Page 17 of Happy Is On Hiatus
“You knowcalm’s not in Taryn’s vocabulary,” Necole said. She’d done as her mother had told her and was now lowering the first basket full of uncooked potatoes into the hot grease. The sizzling sound of contact filled the kitchen, but Rita still heard Taryn suck her teeth.
“Now’s really not the time to be a kiss-up, Nikki,” she said and rolled her eyes at her sister.
“Don’t talk to your sister that way.” Rita had never stood for bickering or teasing between her daughters. “Look, I know this isn’t easy for either of you to hear, but your father has been seeing another woman. I found out because she called me to inform me that she’s having his baby.” She waited a beat, looking from one daughter to the next to see if Nate had left that little tidbit of information out of his talk with them.
“And you believe her?” Necole asked.
Because discussing this deeply personal situation with her daughters was more than a little uncomfortable, Rita went back to her cooking. She picked up the plastic bag full of bread crumbs she’d shredded to a fine texture earlier today and poured them into the bowl. This was the secret to the best crab cakes—the less filler that was tasted in the cake, the better. So, chewing her cakes was like tasting a mouthful of even more flavorful meat than was fresh out of the shell. After the bread crumbs, she added Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper, and of course, a healthy dose of Old Bay Seasoning. She used a fork to stir the mixture and was either so focused on the task or too deep into her thoughts to stop, because the next thing she knew, Necole was touching her arm, whispering, “Mama, are you okay?”
“What?” she asked and then looked down at the wet mixture that had been mixed almost to a liquid status. “Oh. Dang it. I’m sorry, got carried away.” She reached for the bowl of crab meat and dumped it into the bowl with the wet mixture.
“You didn’t answer her question,” Taryn said. “Do you believe this chick that called you?”
Rita had thought about this all last night and then a good portion of today. She was actually tired of thinking about it and hoped this would be the one and only time she’d have to discuss it again. Well, except for whenever she decided to tell the Aunts.
“I do,” she said and then began combining the meat into the wet mixture. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Necole removing the first baskets of fries and refilling them with the rest of the potatoes.
Rita loved potatoes, but she could stand to cut down on her starch intake, so she only planned to eat a crab cake.
“Just like that? You don’t even know her.” Taryn was beyond upset, and the hurt tingeing her angry tone broke Rita’s heart. “And who even calls the wife anymore? That’s not what side chicks do nowadays. They know how to play their position.”
Rita frowned. “Meaning she decides to be a tawdry secret for the rest of her life.” Rita could never, ever live that way.
Necole shrugged. “It’s a real title with benefits for some women. But I never thought Daddy would ... I mean, I still don’t know if I believe it. Why don’t you wait for a DNA test?”
“Thank you! Now you see what I’m saying,” Taryn said to her sister before turning her attention back to Rita. “I feel like you rushed to a conclusion and just did what Aunt Sharae and Aunt Jemel told you to do.”
That stung. “What do you mean by that? I don’t do what anybody tells me to do, Taryn. I make my own decisions.” Except that wasn’t entirely true. A good portion of Rita’s life was exactly as her mother had told her it should be, and look where that had led her.
Taryn didn’t look like she believed Rita’s words any more than Rita expected her to. Despite Rita trying to be a different type of parent than her mother had been to her, Taryn and Necole had been brought up in the same church, listening to the same rhetoric that Rita had as a child. They’d also sat at the same dining room table with the Aunts, hearing them give one lecture after another about how Black women should act, what they should wear, and whom they should love.
“I believed that woman because I know your father.” It was on the tip of her tongue that this wasn’t the first time that Nate had cheated on her, but it really wasn’t her goal to tear down the father her daughters knew and loved.
“Obviously you don’t. If you’d just waited and talked to me and Nikki first, we could’ve helped you see the truth.”
“I don’t need any help seeing the truth. And talking to you and your sister first wouldn’t have changed my decision,” she replied. “You and your sister have a right to your opinion; after all, this affects you too.” Not nearly in the way that it affected Rita, but she wasn’t going to totally count them out of the equation.
“Then why aren’t you listening to us? It’s like you’re just hell-bent on doing your own thing. What is it? Do you have another guy?”
Rita turned at Taryn’s words, staring into root-beer-brown eyes she’d gazed into when they were just three days old. Taryn had been five weeks premature, her four-and-a-half-pound body so light in Rita’s arms. But when she’d cried, as Aunt Rose used to put it, “all hell broke loose.” The thought almost had Rita smiling, but for the disgusted look that the adult Taryn was now tossing her way.
“I hear the concern and the hurt in you and your sister’s voice, and I’m sorry for my part in the pain that you’re experiencing.” Hearing the disappointment and despair in her daughters’ voices was breaking a part of Rita, another barrier she hadn’t even realized she’d placed around her carefully manicured life. “But you obviously aren’t listening to me.”
With all the ingredients mixed, Rita pinched a piece and put it into her mouth to taste. It needed more Old Bay and mustard. She added them both before doing another taste. That was better, and she began patting handfuls of the mixture into cakes and placing them onto an empty plate while she waited for the fries to finish cooking. Rita preferred her crab cakes broiled, but her family had always loved them deep-fried. While she waited, she opened a cabinet and took out some plates.
There were no paper utensils used in Rita’s house unless it was a cookout or other function that drew a crowd of people to her house. For the smaller dinner parties that she’d often hosted for Nate’s business associates, she used the good china. Today, she used her everyday dishes, which were still very nice considering the hefty price tag they carried.
“We heard you say you kicked our father out of his own house.”
Could a person dislike another person who’d been born from their very own body? She was starting to think so. How easy would it be to yell that she didn’t owe Taryn or Necole any explanations? What happened between Rita and Nate wastheirbusiness; it wastheirmarriage that had fallen apart. None of that had anything to do with the daughters they shared, except, yeah, on some level it definitely did.
“It was time for him to go,” Rita said quietly. She stood with her back to both her daughters now. “I wish he would’ve left years ago.” She’d never admitted that to anyone before.
The shock of the statement had Taryn gasping and Rita moving quickly to put back all the ingredients she’d taken out for the mix.
“So, you checked out on the marriage a long time ago?”
“No, Taryn,” Rita said, raising her voice louder than she’d intended. “Your father checked out each time he went home with another woman.”
