turned strangely quiet, to Prudence, who was squeezing the sides of Imani’s face. Imani was giggling in awe at Prudence the way Emira would have when she was little, when she was still quite bemused by what white girls got away with. Jodi was saying, “Would you like it if I did that to your face?” and Prudence was saying, “Yes, I would.”
“What was your GPA at Temple?” Tamra asked.
“Oh . . . not awesome,” Emira said. She set her fork and knife at the side of her plate. “Like, a 3.1.”
“Hmmm, okay, okay.” Tamra nodded slowly. “So grad school may be out. But you know what, Emira? There are plenty of other options that will surprise you. In fact, my sister-in-law went to a certificate program for hotel management, and now she has a five-bedroom house and makes six figures, in Sacramento. Can you believe that?”
Briar hiccuped once and her cheeks turned red.
“Yeah, that’s crazy . . .” Emira said. She wiped her hands on the napkin in her lap and said across the table, “Is Briar okay?”
But Mrs. Chamberlain was passing Catherine to Jodi, and they were trying to get her to say hi once again. On the other side of Emira, Walter, Kelley, and Peter were discussing the new Penn State football coach and his six-year contract. And as Briar’s stare became more glazed and far away, Emira began to feel the way she had on the night she and Briar went to Market Depot, very much together but also brutally alone. Emira said, “B, are you okay?” Briar tapped her mother’s arm. “I want Mama,” she said.
“Mama’s talking, Bri, I still see carrots on your plate.” Mrs. Chamberlain turned back to Catherine and said, “Come on, sweetheart. Can you say hi?”
Tamra leaned over even closer to Emira. “I don’t know if you know this, but Alix has a lot of pull. So does Peter, in fact.” She reached over with long fingers and laid them on Emira’s arm. “They love you,” she said. “I’m sure they would help you get into any program you wanted, or change up your schedule to fit in an internship or classes, or whatever you were looking to get into. How old are you, honey?”
Briar hiccuped again. Emira said, “I’m twenty-five.”
“Okay. We gotta hustle, don’t we? What’s the big goal for you?”
“Umm . . .” Emira readjusted in her seat. She took the clasp of her necklace from the space above her sternum and returned it to its place behind her neck. “I’m not really sure.”
“Come on, now,” Tamra pressed. Across the table, Briar’s face looked like she was both falling asleep and ready to panic. “If you could wake up tomorrow,” Tamra said, “and do anything you wanted, what would that something be?”
Next to Emira, Walter said, “He’s gonna have to do better than that for a championship.” Rachel looked at Catherine and said, “Hi, mini Alix.” Jodi shushed Prudence and said, “Prudence? That’s two,” and Emira realized that if she’d answered Tamra’s question truthfully, no one would have heard her. She could have placed a sweet hand underneath her chin and said, If I had a “big goal,” do you really think I’d be sitting at this fucking table right now? But just then Briar started to gag. And when Emira grabbed what she knew was a very expensive napkin and dove across the table to cover the toddler’s mouth, Jodi was the first to notice and scream.
Seventeen
Years ago, in Alex Murphy’s teenage bedroom, with the door closed, Kelley did all of these things he’d clearly been told to do by an older brother or a more experienced friend, but this obvious instruction didn’t take away from the wildly flattering fact that he was doing these things to her. Kelley made a grand presentation of a recently purchased condom. He asked her if it hurt and if she was okay. He even asked if they should put down a towel since her bedspread was so nice. The whole thing lasted about two songs (“A Long December” and “Colorblind”), but Alex had been so taken with Kelley that she breathed a sigh of relief and gratitude. No matter what happens, she told herself, I’ll never mind remembering this. It wasn’t like she thought they’d marry, but the infatuation was dangerous and heavy.
Now, in the comfort of her adult home, it seemed that the infatuation had never really ended. Alix couldn’t tell if it had started up again, or if it had only become dormant by means of
time and space.
Alix watched Jodi put her hands to her mouth. Emira’s body was soaring across the table both in slow motion and also with a quickness that made Alix jump in her seat. Even slower was Kelley’s rise as he stood up from the table and swung his arm around Emira’s waist, inches above pots of almost-gone butternut squash and a platter of lukewarm dark meat. In the shuffle, Alix couldn’t properly collect the fact that her child was throwing up at the dinner table. She could only stare at the same hand that used to hold the underside of her jaw after varsity games and coed scrimmages. It had only been a few months, but at one time in her life, Kelley made Alix so wonderfully nervous, and he used his hands to steady her. “Hey hey hey.” He’d once said this outside the girls’ locker room. “You gotta be still and let me like you a little bit.”
And now his hands were wrapped around Emira in Alix’s house on Thanksgiving Day. Alix had the sudden urge to remove Kelley’s hands from Emira’s hips, and not just because of the sexual familiarity that they displayed. In the same funny muscle memory that makes you take out your metro card to open your front door, or call your third-grade teacher Mom, Alix found herself ready to slap Kelley’s wrists away from her sitter. In the same voice and motion she used almost every day, she felt herself almost say, No no no. Don’t touch. That’s Mama’s.
Jodi squeezed Alix’s arm so hard that it was clear that it wasn’t the first time. Alix was suddenly back in the room as Briar started to cry. For a moment, when Jodi said, “Alix-honey, grab your girl,” Alix thought she was referring to Emira.
Eighteen
Briar’s face pinched together underneath the vomit-filled napkin, and it reminded Emira that the little girl rarely cried. Emira’s heart raced from diving over the table, from almost falling on top of it until Kelley caught her in his massive hands, and then from seeing a tiny face at the other side begin to moan in shock and discomfiture. Emira cupped the vomit in the napkin and brought it from Briar’s chin upward past her nose. With nothing in front of her face, the three-year-old began to scream.
Tamra said, “Oh no,” and Peter ran to get a towel and Prudence said, “Eww!” and Rachel laughed. “Party foul.”
Mrs. Chamberlain finally blinked. “Oh God.”
She went to pick Briar up, but Emira stopped her. “Actually, can you just unbuckle her? I’ll grab her.” Emira said this with such urgency that Mrs. Chamberlain obeyed. Emira said, “B, stand up for me,” and she swung the toddler into her arms, Briar’s face dripping with snot and tears.
Mrs. Chamberlain said, “Oh no, Emira, you don’t have to do that—”
“No, it’s okay, I got her.” Emira ascended the stairs and passed Peter and a bartender carrying paper towels and cleaning bottles in their hands. When she made it to the kitchen, she heard Walter say, “That was incredible!”
In the upstairs bathroom, Emira sat Briar down on the toilet seat and closed the door behind her. Briar did that nervous and uneven breathing Emira saw other children do when they skinned their knees or popped their balloons. It was alarming to know that this type of crying had been inside Briar all along, that she’d always been capable of it and just chosen not to.
“Hey.” Emira took a washcloth and began to wet it with warm water from the sink. “Hey, mama, it’s okay. Look at me.” She wiped Briar’s mouth and neck as Briar gasped for air so hard her whole body trembled every few seconds. “I’m sorry, big girl. That’s no fun to throw up. But hey, I think I caught it all. Your dress is still clean.”
Briar started to whimper as she touched her dress at the hem. “These is itchy,” she said.
“Yeah.” Emira took Briar’s fingers and wiped each one down with the towel. “This dress isn’t really my favorite either.”
“I don’t—I don’t like . . .” Briar calmed herself enough to point at the ceiling with her free hand and say, “I don’t like when Catherine bees the favorite.”
Emira stopped. She hung the washcloth on the side of the sink and sat back on her heels. “What did you say?”
“I don’t—I don’t like when Catherine bees the littlest favorite to Mama. I don’t like that.” Briar had stopped crying and she said this with a calm and specific certainty, both that she had explained it correctly and that this was in fact how she felt.
Emira pressed her lips together. “B, you know what?” As she formulated her words, Emira held Briar’s knees in both of her hands and thought, This is the littlest your knees will ever be. “You can have . . . favorite ice cream. Or favorite cereal. But guess what? When you have a family, everyone is the same. Do you have a family?”
Briar put her fingers in her mouth. “Yesh.”
“Do you have a mama?”
“Yesh.”
“And a dada?”
“Yesh.”
“And a sister?”
“Yesh.”
“Exactly, that’s your family. And in families, everyone is always the same.”
Briar touched her shoulders. “How come?”
“Well . . .”
In Emira’s family, Justyne was so obviously the favorite, but Emira was her brother’s favorite and so it seemed to even out. Her mother favored Alfie when it came to Christmas gifts, and her father favored Emira when it came to birthdays and phone calls. Emira didn’t figure this out until high school, but Briar was doing so at the tender age of three. Emira looked at the little person on the toilet and felt as if she were pushing an enormous boat out into the ocean. She slumped as if the situation were completely out of her hands and said, “’Cause that’s what family means. Family means no favorites.”
Mr. Chamberlain knocked twice and the cracked door swung open. When Briar saw her father she frowned and said, “Hi.”
By the time Emira came back downstairs, the bartenders were clearing away plates and everyone was gathering in the living room for dessert. Kelley made a very theatrical show of putting his own plate into the sink upstairs, and helping the two hired women push the dining room chairs back underneath the table. A few bites into a sugary strawberry-rhubarb pie, Prudence began to have a breakdown about needing more whipped cream (this marked the third time, in Emira’s opinion, that Prudence had reached number three). Cleo started to cry as well, and then Rachel stood to slip on her jacket. Rachel explained that she was meeting a man-friend in town and would be back in a few hours. She tapped Briar on the nose and said, “I’m off like a prom dress,” before heading for the door. Emira took the moment to squeeze Kelley’s arm. “We should probably get going, too.”
After awkward and stunted good-byes inside the Chamberlain house, Emira had all those feelings of leaving a movie theater and realizing that it was dark outside and that it had been for some time. The snow crunched underneath her feet as she stood next to Kelley and waited for their Uber. In a pink T-shirt and white bedtime leggings, Briar waved from Peter’s arms at the top of the stoop. Emira waved back and mouthed, Bye, pickle. Inside the Uber, Kelley and Emira didn’t speak.
Kelley stared out the window and rubbed his chin. As the silence settled in, Kelley started to remind Emira of the type of person on the train who cussed out loud when there was a delay. There was always that one passenger who seemed to believe that the train had been delayed only for them, as if no one else was inconvenienced and late. And as time went on, they became angrier at the fact that they couldn’t speak to a manager, rather than bothered by the delay itself. The car rolled along in the glittery snow, and for the first time since they’d been dating, Emira felt that Kelley was acting particularly white.
Before they reached his apartment, Kelley told the driver that he could stop on the block before his street. He said to Emira, “I need one last drink,” and reached to open the car door.
Emira followed Kelley into the kind of bar that Shaunie would have been tickled by, particularly at nine p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. There were three white men with gray and black be
ards seated in the center of the dimly lit bar, and a vacant pool table in a wood-paneled back room. One man was eating alone—chicken and something green—as he kept his eyes on the TV screen attached to the wall above the cash register. On the long wall opposite were pictures of John Wayne, Pennsylvania license plates, and other sepia-colored cowboys. Emira could hear low folk music, and just above it, a referee from the large television screen blowing a whistle and throwing a yellow flag. She took her coat off and hung it up next to a longhorn skull mounted on the wall.
On top of a bar stool, Kelley ordered a beer. Emira declined. She wanted to go back to his apartment and back to Kelley’s bed because the idea of laughing away the awkwardness of the evening still didn’t seem completely far-fetched. It wasn’t that Emira wasn’t bothered by the night’s disclosure, but—she thought this as Kelley kicked one boot up on the footrest and kept the other balanced on the soiled floor—at the end of the day, what could she, or anyone, really do about the situation? High school was a long time ago, even for someone you’ve slept with. In college, when Emira learned that she’d once slept with her current boyfriend’s new roommate, Shaunie had gasped and said, “What are you gonna do?” Emira had laughed and said, “Probably just keep living my life.” Josefa had said, “Amen.”
So Emira stayed standing, which put them at eye level, a dynamic she loved. She put her hands behind her back and hooked her fingers together, knowing she had one shot to turn this night around. In an attempt that was dumb but still charmingly dadlike, Emira said, “At least the food was good?”
Kelley’s face stayed the same.
“Emira, I’m not trying to be dramatic . . . but there’s no way you can keep working for Alex.”
Emira couldn’t help but laugh. She waited for his face to break, but when it didn’t, she placed her hands against the side of the bar. “Okay, Kelley, come on. Yeah, that was extremely awkward and it’s pretty weird and gross that you used to date my boss, but that was high school. You expect me to quit my job over it?”