Between Friends

by Kitt, Sandra

  “I’m the black sheep,” Alex said flippantly.

  Valerie grinned. “Nick told me about you when you were going into the service. He was glad you were leaving. The navy or something like that.”

  “That’s right.” Alex looked beyond Valerie toward the salon. He didn’t want to keep standing there. He didn’t want to talk about what he’d been doing.

  “Wanted to see the world? Have a girl in every port?”

  Alex pursed his mouth. “Wanted to stay out of trouble. The chances of surviving where I grew up were not good.”

  “Really? That sounds interesting. I’d like to hear more about it sometime.”

  Alex again looked at the very attractive and confident woman in front of him. He forced himself to ignore the activity beyond the open salon door, but he could peripherally make out the coffin at the front of the room. The encounter with Vin was a bad start, but he had to be here. Staring at Valerie he considered other options.

  “I’m not planning on staying much longer. How about coffee or something after this?”

  Before Valerie could respond, someone appeared suddenly next to her, and stood quietly staring up at Alex. Valerie put her arm around Megan’s shoulder and squeezed her to her side.

  “Mommy, can we go now? Where’s Aunt Dallas?”

  Alex looked down at the little girl, and he was riveted. He let his gaze examine her face, her approximate age. She didn’t have the characteristic pale skin or coloring of her mother’s Irish descendants, but she had the features and prerequisites of someone who was going to become, easily, at least equally as beautiful.

  “Dallas went to her parents’, sweetie. Yes, we’re going to leave soon and take Grandma home, but I want you to meet someone first.”

  Alex couldn’t take his eyes from the little girl. And he knew that his surprise, his fascination, showed clearly on his own face. He looked at Valerie, who waited, staring at him, for his reaction.

  “Is … is this your daughter?” Alex asked, awed.

  Valerie nodded.

  “Are you another friend of my mother’s?” Megan asked guilelessly.

  Alex glanced questioningly at Valerie, who shrugged. “She knows that Nick and I grew up together.”

  “But he wasn’t a friend of Aunt Dallas,” Megan added. “She told me so.”

  “I just met your mother. But I guess you could say I wasn’t a friend of his, either. My name is Alex.”

  Megan pointed blindly behind her to the salon. “He’s dead, you know. I don’t understand why everybody came to see him if he’s dead.”

  Alex chuckled.

  “Megan,” Valerie admonished. “We come to pay our respects. It’s sad that he’s dead.”

  Megan looked confused and lifted her shoulders. “But nobody liked him.”

  Valerie and Alex remained silent and just exchanged looks.

  Alex was reminded that he and Dallas Oliver had very good reasons for feeling the way they did. There was a kinship that was always going to tie them to Nicholas.

  He stared at Valerie’s daughter and he saw the future. But seeing Dallas Oliver again, and to some extent meeting Valerie Holland, had plummeted him into the past. He had a feeling of the inevitable, of not so much history repeating itself as just not being finished yet, for any of them.

  Chapter Three

  I saw this kid sprouting a head full of dreadlocks. He was Asian. I stared at his head, wondering how he had done it, knowing that the texture of his hair was pin straight, slick as seal skin, and fine as rain. I wondered if he’d applied some sort of gel or cream to clump the strands together, or did he roll bunches of it between his palms to get the twists started? I wondered what his parents were thinking and praying when he came home at night, a different species than the child they’d given birth to. But most of all I realized that this kid had accepted something that didn’t naturally belong to him. And yet, by doing so he had validated it for some other black kid. He had not taken away something that wasn’t his, but had copied it. I had to smile at his guts and his humanity. I applaud him. Imitation is still the best form of flattery.

  “MEGAN? I KNOW YOU’VE already gone to bed, just like I told you to twenty minutes ago. Right?” Valerie called out loudly as she stood in her kitchen pouring two glasses of wine.

  Low and aggrieved, Megan’s voice came from somewhere on the sofa in the living room. “But Aunt Dallas is helping me with my homework.”

  “The idea of homework is that you’re supposed to do it yourself. Dallas doesn’t need to learn about chlorophyll in plants, and she’s already graduated from school. If you hope to do the same, I suggest you pay better attention in class.”

  Dallas was slouched next to Megan, and she watched the girl mimic her mother’s complaints.

  “That’s not nice,” Dallas admonished her. “It’s disrespectful, and you know she’s right.”

  “But I just don’t understand why I have to know this,” Megan whined.

  Dallas pulled on a lock of her hair and then sat up, gathering the textbooks in a neat stack. “Because someday you may discover a way of growing better broccoli or cabbage using artificial light … or maybe no light at all.”

  Megan shuddered dramatically. “Ugh,” she said, sticking out her tongue. “I hate broccoli.”

  “You should keep that in mind,” Dallas said, chuckling. “If you don’t want to be stuck growing it, you’d better study real hard to become something else.”

  Megan began putting her schoolbooks back into her knapsack. “I’m going to be a writer like you.”

  “You’re not going to make a lot of money that way,” Dallas said.

  Valerie came from the kitchen carefully carrying the two wineglasses. She set them down on the glass-topped coffee table and glared at her daughter.

  “Good night, Megan.”

  “I’m going …” Megan sighed pettishly, and slowly headed toward the hallway leading to the back of the tiny house. She glanced back. “Aunt Dallas, can you come and put me to bed?”

  “You don’t need anyone to put you to bed,” Valerie said, impatience with her daughter’s delaying tactics creeping into her voice.

  “You go on. I’ll come in to say good night,” Dallas answered, careful not to usurp Valerie’s authority.

  Megan seemed satisfied with that promise. She nodded and then disappeared into her room. Valerie sat down heavily in a roomy armchair, prepared to relax, but then grimaced. She awkwardly heaved up her rear end and reached behind her back. She extracted a beaded hair crunchy belonging to her daughter. Shaking her head, Valerie tossed it onto the table. Dallas smiled at her expression.

  “You can’t believe where I find her things sometimes,” Valerie muttered as she lifted one of the wineglasses. “One morning last week I nearly went crazy trying to find a sweater she was supposed to wear that day to school. I gave it to her, she put it down somewhere and then couldn’t remember where. You’ll never believe where she found it.”

  Dallas shook her head.

  “In the pantry. In the middle of dressing for school she’d gone in to get a box of cereal for breakfast. She probably got distracted. Twenty minutes we spent looking for the damn thing,” Valerie said, bemused.

  Dallas took the second glass of wine and took a sip. “Why didn’t you just get her another sweater?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The point is kids have short attention spans and she has other sweaters. It’s a good thing she didn’t misplace something that could rot.”

  “If her head wasn’t attached to her shoulders …” Valerie began. “Getting her to bed at night is becoming another test of wills …”

  Dallas chuckled quietly. “This conversation should be taped. I wish you could hear yourself.”

  “What?” Valerie asked defensively.

  “Don’t you remember how your mother used to threaten us when I slept over, because we wouldn’t settle down and go to sleep? We’d always find some reason to get out of bed. Remem
ber how she used to yell to us from the living room …”

  Valerie rolled her eyes and nodded as she joined Dallas in mimicking the voice: “‘If I have to come in there, you girls are going to live to regret it … I am going to tan your hides!’”

  Valerie pointed to Dallas. “And you used to whisper, ‘My hide’s already tan.’”

  “I can’t believe I said that,” Dallas murmured with a grin.

  Valerie’s eyes widened, and she gasped as another memory came to her. “Remember the night we snuck into the bathroom after Mom had gone to bed, and we polished our finger and toenails?”

  “And then went back to bed before it was dry and got Tropical Melon Glow all over the sheets,” Dallas added. “What did your mother do when she found out?”

  “I don’t think she ever noticed. You know Mom. She wasn’t exactly the best housekeeper.”

  Dallas didn’t comment. It was true that the Holland household had tended toward the haphazard. The breakfast dishes would still be stacked in the kitchen at dinnertime, and the daily papers could collect in the living room for several weeks. The two family cats had the run of the place.

  But Dallas also recalled that the casual atmosphere was precisely the reason she’d always loved spending time at the Holland house. The rules of order were geared toward treating family members fairly. No hitting below the belt. Unlike at home, no one in Valerie’s family judged her. Or expected perfection. In their chaotic house she could just be herself.

  That was not to say that fights didn’t break out. And there were reminders to Dallas that she was an interloper in Valerie’s family. Like when she was thirteen and Valerie’s sixteen-year-old brother, Tate, had cornered her in his bedroom and kissed her. Dallas remembered the alien invasion of his tongue in her mouth, swishing about like a snake and making her gag. She’d punched him in the stomach … and never told anyone about the incident. Dallas doubted if Tate ever had.

  She and Valerie got mad at each other from time to time and would break off their friendship. The incursions never lasted for more than an hour or two. And it was always Valerie who would have to come to apologize.

  “We used to have so much fun,” Valerie murmured in reminiscence, absently combing her fingers through her beautiful shoulder-length hair. She stretched out her legs and rested them on a corner of the coffee table. Opposite her, Dallas did the same. Their limbs almost touched, ankle to ankle, and simultaneously they caught each other’s gaze and smiled.

  “Do you know, when I was about eight I used to think that when you got older your skin would get lighter, like mine?” Valerie suddenly said.

  Dallas nearly gasped as she raised her brows. “For God’s sake, Val … you never told me that before. Why on earth did you think that?”

  Valerie shrugged. “I know it sounds stupid, but … I wanted you to be just like me.”

  Dallas slowly shook her head, still capable of being amazed at the observations of white folks. Even someone she loved as dearly as Valerie. “Why didn’t you think that as we got older your skin might get darker to match mine?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I always saw you as my sister. I wanted you to look like me.”

  “You know,” Dallas began thoughtfully, taking another sip of the wine. “Megan doesn’t have your fair coloring. She’s a beautiful little girl, but she doesn’t look like a Holland. Now how do you explain that?”

  Valerie didn’t answer right away. Her expression was a blank, as if she hadn’t considered that other people would have noticed the difference. And then there was a hint of embarrassment.

  “Megan looks like Megan,” she murmured evasively. “Maybe she favors the other side of her family.”

  Dallas pursed her lips and gently sloshed the wine around in her glass. She knew better than to pry. For close to twelve years Valerie had kept to herself the identity of her daughter’s natural father.

  “Does she ever ask about her father?”

  Valerie sighed. “All the time, now. It started about a year ago. She suddenly had all these questions I didn’t want to answer.”

  “You must have known that someday it would happen.”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  “So, what do you tell her?”

  Valerie glanced covertly at Dallas and shifted positions. She drew both her legs up onto her chair with her arms closed around her knees. “Just that her father and I had a relationship that was short and didn’t work out.”

  “At least you didn’t tell her he was dead.”

  Valerie stared at her. “I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t true,” she said softly.

  There was a sadness to the admission that Dallas had never heard before. Even after she’d gotten pregnant and had the baby, Valerie had always exhibited a casual acceptance of her situation, as well as being impervious to the inevitable gossip and whispering about what she’d done, and the embarrassment to her family. There had been a total shutdown of any information that would give away the identity of the father.

  Dallas nodded, staring into her wineglass. Everyone had secrets. “I used to wonder who Megan’s father is, but only way back at the beginning, when you were first pregnant and she was a little baby. Now it doesn’t seem important.”

  “I used to think so, too. I thought she’d just get used to not having a father. Lots of her school friends have divorced parents, or ‘uncles’ that come and go, if you know what I mean. But Megan’s old enough to ask questions.”

  “So tell her.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s … too complicated.”

  Dallas slowly shook her head. “It’s only going to get worse. I’m telling you. My mother never said anything to me, but I knew there was something different about me even when I was four or five. I could feel it. Then when I came to live with my father, I still knew there was something but I could never get any information or answers. I want to know. Megan wants to know. Sooner or later we’ll both find out.”

  “Look, there were reasons at the time for not saying anything,” Valerie said. She sat forward in the chair and pointed a finger at Dallas. “Remember that time when you thought you were pregnant?”

  Dallas frowned. “You mean with Hayden?”

  Valerie shook her head, continuing to look directly at her. “I mean when we were still in high school. We were juniors …”

  It suddenly came to Dallas. Of course she remembered. She’d been scared to death, and had cried for two weeks straight when her period was late. Instantly she thought of the circumstances that had precipitated her fright.

  “That … wasn’t the same thing,” she tried to argue, but Valerie wouldn’t let her get away with it.

  “Okay, so you weren’t pregnant. But you didn’t tell me who the guy was. I wouldn’t even have known if you hadn’t panicked later. One week you’re a virgin and three weeks later you’re hysterical, sure that you were going to have a baby. Do you want to tell me who he was?”

  “That was almost fifteen years ago, Val. What’s the point?”

  “Well, I feel the same way. You were lucky. I got caught and you didn’t,” Val said, feeling vindicated.

  “I don’t think I’d refer to Megan Marie as having been caught. You could have had an abortion.”

  Valerie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right. My father wasn’t thrilled about me getting pregnant, and he didn’t get on me or make a real big fuss. But he would have killed me if I’d even thought about an abortion.”

  “Are you sorry you had her?”

  Valerie sighed and stared thoughtfully across the room. “No … I wouldn’t say I’m really sorry. I just wish things had been different. I wish I’d been a whole lot smarter.”

  “How long do you think you can get away with not telling her what she wants to know?” Dallas asked.

  “I know, I know …” Valerie said. Suddenly she uncurled herself from the chair and got up. She brushed back her hair. It fell back into place with a gentle bounce aga
inst her neck and cheeks. She moved around the small room, picking up stray items belonging to her daughter. “I just need the right time …”

  Dallas watched her, knowing Valerie was putting her off. Dallas understood what Megan wanted. Hadn’t she herself been trying for years to piece together her own heritage? She had strange flashbacks, images of white children she used to play with. Another house with other white people she used to know and trust. Before her mother died and she’d come to her father … who was black. Who were they?

  “So, tell me about Alex,” Dallas asked, smoothly shifting to another subject.

  Valerie chuckled. “I knew you were going to ask me about him. He’s related to the Marcos in some way. I think he’s one of Nick’s cousins. Nick never told me how, but he didn’t seem to like Alex very much. I never knew why. We went out after the service for dessert and coffee.”

  Dallas shook her head, bemused. “You go to a funeral and end up with a date.”

  Valerie shrugged, “That was two weeks ago,” she glanced at Dallas. “How come you’re so interested?”

  Dallas shrugged. “Maybe because of what almost happened between him and Vin Marco.”

  “You want to know something? Alex wanted to know about you, too. Asked a lot of questions.”

  In the process of drinking more wine, Dallas used the motion to hide her reaction. “Really?”

  Valerie looked at Dallas. “What did you think of him?”

  Dallas shifted positions, once again in an effort to disguise her response. She now sat with one leg bent beneath her, and half turned to fluff the pillow behind her back. All to avoid looking directly at Valerie.

  “There was no time to think much of anything,” she said. “What happened after I left?”

  “Alex went to look at Nick laid out,” Valerie admitted quietly. “He sat with Lillian for a long time. Finally, he said good night to her and Vin, and that was that.”

  “Except for the coffee afterward,” Dallas probed.

  “It was just coffee. Megan had ice cream. She seems to like Alex. We never even talked about Nick and I can tell you this … if Alex starts asking me out, it won’t be because of him, either.”