“He’s fine.”

Ruth wouldn’t give up that easily. Not now, when she’d risked her marriage telling Xavier everything. And she’d decided she wouldn’t live her life any longer without knowing the truth. “What adoption agency did you go through?” She remembered the litany of questions Xavier had asked her. The ones she couldn’t answer. “You were my legal guardian then, so I assume you signed all the papers?”

A strange look flashed on Mama’s face, but she didn’t say anything, so Ruth went on. “Did you meet the people who adopted him? I need to know who they are and where they live.” Ruth dug her nails deeper into crevices in the wood. “Please.”

“You ain’t never laid eyes on him since you spit him out and now you want to lay claim to him. What sense does that make?”

Ruth wanted to say ain’t never was a double negative that negated Mama’s point, but all she said was “I’m not trying to lay claim. You took him from me. I had no choice. You didn’t give me one.”

“You’re having regrets now because you don’t like what you did. You can’t live with it. But there’s no going back. I’ll tell you something else, young lady,” Mama said, her voice getting tight. “You keep turning up the dirt, you bound to run into a snake one day.” She held up one callused hand, grease smeared on her fingertips. “And it’s going to bite you. Real hard.”

When Mama got the last word, it chilled you down to your ankle bones. Froze you in place like cement. There was nothing left to say.

Mama turned her back and started raking leftovers into Tupperware containers. Then she ran a scouring pad over each burner on the stove until the dried sauces and gravies peeled away along with some of the stainless-steel coating.

Ruth sighed deeply and walked down the hall where the bedrooms were. Eli’s door was closed. “Got Money,” by Lil Wayne, blasted from the other side. Her hand lightly touched the knob. Growing up, a closed door meant he wanted privacy to listen to music, talk on the phone to someone of the opposite sex, or pleasure himself without interruption. She learned the last the hard way when she burst in once on her big brother lying naked on the bed with lotion and a towel beside him.

This time, she knocked first. When he gave her permission to enter, she found him standing in front of the mirror in his pajamas picking his Afro. Eli shouldn’t be here in his cramped childhood bedroom. He should be in his own house with his wife and children, but this town, this country, this life, had cut him down to a boy again.

The one question that went unanswered because no one dared raise it was whether she and Eli even shared the same father. No one knew, and after some time, not knowing became easier. You could fill in whatever fantasy brought you peace. But she didn’t need a DNA test to know Eli was fully her brother in every way that mattered.

“Hey,” she shouted above the music.

Lowering the volume, he said, “What’s good, lil bit?”

Ruth considered herself skinny, but not little and petite. Her long limbs flailed everywhere, and she wished to be more compact. Despite incontrovertible evidence to suggest otherwise, Eli’s nickname for her made her feel small and cute.

A simple question, yet hard to answer. She didn’t want to argue with him, not again. “I like your hair,” she said. “I bet Mama gave you grief over it.”

A laugh escaped his lips. “Yeah, she said something about how we weren’t on a sixties picket line anymore.”

Ruth sat on the edge of his bed and then stretched out on her stomach, beginning to feel comfortable again. She looked up to see Eli wagging his finger at her.

“Now, you know better than to get in the bed with your outside clothes on.”

After a moment’s hesitation, she glanced down at her sweater and leggings. Then she snorted and cackled uncontrollably. Admonitions from Mama could fill a book, and their grandmother had changed very little over the years. Except for one area of her life that left Ruth befuddled and unsettled.

Lowering her voice, Ruth said, “I saw Dino here when I first came home. He looked real comfortable. What’s going on between him and Mama?”

Eli shrugged. “If it was anybody but him, I’d have some issues. But he’s a good dude.”

“Well, yeah, but what about Papa?”

“What about him? He’s dead. Been dead years now.” The blunt finality of those words stung and made Ruth wince. Eli had once held their grandfather up as an idol, but now he sounded dismissive about the man. Eli went on to say, “One thing I learned a long time ago is that you can’t live your life looking back.”

Now he was talking about her, and she took his reproach as a personal failing. Somehow, she had not lived up to Eli’s expectations.

After Papa died, her brother had been the one she desperately wanted to impress. When she wore a new dress or tried a new hairstyle, she hoped he’d notice. Even when she got into Yale, knowing he’d be left behind, she smiled when he bragged to his friends about how smart she was.

Eli said, “So, you asking about Mama’s love life. What about yours? Where’s your husband?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said. “Where’s Cassie?”

He turned back to face the mirror, and in the reflection she could see his face fall in mock defeat. “Touché,” he said, chuckling begrudgingly.