“Was it about the food, really?”
Ryann put her hand on top of his, resting on her stomach. “No,” she said finally. “It wasn’t about the food. I just wanted you there.”
He was starting to like this new chick.
Her hand was still covering his when they pulled into the driveway of his sister May’s grey Georgian-style home, with the pale blue shutters and riot of colorful peonies surrounding it.
Next to him, Spencer thought he heard a slight intake of breath, like someone steeling themselves for a confrontation. He took his hand from Ryann’s stomach to turn off the engine then looked at her. She gave him a wan smile, and in the nanosecond before she looked down to pick up her pocketbook, he saw that there was real trepidation in her eyes.
“My mother is a plainspoken woman,” he said quietly. “And she’s got no problems with someone who’s exactly the same.”
At that, Ryann looked at him, eyebrow arched. “You’re saying I’m like your mother?”
Spencer shrugged. “Don’t get a big head about it. She has a lot more control over her temper than you.”
Rolling her eyes, Ryann opened the door and got out, taking purposeful, and now confident strides toward his sister’s front door.
“Look at him out there, showing off.”
Spencer’s sister, May, fell into the seat next to Ryann’s, a glass of white wine in hand.
Following her gaze, Ryann watched Spencer out on the back lawn, running around in circles, pretending to chase his two nieces. It was still mild enough to be outside, though the evenings were beginning to get cold.
“He never gets down like that with them. Usually finds them too exhausting. But I guess he’s got something to prove to you,” May added, a smile in her voice.
Ryann watched as Spencer fell onto his back in the grass, holding his side, pretending to be injured. The two little girls squealed in delight and piled on top of him while he faux-struggled, as though fighting them off.
Also looking on, from the back patio was Spencer’s mother, reclining in a lounge chair, wearing sunglasses and a hat to shade her from the sun. Ryann had been unprepared for how fragile she looked, because the way Spencer had described her, she sounded like a powerhouse—the woman who had rebuilt a church and soldiered on after her husband’s betrayal, and the public humiliation that must have come along with it.
Ryann had come in to escape her questions, however well-meaning they were; but also the disorientation. Watching Spencer roll around with a couple kids, while his mother sat nearby watching, reminding him that ‘they’re not boys! Be careful!’ was almost surreal. What would she have been doing with her Saturday, just six months ago?
Unless she was on a business trip, she would have awoken by five-thirty a.m. because that was her habit, and after lying in bed for a few minutes, finally gotten up to shower and dress. Then she would have made a coffee and turned on the news, forcing herself not to call Ivy to check in on what she might be doing for the day. Since Eli, Ivy never had as much time as she used to. And if she called, Ryann would have to listen to her friend try to figure out a way to squeeze her in, between the kids’ activities and her desire to have time with her man.
Sometimes, even though she knew Ivy would prefer to be with Eli, Ryann would pretend not to know, and suggest a girls’ day out somewhere. And Ivy, because she was a people-pleaser, would try to accommodate Ryann’s demands on her time.
“How did you and my brother meet?” May asked. She folded her legs beneath her as though settling in for a long chat.
She was a pretty woman, which was entirely expected for any sibling of Spencer’s. With eyes the same color as her brother’s, May was slightly darker in complexion but with lighter colored hair. She spoke in a soft, almost soothing voice that Ryann assumed was partly the product of having young children, who she was probably always trying to cajole into, or out of, something.
“I’m on the board of the Coalition,” Ryann said, surprised that Spencer hadn’t mentioned that. “We’ve actually known each other for a couple of years.”
“So the love-bug didn’t bite right away then,” May said. Then she shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. My brother isn’t exactly the settling down kind. Or at least he didn’t used to be.”
The love-bug? Ryann didn’t quite know what to say to that. She was sure Spencer would have confided in his sister that the pregnancy was a planned, and decidedly love-free arrangement. But then again, the way May and his mother had greeted her, with such warmth, probably meant that they believed Ryann and Spencer were a bonafide couple. One that, like countless modern couples before them, had accidentally stumbled into parenthood and decided to make the best of it.
And what about May’s reference to settling down? Ryann didn’t bother to challenge the assumptions in that little comment. It would never occur to a woman like May, with her sweet, placid disposition and easy smile that never mind Spencer, perhaps Ryann wasn’t the “settling down kind” either.
“I think our mother’s illness is making all of us re-evaluate some things though,” May said, twirling her wineglass by the stem. “Even our sister, Joyce, is …”
“Your mother’s illness?” Ryann leaned in.
“He didn’t tell you?” May glanced out the bay window toward the backyard. “She has, well, had cancer. She’s in remission now, but undergoing chemo, and …” May sighed. “Sometimes it wears on her. On all of us.”
“No.” Ryann looked out into the backyard herself. Spencer was sitting under a tree now, watching his nieces run around in circles, and apparently directing the action. “He didn’t tell me.”
“It’s harder for him,” May said. “Because he didn’t spend as many years with her as me and Joyce. He went to live with our father when he was sixteen, after our parents split up. And then after that …” May broke off, and took a sip of her wine.
“He told me,” Ryann said, realizing that May had probably stopped herself from talking about Spencer’s prison time. “Don’t worry.”
“Oh. Well, good. I mean, I thought he probably had, but …” May stopped again and took another swallow of wine, clearly not wanting to go further into details.
This would have been the perfect time, if Ryann were brave, to say that her own brother was in prison. If anyone would understand, it would be May. It would be a show of faith, and probably put them well on the way toward becoming friends.
But still, she couldn’t make herself do it. Telling Spencer had been one thing—that hadn’t even felt like too much of a disclosure—but she still hadn’t even told her closest friend. How strange was that? Telling Spencer was almost like keeping it to herself. Her secret still felt as secure as if she hadn’t spoken it to a single other soul.
“Anyway, I think because of that, he’s scared to lose her. More even than me. And that’s saying a lot.” For a moment, May’s eyes clouded over and she blinked thrice in rapid succession, and forced a smile.
“I’m sorry,” Ryann said.
“No. Don’t be. Like I said, she’s in remission.” May took a breath, like a heave of renewed relief.
Ryann offered a smile, thinking about her own mother, and wondering what it might be like to be that close to her. It had been well over a decade since she’d thought about the lack of closeness between her and her mother, or bothered to yearn for it. The last time she recalled doing so was after her relationship with Wade ended. She could have used a mother’s love then. But it was too late. She had long before that cut her emotions off almost entirely from her only parent.
“Are both your parents still with you?” May asked after a moment.
Still with you. An interesting phrase since Ryann had never felt that she had parents who were ‘with her’. Rick, yes. But her parents, no. Her father because she had never known him, and her mother because she had always been more preoccupied with her own life, and its various secrets and vices.
“My mother is,” Ryann said. “She lives in DC.�
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“Really?” May sat forward, and Ryann could see in her eyes that she was already plotting a cozy, family get-together. Maybe for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.
“I’m sure you’ll meet her one day,” she said preemptively.
“Maybe at the christening,” May said, winking. “What’re you hoping for?” Ryann must have looked confused because she continued. “Boy, or girl?”
Ryann smiled. She couldn’t recall the last time she smiled as much as she had since entering May’s house. Spencer’s family was different from him. They inspired formality, and unrelenting niceness, while what he teased out of Ryann was informality, and good-humored sarcasm. “I think Spencer wants a boy,” she said.
“Yes, of course he does. Men always do. But I asked what you want,” May said.
“I don’t have a preference,” she said truthfully. “Either would be fine with me.”
She used to think she wanted a girl. Before she was pregnant, she pictured a daughter because she imagined it would be just the two of them. Now, in her mind’s eye, she saw a boy, his small hands in Spencer’s large callused ones; and sometimes she saw a girl, looking up at him with eyes the exact color of her father’s, and bright with adoration. Whichever became a reality, they would bring Ryann equal measures of joy.
“Quincy still wants a boy,” May said, making a face. “So I guess we’ll keep trying till we get one. Although four is my absolute limit.”
May had probably never had to consider scheming her way into being a mother. She was married, and in a true partnership with a man who would likely greet the news of another pregnancy with a smile, and a shrug; not of indifference but of happy acceptance, because when you had a wife that was the way it went.
“Let me not spend all afternoon grilling you,” May said, emptying her wineglass, and standing. “Want to come help me get lunch on the table?”
Ryann spent the next few minutes helping May bring hot dogs for the girls, and grilled chicken and vegetables out to the patio for them all to eat together. There was also a large, glass pitcher of lemonade, in which floated actual slices of lemon, and cubes of ice.
It was such a conventionally domestic scene that Ryann felt like an actress who had been miscast in a play where the role had been written for someone else. Across the table, Spencer sat with his nieces, one on each knee. They had both, after a couple of hours of fun, not wanted to part from him, and he was eating it up. As she watched him, Ryann noticed his mother watching her.
“Spencer tells me you don’t have a church home, either, is that right?” she asked.
“No, I don’t. Although I’ve been to a few in the area. Just never found the one that suited me, I guess,” Ryann said.
Spencer looked up at her, his eyebrows raised.
“Don’t look so surprised,” she said to him, one corner of her mouth lifting in a half-smile. “I know you think I’m a heathen and all, but …”
“I didn’t say a thing,” he laughed.
“Spencer is a little bit of a heathen himself,” May piped in. “He’s hardly in a position to talk.”
“Well, the good thing about church is that, heathen or not, they always welcome you,” Mrs. Hall said. “And when the baby comes …”
“I was just talking to Ryann about that,” May said. “The christening has to be at Bethlehem Baptist …”
“It’ll be where Ryann wants it to be,” Spencer broke in, his eyes on hers.
“Bethlehem Baptist is the church you helped build, Mrs. Hall?”
“Yes. Many years ago now, and it’s under new leadership, but yes.”
“Then of course that’s where it should be,” Ryann said.
“Well.”
With a single word, her mother reduced Ryan to a quivering mass of nerves. She was fifteen-years old again, folding her arms across her chest, not because she was insolent, but because she was embarrassed by her large, and still-growing chest.
Back then, her mother had been thin, with a tidy, almost androgynous physique. Ryann’s own undeniable “femaleness” had shamed her. And, she believed, shamed her mother as well.
This time, standing just inside the front door of her mother’s small apartment, she was tempted to conceal her middle. Her mother looked at it the same way she looked at Ryann’s breasts and hips way back then—as though regarding something obscene.
“Now that I’ve seen it, I believe it,” her mother continued. “Pregnant.”
“Yes,” Ryann said.
She forced herself to say nothing more, and took the cake box—this time white cake with buttercream frosting—to the kitchen. She had broken the news to her mother only three weeks earlier, telling herself that the delay in sharing it had only been because it was bad luck to tell people too early. But here, now, she knew she had withheld it just to spare herself the inevitability of exactly this moment, when her mother would look at her with that awful judgment in her eyes.
Putting on the hot water for tea without being asked, she took a few, quiet cleansing breaths before heading back out into the living room. This time, her mother was watching a courtroom reality show. The TV judge was a pretty Black woman, with a pixie haircut and too much makeup. Her voice was shrill, and jarring.
“The last time I saw you, you had to have been pregnant then as well, judging by how much you show now,” her mother said, without looking over at Ryann again.
“I was.”
“And you decided to tell me now because it’s become impossible to deny.”
“I wouldn’t have wanted to deny it.”
Her mother sighed and turned up the television a smidge, as if hearing about Ryann’s joy at a pregnancy out of wedlock was much too indelicate a subject for her ears. Her mother had always projected impossible propriety. Even while living in a low-income neighborhood, working a low-paying job, and carrying on an affair with a man who was not her own, she behaved as though she was better than just about everyone.
Joe Higgs was the principal of the school where her mother taught. The school that Ryann and Rick had attended, and very much a married man. Apart from the alcohol, he was the only hint of untidiness that her mother would allow into her life. Ryann wondered what had become of him, and where he, his wife and children were now. She could ask her mother. But that would be cruel.
“He wants to meet you,” Ryann said instead.
“By ‘he’ you mean …”
“The father of my baby. I met his family last weekend. Now he wants to meet mine.”
“Such as it is,” her mother said.
“If you don’t want to, then I’ll tell him that.”
“I suppose I could. Are you going to take him to meet your brother as well?”
“If I wanted to, he would go.”
“So you have told him about Rick.” It was said with surprise.
“Yes.”
“Everything about Rick?”
“You mean why he’s in prison? Yes, I told him that, too.”
In the kitchen, the kettle had begun to whistle. Ryann stood to attend to it.
“No. You know what I mean.”
Ryann froze at the door to the kitchen, she put a hand up and held onto the doorframe. “Don’t start with that again. That’s all in the past and you know he didn’t mean …”
“I stopped wondering what he meant a long time ago. I just know that I did what I did to save you as much as I did it to save him. Have you ever talked about it?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. He wasn’t himself, and …”
“All of that may be true, Ryann. But we both know it affected you in some way. And that you need to talk about …”
Turning on her heel, Ryann went into the kitchen to take the kettle off the flame, and turn off the stove. Her hands shook as she made two cups of tea, and sliced the cake. She cut a generous slice for her mother, but none for herself, and brought everything out to the living room.
“Thank you,” her mother said when she set everything down on
the coffee table. Ryann hoped she was done with the subject she had just raised, and that they would fall back into the silence about it that had persisted for two decades.
But she wasn’t so lucky.
“I know you think I’m a terrible mother. And that you blame me for a million things. But I have never been able to understand why you blame him for nothing. He was—he is—your brother, Ryann. And what he did …”
“I’ve forgiven him for. And I don’t understand why you can’t do the same!”
“I have. But forgiving him does not mean I can forget. And I especially cannot forget if you hold the decision I made against me. Instead of putting the blame where it should be.”
“Why?” Ryann erupted, surprising even herself. “Why would you bring this up now? And what does it have to do with me wanting to bring the father of my child over here to meet you?”
“Nothing. It has nothing to do with it. But it makes me wonder whether you truly feel ready for what comes next. Making a family with someone. When you still have not dealt with what happened in our family.”
“Like what, Mom? The drinking? The screwing around with a married man? And how the hell do you know I haven’t dealt with it? What do you know about my life?”
Her mother looked at her, her mouth turned downward, her eyes tired. “I know very little about your life. Only as much as you communicate to me in the one hour, once a month that you visit me here.”
Putting a hand over her abdomen, Ryann sighed. “Mom. Look … I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Maybe we need to fight. Just once and for all. Fight it out, and be done with it.”
“No. I don’t want to …”
“Do you know how often I go over that night in my mind? How many times I turn it over and over?”
“Mom …”
“Hundreds of times. Hundreds of thousands. And each time, I reach the same conclusion. I did what I had to do, to protect my daughter.”
“What are you talking about?”
The Lover Page 24