Sunny sniffled. The first sound from him since we’d been running. I glanced over. He sniffled again as we came up on the last hundred meters.
“You good, Sunny?” I asked. He didn’t respond. Just ran face forward, and kept running, sniffling the whole way. Once we crossed the finish line, he quick-quick dashed tears from his face so no one could see them. But I knew they were there. We all did. “What’s wrong, man?” I shot a look to where Maddy and Uncle Tony were parked. Coach was talking to them and I groaned. I had a feeling my uncle had already told him about Momly.
Ghost put a hand on Sunny’s shoulder. “Yeah, man, what’s goin’ on?”
“It’s just . . .” Sunny started but got caught up. “Sorry.” He took a deep breath, got himself together. “Sorry,” he said again. “Just, thinking about your mother. It just got me, y’know?” he said, his voice shaky. His father was there now, parked in his fancy car, a newspaper parked in front of his face. I knew Sunny meant to say my aunt, but it wasn’t no point in correcting him. I got it.
“Awwww, Sunny,” I said, opening my arms. “She’ll be fine.” We hugged, and then Lu and Ghost, my boys, my YMBCs, came in for theirs, too.
TO DO: Eat pizza! (and . . . do some other things, but . . . pizza!)
I WENT TO bed that night with a belly full of pizza. It was the first night in ages I didn’t have to police Maddy’s plate. The first night we ate without Momly’s tired face looking back at us. Without the smell of turkey wings mixed with the smell of clean. No white plates to put in the sink, because Uncle Tony had us eat on paper ones. It was the first night that me and Uncle Tony actually had to help Maddy with her homework. She had to practice for a spelling test. She wanted to know if the word Dr. Lancaster said, “concussed,” had anything to do with bad words. Me and Uncle Tony laughed, told her it had to do with a concussion, then we had to tell her that neither of us knew exactly what a concussion was. It was the first night that I tried to make small talk at dinner. Momly was always good at starting conversations at the table, even if Uncle Tony was better at stealing them. He couldn’t start them, though. And silent dinner was killing me, so I tried to.
“Y’know, the other day I got into it with this girl,” I said, pulling another slice of pizza from the box. “At practice.” Not sure where it came from. Probably just thinking about how good practice went with me and the girls today, and how sucky it went on Tuesday. I glanced at Maddy, and she was in full-blown cheese mode. It was like eating pizza clogged her ears. She would take a bite, then stare at the slice as if it was talking to her, telling her how delicious it was.
“What? Who?” Uncle Tony perked up, tightened his eyes. “Why?”
“Just this girl, Krystal. I didn’t bother tellin’ nobody about it because we squashed it,” I explained. “But she called Momly my ‘white mother’ and I just, like . . . lost it.”
Uncle Tony slurped the hot cheese, then set what was left of his slice down. Grabbed a napkin, cleaned the grease from his hands and mouth.
“That made you mad?” he asked. “I mean, I know Emily’s not your mother, but did that girl saying you had a white mom really offend you?”
I chewed on crust. Chewed and chewed, thinking. Thinking about . . . everything. I swallowed, shook my head.
“Nah, not really. It wasn’t that. I was more mad that she said it like she knew our family. Our situation.” I glanced at Maddy again. She was nibbling like a rabbit, which meant she was now listening. Didn’t matter. She needed to hear this part. “So I had to defend us. I had to defend Momly.” Maddy looked at me. I looked at Uncle Tony. He nodded and picked his pizza back up.
“You know, Emily would’ve told you not to get into no mess with nobody over her. She would’ve said she doesn’t need you to defend her, because she’s the adult and it’s her job to defend you.”
“Yeah, I know. She probably would’ve got on the phone and snitched on me to Ma.”
Uncle Tony snorted. “And what you think Bev woulda said?” He took another bite of his pizza.
I thought for a moment, ripping the crust in my hand open to pick the soft white bread out of the crunchy part. I glanced back up and shrugged, bread between my fingers like a pinch of cotton. “Probably woulda yelled at me.”
“Concussed you out,” Uncle Tony joked. “Just like she’s gonna do me since I forgot to call her and tell her about everything that happened today.”
I tossed the bread in my mouth, chewed. “Yeah, but then she probably would’ve told me she was proud of me.”
To that, Uncle Tony didn’t have a follow-up joke, like normal. That was a first. Instead he just said, “I’m proud of you too. Me, Emily, Bev, Ronnie, and little Waffle here”—Maddy bounced her eyebrows at me and flashed a joker-y grin—“we all are.”
This was also the first night in a long time someone tucked me in. I don’t mean actually tucked me in, but just came and checked on me. I always did it for Maddy, counting her beads, and toward the end of the week when there were fewer to count—and after the accident there were much fewer to count—I would make up all kinds of silly stories until she fell asleep. Lately, they’ve all been some weird spin-off about Frida. Other times, I would just sit on Maddy’s bed and listen to her make up tales herself until she dozed. Crazy ones about what our mother’s legs might be doing. Maybe they were dancing in Mexico. Maybe they were off kicking butt somewhere. “Who knows,” Maddy would say. “Ma’s legs ain’t no junk.”
Tonight, though, my uncle came and checked on me. This was after he’d finally spoken to my mother. After my mother talked to Maddy. After she talked to me. After she made my uncle put her on speakerphone so she could pray. After she asked my uncle to take her off speakerphone so she could tell him what she would’ve done if anything had happened to Maddy, and how dare he take all day to call her. After she asked for Momly’s hospital room number. And after she told us she loved us. All of us.
Uncle Tony knocked on the door. I had just finished doing my Frida research for the night and was sitting at my desk, staring into the mirror, wrapping my hair—combing it around my head and pinning it in place before covering it in a scarf, a pretty silk one Ma gave me with stars all over it.
“Come in,” I said, tying a knot in the fabric.
“Hey,” Uncle Tony said. He was holding an empty plate and kissed me on top of my head, the image of the two of us in the mirror, obviously related. Uncle Tony set the plate on the desk.
“Hey,” I said, getting up and climbing into bed. Uncle Tony took a seat on the chair.