“The kid’s table,” Aunt Faye replies.
He pushes the back of Chase’s head. “Take that to the kid’s table.”
Chase yanks it from my hands and takes a step to the side, but Rich pulls the back of his shirt, making him stop as the beanie weenies slosh around in the pan.
“Don’t be doing all that motherfuckin running through here. You see all these women around,” Rich says, twirling his finger around the bustling pavilion. “You knock one of ‘em down and I’m gon’ knock you down. Now gon’ on.”
Chase grins back at his firm chastising and nods before taking a cautious step forward, and then another, until his shirt slides from Rich’s fingers. He walks with the pan as if an officer asked him to walk in a straight line to prove he’s sober. His littlefeet even tremble as he glances back at Rich after every step until Rich nods his head toward the kid’s table, silently telling him to “keep going.”
Afterward Rich cuts his eyes back to our mismatched group, and the air feels heavier in a way that only he can make it.
Meechie moves first.
She pushes her hip out and smiles up at him with new porcelain white teeth I didn’t even notice. “I think we met one time at Jazzy’s back when I used to bartend on Sunday nights. You ordered three shots of Don Julio and a grapefruit juice.”
His eyes roll over to me.
There’s nothing in them that says they’ve met or fucked. This moment doesn’t even feel like the time I finally had the pleasure of meeting AJ’s side chick at one of the draft afterparties or the terrible times I met Rasheeda and Beatrice. This feels like Rich and I have lived a thousand lives together where I knowfor surethat on Sundays the only women he has time for are me and LaTanya. And he doesn’t even drink clear liquor—he only drinks brown.
“Introduce me,” he says, looking right at me.
My eyes widen and I cut them at Aunt Faye, but there’s no shock on her face. She raises her eyebrows and gives me an impatient look instead.
I clear my throat. “Um…Meechie, this is Ri—this isPup. Pup this is Meechie and her cousin Terrica.”
He pushes his hand out toward them. They stare at it with bewildered expressions as if they’ve never met a man until Meechie finally pushes her hand into his.
“Nice to meet you,” he says, flinging it up and down.
“Are you sure we?—”
“Never.” He shakes his head. “I ain’t been up in Jazzy’s since you was probably a lil’ girl.”
He pulls his hand from hers and shakes Terrica’s, giving her the same “nice to meet you” with no emotion behind his words.
He drops her hand just as quickly as he picked it up, then looks back at me. In fact, they’re all silently staring at me.
“Fix me a plate, Slim,” Rich says, breaking the silence and narrowing his eyes at Aunt Faye. “I’mma go holler at Lucky and D and I’ll meet you at my truck. I parked in the back by the trees.”
“He won’t eat those ribs,” Aunt Faye mutters from beside me while we stand at the BBQ table under the pavilion.
The ribs in question dangle from the plastic tongs I’m holding over Rich’s plate. I drop them back into the pan, glancing over my shoulder at Aunt Faye.
She crosses her arms and leans against the table. Somehow watching me fix Rich’s plate supersedes all the other things she has to do ever since he narrowed his eyes at her before strolling off into the crowd of people outside the pavilion.
I turn back to the table, shuffle over to the baked beans, and pick up the spoon in the pan. I nudge one of the sauce-covered sausages inside it.
I don’t know if Rich likes his dirty rice touching his baked beans or if he likes wings instead of leg quarters. I don’t even know if he eats everybody’s potato salad, but here I am “fixing his plate.”
She sighs. “He might eat the beans. It depends on what type of sausages Vera used.”
I scoop up a spoonful and dangle it over the plate.
“That’s too much.”
I drop the spoon in the pan and turn toward her. “Look, I’m…I’m not. We’re not?—”
“Sleeping together?” She purses her lips. “Yeah. He told me.”
