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Malak was right. Zena had thought of Adan, of course. And while she’d done a grand but strategic job of avoiding him and all topics concerning him, when Alton proposed to Zola in DC, Zena knew she’d finally have to see Adan. But then she figured she had at least a year—one year to get her head together. She could even meet a wonderful, well-traveled, well-read man, who was also funny and down-to-earth and rich, and get married—at least engaged—okay, at least committed. She’d arrive at Zola and Alton’s wedding to see Adan and his NYC doctor wife and perfect children, and Zena would have to show for her own life a successful law practice, bombshell body and hot judge husband, with dimples—fiancé—okay, boyfriend. But now everything had changed.
“Okay. I won’t make you talk about Adan. If you say you haven’t thought of him and you don’t want to think of him, then we can move on to something else,” Malak agreed patronizingly, as if she was some kind of barroom therapist. “We can focus on what’s really important. And that’s Zola’s happiness. That girl loves you. She trusts you. She adores you. She admires you. She needs your support. Can you just support her?”
“I’ll support the right decision. That’s what I’ll support.” Zena rolled her eyes and waved to a random waitress who was rushing past their table. She asked her, “Can you have our waitress get our check?”
“No problem, hon,” the woman said, sounding more cheerful than she actually looked. “I’ll actually just get it for you.”
“Thanks,” Zena said as the thought of seeing Adan again suddenly hit her. After so many years of blocking painful memories, she wondered if her heart was strong enough to deal with his actual presence. Zena quietly considered that maybe they would be distant, even mockingly cordial. She’d feel like she was meeting a stranger, a stranger who maybe just happened to look like someone she knew. Someone she’d known for a very long time. But Adan was no stranger. He was once Zena’s everything. He was her past, what she’d hoped would become her future. But that was all gone now. And it was all because of him.
Chapter 2
The morning after drowning the news of Zola’s pending Bali wedding in the murky brown liquid of so many shots of reposado tequila she could hardly leave Margarita Town on her feet, Zena awoke to a spinning headache that released her from her morning run. She rolled over in the bed, turning her back to the bedroom window where the late-morning sun was beaming into the room. She was too tired to be fully awake and ready to enter a new day after tossing around in bed through the twilight hours, endlessly replaying worries she had no control over. Problems she’d trained herself to forget, to get away from, but now, there they were right in front of her. While her nighttime thoughts began with Zola, the prickling concern beneath her sister’s future was Zena’s own past.
Malak’s psychic ability—or good sense—had struck gold again at Margarita Town when she boldly shared that maybe much of Zena’s consternation about Alton and Zola getting married wasn’t about them finding love. It was about the love Zena had lost and never forgotten.
Zola wasn’t the only sister to fall in love with a boy who lived up the street. She actually wasn’t even the first.
Lying in bed that night, Zena’s thoughts went back—way back to the time she was a teenager and met Adan Frederick Douglass. He was the first boy to steal her heart away. He was the first man to tear her heart into tiny smithereens. She’d spent too much of her life and good money in therapy trying to pull the pieces back together.
It all started with her parents’ ruined marriage and a popped bicycle chain.
After her father’s second affair with one of the cashiers at the Sutphin Boulevard Burger King where he was a manager, Zena’s mother paid a few hundred to a pimply-faced attorney who promised “quick” divorces in advertisements on subway cars. The couple had no money, property or belongings to split up. Her mother knew there was no way her husband would petition the courts for custody or shared visitation rights for Zena and Zola, fifteen and nine at the time—he had limited funds and no place for his daughters to stay. Zena overheard her mother telling their neighbor who worked on Jamaica Avenue that she just wanted the marriage to be over and to get her girls out of Queens.
Hearing this hurt Zena beyond repair. While her parents’ marriage was mostly rocky, as her father was unreliable and could never keep a long-term job to support them and often stepped out on her mother, Zena loved her father and just wished he’d do right. During their father-daughter walks around the neighborhood, he’d often promise just that. He explained that he didn’t mean to hurt her mother and said something about New York’s poor public school system that diagnosed his dyslexia too late. His reasoning became scrambled into a massive puzzle in Zena’s head. All she wanted to hear about was how her parents and her family could stay together. But he had no solutions. No plans. “I’m broken, babygirl. I done failed ya’ll,” he’d said.
A week later, Zena was standing in a Greyhound bus line with her mother and sister at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. Everything they owned amounted to five boxes being slid into the cargo hold of a bus en route to Atlanta, Georgia. Speaking as if she was a grown woman who’d lived a life and had the necessary scars on her soul one would need to give another grown woman advice, Zena said in her gruff Jamaica, Queens-girl accent, “You didn’t even give him a chance. He was trying and you didn’t give him a chance. And I resent you for that.” Zena thought she’d really said something. Standing in line at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, she crossed her slender teenage arms over her chest and awaited a defense she felt was impossible.
“Mothers don’t have time to give people chances. You’re my top priority. Not him. Not even me. I did this to save you and your sister from growing up and being stuck in a hole like me and your daddy. I did this so you could be happy,” her mother said.
“Happy? In Georgia?” Zena laughed the way any Queens-born girl who’d been torn from her home to live in Georgia would. “You’re making us move from our friends and school. We’re losing everything, Mommy.”
Zena’s mother paused and responded with unmistakable passion in her voice. “You may feel like that now, but I’m giving you a real opportunity to have a better life.”
* * *
Zena’s bicycle chain had popped the morning she met Adan. Her mother had just gotten the rickety red ten-speed from the Salvation Army and unloaded it from the back of the dented 4Runner some cross-eyed deacon at their new church let her mother borrow. Zena was complaining about being locked up all day in the house looking after Zola and begged for a bicycle. While she’d complained about cobwebs on the frame and the cracking fake-leather seat when they spotted the ten-speed in the back of the secondhand store, once Zena got the thing home and kicked off from the curb, she tasted the kind of freedom every fifteen-year-old knew while riding a bicycle.
At first, she heeded her mother’s instructions and only rode around the corner a few times, but then she became curious about her new surroundings and rode faster, standing up on the pedals as she pushed two and three miles from her front door. The houses got bigger and the cars nicer as she sped along. She noticed that the house she lived in with her mother and her sister was the smallest one in the entire neighborhood. She’d heard her mother mention on the phone to her grandmother that she’d gotten the rental for a quarter of the price through some pilot fair-housing project that would later be known as “Section 8 housing.”
It was late summer, and the Georgia heat kept most people indoors, but she saw some stray gaggles of teenagers entering cars and front doors and wondered if any of them would be her classmates when she started classes at her new high school in a few weeks. Walking up flower-lined driveways in bright colors and smiling, they all looked so solidly middle-class, so happy, so far away from the armor-clad, stone-faced friends she knew back in the New York projects. Right then, Zena decided that she wasn’t going to tell anyone at her new school that she lived in the smallest house in the neighborhood.
Soon, droplets of warm sweat escaped Zena’s underarms and wet her T-shirt. The precipitation seemed to descend on her brow and draw every ounce of energy from her body. Zena, going on pure zeal, continued her tour, but she was panting like a thirsty dog and she began feeling as if she’d been away from home for hours, though it had only been twenty minutes since her departure. This was her official introduction to the stifling Georgia humidity that suffocated everything that had the nerve to move before 7 p.m. in late July. Zena would never forget that feeling, that day; it was as if she’d fallen asleep in a sauna and awoke in a pool of her own sweat.
Growing concerned after considering her wet knuckles and steamy scalp, Zena decided to head home, fearing her mother must be panicked because she’d been gone so long.
She’d been resting her bottom on the prickly cracked bicycle seat but decided to get up and floor it home.
When she rounded the curb onto her new street, catching a breeze that did little to cool her off, Zena noticed a family getting out of their car in the driveway on the side of a house that looked identical to the one she lived in just seven houses down. It was a mother and father with two boys. One of the boys looked her age. The other couldn’t be much older than Zola.
While Zena was two houses away, the family stopped and looked at her as if she was an alien pushing a ten-speed up the street.
Zena’s delicate fifteen-year-old self-esteem made her wonder if she was doing something wrong. Could they see the sweat stains at her underarms? Had the wind swept her hair all over her head and she looked like a parading Medusa? What were they looking at?
The little boy started waving, but Zena was too afraid to wave back, fearing she’d lose control of her bike and crash into one of the cars parked on the street. Instead, her bubbling anxiety under their watching eyes made her want to simply disappear, so Zena decided to race home, where she’d run into the house and never ever emerge again.
&nbs
p; That was when the chain popped.
