“Why the fuck didn’t you bring them to the damn airport?” Lionel looked at Tasha like she was crazy.
“Because I wanted to talk to you about this.”
“About fucking what?”
“About the move…”
“There’s nothing to fucking talk about.” Lionel held up his hands to show his puzzlement.
Tasha winced at every curse that came from his lips. Lionel wasn’t a violent man. He almost never even raised his voice. But when he was upset, he cursed like a drunken sailor on weekend leave. Dropping f-bombs was his way of dealing with aggravation. The only way Tasha could get his attention after that was to drop the subject or drop more bombs than him. And she was leaning toward the latter. It was a dramatic dance any married woman knew, and while Tasha wasn’t the best at it, she needed to at least be good. Good enough. Because what she wasn’t telling Lionel was that she’d already packed up half of their belongings, scheduled a moving van, and redirected the mail.
She needed bombs. Canons. Howitzers. Heavy artillery.
“Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it! Fuck it! Just fuck it!” She hollered, banging on the steering wheel as the car jerked from left to right in the traffic on the freeway. Lionel lowered his hands and looked at her. “You know what? I was just trying to do something for this family—for our children. Get them out of this godforsaken hick-ass state and into some motherfucking culture. But just forget it. Fucking forget it! Shit! Fuck me for even trying to be a good mother.”
If any of their grandmothers were alive, bars of Ivory soap would be poking out of both of the LaRoches’ mouths, but in this situation clean language was the mouthwash of losers.
“Pull this motherfucker over!” Lionel shouted, pulling the steering wheel so the car jerked far to the right until Tasha got control again and charged off of the exit into a McDonald’s drive-through.
“You want to tell me what’s right for my damn children?” Lionel started, snatching the keys from the ignition. “What’s more fucking right than what they already have—a million-dollar mansion in the best neighborhood in the country, preadmission to the best day school in the state, every piece of goddamn brand-name clothing you can find, safety, food, heat in the fucking winter, cool air in the summer. Shit, when we took Toni to the mountains last year, I realized she’d never even seen dirt. What’s better than that? What could be better than the life they have?”
“If we keep them here, they’re just gonna turn out like every other suburban teen—sheltered, privileged, and pretentious.”
“They are sheltered and privileged,” Lionel said. “And they should be pretentious. You know, I told you when I agreed to have Toni that I wanted the best for my children. Better than what I had, growing up in the damn projects, not knowing my damn daddy, thinking I was nothing. I’m not nothing anymore and my girls are something. I want them to know that. There ain’t nothing in that fucking city that’s gonna be good for—wait a minute.” Lionel jumped out of the car and ran around to Tasha’s side, pulling her from the car and standing before her like a solid
er in war. “Them…this isn’t them going back to the city. This is about you. About the fucking meeting with…what’s her name…Lynn.”
“No,” Tasha tried, but it was too late. Lionel had added up everything he thought he knew in his mind. “It’s not about—”
“I fucking know you. Everything is about Tasha. Everything. You just want to get back into the city so you can be a drunk with your friends and buy a bunch of shit to make yourself feel better about the fact that you’ll never be as successful as your mother.”
Tasha balled up her fists.
“You know, sometimes when we fight, you take shit too far and now you have, Lionel,” she said, fuming with anger. “Take that back.”
“No, Tasha. Because it’s time I said it to you. It’s time I told you that I know you only had Toni because you wanted to prove that you could be a better mother than Porsche was to you and when Toni came and your mother came here from LA and—”
“Stop!”
“—and everything was perfect for a little while as you two pretended that you didn’t still hate each other, you thought you had her. But when she left and she wasn’t there anymore to watch you be the perfect mother—”
“No!” Tasha wanted to stop Lionel. His words were pouring into her ears like lava.
“—you didn’t know what to do, so you had to one-up her again—and that’s the only reason—”
“You stop it—”
“No!” Lionel barked, inching so close into Tasha she couldn’t breathe. “That’s the only reason you had Tiara. The only reason!”
“It’s not true. None of it’s true,” Tasha cried.
“Come on. You weren’t even thinking about children until it was clear your business wasn’t working,” Lionel said. “You weren’t the hot news anymore. You were my wife and people wanted me out front.”
“Putting you out front was my job.”
“Not for long…it didn’t impress Porsche for long. I wasn’t enough.”
“You think I married you to impress her?” Tasha asked.