“What you mean? How am I holding it?”
“You got it in a fist. You were gripping that fork at dinner like you were about to dig a hole and plant some flowers.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Baby. Trust me.”
I looked down at the fork clutched in my hand. I felt my face burning hot with embarrassment. I wanted to punch Michael in the face for insulting me. I wanted to stick him in the chest with the fork in my fist. But instead I took a breath. “Okay,” I said. “So how am I supposed to hold it?” He took my hands in his and showed me the right way.
We moved in together not long after that.
Chapter 22
Four More
I got the call at three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon. Michael had worked the early shift at the mattress factory and was coming in the door as I picked up the kitchen phone. On the other end of the line, my sister Sweetie was yelling like her house was on fire. “Rabbit! Girl, you gotta come over! The lady from DFACS say she gonna take away my kids!”
The last time I’d seen my sister was almost a year before, not long after Michael and I started dating. He said he wanted to meet my family, so I’d taken him over to Sweetie’s place because she was the only one who wasn’t in jail. We’d driven out to Lynwood Park, past streets lined with luxury homes, crossed an intersection, and suddenly we were in the hood. Sweetie lived with her three daughters in a broke-down house that reeked of stale Newports and dirty diapers. When Michael and I stepped inside I could see him, out of the corner of my eye, gagging from the smell. The floor was littered with overflowing ashtrays and dirty dishes crawling with roaches. In the middle of the room, turned on its side, was a wooden chair missing three of its legs.
I’d heard a rumor that Sweetie was hooked on crack. When I saw her that day with Michael—the way she stood at the window scratching and twitching and searching the road with paranoid eyeballs—I knew the rumor was true. Now here she was on the other end of the phone, begging for my help.
Talking a mile a minute, Sweetie explained that her caseworker had come by and told her the Department of Family and Child Services was taking her kids and putting them in foster care unless Sweetie could find a family member to take them. “She says I have until six o’clock, or else she’s gonna get the police.” Sweetie started to cry. “But I ain’t an unfit mama. I’m a good mama. Rabbit, you gotta come get my kids.”
“Don’t you go get those kids,” Michael said when I hung up the phone. He’d been standing in the doorway, listening to my call.
I ignored him and started pulling on my sneakers, my mind racing as I tried to remember how old Sweetie’s kids were. There was LaDontay, who was a few months older than Ashley, so that put her at eight. And then two younger girls, Destiny and Diamond, who were two and three. But Sweetie had also been pregnant when Michael and I had seen her last. I did the math in my head and figured the baby couldn’t be more than six months old.
I ran into Nikia’s bedroom; I knew I had a box of old baby blankets in there, somewhere. Michael was right on my heels. “We can’t take care of four more children,” he said, watching me throw sneakers, water guns, and headless G.I. Joe action figures out of Nikia’s closet, searching for the blankets. “You know that.”
I turned around to look at Michael. “They’re family,” I said. “Where else they gonna go? Anyway,” I added, turning back to the mess in the closet, “you like kids.”
Ever since we’d been living together Michael had been acting exactly like a daddy. One day I came home after picking up Ashley and Nikia from school and found Michael had cooked us all dinner: fried pork chops, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese. Then he sat at the table and helped the kids with their homework.
“Your daughter can read,” he said later that night. “But your son needs some help.” I already knew Ashley was smart as a whip. Nikia was a different story. He was repeating kindergarten because he was so far behind.
“That boy takes after his daddy,” I told Michael. “Derrick’s stupid ass can’t read, either.”
“Let me try,” said Michael. “I bet your son just needs a little extra help.” He came home the next day with a bag from Kmart filled with a stack of reading books. “Come here, little man,” he called to Nikia. “I got something for you.” The two of them sat at the dining room table, Dr. Seuss’s Hop on Pop cracked open in front of them. I stood in the doorway and watched Michael point to the words on the page. “Sound it out,” he said gently. “Just take your time.”
At the back of Nikia’s closet, I finally found what I was looking for, a clear plastic box filled with Nikia’s old baby clothes. I grabbed a blue flannel blanket and headed to the door. Michael was right behind me. “We need to talk about this,” he said, following me out of the apartment, down the front walk, and over to my car. “I didn’t sign up for all this . . . I’m serious. We got to think this through.”
I opened the car door, slid behind the wheel, and turned on the ignition. I didn’t understand why Michael was getting so worked up. Everybody knows that when your crackhead sister says DFACS is about to snatch her babies, you don’t waste time thinking it through, you just go get them.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. “I gotta get those kids.”
In my rearview mirror I could see Michael standing in the road with his hands on his head. For a second he looked exactly like Curtis the day Mama put her dentures in the road and drove over them with her car.
Sweetie’s house looked worse than I could have imagined, it was like a tornado had lifted up a trash heap and dropped it right in the middle of her living room. My sister was standing at the window, holding a tiny baby and peering out the dirty bedsheets she’d hung up as curtains. On a sagging sofa against the wall were Sweetie’s older girls. LaDontay was dressed in a grimy T-shirt and boy’s shorts, but the other two wore only sagging diapers. All of them were covered in crusty silver-dollar-size sores.
Sweetie’s caseworker was already there, standing by the front door, a manila folder in her hand. “I think the children may have ringworm,” she said when she caught me looking at their scabs.
“My kids ain’t got no worms!” shouted Sweetie from across the room.
The caseworker ignored her and turned to me: “Would you mind if we stepped outside for a moment?”
On the front porch, she cleared her throat. “I’ve offered to help find your sister a drug treatment program,” she said. “Unfortunately, she’s been very resistant.”
“Okay.”
“At this point, we are seriously concerned about the welfare of the children . . .”
“Yeah.”
“My understanding is that you’ve offered to take them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“All four of them?”