Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

Early the following morning, she sat down on Cha-Cha’s little desk chair and sifted through his printouts. She’d stacked them up after his first episode but hadn’t bothered to look through them. Ugly websites with typos in their headers. How crazy had Cha-Cha become? Halfway through the pile hid an image of Alice Rothman, flanked by two older white people who looked like liberal types. The elderly woman had a salt-and-pepper wiry bob and thick-rimmed glasses. The man, whose hairline was receding, wore a blue button-down shirt and a chocolate cardigan, although judging from Alice’s off-the-shoulder black dress, the occasion called for more formal attire. Alice wasn’t even very pretty, Tina thought. Her hair looked healthy enough, but her edges were sparse and her greasy forehead reflected the camera’s flash. She was neither as different nor as similar to Tina as Tina had expected her to be. She was clearly taller than Tina, with a smaller bust, but her skin was almost the same shade, and she didn’t look like she was in better physical shape. A decade ago Tina had put on weight steadily, but she’d started a walking group at church and had stayed within the same ten-pound range since. Of course, Alice’s face was younger; she didn’t have bags under her eyes or the beginnings of smile lines on either side of her mouth. And her clothes looked more fashionable. Tina put the picture close to her face, trying to determine if it was really a dress or a shirt-skirt combo Alice wore. Let her start getting hot flashes, Tina thought; then we’ll see whether she won’t want clothes with a little more drape and flow to them. She folded the paper in half, then folded it again and put it on the arm of the loveseat next to her. Who printed out a picture of their therapist? Tina imagined Cha-Cha on one of his compulsive Google binges, printing out the picture and hiding it in the pile of haint “research.” One would think he’d have the decency to put more thought into covering his tracks.

He could have cheated on her hundreds, if not thousands of times in these thirty-some-odd years, on trucking runs at least twice a month. And if he ever had, Tina would have liked to believe it was a single indiscretion, never an affair. Something not worth telling anyone at all. She would never tell her girlfriends, but Tina was an avid believer that one transgression, one night of succumbing to the weaknesses of the flesh, need not be confessed, dredged up, and displayed to ruin what two people had built through child rearing and sacrifice. She’d told this to Lonnie right before he went and confessed to that smart girl he’d somehow convinced to marry him out in California. Had he listened, they might have not divorced. It was selfish to confess to such a trifling thing. But what Cha-Cha had done wasn’t a one-time slip. It was a full-blown emotional and maybe even intellectual affair. How could this be forgiven?

The front door opened and Cha-Cha walked into the living room with what looked like a spring in his step. A self-satisfied smirk on his face. Then he noticed Tina at the desk in the corner and his face collapsed. He looked like a large child, she thought. A big, fat, philandering baby. She opened her mouth to say the most hurtful thing she could think of—she didn’t even know what, maybe just a loud groan—but Lelah walked into the room. The two of them looked like they had been jumped, drugged, and tossed out the back of a van. He would come home with her, Tina thought, or anyone who could delay the confrontation he knew was coming. Cha-Cha thought decorum would always overrule anger for Tina, and he was usually right, but today there were sufficiently hurtful things she could say in mixed company.

“Your mother has cancer,” she said.

“ What?” Lelah said. Tina watched Cha-Cha’s face for a response. She’d broken a cardinal rule of their relationship: never talk about any big family development without running it by him first, so that he might determine the best way to disseminate the information.

“What?” Lelah said again. She dropped her duffel bag on the living room floor.

Tina ignored Cha-Cha’s death glare and explained.

“Last time we went to the doctor she was complaining about pain in and around her armpits, and after the doctor felt some swelling there they did a scan. Well, today they said it looks like something is there in her lymph nodes, which means it’s gonna spread fast.”

“Something?” Lelah asked. “They don’t know for sure? Can’t they do a biopsy?”

Cha-Cha rubbed his temple but didn’t speak.

“She’s probably awake in her room right now, Lelah,” Tina said. “Go on in and ask her what they said and what she said too.”

“Okay,” Lelah said, as if finally registering the tension in the room. “Good idea.”

Can a human being ever truly know another person’s heart? Tina had thought it possible. How could she have been wrong? Cha-Cha sat on the arm of the love seat closest to her and knocked the folded-up printout of Alice onto the floor. Tina ignored the proximity of the knees of his dirty pants to her face and focused on the paper. He smelled like beer and dirt and mildew. She refused to speak first. Back when she had been closer to her sisters-in-law, Francey and Netti in particular would tease Tina for her inability to hold Cha-Cha accountable for his mistakes. “You give in too easily,” Netti used to say. “I love Cha-Cha, but he’s the type of man that’ll only change if you put him in the doghouse for a while.” Tina never did. Some women put men in the doghouse, she thought, and others just up and quit when they’ve had enough.

Cha-Cha touched her forearm.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Mama sooner? I woulda gone with y’all yesterday. I had no idea—”

“Are you out of your mind? ” Tina swatted his hand away. “I’m not about to sit up here and explain anything to you.”

“I’m just trying,” he started, and stopped. “Cancer is serious , Tina—”

“And what, I don’t know that? You must think I’m so stupid , and weak. But I’m not.”

Cha-Cha stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and sighed. As if he somehow thought he’d get around this.

“Nothing happened, alright? I should’ve called to check in, but nothing happened yesterday, or any other day. I swear to God.”

“Don’t you swear for my sake. You and me must have very different definitions of the word nothing .”

“I slept on the east side at Mama’s house,” Cha-Cha said. He turned around and pointed toward Viola’s closed door. “Ask Lelah. She was there. I found her there and brought her back with me. She’s messed up, Tina. She just needs a place to stay—”

Tina jumped up from her chair so that she was eye level to Cha-Cha’s chest.

“I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care! When have I ever cared about somebody staying here, huh? You didn’t go to work, Cha; I called. And you didn’t pick up the phone all day long.” She took a deep breath before asking: “Did you go see Alice?”

Cha-Cha’s jaw hung open, which was answer enough.

“That doesn’t mean I slept with her! It just means . . . I needed to work some stuff out. Truth be told, I needed alone time more than anything.”

Tina laughed.

“ Alone time? You needed alone time? That’s all you do, Cha. You’ve got to sleep alone to figure out your haint situation. You’ve got to weasel out of helping me with your mother on account of an argument y’all had. You’ve got to keep your Alice conversations to yourself, and you walk around here like somebody’s teenager, resentful of me like I’m your mother. Well, I’m not, alright? I’m sixty years old, and I’m not about to be anybody’s fool anymore.”