Free Black Cake: A Novel by Charmaine Wilkerson

cellphone.
    Benedetta, please come home.
    Maybe her ma was ready to apologize. Maybe Benny was ready to hear her out. Plus, her ma had sounded tired. Her ma had never been one to sound tired. Yes, it was definitely time.
    Benny’s phone was ringing. Her brother’s number. Her brother never called. All of a sudden, everyone was getting in touch.
    Leaning against the wall of her old bedroom now, letting the cool seep through the back of her sweater, Benny can’t get away from the feeling that maybe, just maybe, she’ll step out into the hallway and find her mother there, or see her father pop his head into the room and narrow his eyes at the color of the walls, the way he used to. That, maybe, all this can be undone.

Byron
     
    B yron’s phone is vibrating along the kitchen counter, its screen flashing, one-two, one-two, like lightning strikes in a wall of clouds. Byron feels like the phone. Agitated. Where the hell is Benny, anyway?
    “Sorry, just a second,” he says to Mr. Mitch. He gets up to turn off the phone when he recognizes the number.
    Lynette.
    It’s been three months since they last talked. She must have heard about his ma.
    Byron had wiped Lynette’s number from his list of contacts on the night she’d walked out on him. He’d punched delete with a sense of satisfaction, as though she might feel the defiance in his gesture throbbing across the airwaves, as though it might lead her to regret her hasty exit. It was only later that he realized that when Lynette slammed the door shut, she had already emptied her side of the bedroom closet, had already stuffed her computer and toothbrush into a bag, had already left the earrings he’d given her the previous month on the desk in his studio.
    Byron hadn’t noticed any of this at first, he’d only seen Lynette’s arms waving around, her face turning wet, as they argued. She’d been doing that a lot, lately. Crying, yelling, bugging him about plans for the future. Who talked about The Future nowadays? Byron didn’t like that kind of pressure. Did it mean nothing to her, at all, that they werealready living together? Didn’t it count that he had offered to mentor her nephew Jackson? Why was it that nothing Byron did ever seemed to be enough?
    Officially, Byron hadn’t gotten together with Lynette until after the documentary project they’d been working on together had ended. Still, he knew the moment he first saw her that he’d have to try. He knew that’s what he was doing during filming breaks when they took to chatting together while they picked out sandwiches and fruit cups from the catering table. He knew that’s what he was doing when he invited the director and the entire crew for a barbecue at his place. He knew it was what he was doing as he watched Lynette step out onto the deck of his house, saw her lips part slowly at the view, watched her shoulders rise with the sea air.
    It would be too obvious to say that he couldn’t resist her fluffy crown of hair, or the slopes of her body, or the sight of her deep-brown fingers with their tiny, burgundy-painted nails buzzing over the keyboard of her laptop, or the quiet way she moved through the clamor of a production set. Lynette managed to inhabit space in a way that was different from other people and Byron wanted to be there with her.
    In the end, Lynette was so critical of Byron, and yet she’d started out drawn to everything about him. Back then, she didn’t seem to mind his status, his expertise, the house within view of the Pacific. Then things got serious between them and she suddenly expected him to separate out who he was from what he had to do in life.
    Lynette, who wouldn’t have met Byron if he hadn’t been the host of that documentary.
    Lynette, who he suspects would never have looked at him otherwise.
    Lynette, whose neck smelled like nutmeg and who slammed the door when she left him for good.
    And now, for the first time in three months, his phone is lighting up with