Sisters

The fight, when it finally came, came over something small enough that neither of them would be able to explain it properly afterward to anyone who asked, which was, Odessa would think later, exactly how the realest fights in a family always arrive, not over the big wound, which everyone's too careful around, but over a schedule, a bill, a decision about who's driving to the hospice on a Tuesday.

Mama Ruth had moved into hospice care that week, and there was a question of the house in Algiers: what to do with it, whether to sell it, whether anyone in the family had the money or the will to keep it up. Camille, trying to be useful, trying to fix something with the only tool she'd ever really been given for fixing things, said she could just cover the property taxes for the year, it wasn't a big deal, Grant's firm had a good year, and Odessa felt something in her go instantly, completely rigid.

"You can just cover it," Odessa repeated. "Like that. You can just write a check and it's handled."

"I'm trying to help, Dess."

"I know you are. That's not — " Odessa stood up from the table, needing to move, needing the kitchen's whole familiar geometry under her feet while whatever was rising in her found its shape. "You know what I did the year after the storm? I did homework by flashlight in a trailer that ticked like a bomb going off slow, and you know what you did that same year? You picked a college. Not which one you'd get into. Which one. And now Mama Ruth's dying and you can just write a check, and I'm over here trying to figure out how many plates I gotta sell to cover my half of a funeral, and you're standing in my kitchen acting like the money's the easy part because for you it actually is, and I don't think you even hear how that sounds."

"So what am I supposed to do, Odessa, pretend I don't have it? Refuse to help because it makes you feel some kind of way about what I have and you don't?" "Maybe just sit in it a minute. Maybe just let it be uncomfortable instead of fixing it with a check the second it gets hard, because that's what you've done our whole lives, you fix the surface of the thing and you never once have to sit in the actual weight of it, because you've always had a way out of the weight that I never once had."

"That's not fair." Camille's voice rose now too, the careful control finally cracking. "You think I haven't sat in weight? You think losing a baby at nineteen weeks and going home to a husband who won't talk to me and a mother who taught me my whole worth was a posture isn't weight? You keep acting like money's a force field, Dess, like it just erases everything else, and it doesn't. I have had years where I would've traded every dollar my stepfather ever spent on me for one single person in my life who'd actually ask me a real question and wait for the real answer."

"That's not the same thing and you know it's not."

"I didn't say it was the same thing! I said it was still weight! You get to decide your weight's the only real kind because it's the kind that shows up on the news, and mine doesn't count because it happens behind good drapes, and that's, Odessa, that's its own kind of unfair, deciding whose pain gets to be real based on whether it comes with a flood attached."

"You don't get to stand in a kitchen four miles from your own paid-off house and tell me about unfair."

"And you don't get to stand in a kitchen you built with your own two hands, which I respect, which I have told you I respect, and act like that makes you the only one in this family who ever actually suffered for anything. I have suffered, Dess. Different. Quieter. Nobody sent a caseworker to my door, nobody put me in a shelter, I'll give you every bit of that, it wasn't the same, it was never the same, but it was still real, and I am so tired, I have been tired for thirty-four years, of being told my pain doesn't count because the house it happened in had central air."

The kitchen went quiet after that, both women breathing hard, the whole argument having finally said itself out loud in the plainest possible terms, race sitting underneath every sentence of it without either of them naming it directly yet, until Odessa, several long seconds later, did.

"You know part of what this is," she said, quieter now, some of the heat draining into something colder and more exhausted. "Part of this is you're half of what I am and you got raised like none of it touched you. You got the Blackness and none of the cost of it, not really, not the way I got it, growing up on this side, in this body, in this neighborhood. And some ugly little part of me has been jealous of that since I was eight years old, and I hate that part of myself, and I'm saying it out loud right now because I think if I don't, it's just gonna sit underneath everything else we ever say to each other for the rest of our lives."

Camille sat back down, slowly, the fight going out of her all at once. "I know it touched me different than you," she said. "I've never once thought it touched me the same. But you think it didn't touch me at all. Dess, Dixie Whitfield stood at my own wedding and told a woman I 'scrubbed up nice.' I have spent my whole life being the wrong kind of Black for one side of my family and not Black enough, in your eyes, for the other, and there was never a room, not one single room in my entire life, where I got to just be exactly what I actually am without somebody deciding I owed them an explanation for it." "I didn't know about Dixie."

"There's a lot you don't know. Same as there's a lot I don't know, still, probably, about you." Camille wiped her face again, exhausted now rather than performing anything. "I don't want to fight about whose life was worse, Odessa. I don't think either of us actually believes that's a real contest. I think we're both just so tired of being the only ones who ever had to carry our own particular weight that finding out the other one had weight too feels, for a second, like a threat instead of what it actually is."

"Which is what."

"Which is the thing we actually needed this whole time. Somebody else who gets it. Even if what they get is a different shape of the same thing."

Odessa sat back down across from her, the kitchen slowly settling, both of them wrung out, neither of them having won anything, exactly, because there was nothing here that worked like winning.

"We're not done being mad," Odessa said. "I want you to know that. I'm not gonna pretend this one conversation fixes nineteen years." "I know. I don't expect it to."

"But we said it. All of it, mostly. Out loud, to each other's actual faces, instead of just carrying it around separate." Odessa looked at her sister for a long moment. "That's something. I don't know what it adds up to yet. But it's something."

Camille nodded, and neither of them said anything else for a while, and outside, down the block, someone's radio was playing something slow, and the evening went on being an evening, indifferent to how much two grown women had just torn open at the kitchen table, the way evenings always are.