“I got you,” Hazel repeated back.
CHAPTER 26
Joan
2001
When Daddy and my uncle Bird stepped fully into the parlor, Wolf cried. She lay on her back and showed Daddy her belly. He knelt to her then. I’d known it was him as soon as I heard Wolf whimper at the door. She made that soft cry for one person and one person only.
Uncle Bird’s voice was unmistakable. He had a sharp Chicago slant to his vowels. Ma. Pa. I had spent years listening to him and my dad talk on the phone long into the night, the both of them howling like hyenas. My father’s Chicago accent blossoming on those calls: mane instead of man.
Daddy wore his tan Marine Corps uniform, his cap in his hands. My uncle Bird, Daddy’s clone except a head shorter, wore a black leather jacket and balanced a toothpick between his pursed lips. Even though they stood before me, it was hard for me to register what I was seeing.
Six years. It had been six years since I had seen Daddy. Every time I thought of him, more often than I wanted to admit, I had pushed the memory away from me. Picked up a pencil. Lost myself on the page. But here he was, in front of me. And he looked so heartbreakingly familiar, down on one knee, rubbing our dog’s belly.
“Hey, girl,” he cooed. He glanced up at me.
It hurt to look at his smile.
We stared at each other for a long time. No words came; I didn’t smile back.
He shifted his focus to my mom, who stood in the parlor with her arms folded over each other. “So, you’re alive,” she said. Mama was cold rage. She glared at him. I suspect that if her eyes could have turned into bullets, she would have let them.
Uncle Bird walked over and kissed Mama, sheepishly, lightly, on the cheek. He took off his leather cap and held it in his hands, shuffled his feet. “It was hell getting here, Meer,” he said.
“I bet,” said my Auntie August. I could see that she still kept an eye on the Remington she’d left by the door.
Uncle Bird pointed his cap at Daddy, who was still stroking Wolf, but his eyes were trained on me and Mama. “And it was all because this nigga didn’t kill enough Hajis in the first damn war.”
“Don’t say that,” I snapped.
History had awakened me to the fact that racism is the only food Americans crave. Mornings in class with Mr. Harrison had taught me that Americans had reduced the world’s most elite soldiers to a single word: Jap. I had grown up hearing my father’s Marine friends, even Uncle Mazz, use Haji. I wasn’t having any of it in this house. I was prepared to deal with the fallout, the blowback of sassing an elder and kin, but—To hell with it, I thought. I wasn’t having any of that low ignorance up in my house. Especially not from him.
“Niece!” My uncle crossed the room in a few wide strides, lifted me off the floor, and spun me before setting me down. Felt like something my daddy would have done, should have done, except that neither of us seemed able to bridge the six years of near-silence that lay heavy between us. My anger subsided in my uncle’s embrace. He smelled like him, his brother. I took a deep whiff of sandalwood, cigarettes, and shoe polish.
“Looking just like your daddy. Look at them long spider legs. And you dark as night, girl,” he said.
I blushed.
“And what the hell is wrong with that?” Auntie August rested the shotgun against the front door.
Uncle Bird raised his hands in capitulation. “Not a damn thing. The girl is beautiful. It is well known that North women can stop traffic. Speaking of, you wouldn’t believe the traffic out of Virginia. Nothing I ever seen before. Standstill. Hell, our drive took us all day, all night.
“Now, Meer.” My uncle turned to face Mama. “I know you and my brother got, um, words need saying. That’s fine. But a cup of coffee? Slice of one of your pies? What you say?”