Now you gonna have to pull up a chair.
Because what Ricky told Clyde that Tuesday afternoon out on the porch?
Oh Boy. I been living in this neighborhood thirty-seven years and I thought I’d heard it all.
Clyde was just out there minding his business, drinking a Sprite, fanning himself with a Popeyes bag ‘cause the AC in that man’s car has been broke since Obama’s first term.
And Ricky rolled up on his bike grown man, thirty-two years old on a mountain bike — and sat down on that bottom step like he had the weight of generations on him.
Which, come to find out, he did.
“Aye bruh,” Ricky said, real quiet.
“I gotta tell you something and you cannot repeat this to nobody.”
Now we all know what that means.
That means I’m telling everybody.
So Ricky starts explaining.
His mom, Ms. Denise a sweet woman, makes the best sweet potato pie in the city and has a twin sister Identical twin named Diane.
Okay so back in the day, Diane was dating this man named Curtis.
Curtis what Ricky described a tall slim man with all his teeth that drove a Cutlass Supreme.
So Diane and Curtis are together.
Doing their thing.
Real cute couple from what the family said.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, Curtis crossed a line he had absolutely no business crossing.
He slept with Denise.
The twin.
Clyde sat up straight.
“Bruh—”
“I ain’t done,” Ricky said.
So they do what people with no sense do — everybody acts like nothing happened.
Diane doesn’t know.
Denise ain’t saying nothing.
Curtis kept right on dating Diane.
And eventually it all settled down and life moved on the way life does when folks are too scared to tell the truth.
Fast forward.
Denise ends up pregnant.
She has a baby boy.
That’s Ricky’s oldest brother, Terrance.
Big Terrance. Who everybody in the family just calls “T.”
Now it’s time family reunion.
Hot summer.
A close friend of the family let us use his backyard out in Jasper County.
Potato salad, red beans, bbq smoked meat, cold drinks with dominoes going on two different tables.
The whole family in one place.
And somebody starts doing that family tree thing. You know how older folks get at reunions, trying to trace everybody back to the same great-great-grandmother named Hattie Mae.
And while they’re going down the line connecting cousins and second cousins and third and so on.
It comes out.
Curtis? The man with the Cutlass?
Is that Denise and Diane’s cousin.
Not a distant cousin.
A real one. A documented, same-grandparents.
Which means Terrance Big T Denise oldest son?
Is the product of two cousins.
Clyde said he didn’t say a word for about forty-five seconds. He just sat there looking at a butterfly.
“And everybody at the reunion just… found out at the same time?” he finally said.
“At the same time,” Ricky confirmed. “the whole family.
By the food table.
“And what happened?”
Ricky scratched the back of his neck.
“My Auntie Brenda accidentally knocked over one of the pans of bbq meat. Smoked meat went everywhere.
And then everybody just started pretending like they needed to go check on the grill.”
The thing is there was no falling out with each other.
No big blowups.
Everybody looked at each other across that backyard in Jasper County, made a silent agreement the way families sometimes do when the truth is too big and too loud and too late to do anything about, and they just… kept it inside the family.
If Big T didn’t know he knows now.
Or if he do know, he act like he don’t.
Either way he’s a grown man with three kids and a landscaping business and he shows up to every reunion and I see why he eats his plate and goes home.
Curtis disappeared.
Diane found out and she and Denise had whatever they had between them privately, because ain’t nobody in that family telling that part of the story out loud.
And Ricky? He told Clyde because Ricky has been carrying it since he found out from his grandmother three years ago and he needed to vent to the one person that would listen.
Clyde finished his Sprite and didn’t say nothing for a long time.
“So your brother got cousins just all on one side,” he finally said. “In more ways than one.”
Ricky pointed at him.
“I’m just saying it is what it is, bruh.”
And that right there is the thing about family secrets.
They don’t go away.
They just get passed down quiet, generation to generation, folded up neat like a letter nobody’s supposed to open — until a family reunion.
Some things you can’t unknow, baby.
And a perfectly good pan of smoked chicken can’t go flying all over the backyard. 🤦♂️
To be continued…