“Then, girl, call her back. Life’s too short.” Janetta pulls Kimba from the bath. “My mama passed last year. She never got to meet this grandbaby. If your mama’s willing to put it behind you, give her a chance. Family is everything.”
Laughter erupts from the living room, shouts, raucous voices. The heavy timbre of my husband, the lighter tones of others. I prick my ears to tease out a few phrases.
“Did they just say ‘running a Boston’?” I ask, smiling and offering Janetta a towel for Kimba. “What’s that?”
“In spades, it’s when one team wins all the books.”
“What kind of books?”
“You never played spades?” Janetta asks, surprise tipping the question up at the end.
“No. I didn’t know Al played.”
But as I think about it, in New York, Al was quieter. More reserved, to himself. I grew up there, and every corner felt like home. Al grew up in Chicago, and didn’t have many friends when we first met on campus. I introduced him to my friends; none of them played spades. New York felt very much like my world. Atlanta? Even though Al didn’t grow up here, this world already feels like his.
“If Al’s running a Boston,” Janetta says with a grin, “he not only plays spades, but he must be pretty good. What do you like to play?”
“You’ll laugh,” I say, self-conscious, but still managing to smile under the warmth of her encouragement.
“Probably, but is that so bad? Child, three babies, teaching badass kids, and struggling to keep my house halfway clean, I could use a laugh.
”
“I like playing mah-jongg.”
“Mah who?”
We both laugh, me slipping a onesie onto Ezra and Janetta digging out a fresh T-shirt from her diaper bag for Kimba.
“My mother and Bubbe and—”
“Bubbe?”
“That’s what I call my grandmother. They played mah-jongg with their friends when I was growing up. I called it an old Jewish woman game. Even though it’s originally from China, we adopted it as our own. It’s like bridge or gin rummy, I guess, but with these tiles. Anyway, I started playing with my mom’s group one summer, and I got hooked.”
For a moment, I can almost hear the clack of tiles and their calls of ‘five crack,’ ‘six dot’ and ‘two bam’ as close as the laughter in my living room. I can still see the tables laden with dark chocolate jelly rings, Bridge mix, pineapple and maraschino cherries pierced with toothpicks. Smell the pungent mix of their various perfumes, the scents socializing on a summer afternoon.
“You miss it, huh?” Janetta asks, resting a drowsy-eyed Kimba on her shoulder.
I’ve spent so much time hiding it from myself, and if I’m honest, from Al so he wouldn’t think I regret marrying him, moving here, leaving home – that it’s hard to admit. After a brief hesitation, I nod.
“Tell you what,” Janetta says. “I’ll teach you spades, and you teach me this Mao Tse Tung.”
I chuckle at her deliberate mangling of the game’s name. “It’s mah-jongg, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Good.” She turns to leave the bathroom, but pauses in the doorway to look at me over one shoulder. “And Ruth?”
“Yeah?”
Her smile is the kindest thing I’ve seen since we crossed the state line. “Call your mama.”
Chapter Two
Kimba
10 Years Old, Atlanta, GA
I pull back the curtain at our living room window again, like I’ve done a dozen times in the last hour.