Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [8]
“Tired, couldn’t sleep; all night I was up.” He arranged the parsley on his cook’s table, spreading it wide so that it would take up more space on the table.
“Couldn’t sleep? Why not?” she asked into the bowl as she sopped up another good fingerful of marinade from the inside of the bowl.
“If you must know, it was you grinding your teeth in your sleep. I was up all night listening to you grind your teeth. Have you ever heard yourself? Ghastly sound, so very irritating.”
“Well, silly man, why didn’t you wake me and tell me to stop?” she retorted, licking her lips and making a smacking sound.
“You know you die when you fall asleep.” He reached for his vegetable knife from the knife block. “A bull chasing a matador could crash through the front window and there wouldn’t be a peep from you, except of course for your teeth thrashing about, going at it with each other.”
“Well, what are you doing up all night, listening to my teeth anyhow? Something on your mind, Finch?”
“Always something on my mind. I’m a grown Negro man with a business and a family to care for and keep in style; don’t you think I should have things on my mind?” He cut the leafy heads from the parsley and looked on the wall for his smaller colander. He remembered it was in the refrigerator filled with purple cabbage.
“Money’s on your mind, right, Finch? Worried that we don’t have enough to make it, right?”
“We have enough to make it.”
“For today, Finch, when it’s bright and sunny, like this room is now. What about tomorrow, when it rains?”
They’d had this conversation many times over the years. And usually Finch would hit Clarise with a saying, something about the perils of worrying about tomorrow. This time it was “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.” He shouted to be heard above the water gushing over the colander of parsley. “And I do have substantial life insurance for when that day comes.”
Clarise raised her voice now too. Took the stance the aunts would take when they were teaching her how to hold her own: hands on her hips, legs slightly parted, head pushed way forward of her neck. “You sound like a got-damned fool,” she said. “Don’t you realize that the dodo bird went extinct because it didn’t concern itself with tomorrow?”
He let the parsley fall back in the sink, shook the water from his hands, went to the drawer on the side of his cook’s studio where he kept his contracts, pulled out the passbook savings account from PSFS and turned it to the balance page and flashed it in her face. He thought about something else he could quote, noticed the hand-painted lilies on her silk robe. Paraphrased Matthew then. “Consider the lilies of the field; they neither toil nor spin.”
“You are not some flower, Finch, nor am I,” she said as she snatched the bankbook from his hand.
“But even Solomon in all his splendor was not so richly clothed.” Finch talked right over her.
Clarise studied the balance page. She was half satisfied that they could make it in the short term anyhow.
Finch held his breath while she peered at the bankbook. He could almost smell the lilies on her robe they looked so real. He lived for Clarise. Even though he’d gladly lay his life down for his darling daughters, it was for Clarise that his lungs took in air. He saw her dusty grey eyes soften. He wiped his hands against his apron, took her head against his expansive shoulder. “Clarise, you are so wrong,” he said. “You are in fact a flower, my pretty baby flower, more precious to me than a whole field of lilies.” He mashed his chin against her hair, which had gone from straight to fluffy while they argued, meant it was going to rain later. “So what if you kept me up all night grinding your teeth?”
“Awl, Finch,” she gushed, “you are my dodo bird, the only one who was smart enough to stay alive.”
They swayed against each other, telling love jokes and laughing softly, the daylight trying to get between them,