The Vanishing Half(20)
“I know it exactly,” she said.
* * *
—
IF YOU’D ASKED BACK THEN, nobody believed that Desiree Vignes would stay in Mallard. The bet around town was that she wouldn’t last a month. She’d tire of the crude whispers about her daughter, whispers she must have sensed, even if she could not hear them, each time the two walked around town. Some hoped, watching Desiree hold the hand of the little dark girl, that the two wouldn’t even stay that long. They weren’t used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them. Each time that girl passed by, no hat or nothing, they were as galled as when Thomas Richard returned from the war, half a leg lighter, and walked around town with one pant leg pinned back so that everyone could see his loss. If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.
Still, a month passed, startling everyone. If Desiree didn’t leave because of her daughter, surely boredom alone would root her out. After all her city adventures, how could she endure small-town living? The endless carousel of church bake sales, bazaars, talent shows, birthday parties and weddings and funerals. She’d never cared much for participating even before she’d left—that was the other one, Stella, who’d baked pecan pies for St. Catherine’s bake sale, or sang dutifully in the school choir, or stayed two hours to celebrate Trinity Thierry’s seventieth birthday. Not Desiree, who only attended the party after Stella dragged her, then looked so bored you wished you hadn’t even invited her before she skipped out while you cut the cake.
Somehow that same Desiree was back, kneeling between her mother and daughter during Sunday Mass. She was as surprised as anyone to realize, one morning, that she had been home for an entire month. By then, she’d fallen into a routine, walking Jude to school, cleaning the house, working the sedate dinner crowd at Lou’s as Jude read books at the counter. Each evening, she waited for Early Jones to call. She never knew where he would be calling from, or if he would call at all, but when Lou’s phone rang near closing, she always answered. The shrill bell jolted her from mindlessly refilling sugar canisters or wiping down tabletops.
“Just checkin in on you,” Early always said. How was her day? Her mama? Her daughter? Fine, fine, fine. Sometimes he asked about her shift and she told him that she’d had to send back three orders of eggs because the line cook, distracted as all get out, gave her scrambles instead of over easys. Or she asked about his drive and he told her that he’d been caught in a dust storm in Oklahoma, couldn’t see his own hand in front of him, and he’d had to inch slowly down the road, hoping he wouldn’t get hit. His stories excited her, even the dull ones. His life seemed so different from hers. Over time, he started to talk about the past, like how he’d been raised by his aunt and uncle after his parents dropped him off one night. She’d heard of children like this who had been given away. After her father died, her mother’s sister offered to take one of the twins.
“It’s too much,” Aunt Sophie had said, clasping their mother’s hands. “Let us lighten your load.”
The twins pressed against their bedroom door, listening hard, each wondering if she would be the one to go. Would Aunt Sophie take her pick, like choosing a puppy out of a basket? Or would their mother decide which daughter she could live without? Eventually, their mother told Aunt Sophie that she could not separate her girls, but later, Desiree learned that her aunt had asked for her. Aunt Sophie lived in Houston, and Desiree used to imagine her life there, a city girl whisking around in starched dresses and shiny leather shoes, not the faded calico her mother salvaged from the church bin.
After Mallard, Early said, he was sick of farming other people’s land, so he set off to Baton Rouge to try his luck. Well, the only luck he found was the hard kind. He spent a year there, stealing car parts in order to feed himself, until he got caught and shipped off to Angola State Prison. He was twenty then, already a man in the eyes of the law and truth telling, he’d felt like a man since the night his parents left him without saying good-bye. The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.
He spent four years in prison, a time he leapt over and would never, in all his life, talk much about.
“Does that change anything?” he asked her.
She imagined him in a phone booth somewhere, his boot kicked up on the glass.
“What would it change?” she said.
He was quiet a minute, then said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
But she knew what he meant: would she think about him differently now? She wasn’t sure what she thought about him at all. She’d had a crush on him once, long ago, but she didn’t know the man he’d grown up to be. She had no idea what he wanted from her. Weeks before, he’d offered to find Stella, and when she told him that she couldn’t pay him right away, he said, “That’s all right.”
“What you mean that’s all right?” she said.
“I mean, I don’t need it right off. We can work somethin out.”
She’d never met a working man who was so casual about his money, but then again, she’d never met a working man who did what Early did for a living. He hunted bail jumps who’d disappeared without a trace, hoping to start over somewhere new. But there was always a trail if you looked closely enough—no one disappeared completely. Again, she thought about the envelope of photographs he’d given her. In the diner, she’d held the package, her heart thudding.