“HAPPY DAY AFTER Jesus’s Birthday!” said Lena’s father.
“Happy Day After Jesus’s Birthday,” Lena and her mother echoed, their wine glasses clinking in the half-empty restaurant.
This was the closest thing the Wrights had to a holiday tradition. On December 26, when most of the country was home eating leftovers, it was easy to get in to the type of restaurant where it was, as her mother liked to say, just impossible to get a reservation. Flying on Christmas Day was also less of a hassle, and so ever since Lena had started college, she’d joined the planes full of Asians, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews who flew on Christian holidays. This year, she’d taken the last flight out.
So you’re going to Philly, huh? I guess I can’t bring you over for the holidays, then. Nex had said this three weeks earlier as they’d lain together, their heads on the same pillow, staring up at a poster she’d taped to her ceiling. It was the first night he’d ever shared a poem he was working on.
Racially charged rhetoric results in mass incarceration / Prisons locking up our prophets with a profit motivation…
Lena remembered only pieces of the poem. It was the night itself she’d relived in detail, until lines of poetry had become linked in her memory with lines from the conversation that surrounded it. This verbal remix played in her head even now, as she stared at the menu in a formerly abandoned music club, reborn during gentrification as a soul food–inspired bistro.
Lately, she’d begun imagining Nex’s reaction to her daily activities. It almost felt as if he were hovering over her shoulder, a hologram. This was fine, even motivating, when she was in front of a class. But here, holding a menu that for real contained the phrases nouveau neck bone and drizzle of chitlin reduction, she cringed. Breyonna had it wrong: The trendiest, most expensive restaurants did not serve filet mignon. They served artisanal versions of the food poor people ate.
“So,” Lena’s mother was saying when Lena tuned back in to the conversation, “I guess the other teachers at your school must resent you for working so hard.”
“What? No—why would they?” But it was too late. They were on this again.
Her parents had seen How the Status Quo Stole Christmas the day it came out. They took it for granted that she was one of the good teachers Nick Wallabee claimed he would put in every classroom. With Nex hovering over her shoulder, this detail became as frivolous and humiliating as the restaurant itself. Only the most progressive, educated parents assumed their children were solving the problems of the world.
Raised to represent the real with dreams unrealized / raw grip on reality rarely recognized / boxed into shadow boxes before we ever commit a crime / told, This is where your road ends unless you learn to dunk or rhyme. Lena had read a book about private prisons and had almost mentioned it at that moment. But then she didn’t. She’d long imagined a scene like this one, the two of them sharing poetry in the dark. It felt important to tread lightly.
Again, her mother’s voice: “Well, considering the quality of teaching they’ve been getting away with, they’re probably worried about any challenge to the status quo.”
“The teachers at my school are fine,” said Lena. “I’ve never met anyone like the teachers described in that movie.” This wasn’t entirely true. Mr. Comodio was pretty bad. But there were more than a hundred other teachers at her school who were fine, plus the inaccuracies in the movie would have taken all night to explain, and moreover, she was desperate to get off the subject before the waitress, who seemed always within inches of their table, arrived with their food.
“Here we have the braised neck bone and grits with fatback essence, and the slow-roasted pig foot garnished with one flash-fried collard green leaf.” The waitress placed tiny plates in front of Lena’s parents.
“And the catfish for you, ma’am.” She had a respectable Afro and a calculated subservience in her voice, and was pretty enough that Lena imagined Nex’s hologram watching her with approval. “Don’t worry. It’s not spicy.”
So you’re going to Philly, huh? I guess I can’t bring you over for the holidays, then. It was the day after this that Lena had bought her plane tickets, choosing the last flight out on Christmas. But when she mentioned her late flight time, Nex had not repeated the invitation.
This morning, she’d sent a quick hope your holiday was good message, carefully crafted not to sound like she was demanding a response. Now she wondered if she should have just waited to hear from him. Or maybe she had sent her own text too early in the morning, and Nex, after a long night of partying with his family, was still recovering. Or had he texted her? Maybe she just hadn’t heard her phone inside her purse. Her father considered it a crime against restaurant etiquette to check a cell phone at the table.
She excused herself to the bathroom, phone cupped in her hand.
No new messages.
“I definitely agree with what that superintendent says about football, though,” her father was saying when she returned to the table. They were still on the documentary. “These students are risking concussions for a negligible chance to make it in professional sports, and in the long run, no one ever makes it in football. You should see the statistics.”
“I always say football is for boys whose mothers don’t love them!” said Lena’s mother, laughing. She did, in fact, always say this when the topic of football came up.
“It’s really a sport that exploits kids whose parents don’t have high-paying jobs and can’t afford to—”
The waitress was heading toward the table again.
“Can we talk about something else?” begged Lena.
“How’s everybody doing here?” said the waitress.
“Just talking about football,” said Mr. Wright, with a wink at his wife.
“Oh, yeah?” The waitress brightened, this time in a way that seemed genuine. “My son is a wide receiver at his high school. I told him, Boy, you better get some scholarship money off that, because college is expensive.”
“She teaches high school!” said Lena’s mother, pointing to Lena.
“Really.” The waitress’s smile seemed to cool back into potential-tip-inspired enthusiasm. “Where do you teach?”
“It’s in Texas,” said Lena, relieved that she did not teach in Philadelphia—in addition to the city’s having a notoriously broke school system, this would have left her at risk of actually meeting one of her students’ parents under these circumstances.
“In the inner city!” added her mother.
Lena tried to mentally compress Nex Level’s hologram, as if forcing a genie back into a lamp. She could not let the reality of this moment touch the memory of their last night together. Near the end of the night, she’d finally made some comments on the poem. She’d been conscious of his eyes on her as she spoke, and wondered if he sensed, as she did, the possibility of their combined energy onstage.
You’re smart, you know that? And you got a beautiful smile.
Thanks… I try.
Did you have braces?
“Texas”—the waitress’s voice pulled her back to the restaurant table—“didn’t they just make a movie about the schools down there?”
The look Lena gave her parents said, Please don’t.
Finally, they finished dinner and stepped out onto the snowy sidewalk.
A driver picked them up at the corner and wished them a merry Christmas, though Lena sensed that he might not celebrate Christmas, either.
She checked her phone again, more out of habit than hopefulness. But this time, a new message glowed at the top of the screen. Her heart jumped. She must have been in such a rush to get out of the restaurant that she hadn’t felt the vibration.
Hope ur having a great time in philly. love ya.
Love? He’d said love!
He probably didn’t mean it exactly like that, of course. And she had no intention of saying it back. Or, if she did, she’d say something borderline, like You, too.
Anyway, there was time to think about it. After hours of waiting on her end, it was Nex’s turn to wait for an answer. She put the phone back in her purse.
But still, he’d said love!
The inside of the car was toasty as the Wright family glided through the evening snow. They were far from the restaurant now, and Lena felt something wash over her that felt almost like holiday spirit. Love.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said to her parents, “and happy Day After Jesus’s Birthday!”
She caught the driver’s eye as he looked at her in the rearview mirror.