by Kennedy Ryan
“Um, Mama,” I venture, poking the remnants of my cantaloupe with a fork. “Can I ask you something?”
Mama nods, not looking up from her newspaper that is still delivered to our front door every morning. It’s been so long since I saw the news in ink on paper, it feels like she’s holding an artifact.
“Do you know if we have a history, on either side, of early menopause?”
Mama’s brows bend and dip. She shakes her head. “Not that I know of. Why do you…” She drops her paper to the table and her wide eyes snap to mine. “The doctor. Is that why you were seeing the doctor that day?”
Way to connect the dots.
“I’m in perimenopause, yeah.”
“But you…you’re not even forty.” Mama slams a hand on the table. “Pesticides.”
“Um...huh?”
“It’s those pesticides and those GMAs and—”
“I think you mean GMOs.”
“Yes.” Mama points her fork at me. “Them. And steroids. All in our food, in our water.”
“You’re not wrong, but are you sure there’s no family history?”
“No one I remember. Girl, my mother still had pads under the sink at sixty.”
Between a grandmother still menstruating into her twilight years and a sister who has birthed five children from her actual body, I’m feeling reproductively inadequate to say the least.
“So what does this mean for children?” Mama asks, frowning. “You can still have them, right? You’re so young.”
“I haven’t had a period in four months. Without one of those, no kids. So I’m working with a homeopath to at least get that back, and then I can decide.”
“Decide? Well, how much time do you have to decide?”
“Year and a half. Maybe two.” My shrug is more careless than I am. “I can’t just reproduce on demand. If and when I can get my period on track, I need someone to reproduce with, and I have no prospects. And I’m not sure I want to drop everything to have kids right now. If this window closes and I want kids later, lots of babies are up for adoption and need homes. I don’t need a sperm donor for that.”
“I know you’ve never felt pressure to have kids,” Mama says. “Or to get married, for that matter, but I think you’d make a wonderful mother, if it means anything to you.”
“That does mean something, and thank you, Mama.”
“You keep doing what the doctor says and we’ll get through this.”
The weight that’s been heavy on my shoulders since Dr. Granden first uttered the word “perimenopause” feels that much lighter with every person I share it with.
First Kayla. Then Mona. Now Mama.
I’m beginning to think I should have come home a long time ago.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Ezra
“I love them!” Noah says, grinning at the tickets Aiko left for him.
“You do, honey?” she asks, her expression concerned on the Skype screen. “They’re passes we can use whenever. We’ve been to the aquarium so often, I thought a trip to Nashville for the planetarium might be fun. And I know you’re really into the stars right now.”
“It’s great,” he assures her. “And the other things were awesome, too.”
Aiko asked me to take a bag full of birthday gifts she’d left to his bedroom first thing this morning.
“I wish I was there.” She blinks hard, and I can tell she’s trying not to cry. She doesn’t want Noah to know. “But so many people are coming to your party today.”
“Yeah, and we’ll jump on the trampoline,” Noah says. “You should see it, Mom. It’s the kind with a net.”
“Your mom actually helped pick it out,” I interject. “She wanted to make sure she saw it before she had to leave.”
“You did?” Noah asks.
“Yup.” Aiko shoots me a grateful look. “Sure did. I wanted this to be the best birthday ever even though I’m not there.”
“And four of the guys from school are sleeping over,” Noah rolls on. “Dad says he’ll make stuffed French toast for breakfast.” He looks at me like I may have forgotten.
“Sure.” I nod. “Tomorrow’s breakfast will be lit.”
“Dad,” Noah groans, obviously embarrassed by my hipness. “Don’t say lit, okay?”
“Got it.”
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter by the laptop. It’s my mother calling through FaceTime.
“Bubbe!” Noah squeaks. He glances at Aiko uncertainly.
“Oh, baby, answer,” Aiko tells him. “I’ve kept you long enough. Go talk to your grandmother. I love you.”
“Love you, Mom. See you when you get back.” He grabs my phone. “Dad, can I take it outside to show her my trampoline?”
“Sure, but bring it back to me before you hang up,” I tell him. “I need to talk to her about you flying up there for camp.”
He runs off and out the door to the backyard.
“I should be there,” Aiko says despairingly. “I’m missing his birthday, and he’s going off to camp for weeks. What if he—”
“You’re exactly where you should be,” I interrupt before she can spiral. “And you’re an incredible mom. You’ve sacrificed a lot for him, for me, for this family. Delayed things in your career, put off some of your dreams. This trip is just for you, and you deserve it. He’ll have a great birthday today and see you when you get back.”
“You sure?”
“Am I sure that he won’t be emotionally scarred because you missed this one birthday party? Yes. Besides, the trampoline and the sleepover cover many transgressions.”
“You always know what I need to hear.”
“You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
“Oh, God, but I do.” Affection and torment and tears flood her eyes. “I slept with Chaz.”
I allow her words to sink in, waiting to see if I’m angry or hurt or jealous, but I’m not. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell her, glancing out to the backyard to make sure Noah is still there. “We’re not together anymore.”
“I know.” Fresh tears fall over her cheeks. “He wasn’t you, Ezra, and I haven’t been with anyone else for ten years. I felt like I was cheating on you.”
“You’re not, and if you’re worried about my feelings, I’m fine.”
She hesitates and then releases her next words in a rush. “I know you said before there wasn’t any one in particular you were attracted to,” she says, barreling ahead before I can amend that statement. “But I want you to promise me something.”
“What?” I ask warily.
“When you…” She swallows and closes her eyes. “If you sleep with someone else, I want you to tell me.”
I’m already shaking my head. “Ko, you know how you get. You’ve got a jealous streak a mile wide. How would that even be helpful or healthy?”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Jill Schaffer.”
“That bitch,” Aiko spits. “She was after you from the moment we met her at parent-teacher conference.”
“No, she was just being friendly. You thought she was after me, and made that poor woman’s school year a nightmare.”
“She should not be teaching children if she’s going to lust after their fathers.”
“My point,” I say, pausing to let it sink in, “is that me telling you if I sleep with someone else won’t go as well as our conversation about Chaz did, and you know it.”
With perfect timing, or bad timing, depending on how you look at it, Chaz walks into the hotel room wearing a pair of neon board shorts.
“Babe, you ready for that swim?” he asks.
When he’s fully in the room and realizes she’s on Skype, red crawls under his skin. “Dude, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were—”
“It’s fine.” I give him a very civilized smile. “I gotta go prepare for this party anyway.”
“Take lots of pictures,” Aiko says, blinking at tears again. “And video, Ezra. You always forget the video. I’ll
text Mona.”
“Good idea. Have a great swim.” I flick a glance between her and her new lover. “Goodbye, Ko.”
Once I’m done Skyping with her, and then talking with my mother about Noah’s upcoming trip to New York, it’s almost time for everyone to start arriving. I barely have time to shower and change.
“This is not the eighth-grade dance,” I tell myself while contemplating what I should wear. “Just throw on something, man.”
My options are basically cargo shorts…or other cargo shorts. I always look neat at school, usually wearing a suit since the kids are required to wear uniforms, but out of school? I’m not exactly concerned about what I’m wearing.
“It’s just me!” Mona yells from downstairs. “You here?”
“Uh, yeah!” I pull a YLA T-shirt over my head and grab cargo shorts option number one. “Coming.”
From there, it’s a blur of balloons, cake, ice cream, a random piñata Noah insisted on, and lots of people. So many people. His entire class, but also everyone on our street and several YLA students. Barry is here. Mona made sure to announce it when he arrived, lest I forget her genius plan to hook Kimba up with the math teacher.
“You think Kimba’s still coming?” Noah asks.
“I don’t know, son. She’s a really busy lady. Something may have come up that she had to take care of.”
His face falls a bit. “I really like her.”
“Yeah, I do, too.”
I’m in the kitchen lighting candles when she arrives. From the other room, the low, seductive roll of her voice mingles with Mona’s. I freeze, the lighter suspended over the cake for a second. My damn palms start sweating.
“Not eighth grade,” I remind myself grimly.
I walk the lit cake out to the backyard, and Mona starts the birthday song. We cut the cake, and I still haven’t actually seen Kimba, but I know she’s here somewhere.
“Dr. Stern.”
I turn to find one of the seventh-grade girls from YLA standing there. “Hey, Karinne. Thanks for coming.”
“It’s a great party. The step team prepared something for Noah’s birthday. Is it okay to do it?”
“Are you kidding?” Noah will freak out over this. He loves their impromptu step shows. They’re about to start competing nationally. “Thank you. He’ll love it.”
“Okay.” Karinne’s face lights up. “I’ll get the team together then.”
She’s such a bright kid. Her mom got her master’s and opened her own business in downtown Decatur, one of the coolest parts of Atlanta’s changing landscape. Karinne’s father isn’t in her life, so I, and a lot of the other men on staff, make sure we’re providing her good male role models where we can.
As I knew he would, Noah nearly comes out of his skin when the step team does their birthday routine for him. Mona’s recording it and will probably post it to Instagram and TikTok, or whatever they call it, later. We’ve had several videos go viral, thanks in no small part to her. She’s on top of our socials.
“Wow. They’re fantastic.”
I turn and Kimba’s standing beside me, eyes fixed on the step team leaping and clapping and shouting in rhythm like I could never make my body do.
“Yeah, they are.” I clear my throat. “I wasn’t sure you were gonna make it.”
“I almost didn’t come.” Her laugh is reluctant, reserved. “I probably shouldn’t have.”
“I’m glad you did.” I brush her fingers with mine and turn my head to look directly into her eyes. “Really glad.”
“Ez.” She pulls her fingers away, lowering her head so her hair falls forward to partially obscure her profile. “Don’t.”
“We need to talk.” I reset my attention on the step team, on Noah sitting on the edge of his new trampoline wearing wonder all over his face. “Don’t leave, okay?”
Her chest heaves with the weight of her sigh. She’s wearing skinny jeans and one of those stretchy, tube top-y kind of strapless shirts. It outlines the fullness of her breasts and the dramatic dip of her waist and ass.
“I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “Mona was right. She—”
“Mona doesn’t know what I need to tell you. Not yet. Stay. I want to talk to you after everyone leaves.”
She hesitates, but she finally nods.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Kimba!” Noah runs up. “You came!”
“I told you I would.” She smiles down at him. “Dude, your party is amazing.”
“Thank you.” He bounces on the tips of his toes. “We’re about to open gifts.”
“My favorite part!” Kimba says. “I hope you like mine.”
“You got me a present?” Noah’s eyes stretch and his mouth falls open.
“Of course I did.”
“Let’s go over to the gift table and check out your birthday haul,” I tell him.
It’s quite a lot. I don’t even remember getting this many gifts at my Bar Mitzvah. I think of the eighteen Pixie Stix Kimba gave me and can’t help but look over at her and smile. She’s standing a few feet away with Mona and lifts one brow.
“What?” she mouths.
I shake my head and mouth back. “Later.”
Her gift is one of Noah’s favorites, and one of mine, too.
“Ezra’s Big Shabbat Question.” Noah reads the title of the book once he’s torn off the wrapping paper. The book isn’t that large, but my name leaps out at me immediately, of course. There’s a brown boy on the cover wearing a yarmulke. I go completely still and don’t think I’m even breathing. What a book like this would have meant to me thirty years ago when no one at my synagogue resembled me. A book like this would have reflected me when the only place I saw myself was in a mirror. That she found this book and shared it with my son? It means everything.
“Wow.” Noah’s small face sobers. “This is…it’s great, Kimba. Thank you so much.”
I think he knows this book really means something. For him, maybe for me. His blackness hides deeper in his pores than mine, diluted even further by Aiko’s Vietnamese heritage, but I make sure he knows my history, my father’s history, and his father before him. I make sure he knows about all the influences, cultures and ethnicities that came together to make him who he is. It’s a rich, varied heritage, and I wouldn’t shortchange any part of it.
“I’m glad you like it.” Kimba shrugs, smiles. “I saw it in the bookstore and just thought…”
“It’s perfect,” I say.
She drags her eyes from Noah’s face to mine, and if I could kiss her right now I would. She looks away and chews at the corner of her mouth.
“Noah!” one of his classmates calls. “Trampoline.”
“You go on,” I tell him, taking the book from him. “I’ll hold on to this.”
He runs off, leaving Kimba and me in an electric storm of silence.
“Kimba,” Mona calls from the other side of the yard, looking between us. “Can you come help me with that thing in the kitchen?”
“What thing?” I murmur for Kimba’s ears only.
“That thing that will put me somewhere other than standing beside you.”
“Hey.” I grasp her elbow and bend my head to whisper in her ear. “Don’t forget to stick around.”
“Ezra.”
“Just give me a chance, Tru.”
“A chance for what?” She looks up at me, her smooth face crinkled into a frown. “I don’t think—”
“Hear me out for old time’s sake? If our pact ever meant anything to you, give me a chance to explain.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I know, but this is just like chess. You are the most powerful piece on this board. All the power is in your hands.”
“I don’t feel like I have all the power.”
“How do you feel?”
“Honestly—” She breathes out a short laugh. “A little helpless.”
I know what she means. The pull between us is alive, is burning beneath my fingertips on her
skin. Even surrounded by friends and colleagues who know I’ve been with Aiko for a decade, who know I would never cheat on her, who don’t know we aren’t together anymore and would judge me…even knowing the necessity of discretion, I can barely keep my hands off Kimba.
“Can I tell you something and you believe me?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“I’ve never cheated on Aiko, and I never would.” I dip my head to catch her eyes with mine. “Please trust me.”
She searches my face for several heartbeats and then gives a slow nod. “Okay. I trust you.”
“Kimba!” Mona’s tone is just shy of strident. “Please.”
“I better go,” Kimba says, starting off. She pauses and looks at me over her shoulder. “I’ll wait around, but only for a few minutes, Ezra. I don’t…I can’t…”
She shakes her head and walks away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kimba
“If this was Noah’s party at nine,” Mona says, “can you imagine this kid’s sweet sixteen?”
I laugh and scoop the last of the candy debris from Noah’s piñata out of the grass. “We’ll be that kid’s entourage by the time he’s sixteen.”
Mona glances around Ezra’s backyard and heaves a long sigh. “All done. Food’s put away. Place is clean. Everyone’s gone home. Ezra’s making sure four third-graders don’t kill each other and go to sleep.”
“Ezra’s lucky to have you.” I sit on the edge of the trampoline. “You’re like part of the family.”
Mona gives me a measured look before sitting beside me, the net enclosure at our backs. “Aiko, too. They’re all like family to me.”
“Well then, they’re all lucky to have you.”
Mona tips her head toward the fence that separates her backyard from this one. “Why don’t you come over for a glass…or bottle…of wine?”
“Raincheck?”
“You’re about to leave?” Mona probes.
“In a little bit, yeah.”
Her gaze drifts back toward the house. “This won’t end well, Kimba. It can’t.”
As much as she may be right, I hold on to Ezra’s frankness from earlier tonight. “You know him, Mona. Have you ever even suspected him of being unfaithful?”