when you didn’t answer any of my texts. Also, I’ve never been to St. Louis. I wanted to see what drew you here.” She had an accent I couldn’t place. Not English like Rhys’s but just as pronounced.
My guess that she wasn’t from around here was confirmed when Rhys answered, “So you got on a plane all the way from Europe to come check on me?”
I sat up in bed, so confused. “Rhys? What’s going on?”
They both turned toward me, like I’d interrupted them in the middle of an important conversation.
“Cynda, I’m sorry for waking you,” Rhys said.
At the same time, the blonde princess smirked. “I see you really did decide to experiment with something new. How…interesting.”
I was pretty sure she was talking to Rhys, but her eyes were slitted on me.
“Ingrid…” Rhys said with a warning tone.
“Don’t be upset, darling. It was simply a joke,” she chided. “Perhaps your friend could show me around today since you have to go to work.”
As much as I loved being talked about like I wasn’t sitting right there, naked underneath Rhys’s covers, I had to ask her, “Okay, who are you again?”
“Oh, how rude of me. I’m sorry it took me so long to introduce myself,” she answered.
Then she held up a hand with an enormous engagement ring on her finger. “I’m Ingrid, Rhys’s fiancée.”
Chapter Six
Three years after meeting Rhys’s fiancée, I agree to let him rent out the back house my father built for his mother-in-law. On the very same day he fires me.
And later that night I find myself in bed, hunched over my laptop, researching one Reina Smith.
I think Mabel senses that I need some company. Instead of hanging out with E in her room, she meows into mine and hops on to the bed.
If petting me will help, go right on ahead, she seems to be saying as she settles against my thigh.
“Good idea, Mabe,” I say out loud.
Scratching her behind the ears, I watch the last video in some superfan’s Best of Enjenue Video collection. Despite her ubiquitous last name, Reina Smith had actually been really easy to find on the internet.
My earlier suspicion was right, she’d been a real beauty. She’d been born before it became common for Black girls to compete in the official Princess Missouri pageant. But I’m surprised grandma, who’d sewn my early gowns by hand, hadn’t put her up for Miss Black Missouri or something like that. She was the kind of girl-next-door stunner that beauty pageants love. And she was talented too.
I discovered that she used to be in a 90s girl group. The kind of act that never made it all the way to BET’s 106 and Park but opened before the opener for the acts that did.
The earliest performance clip I found of them after a few deep YouTube searches had been grainy as a big dog. But it had a camcorder date stamp that was just a few months after my birth. Which explained a few things.
Reina had been beautiful with a voice to match. A three-month-old baby probably hadn’t aligned with her dreams of stardom.
Suddenly, so many things were becoming clear. Like why my mom encouraged me to learn piano but then made me stop when I started composing music on my own. Supposedly because I needed to concentrate on “more productive things” like my nursing degree.
Her explanation for moving the piano to the back house had seemed practical enough. But I’d been confused by her unusually firm stance on this one and only matter. Prior to that, she’d let her little beauty queen do pretty much whatever she wanted.
However, now I could see what had really happened. My budding talent had frightened my mom. She’d been scared.
Scared I turn out just like her little sister. My biological mom.
That night, I ended up following Reina’s career all the way up into the 2000s. But somewhere around the late aughts, all mentions of her stopped. Enjenue’s Svengali-like manager replaced two out of three of the group’s singers with younger versions of Black Midwestern girls before disbanding just a couple of years later.
So if my highly guesstimated timeline is correct and everything she said in the letter was true, Reina stopped singing right around the time she got sober.
After the last YouTube clip is done, I scan my emotions.
But I guess that’s the upside of having a mother die too soon on you. I can’t bring myself to be mad at her, or even a little upset. Of course,