The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  Xavier paused at that, then said, “I just wish you’d trusted me more. Or trusted me at all.”

  He rose from the table again and moved to the sink to continue washing dishes, and so did she. They moved like an assembly line in the kitchen, washing and rinsing plates and scooping leftovers into Tupperware containers. When Ruth had first told Xavier that her grandmother didn’t believe in dishwashers, she thought he would laugh and consider it old-fashioned like she had.

  Mama always said dishwashers were nothing but a waste of water, and besides, nothing beats good ol’ elbow grease. Xavier accepted that as reasonable and suggested he and Ruth wash and dry dishes together as a team. They usually talked while they worked. Not this time, though. The hinges of their new cabinets squeaked louder than usual, it seemed, when they put away each dish.

  Through a narrow opening of their bedroom door that night Ruth heard Xavier moving about the house. The announcer on ESPN analyzing plays in a football game. Then the pop from the opening of his bottle of Sam Adams. About two commercial breaks later, the sound of him using the guest bathroom.

  Sitting in bed alone, she pulled the comforter around her shoulders and rocked lightly against the headboard. She thought about the first guy she’d built her world around, only to have him back away from her.

  She remembered Friday nights in Ganton, no particular one because they were all the same. Fast-food islands every few miles teeming with pent-up adrenaline. Taco Bell and Walmart as destinations, not pit stops on the way to something more exciting. Malls jittering with girls telling jokes Ruth didn’t get. When she dreamed of her future, she imagined being on an airplane looking down on Ganton from ten thousand feet, then twenty and thirty thousand feet, until the clouds obscured her hometown altogether. There had to be a world out there that didn’t revolve around high school football.

  As luck would have it, though, it was football that introduced Ruth to Ronald. His sweat-streaked face had glimmered in the moonlight, black and shiny like fresh asphalt after a hard rain. He wore shades even in the dark and a tribal tattoo snaked down his neck, inviting her to follow wherever it led. But it didn’t matter whether he noticed her, because she’d always pitied girls like her best friend, Natasha, who had to rely on their looks instead of their brains to attract boys.

  So when Ronald stopped her on the street after a game and asked her name, she was surprised by her body’s unconscious response to the attention. Inevitably, she tried to think of something coy that Natasha might say. Instead, her brain went to mush and the only comeback she could think of was, of all things, biblical.

  “Jezebel,” she teased.

  He laughed and came back hard. “All right now. Got to watch out for y’all church girls. I know everybody on their knees ain’t praying.”

  She blushed at how brazen he was and looked down at her hands, the nails unpolished and bit to the quick. Hastily, she shoved her hands into her pockets.

  He stepped closer. “Look, I know you’re a good girl. I’m not trying to take advantage. I see you around school. I don’t say anything to you, but I see you and I know you’re about something.”

  I see you. When Ronald said that, it was like turning the key in the ignition of a new car, hearing the engine rev for the first time. She wished she had something to lean on to steady herself. Mama and Eli had been too consumed with their own problems to really see her. They moved through the same rooms, but they didn’t get her the way Ronald did.

  I see you. She couldn’t get that out of her head because everyone saw him, not her. As a star athlete, a football legend, he didn’t get patted down at parties or followed in stores like Eli did.

  Still, this boy was dangerous. Not in the clutch-your-purse kind of way that some white people considered Black boys dangerous. Not because of anything criminal or even borderline criminal. The threat Ronald posed wasn’t to her body. It was to that deep part of herself she was still trying to get to know. Back then, she existed as this little knot of unripe fruit.

  For months, they met in the most clandestine spots—the thirty-yard line of the football field after the stadium lights went out, the aisles of the GoLo gas station, and sometimes his cousin’s apartment. Why they met in secret she didn’t know. And she never asked why he wouldn’t kiss her, but she assumed this was the natural dance of men and women. Everything about their relationship felt like walking on the edge of a cliff, one she wanted to plunge over again and again.

  “We fit together like a puzzle. R and R, baby,” Ronald said. He made it sound like poetry, with the rhythm and soul of spoken word, and she said little because his eloquence said it all, overwhelming and consuming her in a deluge of new emotions. She imagined their alliterative names on wedding invitations someday, Ruth and Ronald embossed in the timeless elegance of calligraphy.

  They blasted their boom boxes and finished each other’s sentences and hip-hop lyrics. This was the nineties and music provided the anthem to their lives. If Ruth had to name one song that embodied their love story, though, it would’ve been the Fugees’ “Killing Me Softly.”

  With Mama taking on extra hours cleaning at the hotel and Eli putting in long shifts at the plant, her family unit barely existed anymore. On most days, she found herself alone.

  The first night she joined Ronald down in the basement of the house he shared with his mother, she took in the sparse furnishings. A ratty brown leather couch with one seat cushion that had turned black and slick where Ronald usually sat. In a corner of the dimly lit room, a floor lamp with a dull bulb. She watched him move with ease across the room to the hi-fi, where he nimbly tuned the FM channels until he settled on one with the DJ whispering in a low, raspy voice. Almost intoxicating. And then a slow jam played.

  A wave of nerves overcame Ruth and something inside her like an alarm screamed that she shouldn’t be there. She’d never done more than kiss a boy, but there she was alone with one in a dark basement. Still, she convinced herself she was being silly, too uptight as usual. This was Ronald from school, not a stranger. Be cool, she told herself.

  He’d poured glasses of grapefruit juice for both of them. When he passed her the bottle of vodka to mix with it, she froze. It smelled like nail polish remover. Other than sneaking a sip of her grandfather’s beer when she was eight, which had made her gag, Ruth had never tried alcohol. Ronald must have sensed her discomfort.

  “Breathe in, then just sip on it. Nice and slow,” he told her. He was sitting close to her on the couch. Too close, their knees bumping. A jolt of excitement intensified by fear ran through her.

  She put the drink to her lips as he had instructed. It reminded her of one of those nasty-tasting medicines Mama had forced her to drink as a kid. The vodka burned the roof of her mouth and then her throat and stomach, too.

  Still, something about the delicious danger of drinking, and doing it with Ronald, ignited her whole body.

  The next time she found herself in Ronald’s basement, she came prepared, knowing what could happen, but also not knowing, either. His mother had worked late that night as a nurse aide at the hospital, filling in for someone else. When Ronald called her to come over, it was already late, but she hurriedly changed into her pretty lace thong that Natasha had convinced her to buy on one of their trips to the mall. Not the granny panties Mama bought for her, five in a pack. She dabbed perfumed body oil on her belly button and the insides of her thighs. All those little details she had picked up from tales of Natasha’s exploits that Ruth had stored in her mind. Finally, it was her turn.

  The low ceiling and the close walls made Ronald’s football player body seem unusually large and awkward. He excited her. He terrified her, too. Wordlessly, he fumbled with the hook of her bra and she turned her head, avoiding his eyes, suddenly shy, maybe even a little remorseful. Yet if she tried hard enough, she could be a girl who didn’t care about bad reputations and grandmothers’ expectations. She could just be.

  It hurt until it didn’t anymore. Sex was like salve on old wo
unds. When he entered her, he filled the aching, empty places left by a dead grandfather and parents she never knew. They didn’t talk about protection because he was her protection.

  The day the doctor confirmed Ruth’s pregnancy, Mama didn’t say a word. There was no surprise on her face. No shock. It was as if she had been awaiting official confirmation of what she already knew. People said there was something about the way a girl walked from the very beginning when she was carrying a baby—a spread to her hips, the parting of her legs—that you could just tell.

  Mama took her anger out on a frying pan, scrubbing it so hard the nonstick coating peeled off like an onion skin. That night, Ruth saw her kneeling in the closet, her face wet with perspiration, trembling, a moan rising from her throat, petitioning Jesus to intervene.

  Ruth couldn’t even look her grandmother in her eyes in those early months of pregnancy. She had messed up big time, carrying her shame in front of her, that shame walking into rooms first, pressing against the kitchen table where they said grace as a family.

  Keeping the baby a secret from Ronald had never been the plan, but he barely looked at her during that first trimester. When he got sidelined from football in a late-season game with an anterior cruciate ligament tear and his college scholarship dreams began slipping away, he withdrew into himself. That’s the only way to put it. As soon as he stopped touching that ball, he stopped touching her, too.

  Still, Ruth kept making plans for them and the baby on the way, hoping he’d eventually stop tripping. On an Excel spreadsheet she kept private, she mapped out her strategy, which included Ronald attending community college to start and then joining her at a four-year university where she’d study part-time and raise their baby, and he’d play football.

  The college prep books had advised making two lists: one for “safety” schools and another for “I’ll die happy if this ever happens” schools. Yale, with its reputation for fostering big ideas and curiosity, had been her reach-beyond-the-cornfields-of-Ganton, her reach-for-more. She had watched Angela Bassett in the movie Waiting to Exhale dozens of times, and the Yale graduate inspired her. There was something about the way she moved—her back stick straight, head high—and every time she spoke, brilliance dripped from her lips. A Yale-made woman.

  After college graduation, Ronald would be drafted to the NFL and she would find an engineering job in whatever city he landed in, and by then, they would consider having a second child.

  In those early months of her pregnancy, before she began to show, she told herself that if Ronald knew the truth, maybe his eyes wouldn’t be so cold and distant. But every time she tried talking to him about anything, he either snapped at her or stayed quiet.

  She tried to explain how the Pythagorean theorem related to football interceptions, but he wasn’t interested. She offered to ice his knee, but he didn’t want her to touch him. Could she make him a sandwich? No.

  One night, they were sitting on the couch at Ronald’s place watching an old Martin rerun and she suggested they go together to a party that Friday night, something to take his mind off his knee injury. And if she were honest, anything to get out of his mother’s basement.

  Without looking at her, Ronald pulled hard on the Velcro strap of his knee brace. “You can do what you want on Friday nights, just not with me,” he said.

  How could she tell him about the baby after that? What if he blamed her and thought she had trapped him somehow? People labeled certain girls in school who zeroed in on potential husbands like a laser, some going as far as to poke holes in condoms. Ruth wasn’t one of those girls, yet she desperately wanted him to know they’d created a life together. Keeping the baby a secret almost destroyed her, but every time she opened her mouth, no sound emerged. She couldn’t do it.

  Her long talks were instead with the baby. Do you think he still loves us? Her tongue would itch, and she’d crave something sweet, like caramel apples or Tootsie Rolls. That would be a sign from their baby that everything would be okay.

  Then she’d say, If Ronald really loves us and wants us to be a family, kick once for yes, twice for no. Sometimes, she wouldn’t feel anything for a long stretch of time, and then if there were two kicks, she told herself the baby had misheard the question. She’d ask it again until she felt a single kick.

  Now, the silence between Ruth and her husband coated the air, thick and pungent, the discontent almost choking them. When there was no more good TV to watch, only infomercials for blenders and thigh thinners, Xavier finally came to bed. He wasn’t a man to pout or lick his wounds. But they’d never fought over anything this consequential before, either, and as well as she knew her husband, it was impossible to read his mind. And honestly, this hadn’t even been a fight. A fight would have been easier. He moved around their bedroom, careful to avoid any physical contact with her.

  Ruth turned out the lights and lay beneath the sheets with her eyes closed and hands clasped over her chest, pretending she hadn’t moments earlier been pressed against the door trying to anticipate his mood. Her head burrowed in the thousand-thread-count pillowcase, made of Egyptian cotton designed to softly caress her cheek. But on this night, it just chafed, and she couldn’t get comfortable with Xavier so close, yet so far away.

  He sat on the edge of the bed for a few minutes before stretching out on top of the covers, then rolling onto his side. Curling into a ball, she tucked her legs beneath her, facing one wall while he faced the other. He had always been a generous bed partner, never hogging the covers or manspreading. In the infancy of their marriage, she had stayed awake through the night watching his chest rise and fall as a mother would do with her baby, admiring the bridge of his nose and the length of his eyelashes. She had been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid he might not be there in the morning.

  For her, love had always been about holding on too tight. She could never get the grip just right. When sleep finally came, her body shook with fresh dreams of her son hungry and helpless in a Ganton alley. Her nightgown, damp with sweat, clung to her skin like Saran wrap.

  Five

  Midnight

  Midnight lay facedown on the back seat of Daddy’s Chevy Silverado pickup truck. The truck smelled worse than the dead frog from science class that had been soaking in formaldehyde for weeks. This was not Midnight’s day to spend with Daddy—usually that was Mondays and Fridays—but he jumped into his father’s truck whenever he spotted it around town.

  He listened to the rumble of the wind and the purr of the engine, trying to ignore the anger in the voice of the man yelling at Daddy. Fights seemed to find Daddy and his friends. Their bodies ready to give a punch or get one. Midnight had seen so much in his time that Granny called him an old soul. Even without sitting up to look, he knew the voice of the other man belonged to Drew, the guy who let Daddy live in his place after the plant closed. Midnight would’ve moved in, too, but Granny said it didn’t look right for a boy his age to live with two men. So he was stuck at her house.

  From inside the truck, he could hear Drew saying, “You owe me rent money, Butch. You better get it to me by the end of the week.”

  Then Daddy: “I told you I’d pay you. Get off my back.”

  Midnight didn’t sit up to look, but he could hear their grunts and the slapping of fists against jaws. With his eyes shut, he felt each bump and bang on the side of the truck, not sure if Daddy or Drew was winning, but sure he had time. A few minutes at least.

  All the truck windows were white with snow. On all fours, he crawled to the center console, opened it, and pulled out the plastic clips that led to the secret compartment where Daddy kept the gun. Well, not a real gun, because Daddy hid those underground. The feds won’t get these, he said. The gun he’d bought for Midnight looked real except it had an orange tip on the end and shot plastic pellets. Daddy was trying to teach him how to shoot. But the only time Daddy let him fire it was when he wore special clothes and something to protect his eyes.

  “Don’t be scared of it. Hold it like you mea
n it,” Daddy said the first time he took him out for practice shooting.

  That day, Midnight had extended his good arm—the left one—wrapped his fingers around the trigger, closed his eyes, and then lost his grip, the gun falling to the ground.

  “Pick it up and do it again without being so reckless.”

  He let Daddy’s words in his ear guide him. Square your shoulders and lean forward. Don’t pull the trigger, squeeze it like you’re making a fist. On Midnight’s fifth try, Daddy dropped his head and was quiet at first, his eyes misting. Then he worked his mouth into a half smile, slapped Midnight on the back, and said, “Good job. That’s my boy.”

  Midnight would always be a one-arm shot. The boy with the gimp arm. Forever damaged goods, and he feared no matter how brave he was, Daddy would only see his scars.

  There was no one in all of Ganton as fearless as Daddy, who called himself a good guy with a gun. He’d whipped it out once at the laundromat to stop a man he swore he saw choking his girlfriend and slamming her head against the washing machine. Both the guy and the girl said they were just goofing around, but Daddy didn’t believe them.

  And there was that time somebody was breaking into cars late at night in one area of Pratt, and Daddy patrolled the street with his hand on the Sig in his waistband, the same nine-millimeter that cops and Navy SEALs carried.

  Now Midnight practiced his shooting position, aiming the gun at the steering wheel, the floor mats, the power locks, then the passenger window. Tucking his elbow in close to his rib cage, he made himself smaller. Then he lined the muzzle of the gun up with the side of the front seat, using it as cover the way he would if he were a cop trying to sneak up on a bad guy. But then the stomp of boots in the snow outside the driver’s-side door got louder and Midnight quickly tossed the gun back in its hiding spot and shut the console. Even though it was a pretend gun, Daddy didn’t like him playing with it unsupervised. Midnight hunched down on the floor of the back seat.