Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

WORD SPREAD THAT Cha-Cha had taken off, and while Miles, Duke, and Russell wanted to call him, drag him back against his will, Lelah and Lonnie convinced everyone that the show had to go on. It was for Viola that they had come, after all. Shortly after Cha-Cha left, Marlene came over to help get Viola ready. She and Lelah bathed their mother, dressed her in her favorite color. Yellow muumuu, yellow slippers, yellow pillbox hat to crown a shiny brown bob wig. “Y’all don’t have to do all this,” Viola repeated as Marlene painted her nails pink, as Lelah lotioned her feet. “We just goin to the living room.” When she saw the finished product in the mirror she smiled, showing off strong teeth that were mostly still hers.

Marlene stopped Lelah in the hallway, held her by the elbow.

“How much medication she take today, Lelah? She can’t even keep eye contact. You think you gave her the wrong amount? We can call Tina and check.”

“She’s got cancer, Marla. And it’s at the point where she gets whatever she wants whenever she wants.”

“Oh. Well. Oh.”

“Cha-Cha isn’t ready to tell people, and I guess Mama isn’t either or she would’ve told you.”

Marlene pulled her into a hug.

“If she doesn’t wanna tell anybody, that’s her choice,” she said.

“But don’t you think the outta-town folks should be able to say goodbye?”

“Maybe she don’t want goodbyes. Trust me, you start to feel a lot more dead when other people find out you’re dying. That’s how I felt when I got sick.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“Nope. But I wasn’t eighty-two years old.”

Lelah slipped the $950 Marlene had loaned her into her purse when she wasn’t looking.

The other sisters arrived with foil trays and ceramic boats of food. Without Tina, the menu lacked the cohesion of a usual Turner party spread. Francey brought vegetarian lasagna with an unappetizing white cream sauce and bread crumbs sprinkled on top. Sandra and Berniece brought potato salad, macaroni salad, and deviled eggs. Netti brought chicken biryani that she’d just learned how to make in India. The rice looked too dry. Henna still decorated her hands. “It was like a honeymoon, but it was so hot! I had a flash about every five minutes, and had to buy water on the street. Rahul was scared but I never got sick.” Marlene’s son, Antoine, arrived with his wife, their new baby girl, and banana pudding. A chorus of coos filled the foyer for several more doorbell rings. Lelah stood in the entryway, feeling pressure to greet these arrivals in the absence of the homeowners. She kept hoping that the next people through the door would be Brianne and Bobbie, or even Rob. She’d told Brianne everything she could remember about Vernon, and that had been enough to get her to take $300. She knew it had not been enough to get Brianne to trust her again, to get her to stop thinking of her as a problem that she should either fix or avoid. Only time would change that.

“WE’RE ON THE way to your house,” Chucky said at the door. He carried a huge pot of something with both hands.

“Who? You and your mama?”

“Me and Isaiah. I just strapped him into the car. Mommy doesn’t wanna—”

“Oh, well then, excuse me.” Cha-Cha sucked in his stomach to squeeze past Chucky and into the house.

“Pop, Pop! You can’t just . . . Oh, whatever,” Chucky said. He shut the door.

Tina sat in Chucky’s living room, flipping through the DVR queue for something to watch. She seemed neither surprised nor relieved to see him.

“You wanna know what the funny thing is, Cha-Cha?”

He said nothing. He was afraid of what the funny thing might be.

“Everybody thinks we gotta make up. That old as we both are, we have to. But that’s exactly why we don’t have to. It’s been thirty-seven years, Cha. Mostly good years. That’s already beating the odds.”

“Tina, I was confused with Alice, not happy with my own life and confused. I’m sorry.”

Tina shook her head.

“It’s bigger than Alice. What do we even have in common anymore, besides other people, besides our family? Just me and you, what do we have? You don’t even like the things I like. You think they’re silly, which is fine.”

“It’s not fine. It’s not fine for me to make fun of things that make you happy.”

“But we also can’t . . .” Tina went on. “We hardly touch. Like, not even walking by each other in the hallway. Nothing. Maybe we’ve finally grown apart.”

She looked at him straight on.

“You and me probably have twenty years or so left, if it all goes right, and that’s it. We’ll be gone. If I’m not what you want for the next twenty years, then you should go find it. I’ll do the same.”

Cha-Cha sat down. He had an inkling of what he wanted. To be satisfied. He recalled what his mother had told him the night before about Francis’s haint. About his father’s private unhappiness. He did not want that inheritance. He could accept a haint visiting him at night but not a life defined by regret. He thought about Troy, twenty years younger than himself and already wrecked by bitterness. This morning he’d been reminded of how smart Tina was, socially adept in a way that Turners were not. The party hadn’t officially started when he’d left, and it was already missing a certain Tina-ness, an inclusionary spirit that he’d heretofore taken for granted.

He put his hand on top of hers, and she did not pull away. He kissed her the way he used to when they’d lived in that drafty apartment off Van Dyke and he had a six-pack and two real hips, that long ago. She kissed him back, and they made love on their son’s sectional. Not quite the same as they had during their Van Dyke days, but very well nonetheless.

PARTY TIME, OFFICIALLY. Tradition obligated everyone to come out of their hidey-holes and make a show of familial togetherness in the living room. There were too many people to sit down at the formal dining table and eat, so knees and palms cradled plates as people leaned against walls and sat cross-legged on the floor. Small groups absconded when they could.

Out on the deck, four Turner men and Rahul smoked cigars and drank Hennessy and Heineken.

“It’s a lose-lose situation: white men won’t vote for a woman, and nobody’s gonna vote for a black man. Not even enough black folks.”

“Yeah, well, all kinds of folks been donating to Barack’s campaign, so that’s gotta mean something.”

“Shit, all kinds of folks donate to Feed the Children, but that don’t mean they want your black ass over for dinner.”

“Say, Antoine, what’s that you got tattooed on your neck?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Rahul, you still got that convenience store off of Ford Road?”

“You don’t wanna know what I think it looks like, it looks like a—”

“No, I sold it last year. Too much hassle.”

“See, I don’t understand why you young guys wanna go and get neck tattoos. What’s it gonna look like when your stuff starts hangin down like this, huh?”

“Can’t get a job with a neck tattoo. No real job.”

“It’s a fist , Uncle Duke. It’s Joe Louis’s arm and fist. Like the statue downtown?”

“I hear it, I hear it. You still have those apartments around there though, I assume?”

“I do. I thought about selling them two years ago, but lucky for me I didn’t. Everyone who’s been foreclosed on needs a place to rent right now. It’s sad, but—”

“Ohhhh. Yeah I see it. You gotta kinda turn your head to the side, but I see it.”

“Nothing sad about it. I’ll tell you, I remember when Hubbard, the old mayor of Dearborn, said he wouldn’t ever have any niggers living in his city. He said it right on TV! They kept voting his fool self back into office, too. Now look. You and your A-rab brothers own that town. It’s a beautiful thing.”