The Vanishing Half(27)

Her mother never acknowledged the beginning of an Early season, but Maman knew. This, too, was a feature of Early season: she and her grandmother, tentative allies, forging clearer allegiance.

“All those men,” Maman said, “all those men around town and she’s still out here chasin after him.”

In her grandmother’s bedroom, Jude maneuvered around the bed, reaching for the bottle of eye drops Dr. Brenner prescribed after her grandmother complained about dryness. Each night before bed, her grandmother rested her head in Jude’s lap, her graying hair spread out like a fan, while Jude carefully placed a drop in each eye.

“You should have seen,” her grandmother said. “All the boys who loved them.”

She still did this sometimes, talked about Jude’s mother as them. Jude never corrected her. She slowly released the drop, her grandmother blinking up at her.



* * *



—

WHEN DESIREE VIGNES waved at her daughter’s bus from the terminal, she waited until the Greyhound disappeared around the corner to wipe the tears from her eyes. She didn’t want the last thing for her daughter to see, if she had in fact been staring out the back window, to be her silly mother, crying as if she’d never see her again. Early handed her a handkerchief and she laughed, dabbing her eyes. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, although nobody had asked and she wasn’t. After he dropped her by Lou’s Egg House for her shift, she realized, tying her apron, that she was starting her day the same way she’d started it for the past ten years, except that this time, she did not know when she would see her daughter again.

Ten years. She had been home ten years. Sometimes she glanced around the house, shaking her head, as if she still didn’t understand how she’d found herself back. As if she were in The Wizard of Oz, but instead of a house dropping on her, she’d fallen through the roof and awakened, years later, dazed to realize that she was still there. When she’d first decided to stay, she gave herself practical reasons. She didn’t earn enough at Lou’s to live anywhere else. She couldn’t abandon her mother again. She still hoped that Stella might return home on her own. And even if Stella didn’t, Desiree felt closer to her here, wandering around Stella’s old things. The chair where Stella sat at the table, a cornhusk doll Stella named Jane. Everywhere around the house, a door handle or blanket or couch cushion that Stella had once touched, bearing the invisible remnants of her fingerprints.

She’d made a sort of life for herself here, hadn’t she? With her mother and her daughter and Early Jones, who left and continued to leave but also continued to return. When he visited, Desiree felt like a girl again, the years falling away like meat off the bone. His arrivals always seemed a little miraculous. Once, she was carrying a country-fried steak and eggs to a table and found Early sitting at the end of the counter, chewing on a toothpick. Another time, she locked up the diner and turned to see Early leaning against the phone booth across the road. She was exhausted but still laughed at the sight of him, as unexpected as the sudden coming of spring. One day there was frost, and the next, bloom.

“I was just thinkin about you,” he’d say, as if he had stopped by on his way home, not driven all the way from Charleston, pressing on through the night, bleary-eyed, to get to her sooner. “Wonderin what you was up to.”

She was never up to anything, of course, her days blending together into a sameness that she later found comforting. No surprises, no sudden anger, no man holding her one moment, then hitting her the next. Now life was steady. She knew what each day would bring, except when Early appeared. He was the only thing in her life she wasn’t prepared for. He never stayed longer than a day or two before he was gone again. Once, he’d convinced her to call in sick to Lou’s so that he could take her fishing. They didn’t catch anything but halfway through the afternoon, he kissed her, slipping his fingers under her dress, stroking her as they floated on the glassy lake. It was the most thrilling thing that had happened to her in months.

When Early came to town, her mother grew grim and tightlipped, glaring at the door when Desiree slipped out to meet him at the boardinghouse.

“I don’t know why you foolin around with that man,” she said. “Can’t stick around, find no decent work.”

“He works,” Desiree said.

“Nothin decent!” her mother said. “Probably got all type of women out there runnin after him—”

“Well, that’s his business, not mine.”

She didn’t ask who Early spent his nights with outside of Mallard. He didn’t ask her either. Each time he left, she missed him, but she wondered if his leaving was the only reason why they worked. He wasn’t a settling man, and maybe she wasn’t a settling woman either. When she thought about marriage, she felt trapped with Sam in an airless apartment, bracing herself, through each calm moment, for his inevitable rage. But Early was easy. He had no hidden sides. They didn’t argue, and if she ever grew annoyed with him, she was comforted by the fact that soon enough he would be gone again. He couldn’t trap her because he refused to trap himself. She’d had to convince him to stay at the house when he visited.

“Aw, I don’t know, Desiree,” he’d said, rubbing his jaw slowly.

“I’m not askin for a ring,” she said. “I’m not really askin for anything. It just don’t make sense, me runnin out to the boardinghouse all the time. And I think with Jude, it would be better if—” But she paused here. She never wanted Early to think that she expected him to be a father to her daughter. He didn’t owe the two of them anything. Owing was never part of their arrangement.