“It’s Friday night, Granny. Everyone is out.”
“You ain’t out,” she says, peering over her spectacles at me. They aren’t glasses, by the way – she’ll tell you that. They’re her spectacles.
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“You usually ain’t so broke up about it either,” she says, taking one of the chocolate chip cookies. “Something goin’ on that you wanna tell your Granny Dee about?”
I take a cookie and bite into it. Stale. Made yesterday. Or the day before.
“These cookies are shit,” I say, standing up so suddenly that my chair squeals in protest against our linoleum floor.
“You watch your language, little girl! That is no way to speak to your grandma. I’m not like your other one. I understand you. You can’t get by saying bad words in front of me.”
LaoLao speaks English just fine, but she still has a heavy accent and Granny Dee likes to pretend that she doesn’t understand her. And LaoLao swears plenty too, but she does that in Mandarin. Practically the only Mandarin words I know are swearwords.
“If you don’t apologize right this second for that filthy language, and for insulting my cookies, I will ground you.”
I laugh. “Ground me? What difference will that make? It isn’t like I’m going anywhere – or have anywhere to go.”
“Where is all this sass coming from? I don’t like it one bit.” Underneath her anger is a note of hurt. Her conflicting emotions come at me like a steam train, but when I look harder I see that they’re nothing but a puff of smoke, leaving a little old lady in its wake.
I go around to my Granny Dee and squeeze her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I say, not quite in a whisper but almost. I don’t have much experience apologizing. I don’t do things that require apologizing too often.
She reaches her veiny hand up and pats my own. “You know what you could do to make it up to me?” She looks up and her eyes are magnified beneath her spectacles. I smile at her encouragingly. “Make me a fresh batch of cookies. You were right, these are shit.”
“Where are Mom and LaoLao?” I ask as I break an egg into our green mixing bowl. The kitchen is small and dark in the daytime, but at night, it’s warm and feels like home. With the curtains drawn over the small boxy windows, some jazz music on for Granny Dee, the oven making everything nice and toasty, I can pretend we are anywhere. I don’t need to see the bars on the windows of the house across from us or our overgrown front lawn, if you can call it a lawn, or watch people hurry by, not wanting to stick around in our neighborhood. I’ve lived in this house my whole life. It was my Granny Dee’s house, the same one my daddy grew up in, but I won’t be sad to say goodbye to it when Marcus gets drafted for the NFL, and I know he will because he isn’t just good, he’s magic, and when he’s rich, we’ll all be rich and we’ll move somewhere real nice, somewhere bigger and better, somewhere we all have enough space and there aren’t bars on the windows and the light shines in every room.
“Your mother took a late shift tonight,” says Granny from her chair as she nods back and forth to the jazz. “And your other grandmother” – I have yet to hear Granny Dee refer to LaoLao as LaoLao – “she went to bed early. Lazybones.”
I nod and crack another egg. Right as the bright yellow yolk falls on top of the white flour, I hear it. A knock. And then another. Urgent. The kind of knocks that the Gestapo use in war films. The kind of knock that makes my Granny Dee’s hand fly up to her heart.
The kind of knock we’ve heard only once before.
I glance at the clock above the old oven. It’s only 10:17. Not that late. Maybe it’s my mom. Maybe we locked her out. This is what I tell myself as I walk to the front door, even though I know I haven’t dead-bolted the door yet. And my mom wouldn’t knock like that. And she doesn’t have a shadow like that. And she wouldn’t ever come home in a car with a red and blue flashing light on top of it.
When I open the door, it is like I’ve fallen into a nightmare, one I’ve had over and over again.
Only it’s worse than a nightmare. It’s happened before.
CHAPTER 7
Officer James Northrup is standing at our door, his fist raised, ready to knock again. I feel all the air go out of me, looking at his craggy face and solemn eyes. He’s got more wrinkles since the last time he came knocking on our door.
“Wing,” he says, and I know what he’s going to say next because he’s said it before, this has all happened before, and I want to slam the door in his face to keep him from saying it because maybe if I don’t hear it, maybe it won’t be true.
“There’s been an accident.”