The Vanishing Half(100)

“Look at you,” he said. “All grown up. Can’t hardly believe it.”

He still looked strong even though his hair was beginning to gray, silver creeping up his sideburns, threading through his beard. When she teased him about it, he laughed, touching his chin. “I’m gonna cut it off,” he said. “Rather walk around babyfaced than lookin like Santa Claus.”

“How’s Mama?” she said.

He wiped his forehead, pushing back his baseball cap.

“Oh she all right,” he said. “You know your mama. She tough. She’ll push through.”

“I wish I’d been here,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she meant that. She’d never known what to say around her grandmother anyway. But she wished she could have been there for her mother, who was never supposed to endure this alone. There were supposed to be two women comforting her grandmother at the end, one on each side of the bed, one holding each hand.

“It’s all right,” Early said. “Nothin you could’ve done. We just glad to have you now.”

She squeezed Reese’s thigh. He squeezed hers back. He was staring out the window, lips slightly parted. She knew he missed this, not sun-dappled beaches or frozen city sidewalks but brown countryside rolling flat into acres of woods. The white shotgun house appeared, looking the same as she’d remembered, which seemed wrong since her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.

You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.



* * *



—

SHE SPENT THE EVENING helping her mother cook for the repast. Early went to finalize everything at the funeral home and brought Reese with him. She stared out the kitchen window, watching both men climb into the truck, wondering what on earth they’d find to talk about.

“Y’all still happy?” her mother said. “He treat you good?”

Desiree wasn’t looking at her, bent over the oven to pull out the tray of yams.

“He loves me,” Jude said.

“That’s not what I asked. That’s two separate things. You think you can’t ever hurt nobody you love?”

Jude chopped celery for the potato salad, feeling that familiar surge of guilt. Four years she’d known about Stella and hadn’t said a word. She’d never expected that Stella would reemerge on her own, that one morning her mother would call her, fighting tears, and expose her lies. She’d apologized as much as she could, but even though her mother said she forgave her, she knew that something had shifted between them. She’d grown up in her mother’s eyes, no longer her daughter but a separate woman, complete with her own secrets.

“Do you think—” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?”

“I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said.

“Do you think he loved me?”

Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.”



* * *



—

THE MORNING OF THE FUNERAL, Jude awoke in her grandmother’s bed because, her mother told her, two unmarried people would not be sharing the same bed in her house. She was still trying to nudge them down the aisle, if a statement that obvious could be considered a nudge. She did not know that Jude and Reese had talked, once or twice, about marriage. They wouldn’t be able to, not without a new birth certificate for Reese, but still they talked about it, the way children talk about weddings. Wistfully. Her mother thought they were hip intellectuals who considered themselves too cool for marriage. Which was better than her understanding just how romantic they were.

Jude carried clean sheets to her old bedroom, helped Reese make the bed, not even pointing out that her mother and Early were also unmarried, in the eyes of the law and the Church. She couldn’t fall asleep until morning. She wondered, foolishly, if she might feel her grandmother’s presence somehow. But she felt nothing and that was worse.

In the hallway, she turned, pinning back her hair, while Reese zipped her black dress.

“I could hardly sleep last night,” she said. “Without you there.”

He kissed the back of her neck. He was wearing his good black suit. Her mother had asked him to help carry the casket. She’d heard them talking last night in the kitchen while she brushed her teeth. Her mother told Reese that she considered him a son, wedding or not, but she hoped at least that he wouldn’t make her wait forever to become a grandmother.

“I’m not sayin it has to be now,” her mother was saying. “I know y’all both busy. But someday, that’s all. Before I’m old and gray and can’t hardly move around. You would make a good daddy, don’t you think?”

He was quiet a minute. “I hope so,” he said.



* * *



—

NEAR THE END OF HER LIFE, Adele Vignes had told Desiree stories about her childhood that were so vivid, Desiree wondered if her mother was confusing them with her soap operas. A girl she’d hated in school who’d tried to push her down a well. Her brothers dressed in all black to steal coal. A poor boy bringing her a carnation corsage for senior prom. She’d bring up one of these anecdotes in front of the television, where she sat watching her soaps each afternoon. The shows seemed like the perfect form for her. Each day, the stories inching forward, but at the end of the week, the world essentially unchanged, the characters exactly who they had always been.