15

When I told Brenda that I was coming back to Pompan, the night after I told Clarise and Cedric, she said, “I wish you’d police your father. Now there’s a man who needs some policing.”

My older sister had always lived in Pompan. Brenda lived three blocks from my parents, and ever since my mother died, she’d gone over and cooked dinner for my father twice a week. She specialized in rice and beans, “healthy food” she called it, which my father had probably gotten used to. When she wasn’t cooking for him, she must have been eating a lot of unhealthy because she was up around 200 pounds. I didn’t talk to her about her weight anymore; she was a grown woman with a nasty temper. The last time I tried she yelled at me, “What do you know about what I eat? Nothing. For your information, I’ve tried every shit-tasting diet out there—the all-grapefruit diet, the protein shake routine, the weight watchers. I exercise more than you, and here I am. Nothing wrong with the way I am.”

Brenda was a big girl and she beat on me mercilessly when we were small. She slapped me around until I was twelve and then she stopped and made out like she had done me a favor, toughening me up.

When my father started dating a younger woman, a white woman, it left a sour taste with Brenda. My sister had a network of spies around Pompan—she’d been popular in high school, still worked in the Pompan school department, and kept up with people—girls she knew in high school who now worked in groceries and waitressed in restaurants and owned flower shops around town, and there was little news of my father that didn’t reach her. She was relentless in her need to know every story about our father and in her need to share them with me. I didn’t really care who he was dating and I told Brenda so. She was worried that he was making a fool of himself seeing a woman so soon after Mother died.

Brenda told her boyfriends that family was her greatest pleasure. But it was our father whom she was attached to; Brenda had nothing good to say about our mother until she died.

I couldn’t imagine my father making a fool of himself. He never hesitated to use his charm on people and usually got what he wanted. At the start of my new job he made it clear that he didn’t like the idea of me working with the Pompan police. I thought perhaps he just didn’t want me nearby too, watching; Brenda was bad enough.