“Thanks, Teesh,” I said, my fingers trailing over the handles of the last gift bag.
While Letitia and Rudy compared and crowed over their gifts, Aunt Bertie smiled gently at me. Pityingly. “Marie,” she called to the kitchen. “Shiloh has something for you.”
Mama couldn’t ignore that.
She got up from her seat at the kitchen window and slowly made her way to me. My heart ached at the reluctance inhabiting her every movement.
Marie Barrera was young—only nineteen years older than me—and beautiful but heavy with sadness. Everyone said I was her spitting image, but my unknown father’s DNA lightened my skin and muted our resemblance.
“At least that’s no mystery,” Jalen Jackson—my Louisiana friend with benefits—had bluntly stated in his bed the night before. “Someone put cream in your mama’s coffee.”
But the obvious fact that my father was white didn’t fill the huge hole in my life where he belonged. He was a ghost, haunting the family through me. No one would speak of him. Least of all Mama. From what little I’d gleaned in seventeen years, I was the product of a one-night stand. Unexpected and unwanted. Mama had been on full scholarship to LSU with a bright future stretching in front of her until the pregnancy. Now, she worked part-time in a bank, her dreams of a job in marketing sidelined forever. Whoever my father was, she’d cut him out of her life and refused to speak of him ever again.
It made no sense. With a big family willing to help, why did Mama drop out of college? Why not put me up for adoption?
Why have me at all?
No one would tell me. But for all the mystery surrounding my father, one thing was crystal clear: Mama saw him when she looked at me, and she didn’t like what she saw.
Her smile flickered like a dying bulb as I held out her gift bag. She took it slowly and hesitantly put her hand inside. “What have we here?”
“It’s nothing. Just…something.”
Mama pulled out the hammered copper cuff bracelet with a turquoise patina and held it up to the light.
“I wanted it to resemble something pulled from a sunken ship,” I said, my normally strong voice wavering. “I know those have always fascinated you.”
I watched her, breath held, as she turned it over and over. Tears filled her brown eyes—eyes like mine—and she really looked at me for the first time since the start of my visit. Then she dropped the cuff back in the bag as if it’d burned her.
“It’s very lovely. Thank you.”
Blinking her eyes dry, she gave me a brief, stiff hug. I wanted to sink into her arms, into her scents of cigarettes and jasmine perfume. But no sooner than I felt her arms around me, they were slipping away.
“Be good. Work hard. Give Bibi our love.”
What about me?
I inhaled sharply, as if I could suck the thought back. Being weak and asking for what I wasn’t given would never get me anywhere. I knew better than to even think it; I was stronger than that.
“Goodbye, Mama,” I said.
But she had already retreated to the table, into her crossword puzzle and the haze of cigarette smoke. She set the gift bag on the floor at her feet, where it looked small and already forgotten.
“Let me drive you, sweetheart,” Uncle Rudy said gently into the stony quiet Mama left behind.
“Thanks, Uncle Rudy,” I said, mustering a sarcastic grin. “But I can’t possibly pull you away from this very important yet meaningless preseason Saints game. I’ll take an Uber.”
Uncle Rudy grinned back. “Smart aleck, ain’t ya?”
Aunt Bertie snorted. “An Uber? You going to get in a stranger’s car? Pretty girl like you?”
In the kitchen, my mother flinched. Or maybe it was just a shiver from the air-conditioning.
“Thanks, Aunt B, but I’ll be fine.”
“Nonsense. Rudy will drive you, and that’s the end of that.”
My uncle shot me a wink, beaming perfect white teeth against rich dark skin. “You heard the boss.”