Chapter 8
eight
. . .
“Baby, don’t put them little plates out,” my mother said from the stove. “This not brunch. Put the real ones on the table.”
I looked down at what I was holding and sighed. “They are real plates.”
My father, standing at the sink with a pack of chicken open and both hands deep in seasoning, laughed without even looking up.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Let her keep setting the table like she live off cheese and crackers.”
I cut my eyes at him. “I cook.”
My mother turned then, one brow lifted. “You assemble.”
That got a laugh out of him too.
“I cook,” I repeated, because I did, technically, and because I was not about to let the two people who raised me reduce my kitchen life to plated snacks and mood lighting.
My father finally looked over his shoulder, smile sitting easy on his face.
Six-three and lean as a rail no matter what my mother put in front of him, light brown skin, amber eyes bright with amusement, and the unfair metabolism of a man who could eat his way through half the refrigerator at midnight and still wake up looking like he had been fasting for the Lord.
I had gotten his coloring and those eyes, which still felt unfair to Nicole, who was missing all this Fourth of July foolishness because she had taken the kids to her husband’s people in Maryland this year. Somehow, the amber had skipped everybody else and landed on me like a family secret.
“You make pretty little meals for one,” Daddy said. “That ain’t cooking the way your mama mean it.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again, because he wasn’t entirely wrong.
That was the trouble with parents who loved you well. They did not need much evidence to find the tender spots.
My mother turned back to the stove, checking the baked beans and shifting a foil pan over to make room for the potato salad she still did not trust anybody else to touch.
She was shorter than him by plenty, brown-skinned and soft in the face in a way I saw every time I looked at my own reflection too long.
I had her cheekbones, her mouth, her chin, and the same body that made dresses fit like they had been given instructions.
Curves. Hips. More behind than most women knew what to do with unless they had been raised by somebody who taught them to stop apologizing for taking up space.
Mama kept herself moving though. Walked the neighborhood almost every morning unless the weather was acting ignorant, wrists swinging, sneakers bright, greeting half the block like she was running for office and checking on everybody’s business at the same time.
She called it exercise. Daddy called it surveillance with cardio.
The kitchen smelled like barbecue sauce warming low, fried corn, and the fruit salad sweating gently in its bowl on the counter.
Every time the screen door opened, charcoal smoke drifted in from the grill out back, along with my cousins’ laughter and somebody getting warned not to touch the fireworks before dark.
Also, Thursday never happened.
One of my clients turned an afternoon sponsorship issue into a late spiral of corrections and calls, and one of Micah’s closings ran long enough to wreck whatever remained of the evening. By the time we admitted it, the hour was too shot for reservations and performance.
So we kept talking.
Texts first. Then calls after dark. Never all night, never breathless in a way that made me feel foolish the next morning.
Just enough to change the reality of things.
Enough that I started expecting his name after sunset.
Enough that his voice in my ear stopped feeling like a surprise and started feeling like something my body made quiet room for before he even called.
That was what had me off balance now.
The lust was there. God knew it was there.
But Micah had gotten under my skin in a place heat alone could not reach.
It was the man sounding like himself in private.
The easy laugh. The music in the background.
The silences that did not feel empty. The fact that he called instead of hiding behind messages once he realized the thread had gotten too thin for what he wanted.
“Ain’t nobody saying you can’t take care of yourself,” my mother said. “We know you can. You been taking care of yourself a long time.”
The kitchen quieted around that for half a second.
Frankie played low from the speaker near the window.
My aunt Denise was in the dining room fixing napkins nobody had asked her to touch.
Somebody out on the deck had started arguing about whether the hot dogs were done, and one of the little boys was already being told, loudly, to put the sparklers down before he burned off his eyebrows.
But Mama’s words still landed.
That was the real thing underneath most conversations with my parents at this point in my life.
The ache they tried to hide because they were proud of me and still human.
They had watched me build a whole, beautiful life, and they knew beauty did not always mean company.
They knew independence could still come home to a quiet house.
That a woman could be successful, self-kept, deeply loved, and still have too many evenings where nobody saw her but herself.
I set the right plates on the table this time.
My father rinsed his hands and dried them on a towel, then looked at me in that calm way that always made me feel like he could see past whatever version of myself I had brought into the room.
“You happy?” he asked.
The question caught me so off guard I almost laughed.
“Why you asking me like that?”
“Because I asked.”
My mother did not turn around, but I could feel her listening.
I leaned one hip against the table and folded my arms. “That’s a big question for people just trying to eat ribs and baked beans.”
My father shrugged. “You don’t come over here in the middle of a holiday unless you either needed feeding or needed noise.”
Damn.
I looked down at the stack of napkins in my hand and smoothed the edge with my thumb for no reason at all.
“That obvious?” I asked.
“To us?” my mother said. “Yes.”
She said it gently. That was what made it worse.
I laughed under my breath and looked around the kitchen. The foil pans. The bowls waiting to go outside. The paper towel roll already half gone. The windows cracked for breeze. The old song. The kind of room that made a woman remember she belonged somewhere before she ever belonged to herself.
It did feel good in here.
Warm. Busy. Familiar in the right way.
The kind of family noise that made a woman feel held without asking her to confess every tender thing out loud.
“I’m okay,” I said finally.
My father nodded once, but not like he was done. More like he was taking that answer for what it was worth.
My mother lifted the lid off the baked beans again, then looked over at me. “Okay and happy are not the same thing.”
“Ma.”
“I’m just saying.” She set the spoon down. “Sometimes you come in here carrying the whole world like you forgot you can put some of it down.”
That one landed quieter. Deeper. Because yes.
There had been enough years now of doing everything myself, deciding everything myself, carrying everything myself, that sometimes even tenderness felt like something I had to schedule around instead of something I was allowed to lean into.
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed against the counter.
My father saw it before I did. “That your little friend?”
I turned too fast. “Excuse me?”
He grinned and reached back for the seasoning bowl. “A phone don’t buzz like that for no dentist reminder.”
My mother finally looked over, one brow lifting in slow interest. “Oh,” she said. “So now we have mystery.”
“There is no mystery,” I said, reaching for the phone before either of them could carry on too far into my business.
It was not a text.
It was a Threads notification from @afterfiveMicah
I opened it and my mouth curved before I could stop it.
Texting gets real weak once the call gets easy and she knows Kut Klose off two notes.
Now that was specific.
No, he had not named me. No, nobody else reading it would think anything had happened worth a second look. But I knew.
Because who else was he talking to about calls and Kut Klose?
“What?” my mother asked.
“Nothing.”
“Mmm,” she said, which in my family meant that’s a lie, but I’ll let you keep it.
I looked at the post one more second, warmth already moving low in my body.
Because he was right, and that was the issue.
The phone had started losing. The texts were good.
The calls were better. But once a man had let me hear the real sound of his laugh, his quiet, the room around him, the screen started feeling a little weak for what this was becoming.
I typed before I could think too hard about it.
That’s what happens when she’s not unmoved either.
That was all.
Just enough to sit there in public and mean something private.
“You gone put the tea out there or stand here smiling at your phone till it get warm?” my mother asked.
I blinked. “I’m moving.”
My father gave me a look that said he saw too much and intended to enjoy every second of it.
I ignored him, grabbed the pitcher and the stack of plastic cups, and pushed through the screen door into the backyard.
Penn Hills backyards had room to breathe, and my parents’ was no exception.
Folding tables ran along the patio under cheap tablecloths held down at the corners with bowls and soda bottles.
Lawn chairs were scattered everywhere. A cooler sat open near the grill.
Somebody had already torn through half the hot dog buns.
Kids kept cutting across the grass with sparklers they had been told three times not to touch yet, and one of my uncles stood over the grill like the ribs and burgers required his full spiritual supervision.