My gaze is brought back to Cadence when she sniffs and wipes her eyes, apologizing with that hint of shame for breaking down. Steadying her with a grip on her forearm, I ask her, “Where’s Dad?” The rustling of the plastic around the flowers is all I get in a response because Cadence breaks down again, silently crying and walking off to gather a tissue.
Hitching my purse up my shoulder and straightening my coat, I take my time making my way to my auntie.
I set the flowers and my purse down on the end of the coffee table and take off my coat, laying it on the third seat from the end. My auntie in the corner, then my sister, then me.
“Hi Auntie,” I greet her, stepping in front of my sister to lean down and give my auntie a hug. I expect it to be brief but she holds onto me tight, whispering that she’s glad I’m here before she releases me.
Her tone is tense and that’s what keeps me from asking the question again: it’s just her arm, isn’t it? Dread is a difficult thing to swallow; even more difficult to talk through.
“Dad’s talking to the police.” My sister speaks up before the silence passes too long. Her slender fingers run under her eyes gracefully before wiping the mascara that mars the tip of her fingers on her black skinny jeans. I know my sister very well, and she simply threw on those clothes. Yet, she still looks beautiful. Her hair in curls, her face fresh and bright eyed. She’s wearing a chunky cream knit sweater that hangs just low enough to show her chest and the cream against her light brown skin complements her perfectly.
Even with tears in her eyes, she’s beautiful. And she looks just like Mom. Everyone used to say it growing up; her skin is lighter than Mom’s, but that’s the only difference between them. She got our mother’s femininity, and I got our father’s intellect and ruthlessness.
“Why?” I question, crossing my ankles and observing, taking everything in. “What happened that he has to talk to the police?”
My auntie looks off in the distance, staring at the worn mural on the far wall. It’s nothing special, a mundane piece of art displaying trees and a sunrise made of tiny mosaic tiles. Something to comfort people and do nothing more. My auntie stares blankly at it while my sister stares at me, her hand landing on my forearm.
“She broke her arm; she said she fell. But the other bruises are older and she has a number of fractures.” My sister whispers the last sentence, swallowing harshly as she lets the implication hang in the air.
My first thought is that it’s been a long time since they’ve fought. We were children back then and he never touched her like that after. How awful is it, that I know even as my chest goes tight and my fingers cold, that he’s hit her before and yet I don’t want to believe the accusation.
“Did he hit her?” I ask outright. How the question comes out evenly, I don’t know. I can feel them both staring at me, their eyes boring holes into the side of my face as I stare at the steel elevator doors, wishing a doctor would come down and say I could see my mother, so I can ask her, rather than sitting here with people who don’t know. They don’t know. Mom would tell me. She’d tell me the truth. They had their problems early on, but they’re over. She broke her arm, that’s all.
Dad wouldn’t do that; he wouldn’t hit her. My mother is a strong woman. She wouldn’t let him. This is all a mistake. Isn’t it? It’s just a misunderstanding.
Fuck, I think as I drop my head and close my tired eyes. My mind’s playing tricks on me and my emotions are storming inside of me, whipping me around until I can’t think straight.
“Did he hit her?” I repeat myself, louder this time when neither of them answers. Auntie doesn’t say a damn thing, but she doesn’t stay silent either. She’s deliberate when she grabs one of the two cups off the table in front of us and makes her way around the other side of it, saying she’ll give us space.
It took me a long time to realize the reason for the tension between my auntie and my father.
He came from money, had a white-collar job. He was powerful, older and white, marrying a younger black woman from a poorer neighborhood. “Trophy wife” was a term used a lot when we were younger.
My mother once screamed at her family that they couldn’t be happy for her. That they hated him because he wasn’t like the rest of them.
I thought she was right because my grandmother, her mother, never did seem to like him. But then again, my father’s mother never seemed to like my mother. It went both ways. All of my grandparents died before I was ten and I hardly remember them but I do remember the way they looked at their child’s spouse. Like they didn’t belong together in any way.