Page 28 of Call Me Mrs. Taylor

“She’s a friend, Raya. Don’t fuck this up.”

“I still don’t understand that relationship, but okay.”

“It’s complicated,” she says.

“Yeah, I bet.”

Tori is only ten years older than I am, so we tend to get a little more personal than my mother was comfortable with. Like, I know all about Tori’s men. And women. And if Jonetta is one of the latter, well, that tea is piping hot. But Tori leans more on the discreet side of things when money is involved. She’s a hardworking nurse, always hustling.

My mother wasn’t comfortable with that, either.

Connie Ashford, née Richardson, was a homemaker. I don’t know if that’s what she wanted, or if my daddy influenced her to quit her job as a sales rep for IBM, but what I do know is she was there every day of my life for as far back as I can remember. She envied my aunt for her free-spiritedness, as much as she tried to disguise it as judgment.

Tori could pick up and go anytime she wanted because she had the will and the means. One day, she’d be in Greece. Two weeks later, she’d be in Senegal. A few months later, she’d call from St. Lucia with a man in the background. A week after that, her and some woman would be laid up in Ojai Valley.

Meanwhile, Connie was stuck in this hell house with two crumb snatchers and a shitty husband.

Oh, yeah.

I have a brother.

But that doesn’t matter.

Even when I was little, I understood that my mother and Tori were two different kinds of women. Connie was made of steel—rigid, unyielding, sharp enough to wound. Tori was fluid. Impossible to pin down, moving through life like she had no fear of sinking. She didn’t see the world in terms of survival like my mother did. She saw it in terms of freedom.

But they both left in the end.

One left physically, but she never strayed too far. The other left in all the ways that truly mattered.

“How’s your daddy doin’?” Tori asks, her tone even.

“He’s down there in his room, probably staring out the window like always.”

“Hmph,” she grunts. “Do you ever wonder…” she trails off, and my ears perk up.

“What?”

“Eh. I don’t know. Sometimes I think…it’s just…okay, I grew up with that man. I know my brother.”

Her voice is steady, but there’s an edge beneath it, a careful weight to her words that makes my skin prickle.

“Sometimes I feel like he might still be verbal.”

I sit up from my reclined position and tuck my legs under me. “Why do you say that?”

“I told you. I know him.”

“I’m around him more than you,” I say, trying to convince both of us. “I think I’d know. And why would he hide it from us if he was?”

“Waiting for his moment, maybe,” she says, and even though I don’t think she’s being a hundred percent serious, a small knot forms in my stomach at the thought.

“Just…don’t let your guard down,” she warns. “That’s all I’m saying.”

I break the tension by forcing out a laugh. “You’re paranoid, Auntie.”

“Maybe,” she says, but she isn’t convinced, and neither am I.

Silence stretches between us, because I think we both know some things are better left unsaid, especially over the phone. As if to punctuate her statement, and freak me out in the process, my father’s wheelchair moves across the wood floor downstairs, causing a faint creak to reach my ears. I glance toward my door, my pulse doing something weird to my throat.

---