“Let me get you something to drink. How about a Coke?” I open the fridge hoping we actually have Coke.
“Whoa, is all that breast milk?” Riley looks stunned at the rows and rows of plastic bottles piled on the top shelf.
“It is. I told the doctor this was the first time in my life that I’ve ever been over-productive at anything. I’m not so great at getting pregnant, but man, I sure can make milk.”
“Have you tasted it?” It’s such a Riley thing to ask, like she’s interviewing me for a segment on new motherhood.
“Omigod, I did!” I haven’t even admitted this to Kevin, worried he would be too grossed out. “It’s sweet, kinda sour, a little grassy too.”
“Hey, look what I made us!” I grab the warm pan from the stove and carry it over to the table. That’s how Gigi always served miracle bread, right out of the pan. I take off the lid with a flourish like I’m presenting a prize. “Miracle bread!”
It works, a layer of tension melts between us.
Riley grabs greedily at the fork I hand her. “Jenny—I can’t believe you made this, with everything else you have to do.” She tears at a piece of bread and lifts it to her lips. When she swallows, her joy consumes her entire face. I don’t want to make a big deal out of how happy this makes me, so I just move a pile of baby clothes and sit down, place the entire skillet in front of her.
The quiet is comfortable—nice even—as we chew thick sweet bites of the mushy bread. Riley actually moans. “It’s so good, Jen. Gigi would be proud.”
I swallow the lump in my throat with another bite.
“So, Jacksonville, huh?” Riley is still processing, and it makes me a little happy that she seems sad. She’s sad for me to go.
“Yep, I got a job there, too. Or almost.” I go on to explain that Dr. Kudlick came by with the sweater and sneakers I’d left at the office and a cute little outfit for the baby, and mentioned that he had a friend from dental school, with a large practice with offices in Jacksonville and Orlando, looking for an experienced office manager.
“Kevin’s friend can’t afford to pay benefits at the landscaping gig, so one of us has to have health insurance. Chase still needs to see the doctor once a week.”
“Well, Kevin was really lucky to get a good job, and so fast. It’s hard with a record,” Riley says. “Shaun just got let go from the moving company. Said they were downsizing, but he thinks it’s because some speakers went missing and it was easy to pin it on him and get rid of him. He’s sent out twenty résumés in the past two weeks. Hasn’t heard back from anyone.”
It couldn’t have been easy for Riley to help her family deal with all of that, and maybe I’d underestimated the stakes and consequences when it happened. Maybe I hadn’t given her enough credit or support back then. The maybes continue to pile up, a Jenga tower of maybes.
I’ve been replaying our conversation at the hospital, the kind of obsessive reenactments where I say different things, where I’m less defensive and less scared. I go into a spiral where I think I’m a horrible person, a terrible friend. The distance between Riley and me these past couple of months has felt like losing a limb, and I’ll do anything to try to make it right.
“About what we talked about in the car—”
“Jenny, we were both so worked up that morning.”
“No. Stop. You said you want us to talk. I want that too.” I don’t want to pick at our scabs, now that it feels like they’re healing, but there’s no other way. “I get what you were saying, it is real easy for me not to think about race. And I don’t even think about it when I look at you because when I look at you I see this person I’ve loved for like my whole life, my sister. All I can say is I’m here for you. I’m here for all of it. And I might say stupid things when we talk, but I want to talk, keep talking.”
I don’t even know if the words coming out of my mouth make any sense, but I hope Riley can feel what it is I’m trying to get across.
“Thank you,” Riley says quietly. “It’s good to hear you say that. I don’t want us to walk on eggshells around each other. I know I probably haven’t opened up enough about my challenges as a Black woman. Or I don’t know, maybe you haven’t probed enough either?”
There are questions I want to ask Riley, like about her family member who she said was lynched or all the comments on her stories, or all those other things I don’t know about. “I can probe. I’m good at probing. I love to probe.”
Riley laughs. There’s nothing better than making Riley laugh.
This is it, a start, a knot loosening. Given that Riley is the most contained person I’ve ever known, these delicate conversations—calm and kind—are how we can start to rebuild. It might not be such a bad thing after all; maybe we don’t need to rehash every miscommunication or slight in painful detail, or go backward to move forward. We can trust that we will eventually return to normal, that the strength of our shared history is enough to fall back on, to carry us through. I allow myself to feel hopeful that this is exactly what’s happening right now. And that after all of this, we could become even closer.
Chase, who’d fallen asleep, wakes with an angry howl that seems far too fierce for such a tiny person. He brings his right fist up to his face, always the right, and presses it tightly to his earlobe. It’s one of the peculiarities about my baby that I’m loving to discover—like how he smacks his lips so hard when he’s ready to nurse that you can practically hear him in the next room. Or the way he can already turn his head from side to side, even as a six-week-old preemie, which Kevin takes as proof of his early athletic potential. Each day it’s a different Chase; there is something completely new to discover about him, to fall in love with. There have been so many surprises the last few months, most of them terrible, but the one good one is that I love motherhood even more than I thought I would, even more than I would have thought possible.
I pull Chase away from me so I can look down at his scrunched-up little face. His crazy-long lashes are collecting teardrops. “He’ll calm down in a sec. Do you want to hold him?”
“Of course. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. Do I need to wash my hands? I’ll go wash my hands.”
Riley furiously scrubs every inch of her hands like she’s going into surgery. Then she comes and lifts Chase out of my arms, gently, careful to support his wobbly little head. As soon as he’s nestled in the crook of Riley’s elbow he stops crying. She looks down at his chest and cracks up.
I’m confused about why Riley is laughing at my baby until I remember that I’d dressed him in the onesie Lou bought him, in case my mom decided to drop by this afternoon like she said she would. It’s bright Eagles green with “DALLAS SUCKS” written across the chest.
“Let me guess, Lou?”
“Who else? She doesn’t bother to come meet her grandson for almost a month and then she shows up with these obnoxious onesies and a bottle of whiskey, which she says is to help my breastfeeding. I told her that it’s beer that’s supposed to help with breast milk and that it’s an old wives’ tale anyway, so she opened it up and made herself a cocktail.”