CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
NOLA
Denise James did not scream when she found out her husband was cheating.
That was almost worse.
Her mother’s voice was calm.
Too calm.
“Can you come over?”
Nola dropped her purse on the kitchen island. “What’s wrong?”
“Just come over.”
“Ma.”
“Nola. Please.”
Click.
Nola looked at Kai.
He had gone still.
She noticed because Kai was rarely still without choosing to be.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The word landed wrong.
Nola narrowed her eyes.
“Why you look like that?”
Kai reached for his keys again. “Let’s go.”
“Kai.”
“Nola. Your mother asked you to come over. We can talk in the truck.”
That answer was not an answer.
She felt it.
But fear about Denise moved faster.
Mani came downstairs when she heard them at the door.
“What happened?”
“My mama wants me over there. Something’s wrong.”
Mani grabbed her own keys.
Nola shook her head. “Stay here. In case Dre calls or shows up.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
Mani hugged her quickly.
Kai and Nola drove in silence for three blocks.
Then Nola turned toward him.
“Tell me.”
Kai kept his eyes on the road.
“I don’t know what Denise knows.”
Nola’s body went cold.
“Knows about what?”
He exhaled.
“Your father.”
Nola stared at the side of his face.
“What about my father?”
Kai said nothing fast enough.
Her voice changed.
“Kai.”
“I saw Curtis with another woman Friday.”
The car seemed to move without her.
Streetlights passed.
A bus stopped.
Somebody crossed in front of a pharmacy pushing a stroller.
Everything outside looked offensively normal.
“What do you mean with another woman?”
“At a restaurant. They kissed.”
Nola’s hands went numb in her lap.
“You saw him Friday?”
“Yeah.”
It was Wednesday.
Five days.
Her mind did the math before the pain got there.
“You knew for five days.”
“I confronted him.”
“I didn’t ask what you did. You knew for five days?”
“Yes.”
Nola turned toward the window.
Kai did not reach for her.
Good.
If he touched her, she might have broken his fingers.
“Who is she?”
“Paris. That’s all I know.”
“What she look like?”
The question came out before she could stop it.
Kai glanced at her.
“That matter?”
“Right now it does.”
He paused.
“Younger. Thick.”
Nola closed her eyes.
Her mother.
Her mother in the kitchen saying every young woman online had a big ass and big breasts now.
Her mother tugging at a blouse because she’d lost two pounds.
Her father looking at his phone.
Nola pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth.
“Did you know Sunday? At dinner?”
“Yes.”
“You sat at my parents’ table knowing my daddy was cheating on my mother.”
“Yes.”
“You listened to her talk about her body.”
Kai’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“Yes.”
Nola laughed once.
Nothing funny in it.
“Wow.”
“I told Curtis to tell her.”
“And that makes it better?”
“No.”
“You gave him five days?”
“I gave him until Sunday. He didn’t do it. I confronted him again.”
Nola turned toward him.
“Confronted him? You had two whole conversations with my father about my mother’s marriage and didn’t say shit to me?”
“Because it was their marriage.”
“I’m your woman.”
Kai glanced at her.
The sentence sat there.
Nola almost hated herself for saying it now, in anger, instead of in one of the dozen moments when it would have meant something else.
She kept going.
“You lay in my bed. I slept in your house. I sat at your mama’s birthday dinner. I told you I trusted you, and all that time you knew my daddy was fucking around on my mother.”
“I didn’t know he was sleeping with her. I know what I saw.”
“Don’t get technical with me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
Kai pulled into her parents’ neighborhood.
“I didn’t want Denise hearing about her husband from me.”
“So you decided what she deserved to know.”
He looked at her.
There.
The exact sentence she’d used with him before about security.
Nola saw recognition hit and got angrier.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“Your face is.”
“That’s my face.”
“Fuck your face.”
He almost smiled from habit, caught himself, and didn’t.
They reached her parents’ house.
Curtis’s Lexus was gone.
Denise’s car sat in the driveway.
The porch light was on.
Nola opened her door before Kai fully parked.
He caught her wrist.
She jerked away.
“Don’t touch me.”
Kai released immediately.
“Okay.”
That made it harder somehow.
Inside, Denise sat at the kitchen table with three things in front of her.
A credit-card statement.
A printed screenshot.
Curtis’s wedding ring.
Nola stopped in the doorway.
Her mother looked small in the chair.
Not fragile.
Just physically small in a way Nola had always known and suddenly hated anybody for making her feel wasn’t enough.
“Ma.”
Denise looked up.
Her eyes were dry.
“Your father is at a hotel.”
Nola sat beside her.
“How do you know?”
Denise pushed the screenshot over.
It was a social media post from Paris.
A hotel mirror picture.
No Curtis in frame.
But his watch lay on the counter behind her.
The watch Nola and Dre bought him for his fiftieth birthday.
A caption read:
WHEN HE MAKES TIME, YOU MAKE MEMORIES.
Nola stared until the words blurred.
“How’d you find this?”
“Her name was on a furniture invoice in his email. I looked her up.”
Denise laughed once, quietly.
“I never look through his email. Thirty-one years and I never had a reason.”
Nola put her hand over her mother’s.
Denise let her.
Then she saw Kai in the doorway.
Her expression changed.
“You knew.”
Not a question.
Kai stepped inside.
“I saw them Friday.”
Denise nodded slowly.
“That’s why you told me Curtis needed to talk to me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Kai did not hide behind Nola.
He sat across from Denise.
“Because I thought he should tell you himself. I confronted him and gave him the chance. I was wrong to let it go this long.”
Nola looked at him.
That wasn’t exactly what he had said in the truck.
No defense now.
No justification.
Denise stared at him.
“How long did you give him?”
“Until Sunday. Then I confronted him again.”
“And after Sunday?”
Kai looked at Nola once.
“I should’ve told her. Or you. I kept trying to give him the responsibility to do it himself.”
Denise leaned back.
“You don’t owe me marital loyalty. He does.”
Nola turned. “Ma—”
“I’m not saying he was right.”
Denise’s voice sharpened for the first time.
“I’m saying I know who promised me something.”
That shut the room down.
Nola swallowed.
“Where is Daddy now?”
“I don’t care.”
That was a lie.
Everybody knew it.
Denise folded the statement in half, then in half again.
“He says Paris loves him.”
Nola stared. “He told you that?”
“After I sent him the picture.”
“Oh, he’s lost his mind.”
Denise laughed unexpectedly.
It cracked in the middle.
“Apparently.”
Then she looked down at herself.
Nola knew before she spoke.
“Don’t, Ma.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I know where your brain going. Don’t.”
Denise’s mouth tightened.
“You don’t know where my brain is going.”
Nola softened.
“Then tell me.”
Her mother stared at the ring.
“I spent thirty years listening to people tell me I needed to gain weight. Your daddy used to act like I was the finest thing walking. I believed him.”
“You were. You are.”
“I know what you’re supposed to say.”
“I’m not saying it because I’m supposed to.”
Denise’s eyes filled finally.
“Then why he go get somebody built like every woman he looks at online now?”
Nola’s chest hurt.
Kai looked down at the table.
He knew this was not his space.
Nola moved her chair closer.
“Because he made a selfish choice. That’s why.”
“That’s easy to say when you look like what everybody wants now.”
The words hit Nola by surprise.
Denise saw it and immediately looked sorry.
“Baby, I didn’t mean—”
“No. It’s okay.”
And it was.
Not because it didn’t sting.
Because her mother was bleeding and Nola was not going to make every drop about her.
Denise wiped under one eye.
“I used to worry about you growing up. People were cruel about your weight.”
“Yeah.”
“Now I get online and see women paying for the body you got naturally, and I’m sitting here wondering if I missed some damn update.”
Nola laughed softly.
“Beauty standards are stupid.”
“I know.”
“Daddy cheating doesn’t make Paris’s body better than yours.”
“I know.”
“Knowing ain’t always feeling.”
Denise looked at her daughter.
That sentence got through where reassurance hadn’t.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
The front door opened.
Curtis walked in.
Nobody moved.
He stopped when he saw Kai.
“You told her?”
Denise stood.
“No. You did. Every sloppy-ass thing you did told me.”
Curtis looked at his wife.
“Denise—”
“Don’t touch me.”
His hand dropped.
Nola had never seen her parents like this.
Arguments, yes.
Real ones too.
Money. Dre. Nola moving out too young. Curtis’s mother staying with them for six months and driving Denise half crazy.
But not this.
Not thirty-one years cracking in a kitchen.
Curtis looked at Nola. “Baby, I—”
“Don’t baby me.”
Then she caught herself.
This wasn’t her marriage either.
Damn.
She hated when truth had inconvenient timing.
Denise pointed toward the stairs.
“Pack a bag.”
Curtis’s face fell. “This is my house.”
“Then sleep in the garage. I don’t give a fuck. You are not getting in my bed tonight.”
“Can we talk?”
“We had thirty-one years to talk. Apparently you needed Paris for that.”
Curtis flinched.
Nola looked at him.
“You told her things too?”
His silence answered.
Different betrayal.
Same shape as Mani’s.
Nola thought of Terrence telling Janelle Mani’s private business and felt sick.
“Jesus Christ, Daddy.”
Curtis sat down.
“I fucked up.”
Denise laughed bitterly. “That’s all?”
“No.”
“Then save the rest for tomorrow because if you keep talking tonight, I’m going to say something I can’t take back.”
Curtis looked at Kai.
Anger flashed.
“And you. Stay out my family.”
Kai stood.
“Gladly.”
Curtis took one step toward him.
Nola stood too.
“Daddy. No.”
Curtis stopped.
Kai did not move.
“You think you better than me?” Curtis asked him.
“No.”
“Then stop looking at me like that.”
“I’m looking at you like a man who had five days to tell his wife and spent them buying furniture for another woman.”
“Kai,” Nola snapped.
He stopped.
Curtis’s face twisted.
“She told you about the furniture?”