The Vanishing Half(28)

“What about your mama?” he said.

“Don’t worry about her. I’ll take care of all that. I just think . . . well, it don’t make sense, that’s all. We two grown people. I’m tired of sneakin around.”

“Well, all right,” he said.

The next time he came to town, he met her at her mother’s house. He stood on the porch, carefully unlacing his dirty boots, and moved inside the house as if it were a fancy store and he was afraid he’d break something. He’d brought, ridiculously, flowers for the table and she filled a vase with water, feeling like they were playing a married couple, Early carrying on like a television husband, honey-I’m-home-ing her from the doorway. He’d also brought gifts from his travels: a new purse for her, a bottle of perfume her mother refused to thank him for, and a book for Jude. She had explained to her daughter that Early would come to stay with them.

“All the time?” Jude asked.

“No, not all the time,” Desiree said. “Just sometimes. When he’s in town.”

Her daughter paused, then said, “Well, maybe he shouldn’t come here. Maybe we should go with him.”

“We can’t, baby. He don’t even have a real house. That’s why we gotta stay here. But he’ll come visit and bring you nice things. Wouldn’t you like that?”

She knew better, of course. Her daughter only wanted to leave. She’d wanted to leave Mallard since they’d arrived and Desiree, ashamed, kept promising that they would. She couldn’t promise Jude that the other children would be kind or eat lunch with her or invite her over to play, so when another birthday party arrived without Jude receiving an invitation, Desiree told her daughter that none of this would matter once they’d left town. Leaving was the only thing she could offer. But, she thought, watching Early and Jude read together on the carpet, maybe staying wasn’t the worst thing for Jude. She had family here, at least. She was loved. At night, Desiree held her daughter and told her stories about her own childhood. At first she said, I have a sister named Stella, then, you have an aunt, then, once upon a time, a girl named Stella lived here.



* * *



—

FOR YEARS, Early tracked Stella Vignes until she was no longer Stella Vignes.

She’d been Stella Vignes in New Orleans and Boston, then the trail ran cold—she’d married, he figured, but he couldn’t find a marriage license for a Stella Vignes in any place he knew she’d been. So she’d married someplace else. She was still, he assumed, Stella. A new first name was too difficult to get used to. Only a professional con man could assume a completely new identity and Stella was nobody’s professional. Why worry about carefulness if you didn’t expect anyone to come looking for you? She’d been sloppy enough that he found her apartment in Boston.

“Oh, she was real nice,” the landlady said when he called. “Quiet. Worked somewhere downtown. A department store, maybe. Then upped and left. But she was real nice. Never caused no trouble.”

He imagined Stella behind a perfume counter, spraying pink bulbs toward ladies passing by, or gift wrapping dolls during Christmas. He’d had one or two dreams where he was chasing her through a Sears and Roebuck, Stella ducking behind dress carousels and shoe racks.

“She have a boyfriend?” he asked.

The landlady grew silent after that, then said she had to go. A colored man asking after a white woman—she’d already said too much. But not enough for Early, who hadn’t even found a forwarding address. Stella sprinkled breadcrumbs, which was almost worse than nothing. Almost, because he didn’t want to find Stella at all.

There’d been a time in the beginning—at least, he told himself this—when he’d wanted to find her in earnest. Now, looking back, he wasn’t so sure. Maybe it had always been Desiree’s will, tugging him along. He’d wanted to please her, that was why he’d offered to hunt for Stella in the first place. He wanted to find Stella because Desiree wished her found; those wishes overlapped into a single desire, one that kept him on the trail for years. But Stella did not want to be found, and that desire seemed even stronger. Desiree pulled, then Stella pulled harder. Early, somehow, had been caught between.

Now time had fallen right out of his pockets when he wasn’t looking. One morning, he climbed out of Desiree Vignes’s bed and found a gray hair in his beard. He spent ten minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, rooting around for others, startled, for the first time, by his own face. He was, he suspected, beginning to look more and more like his own father, which was as unsettling as transforming into a stranger. Then he felt arms around his waist, Desiree pressing against his back.

“You about done starin at yourself?” she asked.

“I found a gray hair,” he said. “Look. Right here.”

She laughed suddenly. After all those years, he still felt delighted by that laugh, stunned to be caught in its blast.

“Well, I hope you didn’t think you’d be young and cute forever,” she said, ushering him to the side so that she could brush her teeth. He leaned against the doorway, watching her. Most mornings, she opened Lou’s at four, so she was gone by the time he woke up. Then again, most mornings, he woke up someplace other than this bed. He would lie in the backseat of his car or sprawl across the stained mattress in some rundown motel, imagining Desiree’s room. The dark wooden walls, the dresser lined with photographs, the calico blue bedspread. Her childhood room, the bed she’d once shared with Stella. Early had learned to sleep on Stella’s side, and sometimes, when they made love, he felt shy, like Stella was perched on the dresser, watching.