Smash It! by Francina Simone

Author:Francina Simone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkyard Press
Published: 2020-07-27T14:43:40+00:00

Chapter 17

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I’m too black not to love this day. My grandparents live ten minutes away, and all my extended family is in a 250-mile radius. Everyone from Miami, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale comes to Orlando for Thanksgiving. I’ve got aunts, uncles, and cousins for days.

I’m at my grandparents’, hiding in the garage with my granddad and great-uncles. The women are in the kitchen, and my grandmother gets a little uptight when things get busy, so I leave her to my sister, who is bomb at cooking and the perfect yang to my grandmother’s yin.

Cleo’s in the kitchen, too, and this is another way in which we completely differ. She’s always been into being around the mother hens. I can’t stand it; they fuss over everything and make me chop up the holy trinity—onions, green bell peppers, and celery—for days. What are the onions, bell peppers, and celery for? Everything. My family can’t cook without them. Cleo’s vegetables are always diced into perfect squares, and I don’t have the patience to be criticized about my lopsided onions and funky-looking celery pieces.

The door to the kitchen opens, and my mom and Aunt Rachel come out to grab something from the deep freezer.

“Don’t start, Rachel,” my mom says between tight lips.

Aunt Rachel rolls her eyes. “Ain’t nobody paying attention to you.”

My mom reaches into the deep freezer and pulls out huge pitchers of mango lemonade. I love that stuff. Especially when it’s chilled. “Green is not your color, yet you stay jealous.”

I don’t even know what set them off this time. It could be anything. Literally anything. Once it was who got my grandmother the lame Hallmark movie box set some years before. They both did—but did that stop them from bickering over this year’s Mother’s Day dinner?

They walk back in and the door slams behind them.

My granddad and great-uncles and I are sitting around a table playing poker for quarters. I sip a Coke as they pretend they didn’t hear anything. In my family, we sweep things under the rug until we start tripping over the lumps.

My granddad puts his cards facedown on the table. He’s good at existing in tension. A self-proclaimed shark, and even though now he’s a straitlaced businessman, he used to own a grocery store back in the day and I think he was a real loan shark—possibly a bookie, too.

When we’re sitting around the table like this and they’re throwing out old stories, I get the sense that he wasn’t so straitlaced back then. I dig it. The old man’s cool. He taught me how to drive—lots of yelling and asking why I can’t park straight—and how to shop for fish and buy odd stuff off the side of the road—my turtles were from the back of a truck and so was the shrimp he had three days ago. He taught me how to exist amid tension.

I’m waiting for the rest of my cousins to get here though, the ones I see only a few times a year.

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