My mother reaches for my plate then.
“Although there is something to be said for seventy degrees and sunny, year-round. It’s great for biking on the beach.”
“Do you hike?” Sylvie asks. “The hiking there is great.”
“I haven’t yet, no.”
“You used to love hiking with Lorry,” my mother says.
I flinch. The room falls quiet.
“Who?” Seth asks, innocent.
From the corner of my eye, I see Jane shaking her head at him, a silent reprimand.
“CeCe’s old boyfriend,” Sylvie says. “From Connecticut. It was a long time ago.”
Clearly not long enough. The very mention of Lorry and I am once again twenty-six, in my parents’ garage, sitting in the Nissan Sentra with the engine running and the windows rolled down, waiting for the misery to end. Waiting. Waiting.
“I used to love a lot of things,” I say pointedly at my mother. “People change.”
Her eyes narrow. Her lips purse. I prepare for a cutting remark, but for the moment she manages to hold her tongue.
“Lorry.” My Aunt Gem smiles. “Oh, he was handsome.”
“Mummy!” Jane admonishes.
“What?Nah tru?”
“That’s not the point. Inappropriate.”
“Who wants dessert?” Auntie Lolo stands, gathering a couple of the serving dishes. My dad rises to help her. My mother continues to scrape plates. She knows she’s thrown a bomb into the middle of the dining table. She knows what the mention of that relationship does to me. She simply does not care.
Jane’s quote comes to mind: Jamaicans gonna Jamaican. Indeed.
VI.SMOKE AND MIRRORS, A STUDY.
NEW YORK.
MARCH. 2015.
Later, after tea with condensed milk and Auntie Gem’s pineapple upside-down cake, Jane and I regroup upstairs, in our cousin Iris’s former bedroom. We are lying on the floral bedspread poring over a box of old snapshots from the ’60s. Our parents, young and beautiful, on an early trip to America. The aunties in fitted and flared dresses, wrist gloves, and stylized wigs. The uncles in mock-neck knit shirts, tapered pants, and loafers. They look so wide-eyed and overly formal, my heart swells. Islanders out of their element.
“God, they were something, weren’t they?”
“They were. They still are.”
“I’m sorry about my mom’s Lorry comment,” Jane continues. “I hope it wasn’t too triggering.”
“Well, hewashandsome. I’ll give her that.”
“He had a great face.” She smiles. “And he was passionate and thoughtful and tall.”
“Deliciously so.”
“Deliciously so.” She laughs. “Still, you deserved better.”
“Did I?”
