The Good House Read online

  “So damn cute. That tall one reminds me of my cousin Betty,” Naomi said, before slipping a fork full of syrup-drowned waffles into her mouth. This was Naomi’s designated “Cheat Meal,” the one day a month she ate what she chose. Naomi’s face melted with delight as she ate. She chewed her waffle as if she’d never tasted sugar before.

  Angela had finished her food long ago, so her plate was a graveyard of stripped chicken bones. “I want to talk about Stan,” Angela said. Their usual habit was to avoid discussing business until their after-dinner coffee, but Angela was making an exception.

  Still hunched over her plate, Naomi looked up at her with one eyebrow raised. “You better not be about to give me any bad news while I’m eating my waffles, Angela.”

  “This deal is still fine. But I want to be honest. Stan tried to call me about five minutes after I hung up from you at lunchtime. I didn’t pick up the phone. I couldn’t talk to him,” Angela said, and she felt her unspoken words being sucked back down her throat. She realized she had just swallowed a sob. Quickly, she wiped the corners of her eyes. Naomi wasn’t the kind of friend Angela wanted to cry in front of. Maybe an old friend, if she’d hadn’t been hiding from them, but not a new one, especially a client. Why had she brought it up?

  She must be desperate to talk to someone, she realized. Life in the outside world wasn’t as ordered as it had been at The Harbor, with daily friendship sessions scheduled at two. Paid friendship, after all, was better than having no one to tell.

  “Honey!” Naomi said, blanketing Angela’s hand with the warmth of her own. “What’s wrong? Do you want to get out of here?”

  Angela shook her head. “No, enjoy your food. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what? I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends.” Angela had spent more time with Naomi in the past year than anyone else. Angela didn’t see many old memories reflected in Naomi’s face, and that alone made her precious.

  “You have to listen to enough of my shit, don’t you? Tell me what’s wrong.”

  So, against her better judgment, Angela told Naomi about Mrs. Everly’s call, the offer on Gramma Marie’s house, the time she’d spent in Sacajawea as a child. There were things she didn’t say, but she didn’t have to. Black Hollywood was a small circle, and there were some things everyone knew. “I think I just want to be rid of that place,” Angela finished.

  Naomi’s eyes, watching her, were wide and all-absorbing. “That’s deep, girl.”

  “Ain’t it, though?”

  Naomi smiled, virtually blinding Angela with her teeth. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you use that word. You never sayain’t.”

  Despite herself, Angela laughed. She dabbed her damp nostrils with her crumpled napkin. “Yeah, well, Gramma Marie drove that word out of my head. I tried to come to her every summer all grown, ‘You don’t tell me what to do and what to say’ and all that mess. By the time she was through with me, I got scared when I eventhought the wordain’t . Gramma Marie didn’t play.”

  “That sounds like Mama June, my grandmama in North Carolina, part of that Booker T. Washington generation. Putting your best foot forward. Representing for the race.”

  “Yes,” Angela said, heartened and surprised by this unexpected strand of kinship. “Gramma Marie made me read all of Booker T.’s books—Up from Slavery,the books about Tuskegee. Oh, and I had to readThe Souls of Black Folk by DuBois, too. Had me writing book reports on my summer vacations. Way back when, Mama wasn’t allowed to go to school in that town because it was segregated, so Gramma Marie taught her at home. When I came along, she put all that schooling on me, too.” And I tried to put it on Corey, she thought, keeping that part to herself. The thought hurt, but not nearly as much as it usually did.

  “Just like me!” Naomi said. “Mama June was the first person to make me recite Langston Hughes poems. And she taught me how to walk with books on my head for my posture. I thought she was crazy, but just look at us now, Angela. God bless those strong black women, huh?”

  “Yeah. God bless them,” Angela said. A rare radiance flooded her heart. She hadn’t permitted herself to think about how much she missed even her memories of Gramma Marie, given that so much of her grandmother was locked inside a house she could no longer stand the sight of. Tears came, but they didn’t feel bitter. Nor drain her strength.

  “I’m’a tell you what I think,” Naomi said, leaning closer. “Your decision about selling your grandmama’s house and that history, that’s between you and Jesus. Maybe selling the house will be the best thing, in the end. But something else Mama June used to tell me: I have intuition. I’ve got a good feel for people and situations. And it sure comes in handy in this town, where people kiss your ass for an hour and forget you an hour later. So I have a feeling about you, Angela.”

  Angela believed in intuition, too, she realized. She hadn’t always, but she did now. She had irrefutable proof of it: She’dknown something was wrong that day of the party. All day long, she’d known it. That might be what had driven her crazy for a little while, just knowing that she’d known. And that knowing hadn’t mattered. It hadn’t helped her stop it.POP

  “What’s your feeling?” Angela said.

  Naomi put her face was so close to Angela’s that their noses nearly touched. “You can’t make that decision until you go to the house again. Spend a few days with it. See if you’re ready to say good-bye.”

  Angela pulled away. “I can’t do that.”

  “Youthink you can’t. But I think you have to, Angela. If you never go back and you decide to sell that house, you might wake up one day and realize you made a mistake you can’t fix. And all because you didn’t know you were ready. What you gonna tell the ancestors then?”

  The ancestors. Now, Naomi sounded like Gramma Marie. It dawned on Angela that she’d never learned more about Naomi’s life outside of the business because she hadn’t shared more of herself either. So much of her job entailed trying to soothe Naomi’s artist’s ego, she’d tricked herself into believing that was all there was to this woman. Naomi knew her better than she’d thought, and she didn’t know Naomi nearly well enough.

  “You know what happened in that house, Naomi.” This was the closest she’d come to talking about the Fourth of July with someone who wasn’t a shrink.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “Then you know why I can’t go back there right now.”

  “I also know that’s your grandmama’s house, and you can’t run from it. If you go back there and the love has been buried by the pain, all right then. That’s when you’llknow . Go on and sell it, let someone else love it. But you can’t walk around thinking you’re the same person you were two years ago—because I saw you two years ago, girl, and it ain’t true.”

  Had Naomi been at the funeral? Of course she had, because almost all of her old law firm’s clients and other industry types had attended out of respect. They hadn’t been doing her any favors, either. Ironically, Angela mused, her display at the funeral was probably the reason so many clients had hesitated to hire her. But not Naomi. She had seen the whole thing—the beginning of what had felt like Angela’s irretrievable descent into a mental bog—and it hadn’t mattered to her.

  “I can’t go through that again,” Angela said.

  “Angela, youwon’t . Look, I’m not saying it won’t hurt—of course it will. But my intuition tells me you need to do this. Not a little bit, either. Alot . And you know what? If it’ll make it easier, I’ll go with you.”

  A young couple in African-style clothing was hovering a few yards from their table, pretending to read a newspaper article framed on the wood-paneled wall while they glanced at Naomi every few seconds with fevered recognition. They were both in their twenties, an age Angela could barely remember, a figment of her own imagination. Angela both pitied and envied the woman she’d been then, always railing at life because she thought it was so hard—when she still had no idea what hard really was. Hard had
just been getting started.

  The couple took steps toward them, and Angela knew she was going to lose Naomi’s attention to fans—“spreading good juju,” Naomi called it. But Naomi did something Angela had never seen her do before: She shifted away from the curious couple. Nothing overt, but enough that her body language spoke volumes, a big red neonDO NOT DISTURB sign. The couple got the message. With sad faces, they drifted back to their seats.

  “Think about it, all right?” Naomi said, holding Angela’s eyes. “Maybe after you get me my million from FilmQuest. My next shoot isn’t until the end of the month. Why don’t we celebrate in…what’s your grandmother’s town called again?”

  Suddenly, Angela felt a bubble break.

  How could she expect Naomi Price to drop everything to go up to Gramma Marie’s house with her? Naomi wouldn’t be caught dead in Sacajawea. People like Naomi Price went through life governing their satellites, and Angela was just another of her satellites. Angela had seen Naomi talk to fans and producers alike with this identical intense sincerity, and Naomi’s ability to make people believe they were the center of her universe was her greatest star quality.

  Down girl,Angela scolded herself, looking away from Naomi’s eyes. She was obsessing, a feeling she recognized from a squeezing sensation in her chest. As the shrinks had pointed out, her tendency to obsess and second-guess had betrayed her many times before. What was so damned hard about allowing herself to have one true friend?

  “It’s called Sacajawea,” Angela said, ignoring her misgivings. “And I’ll think about it.”

  And maybe, God help her, she really would.

  Three

  THIS WAS GOINGto be one of the hard nights.

  A daily menu of tragedies on the ten o’clock news blared from Angela’s television set while she untied the melted ice-pack from her sore left thigh. Early on, she used to coddle herself when she felt tweaks and twinges while she was running, but now she’d learned to endure the punishment and distinguish between normal and abnormal pains. She iced at night, and in the morning she’d wake up groaning and hissing as she swung her cadaver-stiff legs over the side of her bed. How had the gorgeous guy in the park put it? Feeling like she’d been hit by a truck. Right on, mister.

  But she could live with that. Physical pain was the easiest part of her life.

  As Angela stood at her kitchen counter unwrapping herself, she sipped from her cup of herbal tea and dreaded going to bed. She couldn’t put it off much longer. If she didn’t hit her pillow by ten-thirty, she’d have no chance of getting up by five-thirty, which was the only routine that gave her enough time in the mornings to jog, read theTimes and the trades, and start making her East Coast telephone calls before the New Yorkers headed to lunch.

  She hadn’t turned on her lights. The dancing, flickering parade of colors glowing from the television set cast strobelike shadows across the stacks of boxes crowding what was supposed to be her living room. There was a sofa in there somewhere, but mostly the room looked unchanged from when she’d moved into the Sunset Villas apartment eight months before. The only difference now was that most of the boxes had been ripped open. She had never really unpacked, constantly searching through boxes. She could think of much more practical uses for the $2,500 a month she spent on this secure downtown apartment and its 1,500 square feet of glorified storage space. She’d moved in with the dream of an elegant place to entertain her clients: Her kitchen had Italian granite floors and counters, the balcony was large enough for a party, shaded by potted palm trees, and the obscenely large master bathroom was equipped with a black marble jetted soaking tub she and her aching muscles practically lived in.

  So far, no one had seen any of it but her, and the longer she lived here, the more she doubted anyone ever would. She slept here and occasionally ate here, but the apartment felt more cold and austere all the time. She was a visiting drifter. Every morning, Angela awoke to the chaos of boxes and asked herself if she believed this was the way a healthy person would live. The answer, of course, washell no . But as much as she hated not being unpacked, she had not claimed this space either.

  The newscaster’s voice made its way past her thoughts. “…Century City toddler is dead tonight after his six-year-old brother accidentally shot him with a handgun their father left within the boys’ easy reach, police say. The tragedy happened—”

  Instinctively, Angela picked up the remote and changed the channel. She found Lifetime, whereThe Golden Girls were wisecracking in the safety of their comfortable, pastel world. How could she have forgotten never to watch the news before bedtime? Maybe she’d been testing herself, hoping she was ready to reenter the detached society of people who didn’t take the nightly news personally. If so, she’d just failed the test.

  Angela finished her tea, hoping the valerian root, passionflower, and kava-kava would take her down fast, since it was late and she didn’t have time for a hot soak tonight. Supermarket tea wasn’t as good as Gramma Marie’s, but it would have to do. She wouldn’t go foraging in her medicine cabinet for her bottle of Xanax, either. Those days were over. She would learn how to do this on her own, all by herself.

  “Welcome to Helltime,” Angela sighed, and she limped toward her bedroom.

  Helltime. Bedtime. One night at a time.

  My mama is not going to be-LIEVE this

  Mom? Can I talk to you? I want to give you something

  Angela’s eyes snapped open. Eleven o’clock, the bright red numbers on her clock said.

  She thought she’d made it. She almost had. But as soon as she’d felt her limbs finally loosening with occasional tiny sleep-spasms, the lid on the Pandora’s box in her mind had toppled out of place, releasing the voices. She’d heard that teenage girl from Roscoe’s, the one who’d wanted Naomi’s autograph. And then Corey next.

  The voices almost always led to Corey.

  Some people had bad dreams. Not Angela. She wasn’t certain she dreamed at all; she couldn’t remember a dream she’d had in years. But Helltime was the weakness in Angela’s defense system—she couldn’t control her thoughts when she was in that space between waking and sleeping, vulnerable. The closer she floated toward sleep, the more animated her mind’s menagerie became, playing random images, voices, and whole conversations, as if an entire cast of characters sat in her head waiting for the curtain to rise.

  Why,here you are, Angela. So nice of you to join us again, old girl!

  Sometimes she bobbed to consciousness and realized she couldn’t follow the nonsensical trains of thought, and she drifted to full sleep, relieved and unmolested as the harmless babble whispered in her imagination. But sometimes—oftentimes—her thoughts came back to familiar, painful re-frains. Her thoughts took her hostage. When that happened, she felt herself fleeing to wakefulness like she had fallen into a well, flailing for light and air.

  My mama is not going to be-LIEVE this

  Corey and that girl from Roscoe’s would be about the same age now, seventeen. If Corey had been at the restaurant having dinner with them tonight, he might have thought the girl was cute. He might have pretended to be looking elsewhere while he glanced up at her with quick, sly flicks of his eyes, the way she’d first noticed by the time he turned thirteen. MyG od, she’d thought to herself when she observed it, Corey is changing. Corey is growing up.

  Except that he wasn’t growing up, not anymore. Corey was dead.

  Dead.

  A handgun his father left within easy reach

  POP

  You fucking sonofabitch. Look into this coffin and see what you did. Just like Emmett Till’s mama said when they beat her son to death, I want you to SEE it.You did this, Tariq. Look at his face. Look what you did to him with that gun and your lies. It doesn’t even LOOK like him anymore! YOU KILLED HIM YOU FUCKING SONOFABITCH

  I’m gonna take care of you good, Mom

  Angela jerked to full wakefulness again. Her heart had lobbed itself into her throat, beating hard. She raised her hand to the spot,
wondering if her air passage was blocked. But, no. She could breathe, even if her breath had hitched slightly. She felt a thin sheen of perspiration across her neck, tracing it with her index finger to her collarbone. When Angela saw the boxes stacked around her bed, she stared and blinked for a few seconds, confused. Where had these boxes come from? Dr. Houston wouldn’t like these boxes in her room. She didn’t have clearance for so many things. It was against The Harbor’s regulations.

  But she wasn’t at The Harbor, was she?

  Angela recognized her venetian blinds slatting the moonlight, the red numbers glowing from the digital clock. Eleven-twenty. This was the apartment. She wasn’t still living at the private mental retreat where she’d checked herself in for three months after Corey’s death. She had left The Harbor nearly eighteen months ago. Dr. Houston had written her a prescription for Xanax, referred her to an outside psychotherapist, assured her of how much better she was doing, and told her she was free to go. Resume your life, she’d said. Start your new business, your talent agency. Go home.