“I just remembered,” I lied, “I got something to do on Friday. So I can’t go nowhere.”

•    •    •

RIGHT BEFORE I opened the door, I heard the soundtrack to Lady Sings the Blues and smelled the scent of Shalimar. These two meant one thing: Aunt Jewel was in town.

I wasn’t used to being greeted with tight, sincere after-school hugs. But Aunt Jewel was not like her sister, my mother. She flew from the kitchen where they had been listening to records and smoking Salem cigarettes. I could barely flub “Hey, Auntie Jewel” before I was in a grip.

“Come here, love, and give your auntie some sugar!”

Aunt Jewel talked with her whole body; by herself, she was a congregation. She couldn’t stop her shoulders from shimmying or her neck from rolling while she stood before me with arms outstretched, radiant in a snug black rayon dress patterned with dots as orange as California poppies in the wild. She couldn’t have known about the swollen tenderness in my breasts, and squeezed shy giggles out of me despite the discomfort.

“Every time I see you, I swear I’m reminded I’m getting old,” she said.

“You just seen her last summer,” my mother said in between blowing smoke circles. “She ain’t that much bigger …”

“Well, I don’t see Miss Thang every day like you do, Annette,” Jewel replied. “And every time I see her, if she hasn’t grown up she’s definitely grown out. Look at those hips!”

Aunt Jewel playfully slapped my behind as Ma sauntered back to the kitchen tucked in the rear wing of our L-shaped two-bedroom apartment. Emboldened by the surprise visit of the one relative who brought gifts rather than grief, I sashayed to the beat of Diana Ross singing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” as I followed them. By the time we arrived in the humid kitchen, the record had started to skip. Pearls of blood had finally started to pop out of the flour-coated chicken wings tumbling in a cast-iron pot of grease. Instinctively, Jewel tended to the music and I grabbed a fork to rotate the meat. I knew better than to let the blood bleed out and into hardened knobs of brown before the chicken was ready. I had not forgotten the stinging thwacks on my lower back when Ma had once bit into a thigh that drizzled red. It was my chore to fix us both something to eat on the nights I didn’t babysit, but Ma shooed me out of the way tonight. She wasn’t about to let her apathy toward domestic duties shave even more off her womanhood than her baby sister’s kittenish allure already had.