Page 10

10

Raya

As long as I have blood in my veins, oxygen in my lungs, and movement in my fingers, I will answer the phone when my Aunt Tori calls.

At the moment, I’m waiting on a call from a certain someone whose dick I sucked last night, but when I see her name pop up, I’m not even disappointed.

“Hey, Auntie.”

“Hey, baby,” she says in a voice that feels like a cozy cashmere blanket. “Listen, Jonetta called me complaining. What you do now?”

I suck my teeth, irritated that she called me just to fuss. “You know Jonetta. Always mad about nothing. I called out sick, that’s all.”

“How much notice?”

I wanna lie, but I never lie to Auntie. Well, I don’t tell major lies with her. “Like…an hour.”

“So that means more like ten minutes.”

“Auntie. Don’t do that.”

“She’s a friend, Raya. Don’t fuck this up.”

“I still don’t understand that relationship, but okay.”

“It’s complicated,” she says.

“Yeah, I bet.”

Tori is only ten years older than I am, so we tend to get a little more personal than my mother was comfortable with. Like, I know all about Tori’s men. And women. And if Jonetta is one of the latter, well, that tea is piping hot. But Tori leans more on the discreet side of things when money is involved. She’s a hardworking nurse, always hustling.

My mother wasn’t comfortable with that, either.

Connie Ashford, née Richardson, was a homemaker. I don’t know if that’s what she wanted, or if my daddy influenced her to quit her job as a sales rep for IBM, but what I do know is she was there every day of my life for as far back as I can remember. She envied my aunt for her free-spiritedness, as much as she tried to disguise it as judgment.

Tori could pick up and go anytime she wanted because she had the will and the means. One day, she’d be in Greece. Two weeks later, she’d be in Senegal. A few months later, she’d call from St. Lucia with a man in the background. A week after that, her and some woman would be laid up in Ojai Valley.

Meanwhile, Connie was stuck in this hell house with two crumb snatchers and a shitty husband.

Oh, yeah.

I have a brother.

But that doesn’t matter.

Even when I was little, I understood that my mother and Tori were two different kinds of women. Connie was made of steel—rigid, unyielding, sharp enough to wound. Tori was fluid. Impossible to pin down, moving through life like she had no fear of sinking. She didn’t see the world in terms of survival like my mother did. She saw it in terms of freedom.

But they both left in the end.

One left physically, but she never strayed too far. The other left in all the ways that truly mattered.

“How’s your daddy doin’?” Tori asks, her tone even.

“He’s down there in his room, probably staring out the window like always.”

“Hmph,” she grunts. “Do you ever wonder…” she trails off, and my ears perk up.

“What?”

“Eh. I don’t know. Sometimes I think…it’s just…okay, I grew up with that man. I know my brother.”

Her voice is steady, but there’s an edge beneath it, a careful weight to her words that makes my skin prickle.

“Sometimes I feel like he might still be verbal.”

I sit up from my reclined position and tuck my legs under me. “Why do you say that?”

“I told you. I know him.”

“I’m around him more than you,” I say, trying to convince both of us. “I think I’d know. And why would he hide it from us if he was?”

“Waiting for his moment, maybe,” she says, and even though I don’t think she’s being a hundred percent serious, a small knot forms in my stomach at the thought.

“Just…don’t let your guard down,” she warns. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I break the tension by forcing out a laugh. “You’re paranoid, Auntie.”

“Maybe,” she says, but she isn’t convinced, and neither am I.

Silence stretches between us, because I think we both know some things are better left unsaid, especially over the phone. As if to punctuate her statement, and freak me out in the process, my father’s wheelchair moves across the wood floor downstairs, causing a faint creak to reach my ears. I glance toward my door, my pulse doing something weird to my throat.

“Anyway,” I say, forcing nonchalance, “Jonetta’s doing the most, as always. I didn’t feel good, so I didn’t go in. That’s my business.”

Tori sighs like she’s sick of my shit. “Don’t burn no more bridges, Raya. I don’t know anybody else that can hire you.”

I roll my eyes and flop backwards onto my bed. “You’re doing too much right now.”

“Funny. I don’t think I’m doing enough.”

“Tori, please.”

“You ain’t got enough people in your corner to be acting all cocky like this,” she says, and there’s something in her voice that makes me pause.

She’s not being mean to me right now. She’s telling me the truth, and she’s saying it the only way she knows how—like a warning. Like she knows something I don’t.

Like she’s already seen how this story ends.

But I don’t ask her to elaborate, because I don’t want any more truth today.

Besides, the fact that I’m alone in this world isn’t all my fault. I never really learned how to make friends. I just didn’t connect to other kids.

It wasn’t something I could put a name to, but I felt it—like walking into a room mid-conversation, or like a joke I was always a beat too slow to catch. I’d speak and watch their eyes flicker to each other, quick as a camera shutter. A silent conversation I was never a part of, and never invited to.

I still kick myself for falling for it, for running over as fast as I could when I heard one of them say, “Come here, Raya!” I was so thirsty for connection, I’d answer every question they asked, having no clue they were waiting for me to say something weird. At least they always saved their giggles for after they dismissed me.

In middle school, I got kinda close to some alternative kids, and by kinda close, I mean I learned how to skateboard and spent time at the skate parks rolling around in their vicinity. But at the end of the day, they weren’t my friends, either. Just quiet losers with no social lives who didn’t have the social capital to shun me.

I can still feel the sting of it all. But as I always say, all pain is a lesson. What I learned was to stop trying.

Fuck them all.

I hope they’re dead.

But Tori was my friend. She never let me get lonely. She never made me feel like I was too much, or not enough, or like a wayward puzzle piece forced into the wrong picture. When they pushed me away, she pulled me close. Scooped me up on the weekends when she was in town and took me for long drives with the windows down. We’d sing and rap at the top of our lungs, then she’d let me get frappuccinos and try on clothes I had no business wearing and wear lip gloss and blush when I was eight years old as long as I promised to wipe it all off before I went back inside the house.

Tori wasn’t perfect, but she loved me. She was there .

For the good. And the bad.

And the horrible.

“And how are you doing?” she asks.

I hesitate, staring up at my ceiling fan, weighing the pros and cons of telling her I have a man now. If I tell her, she’ll ask questions, and if she asks questions, I’ll have no choice but to hold back information. I’d rather tell her once he knows he’s my man.

“I’m good,” I say cheerfully. “Same old, same old. Tell me something good about Aunt Tori.”

I can practically hear her smiling. It’s a little game I play with her, because she knows I hang on her every word. Her life might be a whirlwind of fun today, or a mundane day at work tomorrow, but I wanna hear it, because I love my auntie, and I’d listen to her read the phonebook.

“Here’s something good: I’ll be in town in a couple of weeks.”

“Yesssss!” I say like a kid who just found out school was canceled. “Oh my God, can we go to the mall? And get Starbucks? And—“

“We will do it all , baby. Clear your schedule.”

“Now you know I don’t have no plans, Auntie.”

She laughs heartily, and it warms me. “I can’t wait to see you.”

After we end the call, I lay there smiling. I’ve forgotten all about Ace, at least for a few minutes. I’m on cloud nine, now. What a treat. A departure from the hell on earth that is my life.

Because I think, and I hate to admit this, but I think the loneliness never really left me, even after all this time. It seeped into my bones, into the spaces between my ribs, settling into all the cracks where love was supposed to go. I carry it with me like a bruise, pressing on it sometimes just to see if it still hurts.

And it always does.

My smile fades.

I consider hopping on live when my phone chimes.

It’s him!

Hubby

Hey, R. My family’s having a cookout for labor day. Nothing major, just a bunch of friends and whatnot. Lemme know if you wanna pull up.

I sit up, my heart pounding in my throat.

It’s not the most elegant invitation, and he made absolutely sure I understand it’s not a marriage proposal, but that’s okay. I’ll mortar and pestle that fuckboy dialect out of him soon enough.

I wait thirty minutes or so, then I respond.

I think I can make it. Let me know where

Yasss, bitch. I’m halfway to the ring.