Should Have Known Better

“Bad day, huh?”

R. J. pushed his hands farther down into the sand.

“Well, you know what Mama says about bad days.” I paused to give him a chance to respond, but he didn’t. “Don’t focus on what happened, focus on what you will do next.” I slid my hand into the sand beside R. J.’s and clutched it.

He looked at me as if he’d seen me someplace before.

“So what a

re we going to focus on now?” I asked.

R. J. looked from me to his left hand that was still buried in the sand.

“What, precious? You want Mama to hold your other hand.”

I slid my hand into the other sandy grave and tried to clutch his hand, only it was balled up. I tried to force it open, but R. J. quickly released his grasp and slid into my hand what felt like a stick. I pulled my hand out of the sand.

“A red marker?” I held it up.

“Trouble,” R. J. said affirmatively. “I’m going to get in trouble.” He nodded and looked at his father, who’d come up behind me.

“Oh, sweetie. It’s not trouble. You just have to give it back and apologize. Can you do that?”

R. J. nodded again.

“You can’t take things that don’t belong to you. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, Mama,” he said.

“Now, let’s get your sister.”

Whenever a day came, and there were many of those days, when we had to manage the negative outcomes of R. J.’s autism, it was nearly certain that we’d have to handle Cheyenne’s attitude. In my brief stint writing diaries about her, I wrote of a baby who was always trying to climb away from me—and that was before she could really climb. The doctors later concluded that she’d likely never develop autism, but I knew something else was brewing. The more I pulled her to me, the more she pushed away. And soon, I just let her go. She taught herself how to walk.

By the time I lassoed her away from her friends and into the car, she was promising to hate me forever and swore a life of eternal silence before telling her brother to stop looking at her “with his stupid bug eyes.”

It was getting dark outside. Reginald had driven ahead of us in his truck. I looked at the twins in the rearview mirror.

“Stop being mean, Cheyenne,” I said, deciding to crush the prospects of a fight by making R. J. recall everything they’d done in school that day. Cheyenne rolled her eyes at the travesty of discussion and seemed to push her back so hard into the seat that it was clear that she wanted to disappear.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Reginald started coolly after dinner. “I listened to the messages on the machine when I got in. Sasha called.”

The house was just getting quiet. The twins were in their bedrooms. I was washing the dishes. Reginald sat at the kitchen table looking over receipts.

“Sasha? You mean from Spelman Sasha?”

The old faucet spat out a rush of overheated water and it nearly burned my hands.

“Yeah. The one with the, you know, television voice, like, ‘Hey, Dawnie, this is Sasha Bellamy—’ ” He’d contorted his voice into a nasal know-it-all inflection, the one he preferred to use when he was making fun of certain people of a certain class. “‘I’m in Augusta. I wanted to stop by your place tomorrow. I have some free time. Maybe I can stay for the weekend. Spend some time with you and the kids. Can’t wait to see you, soror. Give me a call. Awesome!’ ” He flashed a cheerleader’s smile and then pretended to vomit.

I slapped him with the dish towel.

“ ‘Awesome!’ ” he repeated robotically.

“She said she’s coming here?” I asked, tossing the towel onto the counter. “She wants to come to our house?”

“It’s all on the machine. Listen to it. I left it on there.”

“She’s coming here tomorrow?” I looked around the kitchen. Down at my chipped fingernails. “But this place is a mess. Why didn’t you tell me about the message earlier when we got in?”