Her Husband's Second Phone Said "Daddy"

Tamika didn't say anything into the phone. She couldn't.

On the other end, Nikki said, "Darnell? Hello? Can you hear me?"

Then there was a long silence. And Tamika heard her little sister's breathing change. Like Nikki knew. Like she'd been waiting six years for exactly this silence.

"Tee?" Nikki whispered. "Tee, is that you?"

Tamika hung up.

She drove to Charlotte that night. Alone. Three hours and forty minutes up I-85 in the dark. She dropped Darnell off at their house in Atlanta first, without a word, and pulled away while he was still standing in the driveway calling her name.

She didn't turn on the radio. She just drove.

Nikki was seven years younger. The baby. The one Tamika braided hair for every morning before school, the one she taught to ride a bike, the one she gave half her college refund check to so Nikki could get her car fixed. Nikki moved to Charlotte almost seven years ago. For a job, she said. A fresh start.

Tamika had visited twice. Nikki always met her at a restaurant. Never at the apartment. The place was a mess, she said. You know me.

Tamika knew her now.

She had the address. She'd mailed a Christmas card there every year.

At two fifteen in the morning, she pulled up to a little brick townhouse with a pink bicycle with training wheels chained to the front porch rail.

The porch light came on before she even got to the door. Nikki opened it in a robe, her face swollen like she'd been crying for hours.

"Tee..."

"Don't."

Tamika walked past her into the living room. And stopped.

The whole wall was covered with pictures. School pictures. A little girl with a gap-tooth smile and two puffs of hair. A little girl at the beach. A little girl on a man's shoulders at a fair.

The man was Darnell.

Ferris wheel in the background. Funnel cake in his hand. Laughing. Tamika had never once seen him look that happy in a picture with her.

"How long?" she said, without turning around.

"Tee, please sit down."

"How long, Nikki?"

Nikki sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands.

"It was one time," she said. "It was the week you were in the hospital. The third time. You were so sick, and Mama was staying with you, and I was at your house watching the dogs, and Darnell came home from the hospital at midnight, and he was falling apart. He was crying in the kitchen. He said he couldn't watch you go through it again. And I was crying too, and..." She stopped. "And it was one time. I swear to God. Just once."

"And then you moved to Charlotte."

"When I found out I was pregnant, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't tell you. You'd just lost the baby. You'd just lost..." Nikki's voice cracked into pieces. "How was I supposed to call my sister and tell her I was having her husband's baby the same month she lost hers?"

Tamika turned around.

"So you lied for six years."

"He said we had to. He said it would kill you. He said it was the only way to protect you."

"Protect me?" Tamika laughed. It was an ugly sound. "He pays for all this, doesn't he? The townhouse. The bike. Those are his weekends in Charlotte. The new territory."

Nikki didn't answer. She didn't have to.

"Does Mama know?"

Nikki looked down at her hands.

Tamika felt the floor tilt.

"Mama knows."

"She figured it out when Mia was two. She saw a picture." Nikki wiped her face. "She made me promise not to tell you. She said it would break you. She said some things are better left..."

"Everybody," Tamika said. "Everybody knew. Everybody but me."

"Tee, I'm so sorry. I have been sorry every single day..."

There was a creak on the stairs.

Both women turned.

A little girl was standing on the bottom step in pink pajamas with cartoon cats on them, holding a stuffed rabbit by one ear. Two puffs of hair, flattened on one side from the pillow. Darnell's eyes. Darnell's exact eyes.

She looked at her mother, crying on the couch. Then she looked at the strange woman standing in the middle of her living room.

She tilted her head. And then her whole face lit up.

"Are you Aunt Tee?" she said. "From the pictures in Mommy's room?" She held up the rabbit like it was proof. "Mommy said one day you would come."