Black Cake: A Novel (22 page)

B
ert didn’t understand what Benny
was saying. Or maybe he did, but he didn’t understand how it could be true of his daughter. It was bad enough that Benny hadn’t gone back to college, bad enough that she couldn’t focus on getting herself into a profession and gaining economic stability. What kind of rubbish was this
concept café
business, anyway? But it wasn’t the café that was getting Bert agitated, not this time.

In recent years, he and Eleanor had encouraged Benny to bring someone home for Thanksgiving Day, but she’d never done so. Benny lived a day’s drive away in Arizona and they wanted to know more about her friends, wanted to remain part of her life. Finally, Benny was saying that she might bring someone for Christmas, but first she needed to explain something to Bert and Eleanor.

Lord have mercy. Did she really have to tell them all this? What did she expect them to say? Was this why she had left school? Was this why she wanted to lock herself up in some little
concept
hole? To keep herself from having to function in the real world with real relationships? How was she supposed to live a decent life with this kind of confusion?

Bert, who had begun his law studies all over again in the United States under his new name. Bert, who had cut himself off from his life back in the islands and Britain to protect his wife and children. Bert, who had taught his little girl how to ride a bicycle, how to save money from her allowance, how to write a successful term paper, now felt
betrayed. What had he been working for all these years? Who was this woman standing before him now, with her face twisted up in that way and shouting at him?

This was not the daughter he’d raised. This was a person who had walked away from the educational opportunities he’d worked so hard to provide for her. Who kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do and who now was flip-flopping her views on what kind of person she wanted to date. Benny kept complicating her life when he had tried so hard to make things simpler for her. The girl he had raised should have been more grateful. The daughter he had raised should have said
Sorry, Daddy
and run into his arms.

Bert turned and walked out of the room. His wife came running behind him soon after, her eyes wet. Eleanor put her arms around his middle from behind and placed her head against his back.

“Bert,” she said, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

Then Eleanor did what Eleanor did best in their relationship. She just stayed there, without moving, without speaking, letting him know that she was there, that’s all. Once, a long time ago, they had nearly lost each other for good. They had nearly lost their chance to have this beautiful family they had made together. After that, she had never left his side.

“Just give me a moment, okay?” he said. “Just a moment. Then I’ll go back and talk to her.” But when Bert and Eleanor went back to the living room, Benny was gone and the first Thanksgiving guests were already coming in through the kitchen door. And Bert never did understand much about that day.

I
f only Bert had known
that he would be gone in six months, he would have stepped out of the car. He would have crossed the street, he would have rapped on the plate-glass window, he would have smiled. Instead, he remained in the back of a taxi outside the restaurant in New York where Benny was working, watching his daughter through the glass. He wanted to talk to her, but to say what? A year had passed and he still didn’t feel comfortable with this life of hers. If it had been anyone else, anyone but his own child, he would have let them be. Would have said, to each his own, love is what counts. But this was his baby girl.

Young people had always wanted to do things their own way, and Bert had been no different. Only nowadays, there seemed to be this compulsion to eat up everything that was available to you and to let everybody know about it in real time, without figuring out things for yourself first. No, love was not the only thing that counted. What people could say or do to hurt you also mattered. This, perhaps, was what he would say to Benny if he could bring himself to do so:
What are you willing to do? And is it worth it?

What was Benny doing all the way out here on the East Coast, anyway? Did she even have any friends in New York? Did she understand friendship the way he and Benny’s mother did? And what about loyalty? The girl had moved here without even sending them her new address, just because Bert and Eleanor hadn’t been able to pretend that
everything was all right with them. She had let go of them that easily. Did she have any idea what it had taken for them to build a life for her and her brother?

It took work to keep tabs on Benny. For the second time in a row, Bert had told his wife he was going to a meeting out of state, but how many work commitments could a lawyer licensed only in the state of California claim to have outside of California in the space of a year? Their state had been the first to develop proper anti-stalking laws. If he weren’t Benny’s father, he’d accuse his own self of stalking his daughter. But Bert had needed to see Benny with his own two eyes. And he didn’t want to say anything to Eleanor about this until he could figure out what to say to Benny.

He watched as Benny helped an elderly woman on with her coat. Look at how gentle she was. His daughter still had a good dose of respect in her. She had always been a bighearted child. But something had changed. After they’d argued that Thanksgiving, Bert was surprised to come back into the living room to find that Benny had left the house, dismayed when she didn’t come back for dinner, with all those people coming over, no less, and later, angry that she didn’t even call to apologize. It just wasn’t Benny’s way. Never used to be, at any rate.

That day, Benny had accused Bert of not being open-minded, but Benny was the one who had grown more closed, less patient in recent years, less willing to face the questions of others. She had run off because she couldn’t face Bert and her mother, couldn’t accept that they had their doubts. And when had anyone in their family ever worried about whether other people approved?

Where would they be today if Bert had been afraid to go to law classes at night, the only black man and the oldest student in the group? Where would he be today if he’d been afraid to move to a state with all those waxy-looking plants and rattlesnakes and earthquakes and chirpy-talking people? Where would he be today if he had been afraid to raise a family with a woman who could not permit herself to have a past? Who could not permit Bert to have a past? He wondered, sometimes, about his uncle and cousins back on the island. Wished he could
pick up the phone and find out how they were doing. But a move like that could ruin his life.

Bert shifted in his seat and poked at the spot where he’d been having that pain. As he watched his daughter now, as she nodded and smiled at the woman, he found himself nodding along. He was worrying too much, wasn’t he? She was still his Benny, just look at her. She was still young. She would find her way, she would get her life back on track. She would come back to him and her mother, someday, his beautiful baby girl.

O
n the day that Bert
Bennett was laid to rest, Benny’s left arm was in a sling against her bruised ribs and one of her eyes was swollen shut. A bandage covered half of her face.
Bicycle accident,
she’d told the driver who picked her up at the airport the day before.
Ah,
he said in that way that service professionals do.

The same driver picked her up at the hotel before the funeral. He took the seatbelt and helped Benny pull it into position. It was already heating up outside but Benny rolled down the window, breathing in the smell of sun-baked sidewalks and jasmine flowers and tilled soil and a whiff of salt on the breeze coming in from the west. The smell of home.

The cemetery went back to the time when Los Angeles had fewer than thirty thousand people and the county was more farmland than not. It had been SoCal’s first such facility, with broad, grassy lawns that called to mind the kind of place where you might have laid out a picnic blanket. It made Benny think of those barbecues her parents used to organize in the park near the house. She would help her dad attach balloons to the trees with pieces of paper that read
Bennett Bash
and they’d be out there with a bunch of other families until the sun went down.

Benny could imagine slipping off her shoes now and strolling barefoot across the grass until she found her father’s burial site. But she would not be getting out of the car today. She touched her hand to the wound on her cheek.

She asked the driver to follow the road through the grounds until
she saw the crowd of bowed heads, all shades of skin, all sizes of black and navy suits and dresses. Her father had been a popular man, a successful man, a pillar of the black community. He’d been known as a bridge builder, a man of tolerance, but the last time Benny saw him, two years earlier, her father had refused to listen.

Her parents had always taught her that the greater your capacity to love, the better you could be as a person. But when Benny tried to remind them of this principle, her father put up a wall, stood up, and walked out on her. That quickly, her daddy had turned his back on her. And Benny never did see her father again.

Benny caught sight of her brother as the crowd began to break up. He was walking toward a line of parked cars, his arm around their mother, his head lowered toward hers. Ma was wearing a sunny, fluttery dress, her father’s favorite. The color made Benny smile, even as the tears slid down her face.

Benny watched her brother open a car door for their mother, watched him keep his hand on her arm until she had settled onto the seat. Byron used to be that protective of Benny, too.

“That’s fine,” Benny told the driver. “We can leave now.” As the car skirted the cemetery plot, Benny consoled herself with the thought that her father never would have wanted to see her in this state. They hadn’t spoken for two years, and yet she was certain that if she’d told her dad what had happened to her just a few days before, he would have folded his arms around Benny the way he used to when she was little, he would have rested his chin against her hair and murmured,
My baby girl.

E
tta Pringle looked down at
the program in her hand.
Meet Etta Pringle, Endurance Swimmer and Motivational Speaker.
She was traveling so much right now, she made sure to double-check the date and location before speaking into a microphone.
February 27, 2018, Anaheim, California.

Etta smiled as the emcee introduced her as a small-island girl who had grown up to conquer the world. He spoke of how she had swum Catalina and the English Channel and circled the island of Manhattan. Of how she had braved some of the colder swims on the planet.

Etta always spoke openly to her audiences about the challenges she had faced, but there was one thing that she could never tell them, that wherever she went, Etta “Bunny” Pringle still thought of her dear friend Covey Lyncook. And sometimes she thought she saw her.

Losing someone could have that kind of power over you.

After Covey’s death, Bunny had been lucky to fall in love again, this time with someone who felt the same way. She and Patsy had raised her son and Patsy’s baby brother in the UK and watched them grow up to become scholars and parents. Patsy had become one of the first black women to join Scotland Yard. And through it all, the seas that had tested Bunny’s resolve each year had, ultimately, been good to her. Now, at seventy, Bunny had spent more years of her life swimming without Covey than with her, but she still couldn’t face the waves, or her fears, without imagining her friend a few strokes ahead of her.

And now, Bunny saw someone who made her think of Covey. When Bunny was done speaking and the lights had come up for audience questions, she took a good look at a woman sitting on the aisle, gazing up at her as Covey might have done. Bunny looked away, then back in that direction and narrowed her eyes. Bunny, who had put her body through punishing routines for six decades, who was stronger than most people half her age, didn’t think her legs could support the shock of what she thought she was seeing, but they did.

When you’d done as much public speaking as Bunny had, you learned to keep going despite the distractions. People coming and going to the bathroom. Someone talking into their cellphone. A fly buzzing around your face. But this, nothing had prepared her for. Bunny slipped her bare feet back into her shoes and took the steps that led down from the side of the stage. Her foot caught on the nub of the carpet.
Concentrate, Bunny!

She answered one final question as she walked along the central aisle. Audiences loved that kind of close-up thing. People liked to see that a woman who could navigate the strong currents of the Molokai Channel was flesh and blood, too. They liked to see that she walked with a slight limp, had a mole on the side of her face, and was wearing a perfume that some of them, too, might have purchased.

Bunny went down the aisle and back up twice, buoyed by the certainty that this time, she was not hallucinating, not living out some fantasy fed by grief. She stopped. There was no doubt. That short-haired woman sitting in the audience was Covey. How was this possible? Bunny wanted to lean over and pull Covey out of her seat right then but she knew she couldn’t. There were video cameras everywhere. At the end of her event, Bunny waited for the crowd to dissipate, then scurried over to Covey.

“Bunny,” Covey said as she leaned on one of her crutches and embraced her. But then Covey squeezed her forearm and whispered urgently in one ear. Bunny stood up straight and stepped back but held Covey’s right hand in both of hers.

Bunny put on her best greet-the-public voice. “I am so happy that
you came to hear me speak,” she said. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“My name is Eleanor Bennett,” Covey said, leaning back on her crutches. “I saw that you were coming to speak near my home and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, even though I’m still on these,” she said, wobbling on one of the crutches.

“How did you…?”

“Broke my leg surfing.”

“Surfing!” Bunny said. Covey nodded. They both laughed.

“Well, I certainly hope to see you again soon,” Bunny said, pressing a business card into Covey’s hand. Covey had white hair at the sides of her face. Covey was beautiful.
Covey was alive!

A young woman in blond braids and a black pantsuit came toward them and beckoned Bunny toward a side exit. A clutch of television cameras followed them, eclipsing Bunny’s view of her childhood friend. Still, the room felt filled with a kind of light that would continue to follow Bunny for a long time. Bunny had indeed lived a good life and now she knew that it would be even better.

Back at the hotel, Bunny had barely enough time to close up her bags before leaving for the airport. She was laughing out loud when her assistant rapped on the door.

“Etta,” her assistant called.

“Just ten minutes more,” Bunny called through the door. “I’ll see you in the lobby.” Bunny sat down on the edge of the bed and let herself fall back, arms splayed, legs bent over the edge of the mattress, staring at the ceiling.

Floating.

She had to talk to Covey right away. Bunny picked up her mobile phone to call but realized she didn’t have Covey’s number. Eleanor, she’d said her name was. Eleanor Bennett. But where exactly did she live? And how would she find a person with such a common name? Etta would try to find her but she might have to wait for her to get in touch. Either way, Bunny felt certain that it would be soon.