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“I can’t see you being like that!” She frowned at me. “Have you talked to her? It might help.”
“You wouldn’t have recognized me how I was with her when I first got to New York. Like my mother, but male.”
“Don’t speak such nonsense!”
“It’s true.” I put my hand to my heart.
“Austin Mitchell Carmichael! Don’t make me box those ears!”
“I know. I was an ass … a jerk.” Suki would box my ears for cussing even.
She kissed her teeth and poured me more tea. “Don’t get into anything serious until you know what you’re doing about that Greer girl. I don’t like to talk bad about people, Austin, but that Sienna was not so sweet when people would turn their backs. I saw plenty that made me grind my teeth when that girl was hangin’ round the house with Aiden.”
“What do you think of Carly?” I asked.
She smiled. “You know I love you three like I birthed you, and would always take your sides.”
I know this.
She continues. “And sayin’ that, Carly is too good for our Aiden, that’s the first thing. But she’s good for him all the same. You see how he looks at her? Like he can’t believe his luck. And that’s a privileged man looking like that at her. That’s how everyone should look at the one they say they love. If I were Carly’s family instead of your family, I’d be worried. But I know Aiden’s good deep down, so I think it’s a good match.”
I smile.
“So, give Suki the gossip about your father and Alice Roberts. Adele told me something and it was completely scandalous.” Her eyes are lit up the way they go when she reads gossip magazines.
“If Adele told you, you do not need me repeating it,” I made a face of disgust.
She slapped me on the head. Not hard but teasing. “I’m an old woman with nothing to do but live through others’ excitement. Tell me anyway, even though I already know.” Her dark eyes were alight with amusement so even though I knew she knew the story and even though she knew I didn’t want to recount it, I did, and she slapped her knee uproariously and reveled in it.
Suki loves my dad. She even holds affection for my mother and as shitty as my mother is with most people she deems beneath her, she is never shitty with Suki – she probably feared losing her too much.
Suki told me many times that people often get in the way of their own happiness and that my parents did that with one another.
She recounted the fact that it makes her sad, said they were very in love when she first started working for them, but that Dad went out of his way to be successful, to give my mother everything, and tried so hard to do that it meant he neglected to see that what my mother needed most was his attention. She wanted that more than she wanted oxygen and when she didn’t get enough of it she found ways to get attention elsewhere.
After the gossip-fest about Dad and Alice ended, we talked more about Aiden and Carly, how happy they were and then she complained about spending a few extra days in St. Kitts with Adele and Dirk. Her complaint was about their nanny being too lazy and looking at her phone too much. Suki then went on for a while about how great of a mother Adele is. And I told her it’s because Suki was a great mother to all of us and she gave me shit for saying such a thing, insulting our own mother, but she got a little teary-eyed, though she tried to hide it.
I offered to take her for dinner, but she told me that as soon as I’d called and told her I was on my way, she’d started cooking for me.
She took me to the little kitchen in the back of that small house and lifted the lid off the pot. That’s when the smell hit me. It was a curry fish stew that she often made, but only did it when my parents were out of town because my mother didn’t like the smell of fish in the house. Or curry.
I sat and ate two bowls and we talked for hours before her sister came home from a church event that meant I had to stay for another coffee and dessert and catch up with her sister before I headed back to the city.
I did a lot of thinking on the way back and decided I should pull back with Jada. For her sake.
I was planning on a conversation with her about it when I got in. My phone really did die on the way to Suki’s and she didn’t have a charging cord that fit my phone.
