Chapter 26 #3
“Yes,” I mutter.
“Does that mean he hit you?”
I swallow the ball in my throat and croak out a “yes.”
I try to open my mouth and tell her more—like how I told Terrica and Uncle Kenny and how I felt like I lost a part of myself after every confession, but nothing comes out while the music and all the people in the park get louder.
“You could’ve told me,” she says.
I shake my head. “I…I’ve known you all my life and I know how much you try to bury your disappointment when you talk about Mama, and you wanted me to march in your house after being gone for two years and tell you I ended up in a relationship just like hers?”
She opens her trembling mouth, then closes it.
“There’s this quiet rage in your eyes when you see or hear something that reminds you of what happened to Mama—like you can’t believe she let a stupid man take her away from us forever, but you just can’t say the words.
You can’t tell people how mad you were and still are at her for letting it get to that point. ”
“I’m sorry, Lovie.” Her apology comes out in a featherlight whisper, but I hear it above the Tamia song Chico’s playing. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah…me too.”
Her apology doesn’t soothe my bruises like Rich’s kisses do or reassure me I’m tough enough to pick up all the little pieces of myself AJ had torn apart. They’re just words that should’ve come out the first time she looked me up and down when I came home.
I swallow the sharp pain in my throat, glancing over at Rich and D sitting on his truck’s tailgate. I look back at her and find her looking at them too.
“He thinks I neglect you,” she mumbles, covering the potato salad and closing the cooler.
I jerk my head back while my heart jumps again. “What?”
“Rich thinks I don’t pay enough attention to you. Is that what you think too?”
Now my heart gallops.
There are times I forget I’m Rich’s best friend now and not Terrica’s, and Rich doesn’t believe in running from the things that scare us—especially that “biological thing.”
“He can be a little blunt sometimes. I…I don’t think he meant that.”
“I’ve known him a lot longer than you have. I think I know how he is. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he means what he says. But do you think that too?”
I swallow the ball in my throat. “I understand that you and Uncle Kenny didn’t ask to be my parents. It was kind of just thrust upon you. You know? It can be hard parenting a kid who’s not biologically yours.”
“Thrust upon me?” She frowns. “Lovie, wasn’t nothing thrust upon me.
I promised Sonia I would take care of you if anything ever happened to her before you were even in her damn stomach.
We might’ve fought about silly stuff, but that was my baby sister.
We only had each other, and I knew I wasn’t letting that man’s family take you.
Even if Tony and Sonia would’ve died in some other tragic way, they still weren’t getting you.
So it hurts to hear that you might think I neglect you. ”
“But what about Uncle Kenny?” I rasp.
“What about him?”
“Have you ever asked him how he felt about me?”
She picks up Rich’s plate, turning toward me and looking into my eyes. “Kenny is just…just—”
“A man?”
She sighs, nodding. “He’s safe…he’s…he’s easy and lives a slow life. All he knows is to keep the bills paid, keep a roof over our heads, take care of the gym, and take care of the boys at the gym. His heart ain’t like Rich’s and…and—”
“Senior’s?”
She pinches her eyes shut, and for the first time in my life, I don’t see “Aunt Faye,” I see Fayanna.
“I know he calls you Faye-baby.”
She smiles with her eyes closed. The wind picks up around us, and I think I see that time in her life she never talks about.
“He had this…this thing,” she whispers. “He’d make me feel like I was in charge of everything—the kids, the house, him. He’d tell Junior and Nez that at ‘2308 Joliet, Fayanna knows best and if they don’t like it, they can buy their own goddamn house.’”
She sputters out a laugh with her eyes still closed. “Nez hated it, but Rich loved it because he’s just like his damn daddy—always trying to make a woman feel something in a world that just wants her numb, even though he wasn’t even born for that.”
I glance back over at Rich. He’s shoulder to shoulder with D on his truck’s tailgate. His hands flail in the air while he talks, and D stares at him in the same way Ky did—like he’s a real-life superhero. But knowing D, he’d say Rich is more like Spider-Man.
“He was just born to carry on Senior’s legacy, huh?” I gulp, still staring at Rich and the setting sun hitting the diamonds in the paw pendant around his neck.
“Mama used to say their bloodlines were cursed—especially the Lovelaces. Generation after generation of loveless men. She always said any woman that got involved with them was stupid, and I thought so too…until I met Rich Lovelace Sr.”
Uncle Kenny’s voice bellows above the blues Chico’s playing now, but she doesn’t turn to look for him like she normally does when she hears him. I think she’s with Senior right now, and there’s nothing Uncle Kenny can do about it.
“It was the summer of ‘99. Mama had died, Tony had gotten a new job at Shell, and convinced your mama they should buy that house in Pearland for a fresh start, and I…just…”
“Felt alone?”
Her eyes pop open and bore into mine, and I think we see each other for the first time in eighteen years. People bustle around us—laughing and talking and dancing and eating, but we’re stuck in ‘99.
“I remember I walked into Lucky’s one day and saw him at the counter talking to Lucky with a busted lip.
I knew exactly what he was, and he knew exactly what I was as soon as he saw me.
He paid for my gas and told me, ‘If I ever wanted to get rid of that loneliness sitting on me, I could come to 2308 Joliet and he’d take care of it… .’” She smiles.
I see that mucky feeling sitting on her and slithering around her body. I see all the times she contemplated this life with me and Uncle Kenny in the bags under her eyes. I even see all the times her heart beat back and forth between love and some other emotion she held for Uncle Kenny.
“Senior was bitter about love and women when I met him,” I murmur. “And I’m starting to understand why.”
“One thing I’ve learned about Lovelace men is that their heart doesn’t look the same as other men’s,” she says, picking up my hand and sitting Rich’s plate in it.
“I always imagine it looks like a lump of coal in their chest until they find us tough girls—the ones that are brave enough to take care of them while they take care of everybody else. We give them something to hold on to for the short time they’re here, and in return, they give us those ugly lumps of coal in their chests that are supposed to be hearts. ”
She brushes at my edges that wouldn’t lay down no matter how much edge control I slathered on this morning, and that placid smile on her face disappears.
“Those Lovelace men are everything you need until they can’t be anymore.
One day you’ll be drowning in their love, then they’ll come home and hold you while you’re washing dishes and tell you how they met some man playing the machines in the back of Lucky’s—a safe, decent man who said he went to Wesley with you when your name came up while we talked and gambled,” she chokes out.
“And then later on that night, he’ll be holding you in bed and he’ll just blurt it out.
‘I think Kenny Fairchild would take real good care of you, baby. He’s safe and a lil’ boring, but he’ll give you what I can’t.
He’ll give you normalcy.’ That’s what he said to me.
That’s what Rich Lovelace Sr. said to me in our bed in our house. ”
“Aunt Faye…” I choke out, moving Rich’s plate toward the table.
She pushes it back toward me.
“By then the tremors had gotten so bad that he struggled to brush his teeth and I…I would’ve done it if I had to, Lovie.
God, I would’ve bathed him if I had to, but he said he’d rather go down to Beatrice’s and let her and her mama do it because I still had too much life to live.
I was young—we both were. So, I did what he wanted, and I left.
A few months later, I found Kenny gambling in the back of Lucky’s right where Senior said he’d be, and…
and when he asked me out after I told him me and Senior broke up, I said ‘yes.’”
She pushes the plate even further into my chest.
“You just be careful with whatever this is you got going on with Rich because a man like him ain’t the type of man you have a fling with to get over an ex.
He’s…he’s…” her words trail off. “Listen, you’re grown and I can’t tell you what to do.
All I’m saying is that you’re barely out of that relationship with AJ. You should slow down.”