Natalie Baszile - Queen Sugar

Ralph Angel’s eyes met Charley’s and she smiled in agreement. “Kids.” An easy calm settled in the space between them.

“Kinda funny when you think about the two of us,” Ralph Angel said. “We got the same daddy. My wife dies, your husband dies, and here we are, come to roost in the same house. To say we spent so many years apart, we’re just alike.”

Charley gave Ralph Angel a smile, but she felt a chill ripple across her skin. “Funny,” she said, and thought he was almost right — almost but not quite. She wasn’t perfect, far from it, but she’d never taken money from her father and lied to him about it. She’d never used drugs or pushed an old woman down. Were they minor infractions? Perhaps. And she believed everyone deserved a second chance, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to her brother than he was letting her see.

Ralph Angel absentmindedly pulled the dresser’s top drawer open a fraction, then seemed to remember whose room it was now and closed it. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks again for taking Blue with you this afternoon. He’s still talking about it.”

“It was just a sno-cone,” Charley said.

“Not to him.”

Charley nodded, understanding all that Ralph Angel couldn’t bring himself to say. “My pleasure.”

Ralph Angel re-covered The Cane Cutter and slid it back into position. He glanced around the room as though he were seeing it for the last time. “Well, I ought to let you get back to your reading. I just wanted to say thanks.”

“No problem.”

Ralph Angel turned to leave, and was over the threshold, pulling the door behind him, when he paused. “There was one more thing I wanted to ask.” He leaned against the doorjamb. “You said you’d think about us partnering up on the farm.”

“Well, like I said, I already have a partner.” Two, Charley thought, and prayed Ralph Angel never found out about Alison.

“Yeah, you said that before.”

“And there’s not much—”

“To administer. You said that, too. But I’ve been thinking.” Ralph Angel stepped back into the room and straightened the lampshade. “You’ve got to need help with something. I could drive a tractor, run errands. It wouldn’t be permanent. Just till, you know, we figured out an arrangement.”

“An arrangement?”

“For cutting me in on the action.”

“What action?” Charley thought of the long hours she, Denton, and Alison spent in the fields, the black mold she scrubbed off the refrigerator shelves, the bird shit she chiseled off the shop windows. Tedious, boring work. And then there were the bills. Between the unpaid invoices and Denton’s ever-growing list of parts and supplies, they were barely scraping by. Denton and Alison had agreed to take smaller draws till the harvest, but Charley still had to pay them something. As for herself, she’d budgeted sixty dollars a week for gas and her share of Miss Honey’s food bill, but she still felt like they were eating more than their share. Charley looked at her brother in the glow of the bedside lamp and knew Ralph Angel was desperate; she could see it on his face. She knew that in her brother’s eyes, she was seated at a grand banquet and that all he was asking for, begging for, was a morsel off her plate. But she had nothing to offer. Nothing to spare.

“I can barely afford to buy gas,” Charley said. “If I can’t afford that, I can’t afford to pay you, and you can’t work for free. If I could hire you now with the promise of paying you after the harvest, I would, but I’m not sure there’ll be any profit. Hell, I’ll not sure there will be any cane to harvest.” Still, he was her brother — her disinherited brother. She reached for her purse and pulled her last twenty from her wallet. “It’s all I have. I’m sorry.” As she held out the money, Charley thought of the old black veteran who peddled newspapers outside her neighborhood market back in Los Angeles — not a fancy market, but still a decent one, with its crates of freshly picked produce, and bulk bins of grain, and cuts of meat laid between sheets of butcher paper. All day, every day, he stood there, politely, in his dirty veteran’s cap, with his pulpy, smudged newspapers in one hand and frayed American flag in the other. She always thanked him as she bought a paper, slipped him an extra dollar. And sometimes she didn’t buy a paper at all, just gave him the money. “It’s all I have,” she’d say.

Ralph Angel took the money. But rather than put it in his pocket, he let the bill hang limply between his fingers. “Twenty dollars,” he said. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“I’d give you more if I had it,” Charley said, and it was true. If Ernest had left her any unrestricted cash she’d have gladly shared it. For a moment, she thought about explaining the trust: that every expense had to be backed up with receipts; that if she made one false move she’d lose everything.

“Jesus, Charley. I thought we had an understanding.”

Charley blinked. “What are you talking about? What understanding?”

“I gave you that damn chemistry set.”

It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. “But—” Charley counted back through the years. “That was ages ago. I was just a kid.”

“I’m your brother, Charley. Your big brother. Your only brother. We’re supposed to look out for each other.” Ralph Angel stepped deeper into the room and began to pace the floor in front of the dresser. Back and forth, back and forth, slowly, with his hands on his hips. “You know, I’ve tried to be patient. I’ve tried to be nice about it, give you space. But I’m starting to think you’re giving me the runaround.”

“I told you. I can’t afford to take on more expenses.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ralph Angel said. “This is what I’m hearing.” He bunched the fingers on his left hand together, pressed them against his thumb, then opened and closed his hand, pantomiming a mouth talking. “Just talk. Talk, talk, talk.” He gripped the bedpost and leaned toward her. “You think it’s easy for me to sit around here sucking eggs while you waltz off to work every day?”

“It’s not the party you imagine, trust me.” Charley felt her heart drumming. Her legs felt shaky even though she was sitting on the bed.

“I hear you talking to Miss Honey. I know you just bought a shitload of equipment, and that Denton taught you how to drive a combine. You think I can’t do that stuff?”

“You don’t like manual labor. You said so yourself.”

“You think it’s been easy for me, all these years, hearing stories about how good you had it? ‘Charley got a new car for her birthday.’ ‘Charley’s going to a fancy East Coast school.’ ‘Charley went to Hawaii on her honeymoon.’ How do you think that made me feel, sis, knowing Dad loved you more?”

“How can you say that? That’s not true,” Charley said, but the truth was, even if he’d had a perfect childhood, whatever that meant, something told her he would always believe she’d had a better one, and she would never be able to convince him otherwise.

“Then how come he didn’t leave me part of the farm? Come on, sis. Don’t bullshit me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what I think? I think you had something to do with it. I think you told him to cut me out because you wanted it all for yourself.”

“That’s crazy.” Charley thought about her father’s final months: the hospital bed like a barge docked in the living room, the cocktail of medications that coated his teeth with plaque and made his breath smell like metal and rotting meat, the gurgling tubes that sucked green mucus from his lungs, bones so brittle they snapped like matchsticks. Even with hospice there, she’d barely had time for her own life, for Micah. Charley threw her legs over the side of the bed. “I didn’t know anything until he was gone and his lawyer told me.”