SUNDAY DINNER ALWAYS began with a blessing of the food by Grandma Emma after which the family dug into an impressive spread of her best fare. The menu would include deep fried chicken, catfish, neck bones, chitterlings, collard greens, butter beans, stewed okra and cornbread.
Deena used to arrive early enough to help her grandmother with preparation, but since she’d begun seeing Tak two years ago, she found herself arriving later and later, and occasionally missing dinner altogether.
“So, Deena, where’ve you been? We haven’t seen you for a while,” Aunt Rhonda said as the family settled into their meal.
“I’ve been a little busy,” Deena said quietly. “I, uh, have a big project at work that’s taking a lot of my time.”
She would not tell them that her ‘big project’ was tanking—that key investors were threatening to pull out, that construction was delayed, and that the budget was hemorrhaging.
“Oh yeah?” Grandma Emma asked as she piled fried chicken on her plate. “What they got you building?”
“A beachfront condominium.” Deena said. “A skyscraper.”
The truth was she wasn’t building anything. She’d signed on to the project believing she would be Daichi’s proxy, only to become his puppet. Though his workload demanded his presence in Rome and Tokyo, Dubai and Moscow with endless regularity, Daichi continued to micromanage Skylife. Every email, every phone call, and every fax had to be routed halfway around the world so that he could do everything from responding to routine questions from material suppliers to ensuring that building contractors were remaining true to his designs. This resulted in delay after delay as the cost of the project soared.
“Damn, a skyscraper, Deena?” Aunt Caroline said, with flecks of collard greens wedged between her gold teeth. “You ought to see if you can get them to put your name on it.”
Deena rolled her eyes just as her cell phone rang. She turned away from the table and answered.
“Hey there. How’s dinner?” Tak asked.
Deena smiled. “Fine. Everyone’s staring though.”
“Good. Then say something sexy.”
“No!” Deena blushed.
“Say what you said last night.”
“Oh my God, shut up. I’m so going to kill you tonight!” Deena gushed.
“It’s what I’m hoping,” he murmured seductively. “But I won’t keep you. I just need to know what time to pick you up.” He couldn’t stand the thought of her catching the bus in the rankest part of town, standing next to a bench that doubled as the bed for a foul-smelling homeless person. He’d begun picking her up about three months after her brother died when a bum grabbed the hem of her dress as she stood waiting for the bus.
“Six o’clock. Starbucks,” Deena whispered, feeling the collective heat of their stares.
“Good. Till then, love,” he hung up.
“I suspect that’s the reason right there you ain’t got no time to help me come Sunday.” Grandma Emma scowled as Deena put her phone away.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Deena murmured.
“She’s talking about your soon-to-be baby daddy over there,” Deena’s cousin Keisha, piped up.
Deena balked. “I have never, nor will I ever, have a ‘baby daddy’.” Whenever she and Tak had children, she wouldn’t call him that.
She blushed at the certainty of the thought she’d had.
Keisha raised a brow. “Why you gotta say it like that, Deena?” she demanded, no doubt thinking of her disgusting ‘baby daddy’ Snowman.
Keisha had never liked Deena. Right from the start, she acted like she was better than everyone else, with her light eyes and white folk’s skin. When they were kids, she would go on and on about her good grades like someone gave a damn. And when they were in high school, she flaunted her virginity like it was fucking priceless. And the guys, well, they’d act as if it were some precious prize too. Keisha could still remember the way they’d stand by their lockers rambling on about Deena’s pussy like it was the Holy Grail.
When they were in the 9th grade, Keisha had sex with Steven “Snowman” Evans in the school’s broom closet. She would never forget what he said as he pulled up his pants. “Man, if only your cousin were so easy. I’d be in heaven.” If ever there were a moment when Keisha became certain of her hatred for Deena, that was it.
As the family continued with their meal, Keisha stared at Deena, with her matching manicure and pedicure, her light eyes and her light skin, and undoubtedly, wished her all the harm in the world.
“You know, Deena,” Keisha’s mother Caroline piped up. “Nobody’ll get mad if you wind up pregnant. I mean, your mother was a hoe and well, you know what they say.”
She stood and reached over Lizzie for the bowl of collard greens, her tank top and jeans squeezing her belly so that it looked like a split peach.
“Shut up, Caroline,” Grandma Emma snapped. “The only one been having kids is your children. Look at that son of yours, Shakeith. Seventeen, with a baby on the way.” She shook her head. “And anyway, Deena ain’t interested in affronting the Lord no more than her presence already do. Ain’t that right, child?” Emma turned to her granddaughter.
Deena sighed. “Yes ma’am.”
She avoided Lizzie’s piercing gaze.
An awkward silence followed before Rhonda reached over and touched Deena’s hand. “Tell us about your friend.”
Deena trusted Rhonda, and if there were anyone she’d want to tell about Tak, she would be it. When Deena moved in with her grandparents seventeen years ago, Aunt Rhonda had been the only member of her new family that she knew from her old life. Even after Grandma Emma and Grandpa Eddie disowned Deena’s father for marrying her white mother, Rhonda visited her older brother each week. Deena loved her aunt at first because her father loved her, but after his death, that love grew when Rhonda became her only ally.
Still, Deena hesitated. “Well, he paints for a living.”
“Paints!” Grandma Emma bellowed. “Who’s heard of scraping a living like that?”
“Lots of people, Mom. They’re called painters,” Rhonda rolled her eyes. “Or artists. Go ahead, Deena.”
“Well, he’s really talented. His work is featured in two galleries—one in Coconut Grove and another in Manhattan. He sings, plays three instruments and writes music in his spare time.” Deena ticked off each item proudly. “Oh! And he’s fluent in three languages: English, Spanish and—” Deena faltered, horrified by what she was about to reveal.
“And?” Rhonda prompted.
Deena looked down at her plate. “And Japanese.”
Keisha snickered. “I can’t see no black dude speaking Japanese.”
“I know, right? All that ching ching chong!” Aunt Caroline hooted.
Deena sighed. They were impossible. If she were another woman, a braver woman, she’d stand up and demand an end to this foolishness. She’d declare her love for Tak and do so unflinchingly. She would seize this opportunity, and in doing so, tell them everything. But she couldn’t. She thought of the way Aunt Caroline would look at her after finding out that she was sleeping with an Asian man—as if she were somehow less black, and less of a woman for desiring him. And she thought of Grandma Emma and the way she’d turn her back on her when she found out that Deena was sinning against the Lord.
Rhonda glared at Caroline. “Must you always be offensive?”
Caroline rolled her eyes at her younger sister. “Boy I swear, let a nigga go to college and they come back siddity every time.”
“Maybe a lil’ bit o’ college would of did you some good, Caroline,” Emma surmised with a point of her fork. Her eldest daughter was a shift manager at a fast food restaurant.
Rhonda turned back to her niece. “What’s your friend look like, Deena? Is he handsome?”
Deena’s cheeks flushed scarlet. “Well—”
Grandma Emma’s fork clattered to her plate. “Child, what is this foolishness? You think somebody here thinks this just your friend?”
Deena concentrated on her food, avoiding her grandmother’s glare.
Emma sighed in exasperation. “Well, is he a good man at least?”
Deena looked up, smiling. “Very.”
“Not liable to run off and leaves you with no kids, I suspect?” Emma glanced out the corner of her eye at Caroline and Keisha. Caroline stared back at her mother, saucily.
Deena thought of Tak’s playful declaration while in Sayulita that he would accept no less than a dozen children from her. “No,” Deena assured her grandmother. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Emma nodded thoughtfully. “Well then, child, I reckon you best not let nobody get in the way of dat. When you find a man you loves, you keeps ‘em. Any fool can tell you that.”
DEENA STARED AT her clock in an attempt to ignore the pulsating pain at her temples and the insufferable waves of nausea. Were it not the day they broke ground on Skylife she would’ve stayed home. But this was her opportunity to pose alongside Daichi, the city’s mayor and powerful businessmen who had the potential to be her next clients. So, she would spend the morning posing for pictures with pangs of nausea and too-high pumps, smiling a smile that never reached her eyes.
William Henderson, the project’s primary investor, spoke of the Skylife project as though he were the one to design it. It was a “re-envisioning of the Miami skyline,” he said, and a challenge to investors everywhere to start rethinking their place in history. Would they rise to the challenge, as he had done, and create models for the future of environmentally conscious yet posh accommodations? Or would they fall short, as so many do, in making excellence meet conscientiousness?
Deena’s head throbbed with the heat of the morning, and the memory of her and Henderson locked in heated battle as they squabbled over expenditures. She couldn’t recall him possessing such lofty principles on that day.
“As I conclude,” Henderson said with a flourish of the hand, “I ask each of you not what architecture can do for you, but what you can do for architecture.”
Deena groaned.
“And here I thought I was the only one unable to stomach Henderson’s grandstanding,” Daichi said. He turned to Deena with a secret smile. “Perhaps we should let him lay hammer to nail, as he seems so inclined to do.”
Deena giggled.
Deena spent the morning hobnobbing with bigwigs, and was most excited not by that but by the opportunity to meet Mahmoud, Hudson and Marshall. The four of them, along with Daichi, posed for pictures and answered questions, and when Miami Design asked Deena if they could have a word with her, she nearly hemorrhaged on the spot.
When Deena finished shaking the hand of the stocky blonde who’d interviewed her, she found her way over to Daichi, centered in a cluster of fellow architects. He ignored the refreshments, as he usually did at events, and opted only for a bit of soda water.
“So, I tell this intern, listen, if you want to be ‘imaginative’ head down to Brickell and see if Tanaka’s accepting new recruits. He’s got interns over there working million dollar projects.”
Michael Cook, the former professor who saw fit to confront Daichi so many years ago, was met with a roar of laughter as he brought a glass of ice water to his lips. Deena wasn’t surprised that he didn’t remember her as a former student; he could never be bothered with learning the name of an undergrad.
Daichi wasn’t smiling. “Interestingly enough, I’ve found that genius discriminates not in terms of age or race. Perhaps if my peers were better able to grasp that concept, then our field might better reflect the populace.”
The laughter died.
“Incidentally, Ms. Hammond’s not an intern. She’s a registered architect and the genius behind the innovative design you’ve spent all morning fawning over.”
He gestured to the small-scale model of Skylife on display. It was a stately stem, and once completed, would be the narrowest, tallest, most graceful creation to dawn Miami’s skyline to date. With a walkway like an undulating ribbon, the building managed curves in its ascent as if to mimic ocean waves. Its lean appearance gave residents a startling three-sided view of the water while its one hundred and twenty-five floors served to shatter the skyline.
“She designed this?” Cook said. He was the classmate of Daichi’s who had designed Tak’s building. “You’re being far too generous.”
Daichi stared at the man with impatience. “I’m not.” He glanced at Deena. “Are you ill?”
Deena blinked in surprise. He’d only spoken to her once that morning and she knew of no other time where he’d so much as looked her way.
“I’m—I’m feeling a little under the weather.”
“Then why are you still here? Are the hors d’oeuvres so delightful?”
“No.”
“Then leave.”
“Yes, sir.” Deena turned away, then paused. “Would you like me to meet you back at the office?”
“Is that where the ill go? To the office?”
“No.”
“Then no, Deena.” He turned back to Cook.
Still, she hesitated. In her four years at the firm she’d never taken a sick day. Better still, her days of month long vacations weren’t far enough in her rearview mirror for her to feel comfortable.
“So, Daichi,” Cook said. “I hear you’ve been shortlisted for the Pritzker.”
The Pritzker Prize was the architectural equivalent of a Nobel.
Daichi rolled his eyes.
“I’ve no information indicating such, and considering what I know about you, I suspect you have cause to say the same. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business elsewhere.”