The Vanishing Half(12)
“I’m not too hungry,” Desiree said.
“You gonna fall out if you don’t eat somethin.”
Desiree shrugged, taking a sip. Adele could already feel her fighting to break away, like a bird beating its wings against her palms.
“I can take your girl by the school later,” Adele said. “Get her all signed up.”
Desiree scoffed. “Now why in the world you wanna do that?”
“Well, she oughta keep on with her studies—”
“Mama, we’re not stayin.”
“Where you expect to go? And how you expect to get there? I bet you don’t have ten dollars in your pocket—”
“I don’t know! Anywhere.”
Adele pursed her lips. “You rather be anywhere than here with me.”
“It’s not like that, Mama.” Desiree sighed. “I just don’t know where we oughta be right now—”
“You oughta be with your family, cher,” Adele said. “Stay. You safe here.”
Desiree said nothing, staring out into the woods. Overhead, the sky was awakening, fading lavender and pink, and Adele wrapped an arm around her daughter’s waist.
“What you think Stella’s doin right now?” Desiree said.
“I don’t,” Adele said.
“Ma’am?”
“I don’t think about Stella,” she said.
* * *
—
IN MALLARD, Desiree saw Stella everywhere.
Lounging by the water pump in her lilac dress, slipping a finger down her sock to scratch her ankle. Dipping into the woods to play hide-and-seek behind the trees. Stepping out of the butcher’s shop carrying chicken livers wrapped in white paper, clutching the package so tightly, she might have been holding something as precious as a secret. Stella, curly hair pinned into a ponytail, tied with a ribbon, her dresses always starched, shoes shined. A girl still, since that was the only way Desiree had ever known her. But this Stella flitted in and out of her vision. Stella leaning against a fence or pushing a cart down a Fontenot’s aisle or perching on St. Catherine’s stone steps, blowing a dandelion. When Desiree walked her daughter to her first day of school, Stella appeared behind them, fussing about the dust kicking up on her socks. Desiree tried to ignore her, squeezing Jude’s hand.
“You gotta talk to people today,” she said.
“I talk to people I like,” Jude said.
“But you don’t know yet, who you gonna like. So you gotta be friendly to everyone, just to see.”
She straightened the ruffles on her daughter’s collar. She’d spent the night before kneeling in the yard, scrubbing Jude’s clothes in the washtub. She hadn’t packed enough for either of them, and plunging her hands into the filmy water, she imagined her daughter cycling through the same four dresses until she outgrew them. Why hadn’t she made a plan? Stella would have. She would have planned to run months before she actually did, squirreling away clothes slowly, one sock at a time. Set aside money, bought train tickets, prepared a place to go. Desiree knew because Stella had done it in New Orleans. Slipped out of one life into another as easily as stepping into the next room.
Near the schoolyard, beige children pressed against the fence, gawking, and Desiree gripped her daughter’s hand again. She’d laid out Jude’s nicest outfit, a white dress with a pink pinafore, socks with lace trim, and Mary Janes. “Don’t you have something brown?” her mother had asked, lingering in the doorway, but Desiree ignored her, tying pink ribbons around Jude’s braids. Bright colors looked vulgar against dark skin, everyone said, but she refused to hide her daughter in drab olive greens or grays. Now, as they paraded past the other children, she felt foolish. Maybe pink was too showy. Maybe she’d already ruined her daughter’s chances of fitting in by dressing her up like a department store doll.
“Why they all lookin at me?” Jude asked.
“It’s just cause you new,” Desiree said. “They just curious about you.”
She smiled, trying to sound cheerful, but her daughter glanced warily toward the schoolyard.
“How long we stayin out here?” she asked.
Desiree knelt in front of her. “I know it’s different,” she said. “But it’s just for a little bit. Just until Mama figures some things out, okay?”
“How long’s a little bit?”
“I don’t know, baby,” Desiree finally said. “I don’t know.”
* * *
—
THE SURLY GOAT rose lazily on stilts, moss trees dripping onto the reddened roof. Desiree carefully picked around the muddy pathway just to find the first dilapidated step. A small town in the shadow of an oil refinery, with no picture show or nightclub or ballpark nearby meant one thing: an abundance of bored, rough men. Marie Vignes was the only person in Mallard who hadn’t seen a problem with this. Instead, she’d turned the farmhouse her parents left her into a bar, put her four sons to work cleaning glasses and hauling kegs, and on occasion breaking up fights. She’d planned to leave the bar someday to one of her sons, but by the time she died, they were all gone. The twins rarely saw her after their father’s funeral. Their mother had never wanted anything to do with that speakeasy or the unrefined woman it belonged to. The two women had been polite enough when Leon was there to smooth things over, but now that he was gone, there was no space for both of them and their grief.