Chapter 9: Nine

“Tia,” Miller said.

“Let me in,” Tia said.

“Not happening.” He stepped outside and shut the door.

Her bracelets clacked together as she moved her hands from her hips to folded across her chest and back again. Then her anklets clacked as she tapped her toe. Of all the things to notice, Miller caught how she, like Mercedes, was wearing high heels early in the day midweek.

“Why are you here, Tia?”

One hand stayed on her hip, the other pointed at Miller. For such a small girl, you sure knew when she was around.

“What were you doing at my club last night?”

“I came to talk.”

Both her hands were in the air in a mocking shrug. “Well, that’s why I’m here now.”

Miller leaned an elbow on the wall of his apartment, accidentally squishing a spider that didn’t crawl away. “Tia, it was a mistake for me to come looking for you, and it’s a mistake for you to be here now.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Klein said meekly through the kitchen window.

Tia laughed. “You think I wanna talk to you? Boy, I said all I got to say to you ten years ago. I come to talk to the creep who stalkin’ me.”

“Well, Tia,” Miller said with a sigh, “like I said, it was a mistake. There’s nothing for us to say to each other.”

He saw Mr. Wilson standing in the parking lot an almost identical stance to Tia, glowering over his thick glasses. Miller caught his glance, and the old man shook his head and walked away, grumbling a whole list of slurs as he did.

“He did not just say that,” Tia said, turning her head. She went walking after him. “Excuse me? What did you just say? Turn around old man! C’mon! Turn yo cracka ass around!”

“Tia!” Miller boomed, remembering a time when he could stop a bar fight just by being there.

She stopped and turned, slowly. “You gon’ defend him?”

Mr. Wilson hurried inside, but opened his window and was shouting threats of calling the police from behind his screen. People were starting to peek out of their doors.

“Get in,” Miller said, opening his door and gesturing harshly.

Tia sauntered past him, nudging his ribs with her elbow as she went in the door. She turned to him with her finger raised, but he boomed her name again and pointed to the couch. She sat down and was quiet, but her nostrils may as well have been spouting steam.

Miller sat on the opposite side of the couch, faced her, and put his hands up.

“I’m sorry for going to your work. I was out of line. I’d hoped to talk you into doing the right thing and giving your brother his money, but it was wrong for me to approach you while you were working. I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

Beyond all hope, she calmed down. She looked at her brother.

“You could have just asked,” she said. “But you come after me with a lawyer.”

She looked back at Miller. “What, you think sending a black woman lawyer gonna scare me? I thought you was different, Miller.”

Miller shook his head in disbelief. “She was recommended by a friend because she does these cases pro bono, Tia. Her race has nothing to do with it. And for the record, that old coot out there deserves to have his ass kicked a hundred times over. Don’t think for one second that I was defending him. The only person I’m looking out for is this guy right here.”

And Tia did a thing that cut Miller to the quick. She looked him up and down, her eyes slowing when they passed his fat stomach and purple kneecap.

“I just want to help your brother.”

She looked at Klein.

“When you gon’ help yoself? You know what you gotta do. But you always cryin’ ‘bout bein’ ashamed.” She turned back to Miller. “He know what he gotta do. You know what he gotta do. But here he is. Free loadin’. All rashy ‘cos he too big a man to wear a diaper. You don’t know, Miller. You don’t know what it was like.”

“Oh,” Miller said, “I have an idea. Tia,” he looked her up and down, his eyes slowing on her Gucci handbag, “you make plenty of money. There’s no reason for you to be hoarding his. Please, have a heart.”

She leaned back like he’d taken a swing at her. “Have a heart? Have a heart? Is you sayin’ I don’t have a heart?”. Then she was leaning forward like she was about to take a swing at him. “You don’t even know me, Mr.s Miller. And you might think you know this little man right here, but you don’t. He wore our mama out. Always she try an’ git him to do what he could for hiself, and always he cry ‘bout dignity, and bein’ ashamed, and how we don’t know what it’s like bein’ him.”

She turned again and leaned over the arm of the couch. Klein looked like he was about to melt, and Miller wanted to puller her back by her overly styled hair, but he grinded his nails into his palms again. Then there was a knock at the door, and a deep voice claiming to be a police officer.

“You have got to be joking,” Miller and Tia said in unison.

Miller went to the door and looked through the peephole. It was the police, all right.

“Howdy, officers,” he said. He made a point to open it wide so they could see his living room. Tia was on point, leaning back against the couch with her legs crossed and a big smile on her face. Even Klein managed to look relaxed and pleasant.

“We had a report of a domestic disturbance,” said one of the officers.

Miller shrugged, trying not to ham it up too much.

“My roommate’s sister’s here to visit. We had a misunderstanding and argued a little, but she came in and we talked it out. I’m sorry if we disturbed anyone.”

The police were polite, and left without much fuss. Still, their arrival made Miller’s heart feel heavy.

“That punk ass cracka,” Tia said as he was sitting back on the couch.

“Tia,” Miller said, “I don’t like him talking that way anymore than I like you talking that way.”

She was quiet for a moment, then apologized. After her apology, there was a long, and very uncomfortable silence, broken at last when Klein asked his sister if she wanted anything to drink.

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“I’m good,” she said.

“Miller makes good iced tea. He puts even more sugar in that mom did.”

Tia’s face couldn't have been more different than when Miller saw her outside the door. She was calm, sad even. She thanked Miller for the tea while he was making it, and took her cell phone out of her purse. Miller didn’t recognize the brand, but it looked like something Mercedes would use. She made a call, and told the deep voiced man on the other end that she was okay and might be a while. Miller handed them both their tea and opened himself a beer.

“Thank you,” she said again. She took a sip, then smiled. “Dad always got mad. Said she was gon’ make us diabetic.”

Klein gave her one of his typical, unsmiling chuckles.

“I gotta say,” Miller said, “I’d go into a coma if I drank as much sugar as you guys do.”

Tia smiled. “Daddy always said it would rot out teeth and make us fat. He said ‘you don’t see any fat ballet dancers, do ya?’ So, when I went into exotic dancing, first thing I did was quit drinkin’ sugar. At least I thought I did. Then I found out how much sugar is in liquor. So, I quit drinkin’ that. But I miss my momma’s tea.”

“I miss my momma,” Klein said.

“Yeah.”

It was quiet again, but somehow Miller didn’t feel uncomfortable. They finished their tea quietly, and he occupied himself by thumbing through a pile of unopened envelopes he noticed on his coffee table. They were half buried under a pile of books and magazines, which almost slid off when he grabbed the letters. He caught Tia looking at his clutter in the corner of his eyes. It was a few minutes before she spoke.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She gave Miller a look as she stood, so he offered to walk her to her car. It was a red corvette, the kind Miller would have given his eye teeth to own, A very muscular man with a perfectly symmetrical goatee was waiting in the passenger seat.

“If he do what he gotta do, I’ll give him his money,” she said. “I ain’t spent none of it. But he gotta do what he gotta do.”

“Tia,” Miller said, “you can’t make a person do what they should. Try to put yourself in a similar situation. And I don’t mean being disabled, but imagine someone trying to force you to do something. How would you react?”

Her eyebrows shot up her forehead, and Miller imagined a few people had been slapped for trying the thing he’d just suggested.

“See,” he said.

“Mr. Miller, you got yo way of helpin’ my brother, and I got mine.”

She got in her car and drove away. Seconds later, Miller heard sirens and saw flashing lights coming up the back way to their lot.

“For crying out loud,” he said as the lights rounded the corner on the other side of the car park, stopping near his apartment. He hurried as quickly as he could, especially when he heard Santiago woofing and saw Rosa with her hands to her face. He picked up his pace, ignoring the pain in his knee, and saw that the white outline of an ambulance.

“Klein!” he shouted, walking so fast he almost doubled over from the pain.

What happened? He thought desperately. They were getting along. He was fine. So many scenarios flashed through his mind, and each one grew wilder than the next. No matter how little sense they made, he couldn’t shake the feeling in his gut. The ambulance was there, right outside his apartment, whether it made any sense to him or not. But, when he got close enough to see the stretcher, it did make sense, and seeing what happened did offer him some relief, but he was no less sad.

The hardest thing to see was Mr. Wilson. He was hysterical, fighting against the paramedics to get to his wife. She had as much color in her skin as a sheet of paper, but he was screaming that she was fine and that they had no right to take her away from him.

“I wonder who called it in,” Miller said to Rosa.

Klein was in the doorway, watching blankly.

“I did,” Rosa said. “I heard him shouting to her, but he wasn’t angry. I was confused, so I went to their window and I could smell her. I know the smell, because I found my grandfather that way when I was a girl.”

“Poor fella,” Miller said. “Hey, why don’t we all have dinner together? I could use some company. I bet Klein could too.”

“Yes. That would be nice.” Then she looked at Klein. “Maybe you should ask Klein first, though.”

Back in the living room, Klein agreed to having Rosa over.

“I could use the distraction,” he said.

“Me too. Seems like Tia’s changed a little.”

Klein shook his head, then looked over his shoulder to the window. The blinds were two-thirds down and half closed. It was close to evening and the sun was pale, trickling in thin sheets that glowed on the brown carpet. Miller could hear birds, neighbor kids shouting, and Santiago’s giant feet padding around outside.

“Whatcha thinkin’ about, bud?”

Klein took his time responding, keeping his eyes fixed on the window the whole time he sat there quiet. Eventually he sighed and turned his head to look at Miller.

“It’s the same every time. We talk about Mom and Dad, and for a little while she isn’t mean. But she’s not nice. Maybe I’m a snob or something, but not being cruel isn’t good enough. She knew that I knew what she was doing, and even though I still loved her and didn’t judge her, though, to be completely honest, I think what she does is shameful, I still treated her the same as ever and just kept on trying to be a good little brother. But she assumed I judged her and treated me like dirt.”

“Was there ever a time you guys got along?”

Klein shook his head. “Only in pictures. When we got older, she was embarrassed by me, and it showed, even at home. The older we got, the worse it got. Then mom died and everything went to hell. I want to believe that she’s changed, but the best she can ever manage is taking a break from insulting me for a little while. I want more than that from my sister. I feel like...”

He couldn’t finish, but he seemed to want to.

“Like you don’t have a sister?” Miller guessed.

Klein nodded.

Most of the conversation came from Miller and Rosa, but Miller could tell Klein was happy to have her and Santiago there. As dogs always do, Santiago knew Klein needed comfort, so he kept on standing up and putting his paws on the arms of Klein’s chair and licking him.

Klein needed the mop that night, and it was one of his worst episodes that Miller could remember.

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