Mama raised her arm, grabbed the lion’s hoop, and knocked three times.
A calico kitten wove in and out of Mya’s legs in a zigzag, mewing softly.
Mya let go of my hand in order to stroke the kitten’s mane, coo to her gently.
We’d left Wolf in the car. Mama explained she’d have to be let in through the backyard, so she wouldn’t be tempted to attack all the roaming wildlife in the front. She was in the passenger seat with the window down. She wouldn’t jump out; she was too big for that. More mammoth than dog. And even though she was friendlier than a church mouse to all dogs, she mistrusted all humans not family. The curl of her lip and the baring of teeth were enough to send most grown men running to the other side of the street. As a baby, Mya called her “Horse” instead of “Wolf.” Wolf would carry her, Mya tugging at her ears like reins, and Wolf never minding. Mya’s chubby toddler legs all akimbo in Wolf’s thick mane. Wolf grew to expect it, these pony rides. She would nudge Mya first with a face-covering, eye-closing lick, followed by a gentle nip on Mya’s button nose that let us know she was ready to be ridden.
Now Wolf stuck her thick head covered in gray fur out the van window and growled, low. She sensed the front door opening before we did. Just as Mama lifted a hand to knock again, the yellow door opened to reveal Auntie August. Her hair was pinned up in big pink rollers, the kind I’d seen in old pinup-girl photos, and she wore a long, cream-colored silk kimono. Embroidered along the front panels were sunset-colored cranes taking off from a green pool. The kimono appeared like it’d been tied in a rush: A beet-purple man’s necktie held the fabric haphazardly together, barely concealing the full breasts and hips aching to break from the folds. My auntie stood blinking at the bright morning light, an expression of resignation and exhaustion on her face that made her look just like Mama.
“What war y’all lost?” Auntie August asked.
My aunt looked like the taller, more regal version of Mama. Auntie August was nearly six feet tall. I had read Anansi stories. I knew that it was the women tall as trees and fiercer than God that ancient villages often sent into battle. If Mama was Helen of Troy, August was Asafo. She seemed to go on forever, seemed to be the height of the door itself. She had hips, the kind Grecian sculptors would spend months chiseling, big and bold and wide. Her skin was noticeably darker, darker than mine even, and I felt a welt of pride. I had always coveted darker-skinned women their color. There was a mystery to their beauty that I found hypnotizing, Siren-like. They were hardly ever in Jet or Ebony or Essence, the magazines we subscribed to, unless they themselves were famous—the mom from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Joyner, Oprah. Most of the Black women the public pronounced beautiful looked like Mama. Black Barbies. Bright. Hair wavier than curly. Petite figures. So, when my Auntie August opened that door, and I saw that her skin was so dark it reflected all the other colors surrounding it—the yellow of the morning light, the yellow of the door, the peach tan of the calico cat weaving in and out of Mya’s short legs—I knew that the aunt I could barely remember was, in and of herself, a small, delicious miracle.
“Got any food in the fridge?” Mama asked.
August opened the door wider, taking in the spectacle before her. “Is the pope Catholic?”
Mama shrugged.
I could hear Wolf growl again over the hum and buzz of the bees and the hummingbirds.
“My word,” August said in a whisper then. “Did it get that bad?”
“I’ll take my old room if I can have it,” Mama said.
Auntie August fumbled into the deep silk folds of her kimono, her face momentarily scrunched in mild annoyance. Like she had an itch she couldn’t quite reach. From out of her robe’s pocket came the unmistakable green-and-white packaging of a pack of Kools, and the relief was visible in Auntie August’s face. That pack of smokes. I felt a pang, sharp in my ribs, like one of them was missing. Daddy had smoked Kools. Would religiously pull out the green-and-white carton and smack it against his knee a few times before removing and lighting a cigarette and asking if Mya and I wanted to hear another ghost story.