“Is this before or after Iceland?”he asked.
“This is for whenever we feel like bagging on life for a fewdays.”
“So, tomorrow.”
She laughed.
Then she queried, “Your day?”
“Think we licked the rust on the Bronco.May be able to makea stab at getting that fucker running next week.”
“Awesome.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.“You need me to go up and start dinner?”
She looked up at him.“Are you hungry?”
“Not overly, but if you are…?”
“I’m making sweet and sour shrimp.It’s a shortcut recipe.It takes half an hour.Work for you?”
He nodded.
She turned back to the store.
He looked to his side, saw a turntable with a recordspinning, then up on the wall above it, a Plexiglas shelf on which was theCatcha Firealbum sleeve with the Zippo lighter on it.
“Can I pick the next album?”he requested.
She twisted her neck and tipped her head back again, and hesaw her lips turned up.
“Sure.”
“Can I have a cherry Coke?”
The lip curve turned into a big smile.
“Sure,” she repeated.
Jag bent and kissed her before he hopped off the counter andheaded to the album section.
“So, there was a lot of baggage there,” Archie wassaying.
They were both sitting on stools at the bar to her kitchen,their dirty dishes shoved away, and there were a bunch of those old squarephotographs scattered in front of them.
“And it never left,” she went on.“Mom was never tight withher grandparents.It wasn’t just Grandma’s white parents, it was alsoGranddad’s Black ones.No one ever came to terms with them being together.Signof the times, I guess.It still was fucked up.”
He didn’t have to agree to the indisputable.
Because it was totally fucked up.
Jag took in the handsome Black man and the pretty whitewoman—Archie’s grandparents on her mother’s side—and he saw hints of both inArchie.
But it was the more recent photos that were mingled with therest where he saw a lot of his girl.
In the pictures of her mother.
“And making this weirder still, Granddad was not a big fanof Dad,” she continued.“He saw Mom being with a white guy as her rejection ofhim as a Black man.Though, eventually, he got over it.”
