“What would anyone want with her skinny ass anyway?” Letitia laughed and helped pull my luggage to the door. She arched hereyebrows and leaned in close with a knowing grin. “You say goodbye to Jalen already?”
I shot her akeep your voice downglare. “Last night.”
She smirked. “I’ll bet. You’re going to break that boy’s heart.”
“Not possible. He and I have an agreement,” I said, my voice low and my cheeks heating. I hated anything resembling gossip while my cousin lived on it. “No strings. No attachments.”
“Your motto.”
I glanced at Mama.I learned from the best.
“Going to miss you.” Letitia ran her fingers over a handful of the hundreds of microbraids that fell softly down my shoulders. “You got someone in California who can duplicate my artistry?”
Letitia, not even thirty years old, was owner of her own beauty salon—The Studio—on Canal Street. She was my idol and an inspiration for my own ambitions.
“No chance.”
“Great, then you’ll have to come back and see me. And Jalen.”
“Oh, hush up.”
Letitia laughed and gave me a final hug.
Uncle Rudy joined me at the door and took hold of my rolling suitcase. “Let’s hit the road, sweetheart.”
Bertie and Letitia waved and offered safe travels and love. They wrapped me in it.
And then there was Mama, like a cold patch of air in the humid, cloying heat of New Orleans in August.
I shivered and went out.
***
My plane landed in California at one in the afternoon. An Uber ride later, I was hauling my rolling suitcase up the front walk of the cozy one-story house. The air in Santa Cruz was cooler and tinged with salt, and the trees spilled down from the mountainside to line our quiet street. Ahuge cypress shaded our front yard on one side, and on the other, Bibi’s flower garden was a riot of color.
“Home,” I murmured. I climbed the three steps to our tiny front porch and unlocked the front door. “Bibi, it’s me.”
“There she is,” my eighty-year-old great-grandmother said from our lumpy, pillow-strewn couch. Her dark-brown skin was creased with wrinkles—mostly laugh lines—and her close-cropped hair was entirely silver now. Despite the summer warmth, she sat wrapped in a green-and-white shawl she had made herself. A pile of yellow yarn lay at her slippered feet, and needles clacked as she crafted another. Our lazy gray cats, Lucy and Ethel, were both stretched out on the back of the couch.
I left my rolling suitcase by the door and crossed our living room with its antique furniture that was too big for our little house—every available surface housing knickknacks or stacked with old books Bibi was now almost too blind to read. Family photos covered nearly every inch of the flowered wallpaper, and Nina Simone crooned on the ancient stereo.
“How did it go?” Bibi asked. “Better than last year, I hope.”
I flopped down beside her and rested my head on her shoulder. “Don’t know aboutbetter. Bertie and Rudy are great, as usual. Letitia’s like the sister I never had.”
“But?” Bibi’s needlesclacked.
“But Mama is still Mama.”
My great-grandmother patted my cheek with her warm, dry hand and sighed. “Oh, my darling girl. I wish it were better between you.”
“I don’t know why I keep going.” Sudden tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away quickly. Ethel jumped in my lap, and I focused on scratching her ears. “She doesn’t want me around. That’s not self-pity. Straight facts.”
“Shedoeswant you there, honey,” Bibi said. “She’s showing you the only way she knows how.”
“By ignoring me?”
“By asking you to come. Spending time.”