Chapter Seven
Seven
MAYBE GRIEF, LIKE HURRICANES, HAD a calm eye.
The drive home was torture, with a sensation that reminded Johnny of the tachypsychia he experienced when the Florida Highway Patrol called about his mother’s car accident twenty years ago, his eyes seizing on random flashing lights and billboard images as he drove, his thoughts scattering from his head.
But by the time Johnny pulled into his driveway in Baldwin Hills, his relief at returning home blotted out the rest of the afternoon.
The pieces of her life his mother never talked about were plastered into the walls of the house.
Although he’d never learned her most devastating memories—maybe he had no right to know them—he had repaired these walls with better ones.
The four-bedroom house had gone from feeling too big to nearly too small after he married Tasha and they had Sharise, and then Imani.
But after twenty years, the house finally felt like his.
And maybe it had been good luck in the end. He had created his family in this house.
Imani’s skateboard was left flipped over in the driveway, and three life-sized wire reindeer festooned with tangled light cords were lying on their sides near the front walkway to signal the family’s half-hearted attempts to start Christmas decorations.
It was still early December, but the neighborhood got more competitive each year, so they were already late, although fake bloody handprints still decorated their windows from Halloween.
All of it struck him as damn charming. He felt like George Bailey returning home after his nightmare at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.
He was freed from his illusions, even if it was three years too late.
He wouldn’t be spending the holidays in prep.
Hell, maybe he’d have time to start writing his long-delayed novel version of Misery Swamp, with more nuance and a fresh angle.
As he walked to his front door, Johnny thought of anything to be grateful for so his family would not see defeat on his face.
His game face was wasted. Sharise was nowhere in sight, and Imani was immersed in her VR game in the family room beyond the foyer, her eyes hidden behind the white gaming mask. She swung her controllers in wide arcs, some beast’s worst nightmare in a sword battle.
“Skateboard.” He reminded her daily to keep her skateboard out of the driveway.
“Sorry—ADHD!” Imani called out to him right before a dismayed cry, her substitute for cursing in his presence. “Daddy, you made me die!”
She was thirteen and still called him Daddy, another thing he felt grateful for. Johnny kissed the VR strap on top of Imani’s head. “I brought you here too, so we’ll call it even.”
Kissing Imani almost brought a tear to his eye, so maybe the dopamine high from escaping the traffic on Interstate 10 was wearing off.
By the time he got to the kitchen, where he found Tasha unpacking delivery bags from the local sushi restaurant that vied with Roscoe’s for celebrations, depending on their mood—she could see it in his face.
Tasha had sent him a text with stoplight and grinning-face emojis, her code asking if he’d gotten his green light, and he’d only texted back, We’ll talk later, so she wasn’t expecting good news.
Mom had met Tasha a year before she died and told him she looked just like his grandmother at her age, and it was true even if Johnny hadn’t let himself see it.
The striking angles on Tasha’s cheekbones were all he had noticed about her appearance at first: She could have sought out a modeling career if she’d been taller than five six and didn’t want to make use of her PhD.
Tasha welcomed him into her arms, and he sank into her warmth. They swayed in silence so long that Johnny tried to think of the last time he had danced with her. By now, they had been parents far longer than they had solely been two people who didn’t want to be apart.
“Tell me what those assholes did, baby.”
He told her. Even in his own retelling, all he heard was a reckless accusation of racism and a passionate, reasoned rebuttal. Slowly, Tasha’s soft eyes turned to a scowl. “Your Creed speech? You said that in a meeting?”
“You had to be there,” Johnny said. But now he was unsure, and he’d been there.
From instinct, Tasha reached for a half-empty wine bottle on the counter next to the stove, her hand pausing when she remembered she couldn’t drink wine.
She nudged the bottle back against the wall.
Johnny preferred THC gummies to wine, and he couldn’t wait to pop a couple after dinner.
They still ate dinner as a family, and he didn’t like the slow elevator ride up toward outer space when he was at the table with his kids.
It would ruin his buzz, stop the ride cold.
Gummies didn’t ease every situation, so his chances for a good ride were already slim.
“Well… shit,” Tasha said.
“Yeah.”
Between his script fee and his director’s fee when the studio exercised its option, La Petite Mort was supposed to pay Sharise’s first year of college fees.
It was supposed to pay for a lot more than that.
He’d told himself for years never to rely on Hollywood when he needed money—desperation was a stench that made execs lose their hard-ons—but that was what he’d done.
“You might want to do that last polish once you’ve cooled off,” Tasha said.
“Just in case?” Johnny shrugged, hiding how much the question stung.
“You know what the business is, J. A dozen drafts to the finish line? This just feels like something you might regret. I try to steer you clear of regrets, that’s all. ”
“Got it.”
Her cheeks were tightening, and the skin contracted against his jawbone too.
Like a flash fire, this could turn into an argument.
He wanted to say he’d hoped she would stand with him on principle, but he squashed the voice that said, She doesn’t understand, because once he let that voice loose, he would think, She’s living in a damn fairyland, and then grievances big and small he’d hidden from himself might explode.
Tasha nudged on, gently. “You might also think about how much stress we’ve been under since we got the results.
” They both still talked about her pregnancy like an illness, which was fitting, since she spent so much time sick over the toilet.
“So… maybe you’ll feel differently about the meeting next week. ”
“Maybe,” he said, not believing it, still avoiding the flash fire. “I’ll think about it.”
She smiled at him and rubbed her palm against his cheek. “Thank you. All I ask, boo.”
Johnny’s chest burned, so he remembered to inhale. Tasha called him boo to signal she was in a sexy mood, but tonight she would have to be sexy by herself.
“What would you think about a weekend getaway?” Tasha said. “Get our minds off work and spend some time in the snow? The girls can take off a day from school.”
“A cabin at Big Bear?” he said. “Lake Arrowhead?” They rented cabins once a year in the mountains ninety minutes from home, and he enjoyed the change of scenery.
But Tasha’s eyes steered him closer to her thoughts: She wanted to go to his grandmother’s lodge, which was a harder trip in every way imaginable.
She’d been asking so many questions about Mazelle Washington in the past few months that she probably was planning to write a book about her, but she hadn’t said so outright.
“The girls keep asking about it. Imani wants to go snowboarding. Sharise wants to shoot a video for her college applications. She has a bunch due in January.”
“What kind of video?”
“On her family history, Johnny,” Tasha said. “They don’t have anyone else on your side of the family. They’re starved for it. They just want to know more about who she was.”
She’s ambushing you when she knows you’ve already been knocked down, the voice ready to fight said in Johnny’s head.
That’s what she always does. But he couldn’t look into his wife’s eyes and fail to call that voice a liar.
She’d been asking to see his grandmother’s old lodge near Mount Shasta upstate for years.
She didn’t mention again that she was thinking about writing her own article about Mazelle Washington as an African American Studies professor, but it was true the girls had been asking.
His mother had died before they were born, and his father had been in the wind since he was born; he’d been older and married when his mother got pregnant.
Tasha was an only child too, so his kids didn’t have cousins either.
“That’s nine hours upstate,” Johnny said. “We’d have to fly.”
“The flights are cheap,” she said. “Then we’d rent a car for a couple days.”
“There’s no internet in that lodge,” Johnny said, sure that was his checkmate move to stay at home. “And last I heard, no cell phone coverage either.”
Tasha only smiled. “I already told them that. They said they’ll rough it, as long as we’re only there a couple nights. They’re thinking of it like an adventure. Going back in time.”
“Since when do Black people want to ‘go back in time’?” Johnny said with air quotes.
“Your grandmother opened a resort for Black celebrities during segregation with its own ski run,” Tasha said. “That was badass. That’s what they want to see—their legacy.”
Johnny was about to correct her: Resort was a generous term for a two-story wood-frame house and two remaining ramshackle cabins.
His grandmother’s lodge hadn’t been in good shape the last time he’d visited as a child before 1980, and despite the caretaker and decorator he’d hired a couple years ago, he doubted it would meet the standards of his pampered daughters now.
Instead, Tasha said, “I think we should go up there this weekend… and tell them.”