I needed to connect with Octavia, who was probably not pleased that I had ignored her request to meet. With the antic activities at Nigel’s school, I forgot to at least tell Octavia why I didn’t show up. Having ghosted her for nearly eighteen hours, I figured messaging her would be less effective than meeting in person, which meant driving to a restored plantation one hundred miles out of the City. The firm retreat, Seasons’s annual orgy, where sex was replaced by talk of market trends, potential clients, and how to best take over the world, would begin in a few hours. There would be much maniacal laughter and twirling of mustaches. And while associates like myself were encouraged to go, the shareholders liked it just as well if we stayed back in the office and churned billable hours for them.
Maybe it would have been better to wait until Monday. After all, I hadn’t been canned, and Octavia would be back in the office by then. Yet I also hadn’t been promoted or gotten my balloon bonus, pending for 96,342 hours, not that I was counting. No bonus meant no procedure for Nigel’s face, a situation I could not abide.
I was loading my overnight bag into the hood trunk when Penny sauntered up—no woman anywhere sauntered like my Penny—carrying a floral-print duffel decorated with Hibiscus mutabilis.
“You’re coming?” I asked.
“On one condition.” She dropped her bag. “Two conditions, actually.”
“Shoot.”
“Apologize for hiding that cream from me, and promise you’ll never have our son use that crap again.”
My cheeks flushed. I was more embarrassed, I realized, that I’d been caught than that I’d given Nigel the cream behind her back. But a part of me wanted to make the promise, to give in to the possibility that maybe Penny was right. She always thought I was overcompensating in my attempts to protect Nigel. She seemed to think I saw monsters everywhere I looked, which was correct, of course.
“That’s a nice offer,” I said, “but I got this. I’ll just go, handle my business, and come home.”
“Dammit. Don’t be an idiot. Can’t you see I’m worried about you?”
“I’m all good.”
Penny grabbed my face. I tried to look away, but she wouldn’t let me. “Are you really? All good? I need you to be better for your son. I need you to love this family and love yourself.”
I knew what she meant. We got along pretty well most of the time, the three of us. But most of the emotionally violent arguments Penny and I had pertained to Nigel and how to best help him. Like what had happened at the school the day before. As usual, Penny was reacting to something I said or did that caused Nigel’s anxiety to manifest. If I hadn’t pushed the cream on him, he wouldn’t have wound up cowering in a closet. I needed to say less and do less. My family could be happy. We could be grinning fools.
“I’m going with you,” Penny said. “That’s all there is to it.” She raised an eyebrow, and those eyes, those sea-green peepers, washed away my remaining resolve.
“Fine,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”
“For what?” She crossed her arms.
“For hiding the gunk from you.”
“And?”
“And I won’t let him use it again.” I sighed and put her duffel in the trunk next to my battered canvas valise.
“Now, give me your palm.”
I extended my hand. Penny took out a blue permanent marker and drew a misshapen circle. She often did this when we first met. She had a philosophy about focusing on the basics, the people in our orbit who mattered, the actions that supported instead of harmed. She chose a circle as a symbol of inclusion, but also because it was impossible to hand-draw one perfectly. Perfection was the enemy.
Suddenly, I felt ashamed for hiding anything from her. It felt good to be forgiven. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”
“I called in,” she said.
“What about kiddo?”
“We can leave him with your mother. They don’t spend enough time together.”
Leaving Nigel with Mama meant he would spend the weekend in the yard behind her restaurant in the deceptively hyperborean sun, drying up and darkening like a raisin, my warnings that she was setting her grandson up for lethal melanomas notwithstanding. Not to mention all the propaganda she would cram into his head. Black empowerment. Racial righteousness. Resistance. The woman fed filthy protesters for free.
“Let’s make a family outing of it,” I said. “Bring him along.”
Once I covered the Bug’s waterlogged seats with plastic, we hit the highway.
“Look at this, Dad,” Nigel said. “It’s like a sponge.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Nigel was pressing his outstretched fingers into the seat cushion. Water bubbled through a hole in the plastic.
“Don’t do that, son,” I said. “Why don’t you sketch for a while?”
“I don’t want to sketch now.” Viewing him through the rearview mirror, the shadows of trees flowed over his face. “It smells like dog back here.”
“Just occupy yourself, kid.”
“And put on your seatbelt,” Penny said. “We should’ve taken the van.”
“Wouldn’t have made it.” We prided ourselves on not having car notes. My car was an unfortunate bit of forced inheritance, given to me as my father had no use for transportation. He was an indentured servant—had actually cut organically grown sugarcane—in the fields not very far from the plantation we were headed to. As for Penny’s ride, we’d paid that off years earlier. The minivan was safe for her commutes around town, but it shook with righteous indignation at being forced to travel at highway speeds. My Bug, although an antique, was a solid bet on long trips. I drove it to hearings in small-town courts all over the state without incident. I was sure the car would cruise the highways and byways of my nation long after I, and everyone I loved, went dust to dust.
When we hit the northbound interstate, I put on Pet Sounds. Penny turned to me from the passenger seat. I didn’t look, but I could tell she was studying my face as if to say, I can’t believe you still listen to that crusty old white boy music. My grandparents didn’t even like the Beach Boys. You must be the whitest black man on earth. I thought it would just be a phase.
“It is,” I said, forgetting the nonverbal aspect of our chat. “A very long phase.”
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said and wobbled into the second verse of “God Only Knows,” but Carl Wilson’s tenor was far too high for me to glide with for long, especially with other people’s ears at stake. After the bridge, Penny’s voice came in as clean and clear as the original. Nigel leaned forward from the rear, gripping Penny’s seatback for stability. By the swirling, three-part finale, we were all singing together.
Penny and I both looked back at our son for an extended beat. Nigel smiled at us. He was missing a canine tooth then.
“Put on your seatbelt,” we said in unison.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Jeez.”
We exited the highway and dashed into molehill country. Somehow Nigel convinced us to take the scenic route for the last leg. Country towns in the South gave me the jimjams. I worried about every police station, every church I saw. I wondered what evils were done in the name of separating the whites and coloreds, as if people were nothing more than dirty laundry. We passed brick-faced homes that sat far back from the road like they were waiting to pounce. Some had little American flags on their rickety mailboxes. Scarecrows. Spinning windmills. It must have been anxiety-inducing to travel those roads many decades earlier, say, in the time of my father’s father or even earlier yet—like in the 1950s.
What would the people in those houses think of a well-dressed Negro, a redheaded beauty, and an olive-skinned boy puttering by in a spotless German car? Would a patrolman pull us over? Would Penny have to explain that I was her chauffeur? Would the cop knock out a headlight and write us a ticket? Or would he bring us to an abandoned schoolhouse for reeducation?
Still, there was something about that shadowless afternoon, wheeling the freeway with my family. I wasn’t particularly religious, but I noted brief sequences in my life where the invisible medium—air, mist, water, I could never say what the medium most resembled—seemed to drain away. In those moments, there was nothing at all between me and them, the two souls I cared most about in all the unknowable universe. Those were the times when I believed that there was a plan, although I wasn’t privy to the details, and that it was a just and good plan designed to benefit Nigel, Penny, and perhaps even me. Those slim fissures in my logic never lasted long enough.