“Let her say it, Ruby,” Daddy said, his mouth full.
Mama and Jackie glanced at each other, then looked away. Neither felt up to Sybil since she graduated law school ten years earlier. It wasn’t the accomplishment itself. Jackie loved visiting Sybil’s office, looping around Lee Circle past the streetcars ambling onto Poydras, peering up at the Superdome scaling the sky. Her sister had always said she wanted to be a lawyer, but given she didn’t start law school until she hit thirty, everybody believed she’d talk her dream out until it was drained of all its power. Still, she had done it, and Jackie felt a vicarious surge in her own confidence when Sybil passed the bar. No, it wasn’t the accomplishment itself that made Jackie dread her sister’s presence. It was the way Sybil tried to make her feel about it.
Daddy though was proud on all accounts. It was as if Sybil’s achievement had brought them closer. Jackie had been his favorite growing up. He had fawned over her when she was a girl, enraptured by her descriptions of her best friends’ Uptown houses: their wide-open pools and terraced decks. The two drifted apart some when Daddy opened Action Academy. Jackie was in high school, and she had her own life, cheerleading practices and Terry’s football games, and it was Sybil who had helped Daddy most days, bleaching the changing tables, folding spare clothes, and driving to the discount warehouse every week for boxes and boxes of baby wipes. Then Jackie got married, and Sybil went on to law school, and now Daddy sat with his mouth gaping as his oldest daughter went on about her cases. If she paused for even a second, Daddy would jump in with yet another question: How she’d decide whether to settle or go to trial, whether she had considered advertising like that fellow Morris Bart. If so, he had thought of a slogan: No Need to Retort, I’ll See You in Court.
“Well, you know that contract I was trying to snag with Taco Bell, Daddy,” Sybil went on now. “I think it’s going to work out this time. They called me in twice for an interview. I met with the regional manager.”
“The regional manager. Isn’t that Jack Jackson? He used to try to talk to me back in the day,” Jackie said to have something to say, but Sybil snapped back in that tone she’d used since childhood, “Jack Jackson manages the Taco Bell in the East of New Orleans. I’m talking about the manager of the Taco Bells all over Southeastern Louisiana.”
Jackie didn’t say anything to that, just kept her head down, scooped out some more rice.
“That’s great, baby, that’s really something,” Daddy said again, his mouth wide enough to fit the table through it.
Sybil was beaming too. “I know, Daddy. It’s been a long time coming. I can’t do criminal law anymore. It’s starting to eat at me, all these black men on the street.”
Daddy nodded. “Not to mention how dangerous it is.”
It was as if it were a conversation between the two of them and Aunt Ruby, Jackie and Mama were just some fixtures to navigate around, a table leg that dangled, a chair that creaked when you applied too much weight. Jackie suddenly tried to fumble through her past for fodder, which high-end Creole boy had asked her out, her playdates with the Haydels and Davieliers, but it was no use. She was thrilled to hear T.C.’s wails, but Sybil stood up the same time she did, as if she had as much right to the room where the baby slept.
“Let me see him, Jackie, it’s been so long.”
Jackie nodded, smoothed her hands down the front of her work pants, which were already covered in dried paint.
“Just wash up first,” she added, but Sybil was already out of the room.
Sybil pranced back in with the baby on her shoulder, who to Jackie’s dismay didn’t cry. He’d stare up at Sybil, then jerk his head back in his mother’s direction.
“He’s trying to figure out who has him,” Mama said.
“He’s confused by the resemblance,” Daddy said at the same time, though the truth was Jackie and Sybil didn’t resemble each other in the least. Sybil had come out more like their father, with his bunched-up nose and lips; her skin was lighter than his, but not by much, and her hair wouldn’t lay flat if you dared it. Jackie on the other hand was tall and skinny with a size C cup and skin like the inside of an almond. Her hair fell down her back, and she sometimes spiral-rolled it and wore it curly, but mostly she let her mama straighten it, and that was when it reached her behind.
The baby seemed to soften Sybil. Expressions and words Jackie would never associate with her sister sprang out of her now.
“You’re so handsome, yes, you are, just as ooey gooey as a shmooey wooey.”
Jackie and her mama burst out laughing. Soon the whole room was in stitches and that ease that sprang from the mirth smoothed Jackie on the inside as she loaded the dishwasher, wiped down
the counters.
Sybil’s comment was more jarring because it was unexpected. “Have you heard from Terry?”
Mama, Daddy, and Aunt Ruby had been cooing over T.C., but after Sybil’s question the room went silent. The thing was, everyone knew not to bring that up.
Jackie shook her head instead of answering, almost as if she didn’t trust her own voice.
“Good, the farther away he stays from you, the better. You and that precious angel.”
Jackie tended to feel the same way, and if anyone but Sybil had said it, she would have stressed her own agreement, might have added that even though she sometimes let him in the house, she
had closed off any part of herself that was vulnerable to him:
She spoke in one-word sentences, she didn’t look in his eyes, and she never went over their past, how being with him in the beginning reminded her of the stories her daddy had told her about courting Mama. She had really believed their love was as full.
But Sybil spoke so authoritatively about matters she hadn’t earned the right to dominate. Jackie had let her have the edge on almost every subject: the work, the money, the house, the car. And now she was trying to edge her way into a part of life she didn’t understand, and Jackie had had enough.
“You don’t get it,” she snapped.
Sybil smirked, paused for a minute as if she was considering whether or not to speak. “What exactly don’t I get?” she asked finally.
“I mean to say,” Jackie stammered, “that it’s a complicated situation, not one you can sum up with one sentence the way you just tried to.”
Mama stepped in. “You want the rest of this milk for the baby?” She held up a bottle, shook it in Jackie’s face to get her attention.
Even Aunt Ruby tried: “You better be careful, Sybil. Every shut eye isn’t asleep.”
Sybil just ignored them. “Nothing complicated about crack,” she went on. “He’s either on it or he’s not, and chances are he is. So he needs to be gone.”