Playing Hard To Get

“I told that white boy he can keep my check. Shit, set them on fire if he wants,” Nathaniel went on.

“Man, you’re just talking shit now, just like at school when we pledged K-A-Psi. You know you didn’t say that,” Charleston insisted. “And if you don’t want the $50 you’re gonna make selling iTunes to me and your mama, you can send it to me. I can use it to get a haircut.” Charleston rolled his hand over his head and shimmied dapperly.

“How about I cut out the middleman and just send the check directly to your mama? Pay my child support,” Nathaniel jabbed and they all laughed. Unlike Charleston, he’d come from big money. His great-grandfather once sold insurance in Brooklyn, and when the business went belly up during the Depression, he spent his life savings on a dilapidated building in Greenwich Village. Only it was the ’30s then and everyone thought he was crazy. The Village wasn’t the big hot spot just yet. Drugs were everywhere and in just thirty years hippies would be sleeping in the streets. However, after fixing up and renting out units in the property for five decades, his son sold it and purchased another dilapidated building in midtown during the recession in the ’80s. The salesman said he would need at least $5 million to fix it up in order to make any profit from renting office space. Nathaniel’s grandfather spent $1 million and turned it into an indoor parking facility. Now Nathaniel’s father was selling the spots for $275K a piece. The family would keep 50 percent to stay in control.

Tamia was adding up how much Nathaniel’s family was making off of all the spots when she felt the table vibrating beneath her right elbow. She looked down to see that Charleston’s phone was aglow and before he snatched it from the table and excused himself, she saw as clear as black lettering on a white sheet of paper the word “Phae.” Before it made any sense and registered in her head in a way that would make it possible to recall when she later realized that he’d stopped paying her mortgage, Charleston was gone from the table and Tamia was looking over her shoulder.

As she listened to more about the CD and even more about Nathaniel’s pending fame, time seemed to be standing still and moving fast as hell at the same time. Forever, that’s how long it felt that Charleston had been away from the table. And Tamia was fighting hard with herself not to care when Ava came up with a thought of her own.

“Where’s Charleston?” Ava asked. “He’s been gone for a long time.”

Tamia took the last sip of the third glass of wine she’d ordered to escape tasting the leathery scotch and was about to get up to see what was taking Charleston so long when he suddenly reappeared and slid back into his seat. As poised as a politician, he put his hand on Tamia’s knee and kissed her on the cheek.

“Sorry that took so long. It was the office,” he said in a way that left absolutely no space for Tamia to ever quiz him about what she’d seen on the phone.

?

“Why am I in Harlem, Troy Helene?” Lucy asked.

Troy stared at her grandmother from across the mahogany table in the center of her sitting room. She didn’t know why Lucy had ended up in Harlem, in her sitting room, in the Queen Anne armchair she’d purchased as a wedding gift. Ms. Pearl, Lucy’s blind, deaf, and toothless bichon frise, whose once puffy white coat was now a thin, dull silver, was being stroked on Lucy’s lap as she looked on with equal disgust at Troy. A two-time Westminster Best in Show, Lucy’d had the dog for as long as Troy had been alive and the two went everywhere together. Now there was a family joke that the next destination might be the pearly gates. Lucy had already purchased a plot beside hers for the dog; on the other side was Lucy’s dead, rich, white husband.

Troy wanted to break the stare but had no clue as to how to answer the question. Lucy never came to Harlem—rarely crossed any of the bridges to leave Manhattan, for that matter—so even a visit to her granddaughter’s home had to come with great reason.

“Brunch, Troy Helene. We were to have brunch at the Friars’ Club,” Lucy said sharply. As she stroked the dog, the dim light in the sitting room picked up all of the cuts in the seven-carat canary diamond she wore on her ring finger. Big and beautiful, the ring made Lucy’s hand look smaller than it already was, which was why she loved it so. Lucy was a frail woman, whose white skin was as fair as fresh farm milk. Up close, the blue veins on her wrists and hands could be seen. And while anyone sitting in that living room would swear she was white, Lucy’s mother and grandmother were each a shade darker than she—each, like Lucy, had married and had children with white men. The last in this line of tradition was Lucy’s only daughter, Mary Elizabeth—Troy’s mother—whose conception marked the end of Lucy’s passing. But years ago, it came out that the white man Troy knew as her grandfather all of her life was no kin to her. Mary Elizabeth’s father was a jazz musician. This revelation sent all three of the Smith women to therapy.

“Oh, brunch,” Troy remembered, falling back on the couch. She saw Kyle standing in the hallway beside the chair where Lucy was sitting. He jokingly shook his hand at Troy and she sat back up. She was supposed to meet Lucy for brunch after her meeting with the Virtuous Women—well, it was really lunch, but Lucy hated that word, said it made her sound too middle American. “I totally forgot. My meeting ran over and then I…” Troy remembered that Kyle was standing in the hallway and thought it was best not to finish the rundown of where she’d been.

“Water, son. Can you please get my Pearl some water?” Lucy said so softly it was clear she knew Kyle was standing on the other side of the wall beside her.

“Yes, ma’am,” Kyle answered quickly, walking into the room and getting the dog before disappearing into the kitchen.

“Good, they’ll be gone for a while,” Lucy said. “There’s no way Ms. Pearl will drink a teaspoon of water in this…this”—she looked around at what Troy had thought was a nicely decorated room like it was a jail cell before finishing—“this place.”

“I’m sorry I forgot about brunch,” Troy went on. “I really wanted to go, but I had a bad day and just lost track of time, I guess.”

“What happened?” Lucy got up from the Queen Anne and went to sit beside her granddaughter on the couch. The air in the room was interrupted by Chanel No. 5 as she moved.

“Nothing…everything.” Troy tried to relax. Lucy’s haughty disposition really wasn’t as scary to Troy as it was to everyone else. For a long time in Troy’s life, this woman, with all of her flaws, had been her best friend, her only confidante, who took care of her as any crazy and loving grandmother would. “I don’t know, Lucy.”

“I had Paul drive by that church, saw those women there,” Lucy said. Her voice was plump with controversy. A retired socialite who now witnessed a new kind of drama as she sat on philanthropic boards of anything popular in the city, Lucy knew how to seek and savor a matter in need of attention. “That…that Myrtle Glover character…she was looking quite sour.”

“Oh, don’t mind Sister Glover. She just has her way. She always has.” Troy remembered the near lap dance Myrtle had given Kyle when she got the Holy Ghost the first time Troy visited the church.

“A way?” Lucy repeated. “Isn’t that the one who put on like a madwoman before you and Kyle got married? The one who broke the vase during your wedding ceremony and wore red nail polish?” Here, shining like a star, was one of Lucy’s best qualities—no matter how small, she never forgot the dirty details.

“Now, that was a mistake. She apologized. And, yes, she did have a thing for Kyle before I came into his life, but who wouldn’t? My husband is perfect.”

“Ma cherie.” Lucy stroked Troy’s hair like she was a hopeless puppy. “No woman in the history of womankind has ever only had a thing for a man in the past. Either she has a thing for him or not. Women don’t get over good men. Too few of them to go around. I tried to t

ell your mother about that before she left your father…again,” she added, referring to Troy’s parents, who were in the middle of their second bitter divorce. Troy hadn’t seen either of them much since she’d gotten married. When they were together, they were alive and unhappy; when they were apart, they were near dead, but fair.

“Sister Glover let go of the idea of getting with Kyle, Lucy,” Troy said confidently. “She’s a good Christian woman. She even taught me how to be a better Christian woman…a better Christian wife.” After Troy and Kyle had gotten engaged and Troy officially joined First Baptist, Myrtle volunteered to be her spiritual advisor and mentor in the church. Nervous about being attacked by other women for snagging the pastor, Troy thought it was the sweetest suggestion. While she’d been raised in the church, she wasn’t exactly of any church. For her, church was more of a social occasion where she got to meet the right people and sit in the right pews. It was more of a lesson in power and privilege than piety and prayer. Myrtle had changed all of that for her. Showed her the right way to Jesus. And Troy was grateful.

As if she was reading her dippy granddaughter’s thoughts, Lucy puckered her brow and plucked Troy upside her forehead.

“Ouch, Lucy!”

“How is someone who isn’t a wife going to teach you to be a better wife?” Lucy asked. “Seems she has enough on her plate, trying to find what you have…unless she still wants what you have.”