In that first year, when we all thought the Chin Chin Man was coming back, we did everything we could to keep our lives the same, to make our home a place our patriarch would recognize when he returned. My mother, who was always the disciplinarian except in extreme cases, would sometimes find herself in those extreme cases shouting, “Just wait until your father gets home!” Those words still sparked fear in us, were still enough to convince us to behave.

    Nana started playing even more soccer. He tried out for the advanced league and made the team. They practiced every day and had games that took them to Atlanta, Montgomery, Nashville. It was a huge strain on my mother, as all of the parents were expected to pay for the equipment and uniforms and travel expenses. Worse still, they were expected to chaperone at least one of the away games.

The day of the Nashville game, she had no one to watch me. She’d already taken the day off work. At that point she was a home health aide for two families, the Reynoldses and the Palmers, and though neither family was as abusive as Mr. Thomas, her work doubled but her pay didn’t keep pace. My father’s job had kept more regular hours, and so he was the one who acted as my caretaker while my mother went from the Reynoldses to the Palmers and back again. When he left, my mother resorted to paying an old Bajan woman whose daughter she knew from the home health company. I loved this old woman, whose name I have since forgotten. She smelled like fresh ginger and hibiscus, and for years any whiff of those things would conjure up an image of her. I loved to sit in her lap and snuggle into the pillow of her fat stomach and feel it expand as she breathed. She kept ginger candies on her at all times, and she fell asleep so often that it was easy enough for me to rifle through her purse and steal one. If she woke up and caught me, she’d spank me or she’d shrug and laugh and I’d laugh too. It was our little game, and I usually won. But the day of the Nashville game, she’d gone back to Barbados to attend her friend’s funeral.

I rode the team bus to Nashville on my mother’s lap. She had packed a cooler of oranges and grapes and Capri Suns and mini water bottles. The night before, she’d washed Nana’s jersey by hand because a grass stain hadn’t come out in the washing machine. She didn’t trust washing machines. She didn’t trust dishwashers either. “When you want something done right, do it,” she would often say.

    Nana’s team was called the Tornados. There was one other black kid on the team and two Koreans, so Nana didn’t have to worry as much about bearing the full brunt of taunts from angry, racist parents. He was still the best kid on the team, still the reason so many parents got red cards, but it was a comfort to him to not feel so alone.

On the bus ride that day, I wouldn’t sit still. This was the summer before I started kindergarten, nearly a year after the Chin Chin Man left, and I could feel the end of my freedom encroaching. I was wilder than usual. On more than one occasion I’d been brought home by a neighbor after getting into some mischief, and my mother had long since stopped telling me to wait until my father got home. I ran up and down the aisle of the bus. I tugged the hair of the child in front of me until he yelped. I flailed like a fish in my mother’s arms until she released me. The drive from Huntsville to Nashville only takes about two hours, and I was determined to make every passenger feel every minute of it.

My mother kept apologizing to the other chaperones and sending me a look that I knew well. It was her I cannot beat you in front of all these white people, but just you wait look. I didn’t care. If a beating was inevitable, why stop? I spent the last fifteen minutes of the bus ride sing-shouting “The Wheels on the Bus,” while the soccer team plugged their ears and groaned. Nana ignored me. By that point he was an expert at that.

Two referees in impractical cowboy hats waited for us as we pulled into the parking lot of the soccer fields.

The boys and their parents rushed off the bus, no doubt eager to get away from me, but I had already stopped my singing and returned to my calmer, more peaceful self. Nana was seated next to the emergency exit window, his head leaned against the red bar in a way that looked uncomfortable.

    “Come on, Nana,” some of the kids said as they made their way out, but Nana didn’t get up from the seat. He lightly banged his head against that red bar, over and over and over, until everyone left, and it was, finally, just the three of us. My mother, Nana, and me.

My mother squeezed into the seat beside Nana and pulled me up onto her lap. She took his chin in her hand and turned him to face her. “Nana, what’s bothering you?” she said in Twi.

Nana had tears in the corners of his eyes that were threatening to spill, and he was making a face that I’ve only ever seen in young boys, a face that is the fa?ade of a man, hiding a boy who has had to grow up far too fast. I have seen that faux tough look on boys as they pushed shopping carts, walked siblings to school, bought cigarettes for their parents who waited in their cars. It breaks my heart now, to see that face, to recognize the lie of masculinity sitting atop the shoulders of a young child.

Nana blinked his tears back. He sat up a little straighter, gently lifted our mother’s hand from his face, and returned it to her lap. “I don’t want to play soccer anymore,” he said.

Just then one of the referees came onto the bus. He saw the three of us squeezed into those small seats and gave us a sheepish grin, lifting that cowboy hat off his head and placing it onto his heart, as though my family was the national anthem, the yellow school bus a ballpark. “Ma’am, we’re ’bout ready to get this game started and there are a bunch of boys out there saying their star player’s still on this bus.”

My mother didn’t even turn to look at the referee. She kept her eyes trained on Nana. We all remained perfectly quiet and still, and finally the man took the hint, put his cowboy hat back on, and got off the bus.

    “You love soccer,” my mother said once we heard the sound of the referee’s cleats crunching the gravel of the lot.

“No, I don’t.”

“Nana,” she said sharply, and then she stopped and exhaled for so long I wondered where she had been keeping all of that air. She could have told Nana that she’d lost a day’s paycheck to chaperone this trip, that she was already on thin ice with the Reynoldses for missing work two weeks before when I wouldn’t stop vomiting and had to be taken to the emergency room. She could have told him how that emergency room bill was higher than she’d expected, even though we had insurance, that the night she’d opened that envelope she sat there at our dining room table crying into her scrubs so that we wouldn’t be able to hear her. She could have told him that she had already had to take on some extra work cleaning houses to afford the fees for the advanced soccer league, and that those fees were nonrefundable and she couldn’t get her time back either. All that time she’d spent working to afford a trip on a bus with a loud daughter and son who’d somehow realized in the two-hour-long bus ride that his father wasn’t coming back.

“We’ll find another way home,” she said. “We don’t have to stay here for one more second, Nana, okay? You don’t have to play if you don’t want to.”

We walked to the Greyhound station, our mother holding our hands the entire time. We took that bus home, and I don’t think Nana made a single noise. I don’t think I did either. I could feel that something had changed among the three of us and I was trying to learn what my role in this new configuration of my family might be. That day was the end of my naughtiness, the beginning of my good years. If our mother was angry or upset at us, me for being a terror, Nana for changing his mind, she didn’t let on. She wrapped us up in her arms during that long ride home, her face inscrutable. When we got home, she put all of Nana’s soccer gear into a box, sealed the box, and dumped it into the nether regions of our garage, never to be seen again.

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