She shook her head at him. “How about if I don’t think your father is good looking?”
“Women don’t value looks as much as men do,” Sparkle answered. “Also, I’ve already vetted his picture and his face is very symmetrical.”
“Oh, Lord, please tell me you didn’t also tell this man you wanted us to get married!”
“No, not yet,” Kenji answered. “We didn’t come up with the plan until a few weeks ago. Also, I wanted to run it by Uncle Dexter first.”
“Uncle Dexter?”
“His partner. He’s the one who convinced my father to let me go away to Rise Academy. They spend a lot of time together, and he’s black, too, so my father might be more receptive to the idea if it came from him.”
Lacey rubbed a hand over her face. “Please do not involve anyone else in this mess. And what exactly do you mean by ‘his partner?’”
Kenji threw Sparkle a confused look.
“She wants to know if your father is gay,” Sparkle said. “She works with a few of lesbians.”
“No, Dexter is his business partner,” Kenji answered. “And that’s another thing we can add to the list of things you have in common, because Dexter is gay, too.”
“Oh, my sweet—“ Lacey cut herself off before she took the Lord’s name in vain for a second time that day. “Are you sure they’re just business partners? For all you know, I’m really not your dad’s type.”
Kenji frowned. “I hadn’t considered that.”
Then he abruptly walked away.
“He’ll be back,” Sparkle said in response to Lacey’s questioning look.
Lacey shook her head at her daughter. “Wow,” she said. “When you decided to finally get a best friend, you just went all out, didn’t you?”
“I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or giving me a sincere compliment.”
Lacey smiled and resisted the urge to give her daughter another hug. Sparkle could be a nut, but she was her nut and she had missed her terribly this past year while she’d been away at boarding school. “I’m just happy to see you, sweetie,” she said, deciding to drop the subject altogether.
“DAD, ARE YOU GAY?” Kenji asked Suro, coming to stand with him, Dexter, Andrew, and Andrew’s wife, Roxxy. Her newborn baby girl was strapped snugly to her front and snoozing comfortably against her mother’s chest.
Suro had been listening to Dexter, Andrew, and Roxxy talk about how well the inaugural four-day camp, which had wrapped up Rise Academy’s school year, had gone, when his son, Kenji, had approached him and asked this question out of the blue, without so much as a prefaced hello.
“Hello, Kenji,” Suro said, giving him a small bow.
His son, who didn’t speak Japanese, but liked the formality of bows, gave him a much bigger bow back, as was the custom between a father and son who hadn’t seen each other for an extended amount of time. He also gave smaller bows to Dexter, Andrew, and Roxxy before asking Suro again, “Are you gay?”
Suro could see the other adults working hard to suppress their laughter.
“No,” he answered, knowing from long-experience it was easier to answer Kenji’s questions, rather than ask him why he was asking them in the first place.
“You and Dexter aren’t boyfriends then, just business partners?”
Dexter lost the fight not to laugh. “Naw, man! Your dad’s cool and we’ve made a grip of money since going into business together, but it ain’t like that. Plus, he’s not my type.”
Kenji gave them a satisfied nod. “Okay, I’ll go tell Sparkle’s mother.”
“Who’s Sparkle?” Suro asked.
“His little girlfriend,” Dexter, who had worked security pro bono at the camp answered. “They been thick as thieves since before they got here.”
Roxxy ran a hand over her sleeping daughter’s silky brown curls. “And begging us for an electric outlet to plug in their keyboards the entire time,” she added with dry amusement. Her singing days happily behind her, the former rock star now ran the Starry Sky summer camp, so she had intel that Dexter didn’t. “I don’t think they were quite on board with the whole no-electricity part of camping.”
“We liked it here, but we would have liked it more if the tents had electrical outlets,” Kenji told her. “You should put them in the for next year, then your camp will be perfect.”
“That defeats the purpose of camping,” Roxxy started to say.
But the always affable Andrew cut his wife off with a chuckle. “Thanks for the suggestion, kid. We’ll take that under consideration.”
“But let’s get back to this Sparkle girl,” Dexter said. “Why you asking about all this? Did her mom say you two can’t date if your dad’s gay?”
“We’re not dating. We’re best friends and co-composers of an opera we plan to debut in two years. But we won’t be able to make our deadline if we have to keep on spending summers and school breaks apart.” He turned to Suro. “That’s why you have to marry Sparkle’s mom, Dad. That way we can all live in the same place and it will give Sparkle and me more time to work on our project together.”
“What?” Suro said, showing true surprise for the first time in years.
Now Dexter wasn’t even trying to contain his laughter. “Aw man, you got your twelve-year-old son trying to set you up. Consider what that says about your love life!”
Suro ignored his partner. “Perhaps, you should introduce me to this woman,” he said to his son.
“I’m coming with you,” Dexter said. “I’ve got to see this.”
Less than a minute later, Suro and Dexter were following Kenji through the crowd of parents and students at the brunch social toward the breakfast buffet where his son guessed Sparkle and her mother would be.
He had no further plans than to introduce himself, apologize for his son’s pushiness, and extricate himself from the situation as quickly as possible, but then his son pointed to a little black girl standing at the buffet.
“There’s Sparkle,” his son said. Then he pointed again. “And there’s her mother.”
Suro slowed his pace. From behind, the girl’s mother looked just like…
“She looks good from behind at least,” Dexter said. “Not too skinny. I hate when women let themselves get too skinny.”