“So?”
“So? Someday we’re going to start paying more than five hundred for rent, and forty-five thousand to live in Harlem will be nothing.”
She shrugged: just like him to think of all the bad things that could happen. “Someday is not today,” she countered. “Before they find out, we would have saved some money. I’ll be a pharmacist by then.” She smiled again, her eyes narrowing as if she were dreaming of that day. “We’ll have our own apartment, two bedrooms. You’ll make more money as a chauffeur. I’ll make a good pharmacist salary. We won’t live in this place full of cockroaches anymore.”
He looked at her and smiled back, and she imagined he believed, too, that someday she would be a pharmacist. Hopefully five years, maybe seven years, but still someday.
She watched him take the last piece of plantain from the plate, use it to clean the tomato sauce bowl, and rush it, together with the last piece of chicken, into his mouth. Looking at him lovingly, she giggled as he finished up the Mountain Dew and burped. “You’re a tanker,” she said to him, poking him in the ribs.
He giggled, too, wearily. Tired as he was, she could see how pleased he was. Nothing pleased him like a delicious dinner after a long day of work. Nothing pleased her like knowing she had pleased him.
After a long pause, during which he leaned back in his seat and stared at the wall with a faint smile, he washed his hands in the bowl of water she had placed on the table and stood up. “Is Liomi in our bed or his bed?” he whispered from the hallway.
“His bed,” she said, smiling, knowing he would be happy for them to have the bed to celebrate on. She picked up his dirty dishes and took them to the sink. E weni Lowa la manyaka, she sang softly, smiling still and swinging her hips as she cleaned the dishes. E weni Lowa la manyaka, Lowa la nginya, Na weta miseli, E weni Lowa la manyaka.
These days she sang more than she had in her entire life. She sang when she ironed Jende’s shirts and when she walked home after dropping Liomi off at school. She sang as she applied lipstick to head out with Jende and Liomi to an African party: a naming ceremony in Brooklyn; a traditional wedding in the Bronx; a death celebration in Yonkers for someone who had died in Africa and whom practically none of the guests knew; a party for one reason or another that she’d been invited to by a friend from school or work, someone who knew the host and who’d assured her that it was okay to attend, since most African people didn’t care about fancy white-people ideas like attendance by invitation only. She sang walking to the subway and even sang in Pathmark, caring nothing about the looks she got from people who couldn’t understand why someone could be so happy grocery shopping. God na helele, God na waya oh, God na helele, God na waya oh, nobody dey like am oh, nobody dey like am oh, ewoo nwanem, God na helele.
When she finished cleaning the dishes she picked up Jende’s jacket, the new black suit she had bought from T. J. Maxx for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, a third of their savings. She cleaned it with a lint brush, sprayed perfume on it, and laid it on the sofa for the next day. She looked at the jacket and smiled, glad she had bought it. She’d wanted to buy a cheaper one at the discount department store on 125th Street, but Fatou had dissuaded her. Why you gonno buy cheap suit for him to drive big man, she had asked. You musto buy from good store lika T. J. Maxx. Buy him fine suit for wear to drive fine car for rich man. And then one day, when he become rich man himself, you gonno buy from better store. You gonno buy his clothes, you gonno buy all you clothes from better, better store. Fine white people store lika Target.
Five
CINDY EDWARDS HAD BEEN NOTHING BUT CORDIAL TOWARD HIM (RESPONDING promptly to his greeting every time he held the car door open for her; asking, albeit disinterestedly, how his day was going; saying please and thank you as often as she needed to), and yet whenever she was in the car, he stiffened up. Was he breathing too loudly? Driving five miles per hour too fast or too slow? Had he cleaned the backseat well enough so a lingering speck of dust wouldn’t dirty her pantsuit? He knew she’d have to be a precision-obsessed woman with the sensitivity of a champion watchdog to notice such minor transgressions, but that wasn’t enough to allow him to sit at ease—he was still new at the job and thus had to be perfect. Thankfully, she was on her cell phone most days, like the Tuesday two weeks after he began driving her and her family. That afternoon, upon reentering the car in front of a restaurant near Union Square, she had immediately gotten on her phone. “Vince won’t be coming to Aspen,” she’d said slowly and sadly, almost in shock, as if reading aloud the headline of a bizarrely tragic news story from the paper.
Two hours earlier, a much happier Cindy had exited the car, and it had been clear to Jende that the young man she was meeting in front of the restaurant was her son Vince—he was a replica of his father, bearing the same six-foot frame, slender build, and wavy hair. Cindy had all but sprinted out of the car to get to him, to hug him and stroke his cheeks and give him three kisses. It seemed she hadn’t seen him in months, which, based on what Mighty had said, was entirely likely. For minutes they had stood on the sidewalk chatting, Vince rubbing his hands and moving them in and out of his blue Columbia hoodie, Cindy motioning toward Union Square Park and smiling broadly, as if reminding Vince of a special moment they’d once shared there.
“I just had lunch with him,” she went on. “He didn’t say why … No, he says he’s definitely not coming … I said he said he’s not coming! … He’s going to some silent retreat in Costa Rica, something about his Spirit badly needing to get away from the noise … What do you mean it’s okay? Don’t tell me it’s okay, Clark. Your son’s deciding to not spend the holidays with his family and you’re telling me it’s fine? … No, I don’t expect you to do anything. I know there’s nothing you can do … I know there’s nothing I can do, but doesn’t it bother you? I mean, do you not care how he has no sense of family? He doesn’t come for Mighty’s birthday, doesn’t even care to ask me before deciding to go away for Christmas … I’m not rescheduling it … Sure, it might all be for the best. You’re now free to work on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and why don’t you just work nonstop till next year? … Don’t tell me I’m being ridiculous! … If you cared more, Clark, just a little bit more, about how the boys are doing, if they’re happy … I don’t want you to do anything else, because you’re incapable of looking past yourself and putting the needs of others above yours … Yeah, of course, but someday you’re going to have to realize that you can’t keep on doing what you’re doing and hope that somehow, by chance, the kids are going to be all right. It doesn’t work like that … It’ll never work like that.”
Jende heard her toss her phone onto the seat. For a minute the car was silent except for the sound of her heavy breathing.
“Are you coming to Mighty’s recital?” she said after picking up the phone and apparently calling her husband again. “Yes, call me right back, please … I need to know ASAP.”
His hands firmly at the nine and three o’clock positions—as he’d been taught to drive in Cameroon—Jende made a turn onto Madison Avenue. The sun had already left the city on the frigid late afternoon, but Manhattan shone brightly as always and, beneath its streetlamps and in the white lights spilling from glowing stores, he saw faces of many colors going north and south at varied speeds. Some along the crowded avenue looked happy, some looked sad, but none seemed to be as sad as Cindy Edwards at that moment. Her voice was so drenched in agony Jende wished someone would call her with good news, funny news, any kind of news to make her smile.