Disgruntled: A Novel Page 24

  “Let’s get inside, Kenya,” her mother said in her least dreamlike voice. “For now, we’re home.”

  * * *

  That night Kenya sat in the kitchen, which now seemed tiny, listening to her mother explain how they’d wound up renting their old house. The landlord was a friend of Grandmama’s; there had been a chance meeting and then a break in the rent.

  “But, Mom,” she asked, “why would you want to live here again? After everything.”

  “Well, it was cheap.”

  “Okay,” said Kenya. But she didn’t believe that was the reason. When she looked at Sheila across the table, she got an image of her blurring at the edges, flickering like a TV screen going snowy. Her mother felt like a ghost who had come back to haunt their old house. Kenya reached out to her.

  Sheila winced. “Baby, your hand is freezing.”

  “Is this the best you can do for a touching family reunion?”

  Her mother squeezed her hand and smiled. “This is just getting started. Wait till you try spaghetti from a can.”

  * * *

  All Kenya had to do was close her eyes in their old house, in a new, stiff bed, to have a dream of the butler. The next morning she woke feeling horribly awake.

  She tried to close her eyes, but they snapped back open. And before she could stop them, her feet had hit the ground.

  You have to burn it all down, the butler had told her. She knew he didn’t mean for her to set fire to anyone’s home and kill anyone’s child with an ax. But she knew the key to the next part of her life, the good part, was figuring out exactly what he did mean.

  Acknowledgments

  Warmest thanks to Ellen Levine, Miranda Popkey, Jesse Coleman, and Lorin Stein for all that they have done and continue to do.

  Thanks to Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran for telling me about the burning of Taliesin and for cheering me on. Thanks also to Donna Aza Weir-Soley and Linda Kim for helping me pretend to know some things I did not know.

  Thanks to Washington and Lee University, Trinity College, and Haverford College for their support.

  Thanks to Andrew, Adebayo, and Mkale, as well as Akiba, James, and Rochelle for just about everything else.

  Also by Asali Solomon

  Get Down

  A Note About the Author

  Asali Solomon was born and raised in Philadelphia. Get Down, her first book, earned her a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, was chosen as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Fiction Selections for 2007, and was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. She teaches English at Haverford College.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2015 by Asali Solomon

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2015

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Solomon, Asali.

  Disgruntled: a novel / Asali Solomon. — First edition.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-374-14034-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-374-71295-2 (ebook)

  1. African American girls—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Fiction. 2. Philadelphia (Pa.)—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.O4335 D57 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2014027442

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