The cell’s camera turns on to find Desiree Pierce in selfie position, left arm fully extended and raised just enough to make her look up at the screen. She turns her face slightly to the left. Pauses, then faces right. All in search of the perfect light.
Her brown face is beautiful and freckled. Her hair is long and pitch-black, in the kind of beach waves that most Black women get from Bantu knots. Her diamond necklace catches the light.
Behind her are the tasteful yet stark decorations of a hotel suite that’s littered with clothes, shoes, and cups. Desiree turns again, stops, then moves a few centimeters to the left.
She smiles, showing off perfectly aligned white teeth.
Someone unseen takes in a long sniffle. Desiree’s too busy smiling to notice.
“Freck, can you get your beautiful-ass face out of the camera for once?” The voice is female and teasing. It’s impossible to tell where it comes from.
Desiree pretends to roll her eyes. “Let the record show the birthday girl is the first one ready.”
The voice again. “That’s ’cause you don’t have to do all the shit I do! Your skin is perfect.”
Desiree shrugs, pretends to look demure. “Black don’t crack.”
A second later she’s finally joined by Erin Ambrose. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Surgically enhanced lips. She crowds into the frame. “I don’t crack either.”
“Yeah, you just do everything else.”
“No comment.” Erin holds up a white mug with OMNI printed on it in thick black letters. She raises it in mock salute. “To Desiree Pierce on the occasion of her twenty-fifth birthday. A toast.”
Desiree does the same with her free arm, holding another hotel mug. She tips it just enough to show what’s inside. It’s filled with a clear liquid. “A toast…with water.”
Erin nods. “That’s definitely water.”
“It is!”
“Right.” Erin nods double time. “We’re good clean girls who don’t drink, don’t do drugs, and sure as hell don’t fucking curse. So that is definitely not vodka.”
“It’s not.” Desiree chugs it, then flashes the empty mug. “See!”
It takes just a moment for Erin to roll her eyes. “Like you’ve never done that with vodka.”
They both laugh as Desiree speaks. “My family might be watching this!”
“I thought I was your family!”
“You are. Just like a sister.”
They finally clink mugs. Erin talks to Desiree while looking dead at the lens. “Happy birthday, bitch.”
Two
Gram died five years ago in February, a stroke as sudden as it was painful—for her and everyone who loved her. And that truly was everyone. Gram always lit up the room. Especially for me, as she was the only grandparent I knew. My mom’s parents died when I was a baby, and my paternal grandfather was never in the picture.
But if you could have only one grandparent, Phyllis Pierce was perfect. I wouldn’t have gotten through her funeral without Desiree. We moved in tandem all day, only separating to go to the bathroom and even then just long enough to flush. I remember her doing my makeup, loading us both up on waterproof mascara and a healthy dose of setting spray.
My mother, on the other hand, had let me cry for half a day before informing me I needed to get it together. Phyllis Pierce and Olivia Scott had never been close, but that wasn’t why she told me that. It was just my mother’s way. We’d even joke about it, say she was putting on the Super Black Woman cape. You handle your business, and only then do you turn back into the ordinary girl who’s allowed to cry. And there was indeed work to be done, a funeral to help plan.
So when my mom lost her battle with breast cancer three months later, I knew what to do, how to behave.
My mom had known her diagnosis for a whole year but hadn’t told me. She knew I was enjoying my first job—as a project coordinator in DC—and she didn’t want her diagnosis to be the end of my new life. She planned to survive cancer like she’d survived everything else, waiting until she was on her literal deathbed to tell me.
Even once she passed, the tears didn’t come right away. Scotts weren’t criers. I hated it, how it made me feel, how it made me look, turning my nose as red as Rudolph’s. Besides, I was too busy with arrangements.
I’d been surprised when Desiree told me Mel planned to pay for everything. He’d left my mom and me going on twenty years at that point. We hadn’t even been in the same room since before I graduated high school. My mom hadn’t wanted his money when she was alive and she sure as hell wouldn’t want it now. So I politely begged off, pointing at her insurance, and hid behind my Super Black Woman cape.
Unlike the Angry Black Woman label so many tried to make us wear, Strong or Super Black Woman was one we often gave ourselves. We wore it as proudly as a designer brand. It protected us from a lot of shit—earning sixty-three cents for every dollar that went to our white, male counterparts, or raising children not able to step outside without risking their lives. I don’t know if it was always a good thing, but it was most certainly our thing, passed down by both nurture and nature from generation to generation, like a recipe for sweet potato pie.
And I wore it proudly—until the night after my mom’s funeral. I insisted I was okay, sent everyone home so I could barricade myself in the house where I grew up in South Orange. But Desiree refused to leave. I cried so hard and so long my sister almost called an ambulance. Instead, she held me as I got snot on her Chanel dress, wiped my red nose, and swore it would be okay.
And now she was gone too, leaving me nothing but questions.
Research depends on the five w’s. I had the who, what, and whenof Desiree’s death since I’d figured out we had very different definitions of casual drug use. It was the where that had me so shocked.
The Bronx was my home. Not hers. She hadn’t liked coming here even when Gram was still alive. And yet she’d come up here in the middle of the night.
Why?
I needed to find out. Like my mother had said, there was work to do.
I left the playground with Stuart’s question banging around in my head. My neighborhood is deceptively hilly so I walked home, pulling my bike next to me like a cranky toddler. I’d been well past drinking age before I knew this area had a name. Highbridge. Washington Heights was just across the Harlem River, and the Yankees played less than a mile south. Cushioned in between was everything I loved—bodegas and buildings and brown people.
Gram had left me the house when she died, but I still thought of it as hers, especially since Aunt E kept on living there. It actually was the first place I’d called home as a baby, before Mel left my mom when I was four and she moved us to the Jersey suburbs. But I didn’t move back into Highbridge until I realized it was just a hop, skip, and a bridge away from Columbia, way closer than my place in Jersey City and my childhood home in South Orange, which my mom had left to me free and clear. I’d been renting it out since she died. Between that and what I’d saved from the three years I worked for an engineering company in Newark, I was able to go back to school full-time. It helped I was cheap. Another way I was more Scott than Pierce.
I’d been playing with starting a nonprofit to help Black families cope with cancer since my mom died but had only decided to get my master’s in Nonprofit Management two years ago. I didn’t want anyone to have to go through what we did.
So I’d come to Highbridge for the convenience and instead found a community. When I’d first moved back to the Bronx, it was hard to distinguish one building from the next. On the surface they all looked the same. Six-ish stories. Beige paint. Fire escapes and NO LOITERING signs that everyone ignored. But those were the things nonresidents noticed when they raced through, protected by locked car doors and a sense of entitlement. Now I saw the details that made this neighborhood so beautiful.
Like how one building had its fire escape painted a hot pink. Or how another’s super was meticulous in placing their city-issued trash bins. Or the apartments with the Superman mural. According to urban legend, the landlord paid a graffiti artist to spray-paint it after getting fed up with his tagging.
The side streets were mostly one-ways. Just narrow enough that if someone double-parked—and someone always double-parked—you’d have to hold your breath and maneuver your car like a Cirque du Soleil performer.
I’d just passed Plimpton Avenue when my phone rang. An unsaved number. I was tempted to ignore it like I had the previous four times. But instead, I hit the red phone icon and brought it to my ear.
“Hey, Tam,” I said.
There was a pause. “It’s me.”
Me was definitely not Tam yet still a voice that registered as automatically as the number. I’d heard it all through my childhood—in music videos and radio interviews and award acceptance speeches way more than I’d ever heard it in my house.
I didn’t respond, which caused him to speak again. “Your father.”
As if I didn’t know. I finally exhaled the breath I’d been cradling like a baby. Which is how I felt, like I was still the kid waiting for Daddy to come back home. Luckily for me, we didn’t talk often. “Hi, Mel.”
“You heard?” His voice was rich, as he was. And he had a standing reservation on Forbes’s wealthiest in hip-hop list.
“Yeah…”
Another awkward pause. This one even longer. He was the first family member I’d heard from since finding out about Desiree—the fact he’d called proof it was already a different world without her in it. I broke the silence nervously. “How’s Veronika?”
His wife. Desiree’s mother. My mother’s mortal enemy.
My parents had been childhood sweethearts, but according to my mom, Mel had always claimed he wasn’t the “marrying type.” Until Veronika had proved that wrong. My mom had never forgiven him—or them, since Veronika had been her friend. My mom’d even gotten her the receptionist job at Mel’s first record label.
After my parents split, I saw Gram often. Mel technically had custody every other weekend and for a month in the summer, but you couldn’t take a six-year-old to a video set. And there was no way in hell my mother would let me stay with “that heifer” Veronika. So my time was usually spent at Gram’s.
If my mother’s parenting philosophy was Tough Love, then Mel’s was No Love. Over the years, his visits became phone calls. Phone calls became nothing at all. I extended an olive branch when I invited him to my high school graduation. He didn’t show up. So I didn’t invite him to my University of Pennsylvania one. It wasn’t until after my mom died that he made any effort to come back into my life, throwing money at me like a rapper at his first album-release party. But by then I had no interest in being bought back.
“She’s been in bed since we got the call this morning.”
Despite what my mother would want me to believe, Veronika had always been more fun aunt than evil stepmother. I liked her—often more than both my birth parents, which made me feel guilty. So I always tried to steer clear. That didn’t stop Veronika from trying, more for Mel’s sake than mine, because that’s what Veronika always did.
“Ahh.” I drew the h out as I crossed smack-dab in the middle of the street, not even bothering to look both ways. I reached the sidewalk still searching for something else to say. Something more appropriate. I had nothing.
Mel and I barely knew how to talk to each other on a normal day, much less this one. We communicated best when not communicating at all. Our relationship had always been conducted through one intermediary after another. My mom had first taken up the role. Then, once they were no longer on speaking terms, it was Gram. After she died, it became Desiree. And two years ago, we’d switched to Mel’s executive assistant, Tam.
When you never really have to speak to someone, you never learn how. Normally that suited me fine. Just not today, not when there were so many things I wanted to ask.
Did you too know this was going to happen? Does it still feel like someone sucked the air out of your lungs? Are you also kinda relieved you don’t have to worry about her anymore? Do you feel guilty about it too?
And things I needed to ask. The why.
Why had she been coming to see me?
But I didn’t say any of that, just waited for him to take the lead, as usual. There was a voice in the background and then he spoke. “Look, I gotta get to the office. The police are stopping by at two. I want you there.”
He hung up before I could tell him no thank you. I was not in the right mental space. He’d barely registered when Desiree and I had stopped talking, so I knew he couldn’t tell me what I really wanted to know: if she’d been ready to make amends.
“Hey, mamí,” a voice called. Wally, the stock guy at the market on the corner where I always turned to get home.
Usually I was happy to see him. He looked out for me, just like Hector, who knew my breakfast order at the deli, and Malika, who made sure to ring the doorbell when she dropped off an Amazon package.
I wasn’t just in my neighborhood. I realized I was at my street. My body had gotten me there while my head swam.
“You good, mamí?”
I was not, but did Wally really need to know? Did he really care? Or was it just some automatic greeting tossed back and forth like a game of catch? I glanced down at my Jordans. For a moment, I wanted to tell him the truth. That I’d been an only child for two hours now. That I was not handling it well.
But that seemed like too much to yell across the street, especially with the Latin trap music blasting from the car at the light. I rubbed my left wrist and smiled while I lied. “I’m good.”
The smile instantly disappeared, and I scrambled to bring it back, making sure the follow-up was brighter, better, longer—because that’s really all he wanted. He went back to unpacking strawberries, and I continued the two blocks home.
Someone once told me you can tell how gentrified a neighborhood is by the supermarket. When you see the Tom’s of Maine on the shelf, you know Becky of Midtown will soon follow. Shopping. Jogging. Waving at the men drinking nutcrackers on their front stoops.
We weren’t there. Yet. No cabs. No food carts. No tourists. The only interloper was me, and I’d like to think, given my family history, that I didn’t count.
One of ten and the bookend, Gram’s place—my place—was yellow brick like in Oz and probably as narrow as Dorothy’s favorite road too. Inside were twin two-bedroom apartments, each taking up a single floor—combined living room and kitchen and then bedrooms. Gram and Aunt E had lived on the first floor since Mel was a teenager. Even now I spent so much time in Aunt E’s unit that she no longer bothered to lock the door, ...
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