“Bitter Tea”

by Irvin J. Hunt III (Jamaica)

We’re late for my dad’s wake. My aunt’s driving and I can tell see she’s tense. Her forearms are taut. A vein rivers over the edge of her knuckle as she grips the top of the steering wheel. Her chandelier gold earrings bounce and jitter as she glances at the time. But it’s the best I’ve felt all day. We’re slinging around corners and curling over hills. Each time we fall to the bottom, a balloon of excitement blows up in my belly, rises to my chest, and stays here for a second before it flies away.

“Rose,” my mom says, as she grips the handle of the door and thrusts her neck back. “We don’t need another funeral.” 

“Eleanor, hush,” my aunt says to the road, which is climbing like a wave about to crash on us. “We don’t need the embarrassment.” 

My mom looks out the window. Aunty Rose, like my mom, grew up in a Jamaican town named Adelphi that is almost as remote as this one. She’s my mom’s closest friend, going all the way back to high school, which may be the reason she’s the only one who can talk to my mom like that, she and my dad, but that’s another matter. She blew up at my mom once for something she called prebearicating. And when my mom said, you know, you must have been born on a scotch bonnet pepper, she replied, that’s right honey. A hot one. So I’m not surprised to see my my mom simply look out the window, as the trees sprint pass the car in sparkly sheets of green.  

We hit a bump and the silver mug of my mom’s aloe vera tea sputters and spits in its black holder. She calls this her elixir. I call it gross, which is exactly how I’m feeling about it right now because I can smell it on my suit. This awful suit. It’s dark brown with creases pressed so sharply down the legs that the whole thing looks like it was cut from a plank. 

The last time I wore it was about a year ago at my dad’s arainment. I think that’s what it was called. I’m not sure because from the day it was over, no one mentioned it again. Everything that happened in court that day and everything before it was, like everything else in my house, a cuss word scrawled in black permanent ink on the kitchen wall. There, before our eyes, but you better not say it. My mom was sipping her elixir and when we heard my dad’s name being called by a woman from outside the courtroom, I sprang up from that punishing, hard-backed bench because we’d been waiting for hours, and I knocked my mom’s silver mug out of her hand, splashing its horrible disgusting contents all over me. She got mad like she was the one reared on pepper, and not only did I have to say sorry, I’m really sorry, but I also had to sit in damp sticky pants for the rest of the day. 

I crack my window to beat the air clean.  

“Alright!” my aunt yells. “Thank you. You’re learning.” 

“You smell it, too?” 

“No, but I’m sure I will.” 

She doesn’t know what I’m talking about. 

“When’s the last time you talked to Daphne?” my aunt asks. 

I watch my mom swivel her a glance and her eyes look as startled as a field of scattered birds. 

Questions about family communication require a bit of strategy. They’re not questions. They’re accusations or, at best, chides. Daphne is my older sister by six years and her eighteenth birthday was the day before my dad fell down at the bar and never got up again. In this case, it’s best to pretend I didn’t hear her.  

“You know they accept letters at the convent,” she continues. 

 She’s told me this before, but this time it makes me sorrier than I know why. The stench on my clothes wafts up like a thick strand of invisible smoke. I suddenly feel like I’ve been dipped into a pool of bitter tea. I wench my hands under my thighs and try to distract myself. 

I count Volkswagen buggies wherever I spot them, the way I used to do with Daphne in Jamaica, our feet dangling off the end of grandma’s roof, before everything turned with us, in us, against us. Above the horn and hiss of Kingston traffic, the game was to be the first to call out a buggy or be thumped in the shoulder. One buggy. Two. Three buggies, six, and frick, there’s the smell again, and now there’s Daphne standing with her head a foot above the table, saying yes, judge, yes, I’d like to drop the charges, then glancing down at mom rubbing the small of her back, and on her face the same sadness as when dad went away when I expect relief, smiles, hugs and relief, because now he’s coming back. Why else if not for that would mom have said, please, Daph, let him come home. Why else if not for happiness, which not even Dad feels because standing behind his table on the other side of the room, clutching the back of his chair with a tremor in his wrists, he just turned to look at us, and his eyes are blackboards with nothing written on them.

Mom told Daphne to let him come home but he never did. He wore the same clothes, creased black pants and a buttoned-up, white shirt. But something inside it was gone. His laugh was gone, and he walked around with his back bent like he was looking for it. It sounded like a struggling engine, that laugh, like his Lincoln starting in the cold as he pressed on the gas.

My aunt rolls up the window. I hear it whistle and seal like we’re inside a vacuum and everything outside just got sucked out. Or sucked in. I can’t tell. I hear the hum of the road as we curl onto the highway. The wind thrusts its back against my door. 

My mom sips her elixir. She puts it back down. A cloud of red lipstick is smudged on the tip of its mouth. No one speaks for a while. 

“You alright, Patrick?” my aunt asks. “About this afternoon, how are you feeling?” She’s calmer now and I can tell she was a singer from the way her words go up and down and stretch out like taffy. 

“Fine.” I say. But my stomach is a bucket sloshing with water. I breathe in deep, deciding to hold my breath. I stuff my stomach with air to hold it steady. I squeeze my eyes shut and suddenly I see a strobe of blue cop lights splashing on and off my bedroom ceiling. Blue. More blue. Blue. More blue. Mom tromping down the carpeted steps, holding her bathrobe closed, saying dear Lord, no. I want to tell her I tried, tried to tell her to stop it, tried to open her door, knocked and knocked, calling her name above the screaming, but then the screaming stopped and everything was right again, so why are they arresting him? Why are they taking him away? 

I open my eyes and exhale in a mad rush. A cop has pulled someone over in the emergency lane. And as he walks to the driver’s window, for a second I see my father’s boat of a body pitching into the night, hands glinting behind his back. 

“You alright?” my aunt asks. 

“Huh?” 

“Are you alright? Why you breathing like that?” 

I look at her in the mirror, her eyebrows raised. I look at my mom, whose turned her head to stare at me, questioning, pleading, and there are those birds again. For the first time since this morning, I want to tell them the truth, but then I see my mom withdrawing again, as if those birds are carrying her away. I see the white and black sign of the funeral home. 

“No,” I say. “I’m not feeling well.” 

“You’ll feel better, by and by,” I hear my aunt say to the air, as she thrusts the car into park, and my mom picks up her mug.