“Hurry up and get in, Troy. I’m blocking traffic,” my mother said, watching me in the rearview mirror as I stuffed luggage into her trunk.
“Mom, no one’s behind you. You’re fine.” I put my last bag in and closed the trunk.
I’d called my father early in the morning to ask him to give me a ride to the airport and he wasn’t home. “Off at the golf course with Dr. Williams,” my mother said. I could tell she was still in bed. “I’ll come and take you, Troy.”
Bad news.
My mother was good at a lot of things, but driving just wasn’t one of them. Having been chauffeured around by Grandma Lucy’s drivers all her life, my mother hadn’t learned to drive until she was well into her twenties and she drove like it. She darted in and out of traffic like a madwoman, cutting people off and cursing through the window. What was worse was that to add to her reckless driving skills, she still wanted to carry on regular conversations with people in the car. My mother was famous for doing 90 down the FDR while on her cell phone. And she had the tickets to prove it.
“Oh, I thought I saw someone behind me,” she said nonchalantly, eyeing herself in the mirror as I got in. “Hey, baby.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss me. “I’m so happy you called me.”
“Hi, Mom,” I said, returning the kiss. As usual my mother looked stunning, sitting across from me in the car. Even though she didn’t have on a dab of makeup and her hair was pulled back in a bun, she looked flawless. She was fifty-six, but you’d never know. There wasn’t a wrinkle on her face. She once had told me it was “a blessing from the melanin gods.” I prayed they’d bless me, too.
“I think it’s just great that you’re getting away from the city with your girlfriends.” She pulled into traffic without looking in her side mirror. “It’s always a good idea to get a break, you know? To say goodbye to the city for a while.”
“Yeah, I know.” I looked in my bag to make sure I had my e-ticket. Tasha and I weren’t able to get the same flight going into L.A.; she had an early appointment at her doctor’s office. They wanted to make sure everything was okay with her pregnancy before she got on the plane.
“And I know you could use a break from that Julian, too,” she murmured in a motherly way.
“Mom, I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m serious. The best thing you can do is just forget about that boy.”
“Jesus, Mom. I’m not going to talk about Julian all the way to the airport.” I looked out of the window.
“Oh my, she’s calling on Jesus and cursing her mother. What’s wrong with the world?”
“I didn’t curse you, Mom,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Well, the point is, you could’ve, and I don’t appreciate it.”
“How are you going to say you don’t appreciate me doing something I didn’t do?” I looked at her. We weren’t even out of Manhattan yet. There was no way I’d survive all the way to JFK. “Okay, you know what, I’m not even playing into this. I’m just going to be quiet,” I said.
“Fine, don’t talk to me. You can ignore the problem, but it won’t just go away. I know I taught you that.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
“Fine.”
We were both silent. I looked at the cars disappearing behind us. She was weaving in and out of traffic like I was about to miss my flight.
“So how’s Kyle doing?” my mother asked, breaching our agreement of silence. I knew it wouldn’t last long.
“Mom!”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry, Troy. Don’t get so touchy.” She reached over and rubbed my knee. “I know this is a stressful time for you, but I just want to know what’s going on.”
“Kyle is just my friend. That’s it. But I’m not saying anything else about him. I don’t want to talk about men right now. This weekend is about me and my girls.”
“That’s fine, baby. Just let me say one more thing and then we can drop it.” She looked at me. I nodded my head just to make her stop. “Okay, let me say this—”
Someone jumped into our lane, cutting her off. “Watch it, speedy,” my mother said, sliding her window down. “Can’t you see this is a damn Mercedes?” She closed the window, beeped her horn, and swerved around another car.
“Mom, you’re going to get us killed,” I said, holding on to the glove compartment. Thank God for seat belts.
“Well, like I was saying”—she readjusted herself in her seat—“I know you get mad at me, but there’s a reason why I’m so hard on you with these men.”
“Why, Mom?”
“It’s because I know what you’re worth,” she said. She looked over at me again. “And I don’t mean money. I know what your heart is worth. And I don’t want you to accept any man who doesn’t know your worth. Do you understand me?” She paused. “I know it’s hard for you, Troy. You see these men out here and they seem like they’re everything you want—in more ways than one…”
“Mom!” I put my hand over my forehead. This was almost as painful as our sex talk when I was fifteen.
“I’m serious, Troy.” She laughed. “My point is, there are a lot of men out there, but you have to be selective.”
“I know.”
“Yeah, I know how you and your friends rate men.” We both laughed. “But that’s not what I mean. See, you can find a man with a good upbringing, a great career, and lots of money, but if he doesn’t know what you’re worth, then he’s not worth your time. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Now, that’s why I don’t like this Julian,” she went on. I exhaled and looked away. She was cursing him just like she had Champ. “No, hear me out, Troy. Julian doesn’t know your worth. What kind of man just walks away from a beautiful, intelligent, warm woman like you? Saying he needs time?” I couldn’t believe my father had told her everything I said about the breakup! “I’ll tell you, Troy: a foolish one who’s so worried about his own worth and everything else going on in the world that he can’t see what’s right in front of him.”
“I know. You’re right, Mom,” I said, fighting to hold back tears. I didn’t want to hear it, but she was right.
“And your grandmother told me all about your little plan to get him back,” she added. I almost had a heart attack. Grandma Lucy—a traitor, too? “And that’s okay. You’re young, and your ego makes you do crazy things when you’re young sometimes. I was there too myself when I was your age. But listen to me good, Troy.” She slowed the car down and locked her eyes on me. “You can’t ever make a man do something he didn’t want to do in the first place. No woman has ever made a man do something he didn’t already want to do. Now, when and if your plan goes as you want it to and Julian comes back to you, I want you to ask yourself one question.”
“What, Mom?”
“Ask yourself if you really want him back,” she said, “and if he was worth all of the energy it took to get him. And, Troy, what it will take to keep him. Because the energy you put out to get him, it will take double that to keep him. And you can quote your mother on that.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, noticing that her eyes were growing teary too as she watched the other cars around us on the road.
“No problem, baby. That’s just what mothers do—we tell our little girls the truth.” She pat me on the leg warmly as tears began to fall from her eyes.
“Mom? What’s wrong? I was listening. I heard what you said about Julian.” I turned to her.
“It’s not that…I’m just going through something.”
“What is it? Is it Dad?” I was growing concerned. My mother had always been emotional, but something in her eyes was broken, heavy.
“No,” she said. “It’s something I’ve been dealing with on my own. I didn’t want to tell anyone…I couldn’t.” She began crying and wiping her tears as she fought to control the wheel.
“Pull over,” I said, looking to see that there was no one in the lane to our right. I had over an hour before I had to be at the airport, and she was in no condition to drive. She pulled the car over to the side of the road and rested her forehead on the center of the wheel. “What’s going on? Just tell me.”
“I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone. Only your father knows.”
“Mom, you’re scaring me.” I kept thinking she was about to tell me about some awful disease she was dying from. I couldn’t take that kind of news, but I had to know.
“Before my father died, I…I…”
“What?” I asked. My grandfather had died of kidney cancer, just hours after his old kidney had been removed and a new one had been inserted. Before the doctor walked out with the bad news, we were all outside the hospital room, crying happily as Grandma Lucy thanked God that he had been spared. While my mother had been quiet, seemingly meditating in her own space, I’d assumed it was because it had been such a long time that my grandfather had been struggling with his illness. For two years, as the cancer progressed, the doctors had searched all over for a kidney that would save him but he had a semi-rare blood type, so even with his money, it was a difficult process. Even my mother tested out, as she’d inherited Grandma Lucy’s blood type and wasn’t a suitable donor. By the time the B-type kidney came in, we were rejoicing and looked forward to Grandpa beating the cancer. But then the doctor came out of the room with the bad news. He wasn’t strong enough; his body had been weakened by two rounds of chemotherapy and he’d passed. “What happened before Grandpa died?” I asked.
“I wasn’t a match. I couldn’t be a donor. I…I wasn’t his child,” she cried banging on the wheel. “There was so much going on and I just had to watch my own father die. All those years and there was nothing I could do. Just watch.”
“What are you talking about? Not his daughter? He was your father…right?”
“Not according to the blood test.” She looked over at me.
“But you have Lucy’s blood type. Mom, this is crazy.”
“Troy,” she reached over and grabbed my arm, “your grandfather was a B-type.”
“Yes.”
“Lucy is an A.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m an A.”
“What? What are you saying?” I was no scientist, but my years of watching soaps in between classes in college made it clear where this was going. Then, just then, I looked out at the street in front of me and began to realize how slow the world moves. While they beg to look fast, people slip by slowly, cars meander in sluggish motion, and even the air sits still if you really pay attention. Maybe it wasn’t the entire world that was slowing down. Maybe it was just my world, the one I knew that was coming apart in slow seconds.
“If two people with A and B blood types conceive, the child is always an AB.” She looked out of the window. “My father had to have been an A.”
“What did Lucy say?”
“What could she say? She lied. The man she claimed was my father was dying and there was nothing any of us could do.”
“Did he know?”
She turned to me and wiped a tear from my cheek. She shook her head no and turned to the look out of the side window, placing her hand over her mouth.
“Why did she lie? To you? To him? To me? All these years, Lucy’s been lying?”
“My father was a black man. She’d been having an affair with him for years, even before she met my father. He lived in Harlem.” She gave a short, sad laugh. “His name was Oscar. He was mixed. Had short blond hair, hazel eyes, freckles like mine across his nose….”
“But Lucy loved Grandpa.” I ran my hand along the freckles above my cheeks.
“He was a horn player who played at the club where Lucy and my father met,” she went on. “He lived just a few blocks away from the brownstone your father grew up in.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“He died a few months after I was born. Overdosed on heroine.”
“This is so sad. I just don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t feel bad, baby. There’s nothing you did wrong. This is our stuff and that’s why I’ve been dealing with it on my own. I didn’t want to pull you into it. You’re dealing with your own life.”
“But this is my life,” I said. “You’re my family and this is my life.” I felt so helpless. Everything, anything I knew growing up just seemed like a lie. I was Troy Helene Smith—that was who I was. My family had its issues, but that was who I was. I’d learned to deal with it. “It’s all a lie,” I continued, shaking with fear. “My life.”
“No, baby. That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do. You can’t believe for one second that anything you have lived was a lie. You are still my daughter and until they put my father’s body into the ground you were his granddaughter. That man loved you dearly. And he’d roll over in his grave if he thought for one minute you denied being his granddaughter. Some things go beyond blood and we can’t make him pay for Lucy’s mistake.”
I took a deep breath and sat back in my seat, trying to take it all in.
“So, that’s why you and Lucy haven’t been speaking lately?” I asked. My mother and grandmother’s relationship had always been strained, but since my grandfather had gotten ill, it seemed like they were on opposite sides of the ocean. I always thought it was because since my grandfather died, they’d had no one to play referee and keep the peace.
“I can’t deal with her right now. That woman put me through so much with her shit,” she screamed. “I just need a break. I just need to get myself together and realize that my mother is never going to change. She’s just fucked up. She’s been fucked up and that’s it.”
“Mom, Lucy’s not all bad. She has some good sides.”
“All of the stuff she put me though, making me believe I wasn’t good enough because my skin was darker than hers, making me feel bad about marrying your father, all of it was to protect her lie, to keep that bullshit going long enough so she could cash in on my father’s money.”
“Do you think that was all it was? Really, Mom? She loved Grandpa,” I said, “You know that. I don’t care if she lied. She made a mistake. We both know how things were back then. Right or wrong, she did what she had to do.”
“Well, she did what she had to do and I’m doing what I have to do,” my mother said, wiping away the last of her tears. “I can’t live in the past. I may not have a relationship with my mother, but I’m going to make sure we have one.” She looked at me and forced a smile. “If I get anything from this whole thing, it has to be that I want to have a strong relationship with you.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling bad for all the times I’d turned my back on her. All this time my mother has been going through something horrible and I haven’t been there for her. I felt selfish and mean. I had to help her though this.
As we drove to the airport, I thought of my grandfather, how he loved my mother so much he often told people she was the only thing that made life worth living. While raising her risked everything he’d had, he once told me he would rather have been a poor man if being rich meant he’d never had my mother and then had me for a grandchild. He was a beautiful man who loved us all with everything he’d had. My mother was right; he’d always be my grandfather.
My mother pulled the car to the curb outside the airport. She got out of the car, still silent with sadness, and helped me get my bags out of the trunk.
“I think we all need to go for counseling,” I said. “When I get back to town.” I looked into her eyes. “We have to talk about this. Sweeping it under the rug will only allow it to get worse.”
“We’ll see, baby,” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “We’ll see about that.” She cupped my face in her hands. “But now, I want you to walk into this airport and forget about all of this drama. Go and have a good time with your girlfriends. Can you promise me that?” She began to cry again.
“Mom—”
“Just promise me that. I can’t let you have this bring you down like it’s done to me. I can’t let another generation deal with this.”
“OK,” I lied. “I’ll try.”
After I made it through the security maze, I managed to make it to my gate just a few minutes before boarding. My mother’s news was flipping around in my mind and I was struggling hard not to cry or call Lucy. I couldn’t tell if I was mad or just in shock about the whole thing, but all I had were questions that hadn’t been answered. I kept trying to stop thinking about the whole thing. If I let it take control of me, my trip would be ruined, and I’d promised my mother I wouldn’t let that happen. I’d have to wait and deal with everything when I got back home.
When I sat down and waited for the airline to begin boarding, I decided to call Julian. I wasn’t going to tell him what was going on. It just didn’t seem like the right time. I didn’t even know all of the facts yet. I just wanted to hear his voice for comfort, to remind myself that the rest of my world still existed.
“Hey, baby,” I said when he picked up the phone. He sounded like he was still in bed. “Are you sleeping?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m in bed,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you be in L.A. with your friends by now?”
“No, silly. I’m at the airport. My flight doesn’t leave until 4 P.M. I told you all of this yesterday,” I said.
“Oh yeah. I must’ve forgot. Things are just crazy right now at the hospital,” Julian mumbled. “I’m covering for someone. Been doing 72s.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to wake you up. I was just calling to say goodbye before I left.”
“No problem. When will you be back?” Julian asked. He sounded anxious.
“Oh, it’s just for the weekend. So I’ll be back on Monday.”
“What hotel will you be staying at?”
“The Mondrain.”
“Great,” Julian said. “Well, have fun. And call me as soon as you get in.”
“I will.” I heard them call my flight for boarding.
“Have a nice trip, baby,” Julian said. “Goodbye.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Julian’s name before it disappeared off the screen.
Though I knew my mother was right about some of the things she’d said about Julian, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it. I mean, she didn’t really know Julian like I did. Yes, Julian messed up with the Miata thing. But was I supposed to make him pay for it for the rest of his life? For the rest of my life? Was I supposed to miss out on the one man I loved because he made one mistake? He’d come clean to me about her. I wasn’t ready to walk away from him yet. All I knew was that I loved that man and he still loved me.
I handed my ticket to the flight attendant and boarded the plane. Next stop, L.A.