Why have me at all?
No one would tell me. But for all the mystery surrounding my father, one thing was crystal clear: Mama saw him when she looked at me and she didn’t like what she saw.
Her smile flickered like a dying bulb as I held out her giftbag. She took it slowly and hesitantly put her hand inside. “What have we here?”
“It’s nothing. Just…something.”
Mama pulled out the hammered copper cuff bracelet with a turquoise patina and held it up to the light.
“I wanted it to resemble something pulled from a sunken ship,” I said, my normally strong voice wavering. “I know those have always fascinated you.”
I watched her, breath held, as she turned it over and over. Tears filled her brown eyes—eyes like mine—and she really looked at me for the first time since the start of my visit. Then she dropped the cuff back in the bag as if it’d burned her.
“It’s very lovely. Thank you.”
Blinking her eyes dry, she gave me a brief, stiff hug. I wanted to sink into her arms, into her scents of cigarettes and jasmine perfume. But no sooner than I felt her arms around me, they were slipping away.
“Be good. Work hard. Give Bibi our love.”
What about me?
I inhaled sharply, as if I could suck the thought back. Being weak and asking for what I wasn’t given would never get me anywhere. I knew better than to even think it; I was stronger than that.
“Goodbye, Mama,” I said.
But she had already retreated to the table, into her crossword puzzle and the haze of cigarette smoke. She set the giftbag on the floor at her feet, where it looked small and already forgotten.
“Let me drive you, sweetheart,” Uncle Rudolph said gently into the stony quiet Mama left behind.
“Thanks, Uncle Rudy,” I said, mustering a sarcastic grin. “But I can’t possibly pull you away from this very important yet meaningless preseason Saints game. I’ll take an Uber.”
Uncle Rudy grinned back. “Smart aleck, ain’t ya?”
Aunt Bertie snorted. “An Uber? You going to get in a stranger’s car? Pretty girl like you?”
In the kitchen, my mother flinched. Or maybe it was just a shiver from the air conditioning.
“Thanks, Aunt B, but I’ll be fine.”
“Nonsense. Rudy will drive you and that’s the end of that.”
My uncle shot me a wink, beaming perfect white teeth against rich dark skin. “You heard the boss.”
“What would anyone want with her skinny ass, anyway?” Letitia laughed and helped pull my luggage to the door. She arched her eyebrows and leaned in close with a knowing grin. “You say goodbye to Jalen already?”
I shot her a keep your voice down glare. “Last night.”
She smirked. “I’ll bet. You’re going to break that boy’s heart.”
“Not possible. He and I have an agreement,” I said, my voice low and my cheeks heating. I hated anything resembling gossip, while my cousin lived on it. “No strings. No attachments.”
“Your motto.”
I glanced at Mama. I learned from the best.
“Going to miss you.” Letitia ran her fingers over a handful of the hundreds of microbraids that fell softly down my shoulders. “You got someone in California who can duplicate my artistry?”
Letitia, not even thirty years old, was owner of her own beauty salon—The Studio—on Canal Street. She was my idol and an inspiration for my own ambitions.
“No chance.”
“Great, then you’ll have to come back and see me. And Jalen.”
“Oh, hush up.”
Letitia laughed and gave me a final hug.
Uncle Rudy joined me at the door and took hold of my rolling suitcase. “Let’s hit the road, sweetheart.”
Bertie and Letitia waved and offered safe travels and love. They wrapped me in it.
And then there was Mama, like a cold patch of air in the humid, cloying heat of New Orleans in August.
I shivered and went out.
My plane landed in California at one in the afternoon. An Uber ride later, I was hauling my rolling suitcase up the front walk of the cozy one-story house. The air in Santa Cruz was cooler and tinged with salt, and the trees spilled down from the mountainside to line our quiet street. A huge Cyprus shaded our front yard on one side, and on the other, Bibi’s flower garden was a riot of color.
“Home,” I murmured. I climbed the three steps to our tiny front porch and unlocked the front door. “Bibi, it’s me.”
“There she is,” my eighty-year-old great-grandmother said from our lumpy, pillow-strewn couch. Her dark brown skin was creased with wrinkles—mostly laugh lines—and her close-cropped hair was entirely silver now. Despite the summer warmth, she sat wrapped in a green and white shawl she had made herself. A pile of yellow yarn lay at her slippered feet, and needles clacked as she crafted another. Our lazy gray cats, Lucy and Ethel, were both stretched out on the back of the couch.
I left my rolling suitcase by the door and crossed our living room with its antique furniture that was too big for our little house—every available surface housing knickknacks or stacked with old books Bibi was now too blind to read. Family photos covered nearly every inch of the flowered wallpaper, and Nina Simone crooned on the ancient stereo.
“How did it go?” Bibi asked. “Better than last year, I hope.”
I flopped down beside her and rested my head on her shoulder. “Don’t know about better. Bertie and Rudy are great, as usual. Letitia’s like the sister I never had.”
“But…?” Bibi’s needles clacked.
“But Mama is still Mama.”
My grandmother patted my cheek with her warm, dry hand and sighed. “Oh, my darling girl. I wish it were better between you.”
“I don’t know why I keep going.” Sudden tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away quickly. Ethel jumped in my lap and I focused on scratching her ears. “She doesn’t want me around. That’s not self-pity. Straight facts.”
“She does want you there, honey,” Bibi said. “She’s showing you the only way she knows how.”
“By ignoring me?”
“By asking you to come. Spending time.”
“Not what I’d call quality time. It’s like it’s physically painful for her to look at me. I mean, I get it. I ruined her future. But why does she bother? Why do I?”
“Because there is love there, even if it’s hard to see.”
She didn’t have to keep me.
The thought left me with a cold shiver in my heart, because no doubt, my mother must’ve had the same idea. Looking at her sometimes, I’d feel a strange, remembered vertigo, as if I’d once teetered on a razor’s edge between here and oblivion.
“Don’t go there, Shiloh.”
Bibi might’ve been legally blind, but she saw everything.
“Can’t help it,” I said softly. “Why did she have me if it was going to be so hard for her?”
Bibi thought for a moment. “A woman’s heart is not a single room with her feelings and choices stark on white walls, like an exhibit. It’s a deep catacomb we spend our entire life mapping. Your mama is navigating her way, but it’s slow and hard. Because she’s lost.”