Take Her Man

“Troy,” she reached over and grabbed my arm, “your grandfather was a B-type.”

“Yes.”

“Lucy is an A.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m an A.”

“What? What are you saying?” I was no scientist, but my years of watching soaps in between classes in college made it clear where this was going. Then, just then, I looked out at the street in front of me and began to realize how slow the world moves. While they beg to look fast, people slip by slowly, cars meander in sluggish motion, and even the air sits still if you really pay attention. Maybe it wasn’t the entire world that was slowing down. Maybe it was just my world, the one I knew that was coming apart in slow seconds.

“If two people with A and B blood types conceive, the child is always an AB.” She looked out of the window. “My father had to have been an A.”

“What did Lucy say?”

“What could she say? She lied. The man she claimed was my father was dying and there was nothing any of us could do.”

“Did he know?”

She turned to me and wiped a tear from my cheek. She shook her head no and turned to the look out of the side window, placing her hand over her mouth.

“Why did she lie? To you? To him? To me? All these years, Lucy’s been lying?”

“My father was a black man. She’d been having an affair with him for years, even before she met my father. He lived in Harlem.” She gave a short, sad laugh. “His name was Oscar. He was mixed. Had short blond hair, hazel eyes, freckles like mine across his nose….”

“But Lucy loved Grandpa.” I ran my hand along the freckles above my cheeks.

“He was a horn player who played at the club where Lucy and my father met,” she went on. “He lived just a few blocks away from the brownstone your father grew up in.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“He died a few months after I was born. Overdosed on heroine.”

“This is so sad. I just don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t feel bad, baby. There’s nothing you did wrong. This is our stuff and that’s why I’ve been dealing with it on my own. I didn’t want to pull you into it. You’re dealing with your own life.”

“But this is my life,” I said. “You’re my family and this is my life.” I felt so helpless. Everything, anything I knew growing up just seemed like a lie. I was Troy Helene Smith—that was who I was. My family had its issues, but that was who I was. I’d learned to deal with it. “It’s all a lie,” I continued, shaking with fear. “My life.”

“No, baby. That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do. You can’t believe for one second that anything you have lived was a lie. You are still my daughter and until they put my father’s body into the ground you were his granddaughter. That man loved you dearly. And he’d roll over in his grave if he thought for one minute you denied being his granddaughter. Some things go beyond blood and we can’t make him pay for Lucy’s mistake.”

I took a deep breath and sat back in my seat, trying to take it all in.

“So, that’s why you and Lucy haven’t been speaking lately?” I asked. My mother and grandmother’s relationship had always been strained, but since my grandfather had gotten ill, it seemed like they were on opposite sides of the ocean. I always thought it was because since my grandfather died, they’d had no one to play referee and keep the peace.

“I can’t deal with her right now. That woman put me through so much with her shit,” she screamed. “I just need a break. I just need to get myself together and realize that my mother is never going to change. She’s just fucked up. She’s been fucked up and that’s it.”

“Mom, Lucy’s not all bad. She has some good sides.”

“All of the stuff she put me though, making me believe I wasn’t good enough because my skin was darker than hers, making me feel bad about marrying your father, all of it was to protect her lie, to keep that bullshit going long enough so she could cash in on my father’s money.”

“Do you think that was all it was? Really, Mom? She loved Grandpa,” I said, “You know that. I don’t care if she lied. She made a mistake. We both know how things were back then. Right or wrong, she did what she had to do.”

“Well, she did what she had to do and I’m doing what I have to do,” my mother said, wiping away the last of her tears. “I can’t live in the past. I may not have a relationship with my mother, but I’m going to make sure we have one.” She looked at me and forced a smile. “If I get anything from this whole thing, it has to be that I want to have a strong relationship with you.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling bad for all the times I’d turned my back on her. All this time my mother has been going through something horrible and I haven’t been there for her. I felt selfish and mean. I had to help her though this.

As we drove to the airport, I thought of my grandfather, how he loved my mother so much he often told people she was the only thing that made life worth living. While raising her risked everything he’d had, he once told me he would rather have been a poor man if being rich meant he’d never had my mother and then had me for a grandchild. He was a beautiful man who loved us all with everything he’d had. My mother was right; he’d always be my grandfather.