Quiet as Kept

Chapter 1

One

X arielle

It was an unseasonably warm March day, and the moment that I stepped into my grandmother’s house, I was hit with the unmistakable smell of sweat, frying chicken, Pine Sol, and bleach. It was a combination I knew well from my childhood that I hated as an adult.

The living room was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual. Nobody ever really sat in Granny’s front room. That room was designated for guests. The only thing was the majority of guests that visited my grandmother were her children and grandchildren.

I barely took in the room with its plastic covered velvet sofa, threadbare rug, and ancient La-Z Boy.

I followed the sound of the noise and chatter until I found myself in the kitchen.

My aunt, Bobbie, and her daughter, Nisha, were at the stove and sink respectively overseeing the food that would later be served in celebration of my Granny’s seventy-fifth birthday.

I wanted to sit down, but with the majority of my family present in the small shot-gun house, there wasn’t a seat for me. Before I could decide which wall looked good for leaning, I was accosted by my aunt, Cassandra.

“There you are.” Her tone held exasperation. “What took you so long to get here?”

I eyed her. She was my grandmother’s oldest child, and she had the bossy personality to prove it.

“Uh, I was at work. I don’t get off until six, and I came straight here.”

“Where you work that you don’t get off until six?”

I didn’t need the stank attitude. I was already exhausted and had forced myself to show up out of respect for my grandmother.

My mother was an absentee mom, who dropped me off at Granny’s house when I was seven and had only returned periodically.

Granny wasn’t one of those warm and fuzzy grandmothers, but she had taken me in.

She . . . sort of raised me. I mean, she didn’t check homework, attend school functions, or enroll me in activities, but she cooked every night, did laundry, and provided a roof over my head.

To be fair, my mother wasn’t the only one of her children to dump their children off on her, so my granny would be “raising” anywhere from two to seven of her grandchildren at any given time.

“At the same place I’ve been working for the last seven years.” I reminded her.

She waved me off. “Anyway, I had Jayda send out a text over a week ago to the family group chat. You never responded.”

One thing I didn’t really do was mess with my biological family.

Collectively, they’d taught me over the years that they were toxic.

They’d taught me with their behavior that they didn’t deserve my loyalty, my consideration, my time, my money, and most importantly, my heart.

Collectively, they were mean, selfish, greedy, jealous-hearted, hedonistic, and had the crabs in a barrel mentality.

After years of trauma at their hands and wondering why my own family couldn’t love me, I threw in the towel. I distanced myself from each and every one of them with the exception of Granny, my Aunt Bobbie, and my cousin Nisha.

Aunt Bobbie and Nisha were nice, and they had sweet dispositions. They kept their distance though. So, I never got to have as many dealings with the two of them as I had with my more hateful family members.

I couldn’t really say how my granny was.

I never felt like I really knew or understood her.

Her disassociation game was so next level that she rarely commented on anything.

But she was my grandmother, and even though she’d never told me that she loved me or that she was proud of me, even though she wasn’t a hugger or an encourager, I would come through for her.

Only her. I didn’t care which of the rest of them had a birthday, a baby, a wedding, an anniversary or otherwise .

. . I was busy that day, couldn’t make it, and my gift got lost in the mail.

“What text?” I questioned, preparing myself for the drama that I could just sense was about to unfold.

“The text about the money to get momma a birthday gift.”

“Oh, I got that text,” I admitted.

The text from my cousin requested that I send fifty dollars to Cassandra for a group gift. Apparently, Cassandra had some bright idea about a gift she wanted to get for Granny.

First of all, I didn’t trust any of my maternal family members with my money, least of all Cassandra. I already knew that she would pocket half the money and get Granny something really cheap, if she got her anything at all.

“I never got your money though.”

“I know. I wanted to get Granny something that was just from me,” I explained.

She rolled her eyes. “A lot of the grandchildren wanted to do that, but they still sent me the money, so they could be included in the group gift.”

“I don’t want to be included in the group gift.”

“Ew! You have so much of LaTasha in you that it’s not even funny. Even with her running off and not sticking around to raise you, you still turned out just like her . . . selfish and self-centered as hell.”

LaTasha was the woman who birthed me. My biological mother.

Whenever a family member really wanted to take a shot at me, they would accuse me of being like her.

As a young girl and a younger woman, that comparison used to eat me up inside.

My mother was selfish. She was irresponsible.

She was immature. She was negligent. The thought that my family would even suggest that I had similar characteristics would usually get me to do whatever they were trying to browbeat me into doing.

That tactic no longer worked. I shrugged my shoulders.

She huffed out a sigh at my lack of response. “Ugh! Well, because you’re opting not to participate, you’re making everybody else have to come up with more money. I divided the cost of the gift by twelve. Now, it’ll need to be divided by eleven.”

“In the future, don’t count my money, Cassandra,” I told her. “I never said I was contributing to no group gift, so I shouldn’t have been included in the number.”

“As much as Mama has done for you, I thought you, of all people, would want to contribute. I mean, she could’ve let you go into the system, but instead, she took you in when Tasha just dumped you on her?—”

I cut her off because she’d been using that as ammunition against me for decades. As if it was my fault that LaTasha got in the wind.

“And she took in Meechie and Mookie too. When you dumped them on her for two years without a visit or a call.” I reminded her about her own less than stellar parenting missteps.

“Fuck you, you little uppity bitch.”

She looked like she wanted to hit me, but another thing the Simpson family had taught me as a collective was how to defend myself. I didn’t have much in life, but I definitely had hands.

“Fuck you right back, with your big back ass,” I told her, completely unbothered by her name calling.

The Simpson family was big on name calling, signifying, and playing the dozens. However you identified it, they were the kings and queens.

“Not too much on my mama, Xari!” Her younger son, Mookie, called out from the dining room.

“Yeah, you don’t want this work, cousin,” Meechie, her older son, added.

“Ain’t nobody finna jump on my baby cousin,” Nisha told them as she dusted the excess flour off of a chicken leg. “You need to be cool, Aunt Sanny.”

“ She needs to be cool,” Cassandra insisted. “You know Xari’s ass has a bad habit of acting superior and shit.”

“You do be acting superior,” another of my cousins, Harper, said as she moved past me to get to the refrigerator.

“And I never understood why she thought she was better than us,” Cassandra’s daughter, Zatoria added. “She’s working that penny-ante ass job, driving that trap ass car, and living in that trap ass building on the corner of Broke Avenue and Bitch Boulevard.”

Chuckles went up around the room.

“I do not need this shit,” I mumbled to myself as I turned on my heel.

“That’s right. Run off, bitch,” Cassandran taunted me. “Just like your stanking ass mammy. Any time shit gets tough, she runs off.”

“Fuck you,” I told her as I made my way back down the long hallway. Once again, I couldn’t help thinking that they were probably the reason my mother left. I just don’t know why she would leave me with them.

I was almost to the front door when her voice stopped me.

“You’re gonna leave without even wishing me a happy birthday?”

I looked to the left, and there in that ancient La-Z Boy recliner sat my grandmother.

“Hey, Granny. Sorry. I can’t take your oldest daughter . . . or her children.”

“Sometimes, family is the most contentious relationship on Earth.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Which is why I stay away.”

I was fourteen years old, when for all intents and purposes, I moved out of Granny’s house.

I never told her I was moving. I just started spending more and more time at my best friend, Yahirah’s, house.

It was just Yahirah, her mother, and her brother, Nehemiah.

Their house was calm. Peaceful. Yahirah’s mother didn’t down talk me or try to make me feel less than.

She just loved on me and treated me with the same tender kindness that she gave to her children.

“You definitely stay away,” Granny agreed with a nod of her head.

Because of her tendency to disassociate and distance herself emotionally, I wasn’t even sure that she noticed I stopped sleeping at her house as a teenager.

She never mentioned it. She never asked me why I stopped coming home.

I felt like I could’ve run off with a pimp, and she would’ve been unbothered.

I never felt like anybody who shared my blood was concerned about or invested in me—even her.

“Your family is toxic.”

“We’ve made some mistakes.” She shrugged her shoulders. “But nobody is perfect.”

“Especially when they’re not trying to be.”

“And Sherise is perfect?”

Sherise was Yahirah’s mother.

“Not perfect, just loving.”

“Touché.” She chuckled with genuine mirth.