Free Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones Page B

take a while to catch up.’ I was looking at her like she had gone stone crazy and then she had the nerve to say that she was a virgin when she married my father. She said it with this little smile on her face.”
    I knew the little smile she was talking about. You see it on the faces of girls who were born to be somebody’s wife. That virgin-smile was plenty annoying on the faces of tenth-grade girls, but on grown women it was infuriating. One good thing about having a mother like mine is that she never went and got al superior on me.
    “You know her favorite word?
Inappropriate.
Seems like the only appropriate thing for me to do is to babysit.”
    “Does she pay you?”
    “Yeah,” Ronalda said. “I get al owance. But sometimes I don’t want her to pay me. I want it to be like I am just someone in the family, but I don’t want to get took advantage of, either. Next week, my stepmother is taking her nieces to see
The Wiz.
She asked me yesterday if I wanted to come along. I said yes at first, and then she told me that she was going to have to buy an extra ticket and I might end up sitting by myself in the balcony or something. So I told her I didn’t want to go, that I don’t like plays. But real y I have never seen one before.”
    She looked so unhappy that I wanted to touch her, but I didn’t know where to put my hand. I ended up stroking my own shoulder. “I would go to see a play with you if you wanted to see one.”
    “I don’t want see one,” she said. “I just wanted to be invited somewhere.”
    “I go places with my mother,” I said. “But not any place special.”
    Ronalda looked at me as though she couldn’t imagine an unspecial mother-daughter outing. It was like I had told her that I had money, but not the kind you could spend.
    “Real y,” I said.
    Ronalda put her hand in my hair again. “Did you bring a brush?”
    I knelt on the tile floor between her knees while Ronalda sat up on the desk pul ing the brush through my hair. Al my life people have wanted to play in my head. On the very first day of first grade, the teacher took me into the lounge and undid my ponytails. Ronalda wanted to know if I was tender-headed. I murmured that I wasn’t, resting my face on her thigh.
    “Tel me what you were about to tel me,” she said. The bristles against my scalp felt firm and good. I knew she was probably brushing out my curls, but I didn’t ask her to stop. “Tel me. Tel me about your mother.”
    It was as though she had pul ed the truth out of my head. “I’m il egitimate.”
    “Join the club,” said Ronalda.
    “No,” I said. “It’s worse. I’m a secret.”
    “Oh,” Ronalda said. “You’re an outside child?”
    “Yeah,” I whispered.
    “That’s okay,” she said. “A lot of people are.”
    I let go of a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it. I twisted to look at her, but if she knew something important had passed between us, her face didn’t show it.
    I asked her, “Was your father married to your stepmother when you were born?”
    She shook her head. “No. They got together back when they were both living in Indy. He got her pregnant the night before he left to go to Notre Dame.”
    “At least he claims you. I wonder sometimes what would happen to me if my mother passed away. I wonder if my father would take me in.”
    She stopped brushing. The floor was cold under me, but I could feel the warmth of Ronalda’s thigh through her jeans. I wanted another of the sweet wine coolers, but I couldn’t ask for it because I had somehow forgotten how to speak.
    “Don’t cry,” Ronalda said. “I have a secret, too. My mother’s not real y dead. I just tel people that. She’s alive, she’s just negligent.” She pronounced the word careful y, as though she were reading it from a legal document. “The principal at my school cal ed child services on her. She left