Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Chapter 3

Romantic Comedy

2004

“SWEETIE, YOU UP?”

Lizette’s Louisiana drawl was both syrupy and whisper light. No one’s mom sounded like that.

“You awake? Genevieve? My Evie Sweetie? My Eva Diva? You up?”

Well, Genevieve, a.k.a. Eva Diva, was up now. The covers were pulled up to her eyebrows, and she was in the fetal position on the ancient, springy twin mattress. Exactly four days ago, when Genevieve Mercier and her mom drove from Cincinnati to Washington, DC, they’d dragged the mattress up the five-story walk-up and flung it on the patchy carpet of the bedroom floor. And there it had stayed. Genevieve and Lizette were both the same brand of scrawny and couldn’t afford movers, so after struggling to carry Genevieve’s mattress and her mom’s mattress, plus a small kitchen table and two folding chairs, up all those stairs—in the blazing June heat, no less—the nomadic mother-daughter duo had decided they needed no more decor.

Genevieve opened one eye and scanned the itty-bitty space. She was seventeen, and this was a new bedroom, but it could’ve been any of the ones she’d occupied in any of the cities she’d lived in at fifteen, twelve, or eleven. It was nondescript, with disposable details, except for one thing that was unmistakably hers: a plaid suitcase erupting with clothes, pill bottles, and books. She squinted at the dollar-store alarm clock on the bare windowsill. It was 6:05 a.m. Right on time.

Lizette always came home just as Genevieve was waking up for school. Her mom was a purely nocturnal animal. It was like their personalities were too outsized to exist at the same time—so the mother claimed night, and the daughter got day.

Daytime was for responsible people, and Lizette was a delicate, distracted woman, too wispy to negotiate the details of grown-up living. Like cooking. Paying taxes. Cleaning. (One time, Genevieve watched her mom vacuum for an hour before realizing it wasn’t plugged in.) Lizette’s beauty kept them afloat, which was hard work, Genevieve knew—so she handled everything else. She forged Lizette’s signature at banks. She monitored the pills in Lizette’s Valium bottles. She toasted Lizette’s Hot Pockets. She roller-set Lizette’s hair before she went out on her “money dates” (You’re for sale—just fucking say it…).

They’d moved several times since Genevieve was a toddler. Each time was for a different man who promised Lizette a dazzling life. They always set her up with a place to live, all expenses paid. And it used to be such an adventure. Genevieve had spent first grade living in a designer cottage in Laurel Canyon—rented for them by a famous pop producer who bought her a parrot named Alanis. The year before, an oil big shot had set them up in a Saint Moritz chalet, where their cook taught her how to ask for Birchermüesli in impeccable Swiss German. But as Lizette graduated from her “hot young thing” years, the dazzle dulled. Slowly, and then suddenly, the cities got seedier, the apartments got shabbier, and the men got meaner.

This latest guy wasn’t paying for the apartment. But he did give Lizette a job as a hostess in his cocktail lounge, the Foxxx Trap. And he was paying her double time. For what, Genevieve didn’t want to know.

Lizette crawled under the covers, still wearing her Bebe freakum dress, and snuggled up to her daughter. She gave Genevieve a lipsticked peck on the cheek and clasped her hand. With a resigned sigh, Genevieve sank into her mom’s lushly perfumed embrace. Lizette always wore White Diamonds by Elizabeth Taylor, and Genevieve found the scent overwhelmingly glamorous but also soothing.

That was her mom in a nutshell. White Diamonds.

And Black drama.

“Assess your pain level, Spawn of My Loins,” Lizette ordered in her outrageous southwestern-Louisiana accent.

Genevieve raised her head up from the pillow, giving it a little shake. She did this every morning to see how bad it was and determine how many painkillers she’d need to take to start the day. Luckily, she wasn’t in agony. It was just a slow, steady pounding on a door. She could still breathe between thuds.

“I’ll live,” she reported.

“Good, then gimme a story.”

“I’m sleeping!”

“You ain’t. Come on, you know I can’t sleep without a story.”

“Can’t we go back to when you used to do the stories?”

“I would, but you abolished my storytelling five years ago, you little shit,” she cooed, her breath bourbon-scented.

Years before, Lizette would come home in the mornings and regale Genevieve with tales before she got up for elementary school. Their favorite ones involved long-ago scandals from Lizette’s Louisiana hometown, Belle Fleur. And though Genevieve had never been there, she knew the place by heart.

Belle Fleur was a tiny bayou where there were only about eight last names, Black was the race, Creole was the culture, and everyone could trace their bloodline to the same eighteenth-century pair: a French plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. Along the way, their descendants mixed with Haitian Revolution rebels, Indigenous peoples, and Spaniards to produce a rich, insular, filé-flavored culture both highly religious and deeply superstitious. And colorful in the extreme.

The most colorful, though, were Lizette’s mother and grandmother. Their reputations were as wild and dramatic as their names—Clotilde and Delphine. Their lives had been affected by murder and madness and mysterious rage. Explosive secrets and a conspicuous absence of fathers. It was as if Genevieve’s entire matriarchal lineage had spontaneously regenerated from alien pods.

As a little girl, Genevieve assumed that these were tall tales, half-truths. But her grandma and great-grandma sounded fabulous, just the same.

Lizette wasn’t sentimental. The only moment that mattered to her was the one she was in. But she did keep a thin, fraying scrapbook, which Genevieve had discovered in a cardboard moving box as a kid. On the last page, there were two four-by-six black-and-white photos with “Delphine” and “Clotilde” scrawled under them in Lizette’s Catholic-school cursive. Genevieve stared and stared into their faces until her eyes unfocused, the photos blending into each other. It was like time hiccupped. And she knew Lizette’s stories were real.

Delphine and Clotilde looked haunted, intense, wild. They looked like women who were born with the wrong mind at the wrong time. They looked like her mom. They looked like her.

And suddenly, the women didn’t seem fabulous. They seemed dark, dangerous, and self-destructive. And it was too familiar.

There were corners of Genevieve’s brain that terrified her. She was friendless and restless, and pain ruled everything. On her best days, she felt as if she were clinging to sanity by her fingernails. If her great-grandma, grandma, and mom were nuts (and yeah, her mom definitely was), then she was right on their heels.

Genevieve wanted to be normal. So she decided to tell the tales instead. Since it was usually too early in the morning to think of anything original, she’d just plug Lizette into movie plots.

“There was once,” she started, “a down-on-her-luck cutie named Lizette. She wore thigh-high boots and a platinum bob wig and worked…um, on Hollywood Boulevard. In human resources. One night, she meets a dashing, wealthy businessman. He doesn’t care that she can’t eat lobster correctly…”

“Pretty Woman,” sighed Lizette. “Richard Gere’s Black—I feel it.”

“You think everybody’s Black until proven otherwise.”

“I won’t know peace till I see his genealogy report.”

Lizette felt that since Belle Fleur was full of Black folks who looked white, numbers suggested that many whites could be Black. It was all a fine line in the South, she’d say. Given that those sinning, raping plantation owners had both white babies and Black babies, everyone was six degrees from being one or the other. Which was what scared southern white people the most.

Lizette let go of Genevieve’s hand and launched into a catlike stretch. “I’m gonna have a time falling asleep. Honey, can you brew me up some Lipton’s?”

Genevieve nodded robotically. It was 6:17, and she should’ve been asleep. But this was her job. She was in charge of daytime. So she disentangled herself from Lizette and shuffled down the short hallway to the kitchen.

The hallway was dark, but the kitchen light was on. This was odd. Lizette was maniacal about keeping lights out unless absolutely necessary. To keep the light bill reasonable, and also for mood lighting.

She froze, a creeping feeling rising in her chest.

Nooo. Not today, of all days.

She’d begged her mom not to invite her boyfriends over. And Lizette always assured her that she’d stop, that their home would be a no-man zone. But by the end of a long, liquor-soaked night, Lizette never remembered her promises. Or why she’d made them in the first place.

She smelled him before she saw him. Hennessy and Newports. There he was, a small round man who looked about sixty, slumped over their tiny Salvation Army kitchen table, snoring jaggedly. He was wearing a cheap suit—shiny at the elbows and knees—and a lush, curly black toupee that was as crooked as it was shameless.

Genevieve took a hesitant step into the kitchen, the linoleum floor crackling a bit. Bending down to his level, she snapped her fingers in front of his face. Nothing.

Good, she thought. Passed out, he was harmless.

Holding her breath, she tiptoed past him to the cabinet over the sink. As she reached in for the Lipton, she knocked over a box of Bisquick. It hit the counter with a dull thud, emitting a cloud of pancake powder.

“Genevieve,” he slurred. His voice was higher pitched than it should’ve been. And two-packs-a-day raspy. “Wassup, Genevieve? ’S your name, right?”

“Yeah,” she said, turning around to face him. “We met yesterday.”

He smiled at her with discolored teeth. “I remember.”

“I bet you do,” she muttered. She leaned back against the counter, defensively folding her arms across her chest. Chuckling, he shimmied out of his suit jacket and then thrust it in Genevieve’s direction.

“Hang this up somewhere, baby.” It sounded like Haydisumwheah bebeh.

She eyed the jacket with extreme disgust. “We don’t have hangers.”

With a barking laugh, he shrugged and tossed the jacket on the floor. And then he leaned back in his chair and adjusted each pant leg with painstakingly slow precision. He leered at her while he did it, checking her out from the top of her poufy high ponytail to her socks.

Genevieve was wearing an oversized men’s Hanes tee and sweats; he definitely wasn’t catching any of her actual body. It didn’t matter, though. His type just wanted to intimidate. Assert dominance.

She wanted to call out for her mom, who she knew was already asleep. But Lizette wouldn’t have helped, anyway. The last time she’d told her mom about a run-in with one of her boyfriends, a shadow of…something…had passed behind Lizette’s eyes, and then she’d dismissed it.

“Oh, girl, he’s past the point of God’s forgiveness,” she’d said, all breezy with her movie-star smile. “You like to be clothed and fed?”

Genevieve had nodded, teary-eyed but almost numb.

“Well then. Be nice. Be good,” she warned, still smiling. “Besides, you’re too clever to be prey.”

Unlike mewas Lizette’s implication. When it came to men, her mom was, indeed, not clever. Every time one of her terribly dysfunctional relationships imploded, she was confused and stunned. And then with fresh hope, she’d fling herself at another jackass. Hope was Lizette’s greatest downfall. She was like a kid at one of those toy claw machines at Chuck E. Cheese. The claw never actually picks up a toy, no matter how strategically you aim—the game is obviously rigged. But you try every time, because the hope of it finally working, just this once, is such a thrill.

“You’re pretty,” the guy said, the whites of his eyes gone splotchy red. “Just like your mom. Lucky you.”

“Yeah,” she said dryly. “It’s worked out so well for me.”

Genevieve eyed this fool—his insane hairpiece, his wedding ring—and, not for the first time, wished she were a boy. If she were a boy, she’d knock him into his next life for the tone alone. And again for being married. And then again for letting her mom drink on the job because he knew that was the only way she’d agree to offer off-menu, high-priced services to VIP customers.

Be nice. Be good.

“But are you?” he asked.

“Am I what?”

He stroked the shiny fabric on his meaty thigh. “Are you just like your mom?”

“In…what way exactly?” Genevieve was buying time, trying to figure out how she’d defend herself if it came to it. “You mean, like, in terms of hobbies and interests? Astrological signs? Favorite Ying Yang Twin?”

He bark-laughed again and shook his finger at her. “You’re a smart-ass.”

He hoisted himself out of the foldout chair, ambled toward Genevieve, and stopped about a foot from where she was standing. Despite her thrumming sense of unease, she tried to look tough.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Seventeen.”

“You look younger,” he said, moving a bit closer to her.

Jesus, he’s one of those, thought Genevieve, her mind racing. He had one hundred pounds on her, but he was also drunk and sluggish—and she was fast. Desperately, her eyes darted around the tiny kitchen. There was nothing hard she could hit him with, like a pan or a teakettle. There was nothing but Honey Bunches of Oats, plastic forks, and Capri Suns.

My pocketknife’s all the way in the bedroom.

She wanted to hurt him before he hurt her. But then there was that old hesitation. Her mom needed this guy. He’d found them this shitty apartment. He’d given her mom a job. He was supporting them. She and her mom were a team.

Be nice. Be good.

“How old are you?” she asked, stalling even more.

“Fifty-eight.” He leaned a bit closer, unsteady on his feet. His after-hours club stench was pungent. “But I got stamina.”

Grinning, he slapped his clammy palm down on her forearm. And then the Lizette-wired part of her brain clicked off. She went completely still. Eyes narrowed. Senses sharpened.

“Wanna hear a joke?” she asked abruptly, with a sweet smile.

“A joke?” He was caught off guard. “Oh. Okay, I like jokes.”

“What did Satan say when he lost his hair?”

“I don’t know. What?”

She chuckled a bit to herself. “How bad do you wanna know?”

“Stop playing. Tell me!”

She glanced up at the rug atop his head. “There’ll be hell toupee.”

His mouth dropped open grotesquely. “W-what? Oh, you little cunt.”

He lunged at her. Genevieve dodged to her left, eluding his grasp. Knocked off-balance, he toppled drunkenly and then crashed to the floor, a cumbersome, slow-moving vat of lard. Momentarily paralyzed with shock, she just stood there, breathing heavily—and then he grabbed her ankle and yanked her to the ground. She fell down hard. Her head exploded into a thousand shards of razor-sharp glass.

“Fuck! You!” she wailed, clutching her face. And then, purely out of pain reflex, she reared back and power-kicked him in the ribs.

While he roared, she scrambled out of the kitchen on her hands and knees and then sprinted into the bathroom. She slammed the door, locking it with badly shaking hands. Grasping her face with one hand, her head thundering, she grabbed a bottle of Percocet from the sink drawer, climbed into the tub, and snatched the shower curtain shut. And only then did she breathe.

Through the cheap hollow-core bathroom door, Genevieve heard the guy screaming Lizette’s name. And then there was the gossamer pitter-pat of Lizette’s feet as she ran down the hall to the kitchen, hollering bewildered nonsense.

From experience, Genevieve knew to wait this out in the bathroom. She popped two pills into her mouth and chewed them dry. (They were prescribed by her Cincinnati doctor—who, like the countless frustrated docs before him, solved her unsolvable problem with opioids.) As Lizette and her man starred in their own chitlin circuit revival in the kitchen, she curled up on her side, waiting for relief.

Lizette had stopped the hysterics. Now she was cooing. Then Genevieve heard footsteps heading toward the master bedroom—Lizette’s Tinker Bell toes barely touching the ground, his steps heavy, labored. Genevieve knew this was her mom’s way of protecting her: luring him away and locking the door. Of course, it never occurred to Lizette to kick him out. Break up with him. Call the police. Be single for a minute, for that matter. Get her own job. Finance her own life. Save the day herself instead of depending on horrible men to do it for her.

Are you just like your mom?

Genevieve curled up tighter on her side, trying to make herself smaller. She was exhausted. All she wanted was to escape this repetitive, redundant hell.

Her eyes shut. She had only a few more minutes to pull herself together. She had to get ready.

Today was her first day at her new school.