The Color of Family (38 page)

And as he watched his father move farther away, Aaron knew he couldn't let him get too far. So he stood, and, moving with a quickness that would not let his father get away, he said, “Poppa.” When Junior turned around just before he turned the corner that would have made Aaron run after him, or at least move even quicker, Aaron replied, “Would he come to Baltimore?”

With hope in his voice and a perked-up face, Junior offered his
son a slight smile and replied, “He can. He can come here and he'd want to come here, I'm sure.”

“Okay. Then Thyme and I will meet here in Baltimore.”

 

Antonia mixed her cake batter to her own beat, which had been her own for practically her whole life. No electric mixer for her, and as she mixed and mixed her mind wandered to where her electric mixer just might be. It only saw the light of day when she needed to whip potatoes. Then she remembered that there was someone there in the kitchen with her, eating dinner like it was the first food she'd ever eaten and that it had come from a real kitchen where love and goodness soaked into every dish. Antonia looked over to the table and felt a deep comfort that she could trace back to a time when she was mothering her own children—plying them with food that, she was certain, made them know their house was a home.

A satisfied smile grew across her face as she said, “Jackie, honey, do you want more? There's plenty more of everything—more of the fish, more potato salad, more string beans, and more kale. Just come on over here and help yourself.”

“Aw man, thank you, Miss Antonia,” she said as she scooped the last bit of potato salad up and ate it. Then she rose, still chewing, and headed for the stove. “I've told you before, Miss Antonia—nobody I know can cook like you. I guess it's that New Orleans magic that puts good cooking into your blood, huh.”

Antonia laughed diffidently as she said, “I guess it's something like that. One thing for sure I know, when you're from the south it's just un-southern not to know how to cook.”

As she spooned more kale onto her plate, then more fish, Jackie replied, “Well, then you must be as southern as southern can be, 'cause you sure can cook.” Jackie stood on the other side of the island where Antonia worked on her cake and said, “I mean, it just blows my mind that you make dessert. With my mother, you got dinner, and that was it. We knew what dessert was, we just never had it.” Then, Jackie headed back to the table. When she set down her plate, she stamped her foot and said, “Aw doggone it! I forgot the potato salad.”

“All right,” Antonia said as she poured the cake batter evenly and beautifully into two round pans. “I'll get it for you. You just
sit.” And after she put the cakes in the oven, she went to the refrigerator and pulled out the bowl of potato salad. She moved with haste, stopping only to pluck a spoon from the drawer, and went over to where Jackie sat at the table, because she didn't want anyone sitting in her kitchen having to wait for food. She put the bowl right in front of Jackie's plate and took off the plastic wrap. “Just take what you want, honey.”

“Thank you, Miss Antonia,” Jackie said as she dug right in, pulling out a big glop of a spoonful. Before Antonia could turn to leave, though, Jackie said, “Miss Antonia, I know this is none of my business and all, but is everything okay between you and Dr. Jackson? I mean, did you ever ask him about that broken locket?”

Antonia stepped behind the island, where she could busy herself while coming up with just how she would tell Jackie everything that happened. After all, Antonia reasoned to herself, Jackie did not need to know that Ellen and Aaron dragged her off to a psychiatrist. So as she wiped the counter she said, with a certain reserve in her voice, “Yes, I did ask him, Jackie. And it was just as I knew. Junior and Cora had been carrying on an affair. And it's a good thing you're sitting down, otherwise what I'm about to tell you would lay you out on the floor.” Antonia put the sponge down so that her hands would be free to grip the counter as she leaned toward Jackie, and she continued, “Not only had he been having an affair with Cora, but they have a son together.”

Jackie put her fork down and looked at Antonia with shocked anger. She sat back and folded her arms with a clear stubbornness, much like a pouting child, then replied, “Miss Antonia, there's no way you're telling the truth. Dr. Jackson is such a family man, and you're telling me that he had a son with this woman! I just can't believe this.”

“You?” Antonia responded with an incredulity that had nothing to do with Jackie's disbelief. It was about how she had turned the notion of Junior and Cora upside down, right side up, and sideways and still she could not make sense of the two of them in any way or form. So she continued, “Let me tell you, I still can't look at him without seeing Cora all over him. Mostly, though, I can't believe that my life with this man in the past, in the present, and in the future has become something else. Something
that I've never known, so I just can't say what it is; but it's all different now.”

“What do you mean different, Miss Antonia?” Jackie asked as she swallowed a forkful of kale.

“I mean that I can't believe in anything that's happened, is happening, or has yet to happen in my family anymore because Junior has changed the reality,” Antonia said as she wiped the counter back and forth for something to do.

Jackie set her fork down as if there was nothing, not even Antonia's good cooking, that could get in the way of what she was going to say. She wiped at her mouth so as not to disturb the layered-on lipstick, then said, “Miss Antonia, I'm not trying to hurt your feelings or nothin' like that, but I've got to be the one to tell you that you're wasting good time in a good marriage worried about an invisible woman.”

Antonia stopped the busywork of wiping down a counter that was already spotless. She said not a word to question Jackie because it was all said in the crevices of her puzzled face.

“Cora was and still is invisible to him, Miss Antonia,” Jackie said, smacking the back of her hand into the palm of the other, as if each slap would make her point clearer. Then she continued, “And if he can even see her a little bit now it's only because he's a decent man who fathered her son. That's all. Could you love a man who couldn't see the mother of his child even a little bit? A man who could look at her as if she were nothing?”

“No, I guess I couldn't,” Antonia whispered in response to this dose of wisdom coming from the darnedest place.

“I didn't think you could. But trust me, she's no more visible than just a little bit, and I would bet that he never has and still can't see her in as full a color as he sees you.” She picked up her fork then put it down. Jackie puckered her lips and furrowed her forehead in a contemplative way—a way that seemed to show an indecision of what she would share with Antonia in that moment of truth-telling. But then she looked at Antonia who was wrestling with a conflict that showed in every part of her, and continued, “Miss Antonia, when men lay with me, I'm invisible. I'm not even a little bit visible. But that's okay, see, because they're invisible to me too. It's all about the moment, and sometimes that moment is
what they need to get through to the next moment where they can see clearly. If you don't believe that, then you're going to throw a hell of a good life away, and that's just crazy.”

As if things had been timed, Jackie finished her last bit of food when Junior's key slid in the door. Not even Antonia heard, but Jackie did, her head snapping to attention like a hound's. She gathered her jacket in a hurry and said in a whisper, “I'll see you Miss Antonia. I need to get out of here so Dr. Jackson doesn't see me.” As she opened the back door, she turned quickly to Antonia and said, “Please remember what I said.”

“Oh, believe me I will, sugar,” Antonia promised in a low voice as she blew Jackie a kiss and picked her plate up from the table.

Antonia listened as the sounds of Junior coming home made their way down the hall and through the cracks around the door. She could hear him drop his keys in his coat pocket. She could tell that he shrugged off his coat by the way the keys jingled three times. So now she knew that in any second he'd push through the swinging door and there'd be nothing before them—no distraction like breaking water and rushing to the hospital and the birth of a baby—to keep them from what she knew had to be faced. Junior, she knew, would be no less resolved to talk about it than he was the night before on the way to the hospital, in the hospital waiting room, and before he left the hospital all droopy-eyed and dragging once his grandson burst into the family. Even though the news of his Uncle Thyme still had Antonia, Ellen, but mostly Aaron, wobbly-legged and weak and wondering where firm ground might lay.

Antonia was taking dishes from the cupboard when Junior did finally push through the door and into the kitchen. Without a word of greeting or any sort of sentiment passing between them, Antonia said, “We're having red snapper, kale, and potato salad for dinner.” No matter how mad she could get at him, she thought, he still had a right to know his meal.

Junior went to the table right where Jackie had sat not even minutes before, then made a plaintive sigh that accompanied a graceless plop into the chair. “How's the snapper fixed?”

She didn't look at him full on because she felt some part of her curling up into a hard intransigent knot of resentment that had
made its way into her from some other place in her heart where the darkness of Junior, Cora, and Thyme danced mockingly. Antonia couldn't begin to fathom why it mattered because he should have simply considered himself lucky if she slapped a red snapper on his plate still wiggling to breathe. But she gave him the simplest answer she could that required the least amount of words. “Pan seared.”

It was just as she knew. How that fish would end up on his plate didn't seem to matter one wit to him, and she knew this as she watched him, as she had most of her life, from across the room. And as he fidgeted with his fingers, massaging each tip one at a time, she took him into her heart in the only way she knew; she'd loved him for many more years than she didn't. It seemed to her that for as long as she had a memory of love, there was Junior. So there he was at the table waiting for dinner while she stood at the counter preparing it. Across the room, Antonia thought, was her one true and only love, and as her heartbeat was set on tremor, she knew that there was nothing in her life that would have prepared her for the time when things simply weren't right. And if things were never going to be right, how would the rest of her life unfurl without Junior?

So she met his eyes when he looked at her and asked with a quiver in his voice that nearly made him inaudible, “What do you want to do, Antonia?”

“About what?” she asked while simultaneously wanting to kick herself for that bit of ridiculous coy southern-womanness.

Junior took Antonia in with narrowed eyes that were at a complete loss for understanding. Then he replied, “I've betrayed you, Antonia. I've got a grown son by another woman, and you want to know ‘about what?'”

Antonia picked up the dishes she'd just put on the counter from the cupboard, then she began, “You know, Junior, I
could
leave you. For my pride's sake, I could leave you as if I were some twenty-five-year-old ingénue whose innocence makes her certain she'll love as deeply again, but I'm not.” She clasped the plates to her bosom as she crossed the room. When she reached the table, she put a plate in front of Junior and the other directly across from him. As she sat, she handed him his knife and fork while she put her own on either side of her plate. She looked up at Junior with a
shadow of a smile that lingered, then said, “I know that if I were to leave you for something that was fresh over thirty years ago but is as stale as can be now, I'd have a big ball of pain right here in the pit of my stomach that would be my own damned fault.” She had pressed four fingers into her belly and did not relax them into her lap until she continued, “And that big ball, Junior, would kill me.” The thought of Ellen flashed before her as she wondered how her daughter could endure a stench, merely a few years old, that was still so fresh its power to offend was nonetheless quite potent.

Junior reached out across the table for Antonia's hand. And when he took it, she stared at the two hands clasped, remembering as if it were one big memory, all that their two hands had gone through over the years sometimes clasped like this, but most of the time only metaphorically so. Then she looked at Junior and said, “I just never knew that our life was so profound. I always thought we were simple people.”

Junior laughed heartily, and though she didn't quite see the humor, she joined him.

His laughter ebbed to a slight smile as he replied, “Antonia, you've never been simple. You remember the first time I ever laid eyes on you? There they were, those boys throwing those mushy tomatoes at that little half-wit dwarf who used to scoot around town on that rickety old cart, and there you were throwing stones at them with your little fifteen-year-old self and with all your might to get them to leave that dwarf-boy alone. You were all by yourself carrying that silly old yellow cat, and it was you against those big bullies, but you had no fear. Wrong was wrong for you, and you cussed up a blue streak throwing those rocks and stones from one hand and holding on to that basket full of cat in the other till those boys ran on their way. You were tenacious then and you're tenacious now. You weren't a typical girl with a typical girl's life, and you're not a typical woman with a typical woman's life. I know it's too much for some, but for me it's always been what's made you larger than anyone I've ever known, and why I love you larger than anyone I've known.”

She blushed in a way she had no memory of ever doing since she was the girl Junior once courted. She smiled quite shyly while squeezing Junior's hand and said, “Today, someone made me see that to you Cora is nearly invisible, and would be completely
invisible if it weren't for Thyme. And that's just the way it should be. Thyme is your son. Cora is his mother and there's no changing that.” Though she could clearly see in every crevice in his puzzled face that he did not understand, she stood and continued: “Thyme has a right to know his brother and sister, so he will meet his other family.” As she went to get their meal, she turned swiftly with an immediate ingenious thought as shown by her one raised finger, “
And
he'll come to the baby-naming ceremony! I'll tell Ellen.”