Disgruntled by Asali Solomon Page B

volume and sweetening her voice with a flourish, “your father and I are not getting a divorce because we never got married.”
    “Sheila!” Johnbrown yelled.
    “Stop saying my name.”
    Kenya felt sure that she’d never been more miserable. Then, as if to make herself feel worse, to see how much she could stand, she fell again into the memory of Charlena and the girl’s fear about her parents breaking up. Kenya remembered how smugly secure she’d felt about Johnbrown and Sheila’s marriage. Marriage! Now Charlena’s mom was pregnant and their family was moving to a bigger house. Charlena might even have to transfer schools. Frankly, Kenya was more broken up about that than Charlena was. Now it was Kenya who sometimes proposed playing Star Wars , and a little desperately at that.
    “But you—” Kenya tried again with her parents.
    “We thought it would confuse you. Also, I don’t know that we ever agreed on the whole setup. See, your father, this principled man here, doesn’t believe in marriage. He didn’t see why the government had to be involved in our family life. He didn’t need a piece of paper to be committed to us, he said. But maybe, you know if I ever speak to that bitch Cindalou again, I should tell her she needs to get that paper .”
    Johnbrown rubbed at his temples, staring down at his plate. “This wasn’t what I wanted at all. This wasn’t the way to go about this at all.”
    “Go about what? Is there a way to go about cheating on your wife with her girlfriend? Oh no, you’re probably talking about some bullshit like the right way to propose half-assed polygamy to your family. Maybe there’s a strategy of some sort, or some literature I could have brought from my job ! The one I keep to support this family .”
    Something, Kenya wasn’t sure what, switched over and her parents assumed their normal fighting positions.
    Johnbrown screeched at Sheila that her problem was that she wouldn’t let a man be himself.
    Sheila asked calmly what Johnbrown thought a man was and how he thought the definition applied to him.
    Johnbrown said this was exactly the kind of conversation he never had with Cindalou. Abruptly, Sheila said, “I see your mother every year. She gives us money.”
    Johnbrown clenched his fists. “I need to go,” he said. “I just need to get out of here, because otherwise—”
    “So GO!”
    But he didn’t, not just yet. The three of them sat trapped, not eating their cold spaghetti in the dim dining room. By now it was probably night outside, but Kenya couldn’t tell.
    Then, after an eternity, with a final pleading look at Sheila, Johnbrown got up and left. No one ever found out where he went, because of what happened when he returned, what happened with a sleepwalking Kenya and his lawfully registered gun.

 
    Sometimes Kenya thought that if the world before the walk she took with her father could be real, then the world on the other side could not be. Sheila had been shot. It was years before Kenya could say in her mind I shot my mother in the shoulder . Whether she’d been asleep or not, it made her want to die.
    That late-spring night was a blur that reminded Kenya of a sickening amusement park ride. Johnbrown, who did not have a license, driving them crazily to the hospital; Sheila cursing, sobbing, and bleeding; Johnbrown ordering Kenya to stay quiet at the hospital when they asked what happened. He would take the blame for the shooting, he said. Kenya should not worry. He would take the blame, he kept repeating. The last image of her father Kenya had for a long time was him kneeling, as if praying, as he dripped tears on her mother’s hospital bed.
    After it became clear that Sheila would be okay, Johnbrown had fled the hospital, off with Cindalou, her mother guessed, to who knows where. But to Kenya it felt like she and her mother were the ones who had disappeared, going to stay at Grandmama’s home. Kenya now noticed that the air there was always damp and the