Free Disgruntled by Asali Solomon

from anyplace they were currently.”
    “So all this says is he’s not in St. Louis.”
    “It says more than that.”
    Kenya rolled her eyes. “You mean it says he loves me?”
    “Well, it does,” Sheila said.
    “Mom, how long is this going to go on? I mean, what would happen if he got caught?”
    Sheila looked around Kenya’s room, furnished with the small child’s desk they’d borrowed from Grandmama and the tall shelf of books of which Kenya was proud. There was a dresser, a couple of orange crates full of board games brought from the city, and that was basically it. Kenya hadn’t decorated the ugly yellow walls, feeling too angry at the Black History Month calendar pictures and UNICEF posters of the world’s brown children that her mother had hung in her old room back in the city, but not knowing where to go next.
    Instead of answering, Sheila said, “You would think you would go crazy in here with nothing on the walls.”
    “Mom!”
    “I don’t know what would happen, okay? There’s a warrant out for his arrest for … what happened.”
    Kenya looked down, but the world kept spinning and her mother kept talking. “I told them I wouldn’t testify against him, but he claims the prosecutor is out to get him.”
    “Is he?”
    “I don’t know. But the other thing is…” And here she managed to roll her eyes, even as they filled with water. “There’s stuff I didn’t know about.”
    “What?”
    Sheila sighed. “Well, I guess your father and Cindalou were going around vandalizing police stations? So your father’s on probation and he already spent a night in jail.”
    Kenya remembered when she’d awoken to the sound of her parents arguing about where her father had spent the night. He claimed he’d fallen asleep in the library. Maybe he’d been in jail. Or, she thought, feeling queasy, making a baby with Cindalou.
    “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
    “I really don’t know,” Sheila said, her face wet with unacknowledged tears. Then, as if she absolutely couldn’t stand up anymore, she sat down on Kenya’s bed.
    It was not the tears but the sitting that did it. Kenya found that when she went to ask her mother more questions, her mouth would not move. How could you not know all of this? Is Baba a crazy person?
    “Okay,” said Kenya. “Okay.”
    Shortly after that conversation, Kenya realized she’d squandered what might have been her last chance to ask about what had happened to their family. The subjects of Johnbrown, Cindalou, and even the Seven Days had been sealed up underground, like the man in the Edgar Allan Poe story she had read at school.
    One subject that didn’t need to be closed, as it had never been opened, was how Kenya, sleeping, came to hold a loaded gun, and why she chose to aim it at her mother. The one thing Kenya felt sure of was that she had not had to unearth the gun from its hiding place in the basement. One of her parents had taken it out. She never found out which one it was. She could easily imagine Sheila going for it in a moment of indignant rage, or Johnbrown moving it to keep it from Sheila’s hands. Or maybe it was the desperate Johnbrown trying finally to win a fight.
    When Kenya asked herself, of all things, why, even sleeping, she would shoot her mother, no answer suggested itself. Whenever she found herself pondering this question, she felt that a cord had snapped and she was flying away from her body.
    *   *   *
    That December, Sheila and Kenya did not have to make a special secret trip to Bryn Mawr to see Grandmama. Instead they were invited to Christmas dinner at her house. “Nothing fancy,” she had promised.
    Knowing Grandmama, like attending Barrett, was a constant education for Kenya about the well-to-do. For instance, while she dreamed, in spite of Grandmama’s warning, that the house would be decked out with scarlet ribbons and softly glowing white candles, there was only a squat businesslike tree hung with a few pink balls