A Necessary Struggle: Fall Semester

Part 6

It's been three and a half hours since Harmony spoke a word. Two hours of that was the car ride from Austin to Houston. She left the café in a fury trailed by Samuel running after her with her purse in tow. He jumped in the front seat as she backed her burnt orange Jeep out the parking lot barreling down the four-lane street en route for their childhood home. Samuel wasn't worried about the letter he read aloud in the car, as he lay zonked out on the dark sandy fabric sofa.

Harmony sat in a wingback chair, tuning out Wolf Blitzer reporting on the unrest on the Gaza Strip displayed on the flat screen hanging above the fireplace. Her mind was drifting on a backward spiral through what was her childhood. 

This very house with its redwood floors, five bedrooms, five bathrooms, custom kitchen, and straight run stairs was a hub for most of her childhood memories. She practiced cartwheels in the backyard when she was seven, learned how to bake oatmeal cookies in the kitchen at eight. 

She had her first driving lesson on their street at fifteen and broke her leg chasing Samuel down the stairs at sixteen. At eighteen, in the driveway, she hugged her dad, kissed him on the cheek and vowed to always be his baby girl before driving off into her life as a college girl.

That was a lie; she wasn't Henry Monroe's baby girl. She was Laurent O' Connor's but if he knew about her all this time why now. Why did he wait until the eve of her twenty-first birthday to tell her? Why did he wait this long to contact her? Why didn't Mama tell me, she wondered. 

Did her dad know, she paced along the trail of her racing thoughts? Or was this man lying, if he even was real? This all could be an elaborate hoax thought up by Cairo and executed by Samuel and Trevor. She looked at Samuel sleeping like a fetched out pup. He was too calm after hearing family wreaking news. Maybe it was fake.

 Or maybe, just maybe, it was true and these were the last moments of her normal, simple Huxtable family life. Tension and doubt was sending her stomach, mind, and heart along a five-loop, two hundred drop roller coaster with every minute that passed and her parents didn't walk through that door.

She glanced at the brass wall clock; it was 4:20. They've been off for seventy-five minutes. That was ample time for her mother to sow up her last patient and her father to check in on his. They should be home by now unless something happened to them. A patient crashed, a car crash, or maybe Laurent O' Connor showed up at the hospital and they were arguing in the parking lot. Her Dad telling her mama he wanted a divorce, her mama crying in the car and her dad checking into a hotel.

The front door slammed. Every muscle in Harmony's body tightened.

"My babies are home!" Her mama cheered. "Look, Henry, our babies are home!"

"What's the matter? Need money?" Henry sat his black leather briefcase on the floor and dropped his keys in the green glass dish on the pine table in the hall. "Something has to be wrong for ya'll to be here and it's not a holiday."

Harmony looked at her father trying to figure out what she inherited from him. She didn't have his wide nose, his bushy eyebrows or his sturdy frame six-foot-three frame. His eyes were coal black, her mama's blacker than night. Harmony's eyes were copper and her skin was sorrel. Her dad was ebony and her mother was coffee. She was always a shade lighter but she just chalked it up to DNA of a past ancestor. Samuel was the spitting image of their father, six-foot-three, mahogany skin, bushy eyebrows that he tamed in the morning, wide nose and a sturdy frame. She had the same hips and a butt the African genes blessed her with like her mama. She was lean, with a button nose, curls for days, and dimples that no one else in her family had.

"Who's Laurent O'Connor?" It came out Harmony's mouth like word vomit. It was the question that sat on her brain during the entire ride home.

"How do you know that name?" Henry asked walking into the living room.