Finally her daughter was there, wearing a fancy peach-colored blouse and faded green sweatpants. Her short hair was ragged around the edges. But she was beautiful. Sheila crushed Kenya into her chest, gratefully inhaling her staleness.
“But your phone—” Kenya said.
“Doesn’t matter. I’m here,” Sheila said.
Sheila knew that when some women observed the progress of time in their getting-older children, they flashed back to them as infants. But Kenya’s infancy was a time of blurry terror that Sheila rarely thought about. Instead, when she noticed Kenya getting older, as she did now in the police station, she remembered her at four and five, asking questions with serious eyes: questions about nuclear war, death, God, the making of babies, the color of skin. She thought of Johnbrown and his reckless conversations with the little girl. At the time, Sheila had thought maybe a preschooler did not need to know that, yes, the earth would one day be consumed by the sun, or about slaves being hobbled for trying to escape. On the other hand, she didn’t want Kenya to grow up in the same ignorance she had. Sheila had known that with Johnbrown in her life, Kenya could be proud of who she was. She wouldn’t grow up thinking that white people were gods or superheroes. Sheila herself had known very few white people, since none lived in the Richard Allen projects or went to her schools. From television and occasional car trips, she knew they lived in houses with lawns and station wagons in front of them. She once asked her mother if white people were better than black people. “They sure got more money,” her mother had replied.
Officer Rivers cleared his throat softly, indicating forms to sign. When their business was concluded, he nodded with his smile. It occurred to Sheila that after Johnbrown had left, she should have married a man like that. She imagined Teddy at the desk, acting as if he’d done a magic trick to produce people’s sons and daughters and boyfriends, after detaining them with bullshit conversation.
Teddy.
She gripped Kenya’s hand. Then she pulled her daughter’s head to her shoulder, even though it made for awkward walking out of the station doors, and though it made her shoulder hurt even more. In all of these years, nearly ten, she had taken great care never to betray to Kenya that it still caused her pain.
“You got a ticket,” Kenya said as they approached the car.
“Yup,” said Sheila. She yanked the paper off of her windshield and shoved it into her purse without looking at it.
“I’m so sorry,” said Kenya, starting to cry as soon as she was in the car.
Sheila wiped away her own tears. “Yeah, you
are
sorry,” she said. “Do you know how many stations I went to filling out missing persons reports? Do you know your father came down here and we spent a week driving all over the fucking Greater Philadelphia metro area looking for you? I had to spend a week listening to him go on about the farm and all of his financial problems. And he kept saying, ‘She’s okay, I just know it.’ I wanted to strangle him.”
At this Kenya burst into fresh sobs that Sheila didn’t understand. “What?” she said.
“Do you?” Kenya began.
“What, baby?”
“Have a tissue?”
Sheila laughed as Kenya blew her nose and dabbed at her cheeks. Before long, they were on Irving Street, in view of the small, peeling houses where all of this had started. She stopped the car directly in front of their old home, whose windows now bore lace curtains.
“What are we doing here?” Kenya asked in a panicked voice.
“Long story,” Sheila said.
She knew she should walk in front because she had the key, but instead she followed Kenya’s thin, sagging figure. Sheila felt as if the figure was her. She had borrowed against, and then sold, the house in the suburbs. She’d used all of her savings and much of her pension to pay for lawyers for the con man and to put up bail for her daughter. She was breathlessly awaiting a call about part-time work at a used bookstore that reeked of cats. Before Missing Persons had called to tell her where Kenya was, she’d been very close to walking out into the Philadelphia streets naked and screaming. But now that her daughter was back, she knew it was all going to work. Somehow the two of them had to make it all work.
Kenya looked at the house and back at her mother. She remembered seeing it with Commodore, their arms brushing. Her knees buckled slightly. “Am I going crazy—or having a dream?”
“Let’s get inside, Kenya,” her mother said in her least dreamlike voice. “For now, we’re home.”
* * *
That night Kenya sat in the kitchen, which now seemed tiny, listening to her mother explain how they’d wound up renting their old house. The landlord was a friend of Grandmama’s; there had been a chance meeting and then a break in the rent.
“But, Mom,” she asked, “why would you want to live
here
again? After everything.”
“Well, it was cheap.”
“Okay,” said Kenya. But she didn’t believe that was the reason. When she looked at Sheila across the table, she got an image of her blurring at the edges, flickering like a TV screen going snowy. Her mother felt like a ghost who had come back to haunt their old house. Kenya reached out to her.
Sheila winced. “Baby, your hand is freezing.”
“Is this the best you can do for a touching family reunion?”
Her mother squeezed her hand and smiled. “This is just getting started. Wait till you try spaghetti from a can.”
* * *
All Kenya had to do was close her eyes in their old house, in a new, stiff bed, to have a dream of the butler. The next morning she woke feeling horribly awake.
She tried to close her eyes, but they snapped back open. And before she could stop them, her feet had hit the ground.
You have to burn it all down
, the butler had told her. She knew he didn’t mean for her to set fire to anyone’s home and kill anyone’s child with an ax. But she knew the key to the next part of her life, the good part, was figuring out exactly what he did mean.
Warmest thanks to Ellen Levine, Miranda Popkey, Jesse Coleman, and Lorin Stein for all that they have done and continue to do.
Thanks to Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran for telling me about the burning of Taliesin and for cheering me on. Thanks also to Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Linda Kim for helping me pretend to know some things I did not know.
Thanks to Washington and Lee University, Trinity College, and Haverford College for their support.
Thanks to Andrew, Adebayo, and Mkale, as well as Akiba, James, and Rochelle for just about everything else.
Get Down
Asali Solomon was born and raised in Philadelphia.
Get Down
, her first book, earned her a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Fiction Selections for 2007, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She teaches English at Haverford College.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2015 by Asali Solomon
All rights reserved
First edition, 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Asali.
Disgruntled: a novel / Asali Solomon. — First edition.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-0-374-14034-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71295-2 (ebook)
1. African American girls—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 2. Philadelphia (Pa.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.O4335 D57 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014027442