“Someone had to after Momma died. That’s what she would’ve wanted.”
“No. She would’ve wanted you to be happy. Like she was.” He glanced at his watch then tapped it. “I have to go. My happily ever after is waiting for me to have dinner and help the kids with their homework.” He patted her shoulder on his way past. “Maybe you and Rosie could join us one weekend.”
She couldn’t help but smile thinking of Rosie with her at Aaron’s house, but then she stopped herself. Would an invite to her brother’s house overstep the boundaries of their situationship? Or would it be considered just a friendly gesture? After going with Rosie to pick up her mom’s ashes, they’d definitely taken their friendship to a new level, and the intimacy between them had ramped up a hundred notches. Was she getting actualfeelingsfor Rosie? She shook her head. Of course she had feelings, and they’d been getting stronger since she stepped on the plane to San Diego—she just needed to know what they meant.
“Shanae?” her daddy half-shouted, his voice echoing in the quiet hallway.
So he was getting his strength back then. She rounded the doorway and smiled, not sure what reception to expect. He gave her a small smile, but she couldn’t interpret his expression. It certainly wasn’t one she’d seen in a long time.
“Hey, Daddy.” She dropped into the sleeper chair beside his bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Like Kelly Pierce cracked my head open with an ice pick and dug around in there for ancient artifacts,” he said. “How do you think?”
And there he was again. Whatever they’d drained from his brain, it hadn’t been his grumpiness. He groaned as if in pain. “Issomething wrong? Do you need me to get a nurse?”
He shook his head and didn’t make eye contact. “No nurse or doctor can fix this.”
“Are you in pain? They can probably increase the morphine on the drip.”
“Morphine can’t make the pain in my heart go away, girl.”
Was he delirious? They’d said to look out for signs of inconsistent behavior, and this didn’t sound like him at all. She was half out of her chair, going to call for a nurse anyway.
He patted the bed. “Relax, Shanae. My head’s fine, and I’m not confused.” He opened his hand to her. “In fact, I haven’t been this clear since your momma died. Seems like I needed a giant knock to the brain to wake me up.”
Shay tentatively accepted the gesture, not wanting to speak in case she broke whatever spell this was. He hadn’t held her hand since she was maybe ten years old on one of those rare family trips to the park for a community picnic.
“I was lost when your momma passed,” he said quietly, “and I haven’t been able to find my way back to any of you, but you especially.”
The initial shock of whatever this was began to recede, and all the questions she harbored about the past six years pushed to be voiced. “Why? Why me? You’ve been soangrywith me, so dismissive. I just don’t know what I did wrong.” She looked up at him and what she saw almost made her jump out of her chair like she’d received an electric shock. His dark brown eyes were edged with tears, and then one escaped and tracked along the deep lines of his face.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, girl. This is all on me. I was angry because you weren’t there when your momma died. She wanted nothing more than to see her baby girl one more time before she passed, but by the time you got home, she was gone.”
“That wasn’t my fault,” Shay said, finding her feet again. “My CO?—”
“I know, I know. But I was already angry at your choice to join the Army. You got a math scholarship to Yale, Shanae. You were the first in our family to have a chance to do something more than blue-collar work, to be a Black professor. Hell, you could’ve been our first Black female president. But you chose the Army. Did you know that your grandpa spent three months in Long Binh jail?—”
“The military prison in Vietnam?” She knew her grandpa had served, but this was new information.
He nodded. “For supposed insubordination. You know what your grandpa actually did?”
“No,” Shay whispered.
“He refused to follow an order to beat a fellow soldier, another Black man, who was caught with marijuana.” He pounded on the bed with his other hand.
“You need to calm down, Daddy, or the alarm’s gonna go off.” She gestured toward the monitor and his rising heart rate.
He glanced at it and nodded slowly. “Did you know it took the US government nearly sixty years to award his Black captain the Medal of Honor for his bravery in the Vietnam War?”
Shay shook her head. “I had no idea.”
“The real fight for us was in America, not Vietnam. It was okay for us to put on a uniform and shoot Viet Cong, but back home, we couldn’t even sit at a lunch counter.”
“Things have changed, Daddy. That was nearly fifty years ago,” she said with a conviction she had no right to feel and no evidence to support. She’d experienced it herself, especially from their old CO, Nelson. Her daddy’s rejection started to come into focus; it was more about his dislike of her career choice than her as his daughter.
“Have they? Five percent of the most senior officers in the military are Black, Shanae. Five percent. It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s made of cement to stop us from getting to the top.”
“We can only change that from the inside,” she said. “Look, Daddy, thank you for sharing that part of your history with me, butit should be exactly that:yourhistory. By taking that out on me, you’ve made it your present…and your future if we don’t fix things.”
