Aftermath of Dreaming(115)

“You know that’s not true.”

“Well, Christ, if this is how you show you care, I hope to God I never have to find out what it’s like when you don’t. This is brutal enough.”

“I’m sorry, all right?”

“I just don’t understand why you didn’t call me. You showed up for me when Momma died, I can’t understand why you wouldn’t just call me back. There wasn’t even a funeral to fly to.”

“This one felt too big for me. I didn’t think I could say anything comforting about it. It was your father, for Christ’s sake, and now, I mean, both your parents are dead. I had no idea what to say, so I stayed away.”

“But anything you say is a comfort to me. All I needed was to know you were there.”

Reggie says nothing. The line sounds dead. I wonder if he is back on the protein shakes and has learned to sip them quietly. It still hurts to open my mouth and my appetite isn’t back yet anyway.

“Yvette, I’m sorry I didn’t call you back when you found out your father died. That must have been horrible. Will you tell me about it now?”

He has asked in the gentle tone that I longed to hear from him a week ago, and as I tell him about it a truce is formed through the information leaving me and becoming part of him, for him to have in his memory, so I don’t have to carry it alone.

You just never know with people, I think as I hang up the phone. I had never thought that both of my parents dead might flip Reggie out. When Momma died, I joined a club that he was already in, the club of people with one parent no longer alive. The people I had left outside, the ones still with both parents, had no idea what it was like, so I didn’t talk to them about it and I could tell they were glad because they didn’t want to hear. I never stopped to think—and now I understand why—that there is an even smaller club to go into, the both-parents-gone tribe, and I guess people with one parent still living don’t want to talk to this group, want to stay outside with their last parent standing as long as they can, refusing to believe that this club may actually be home one day to them, and better be home to them because the alternative is their own demise.

I am not going to boxing tonight on this one-week anniversary of finding out about Daddy’s death. In fact, I have decided never to go back. Dave and the coach will probably think it is because I got flipped out by being hit, but it’s not. It’s because my drives home from there will always be associated with discovering that Daddy died and I can’t have that memory recurring every time I get on the 10 from that point. I know how to hit now, I have a pretty good right jab, so if anything happens I’m prepared. I mean, obviously, hopefully something won’t happen, but I’m prepared if it does, so it probably won’t. Those are the odds.



My grief is round and red and jagged inside me. It is exhausting, but I cannot sleep. It has become harder and harder for me to put myself to bed, like a child whose parent has forgotten his job, so I stay on the couch. Push the decorative pillows off, pull the throw down from the back, and settle in. I have stopped attempting to sleep in my bed, and when I fall asleep on the couch, the scream dream follows me there. In the mornings, I peek in at my bedroom, so bright and untouched, like a storeroom display for sleep that can’t be bought. I feel like a visitor in there, no longer master of its purpose. I have lost the ability to be in it at night.

In the mornings, I have a truncated conversation with Reggie, sometimes just hello, and not even while we eat. It is hard to know where more pain is emanating from—losing Daddy, Andrew, or Reggie. Though Reggie isn’t gone, we just haven’t gotten back to where we were. And probably won’t. Which I am starting to think is maybe a good thing. Virtual emotional boyfriend is what he was and exactly the problem really.

After a few weeks, I pull myself together enough to think about my jewelry, which has been flung across the country like my father’s soul dispersed God knows where.

The last call I make to Greeley’s to check on my line is to their Houston store. I figured I’d finish in the South, irrationally hoping that the relative proximity to my birthplace will have a good-luck effect on what they’ll tell me.

“I think, yeah, is it the…?” Then the woman’s accent gets even more pronounced as she yells away from the phone, “Sally Ann, look over on your side of the case there, hon, is that the Broussard’s Bijoux stuff over there? Those pearly necklaces and things. You know, next to the gold add-a-beads.”

Pearly necklaces and things. Next to the gold add-a-beads. Oh, good God. Can I fall off a cliff right now?

“Uh-huh, we got ’em. What do ya wanna know?”

We’ve got all of ’em, she could’ve said to save her coworker from having to count up the pieces as I waited on the phone while dreading that the numbers were getting higher the longer it took. Not a one had sold. Just like in Miami and White Plains. This was not the news I wanted to hear to cheer me up and give me some security after a godforsaken month of dealing with my father’s death. But at least Greeley’s had already paid me for them. I just hope Linda will still order more.

I peek at my bank accounts and calculate how much living-time the numbers represent. A couple more months, maybe, but I can already see a sliding-into-broke if nothing comes up. Fuck. Another store is the answer, that is obvious enough. Or new commissions, because I am going to need a cash infusion soon to pay the bills for my business and this apartment that I can’t fall asleep in. I pull out my list of private customers and begin addressing envelopes to them that I will put my brochure in, plus a personal note, all the while praying some of them will order new jewelry.