The Vanishing Half(90)

Went to find myself, she wrote. I’m safe. Don’t worry about me.

The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be. And wasn’t her daughter already doing that? Stella blamed the dark girl, who’d stalked her daughter around Los Angeles, who’d tracked her, somehow, all the way across the country. The girl was determined to prove the truth to Kennedy and she would never give up. Unless. In her office, Stella stopped pacing, slumping against the door.

She knew what she had to do: tell Desiree to call her girl off. She had to go back to Mallard.

So when Blake left for business to Boston, she booked a flight to New Orleans. As the airplane descended, she wrung her hands, staring out the window at the brown flatness. She could always go back. Turn around, buy a ticket to Los Angeles, forget this whole foolish idea. But then she imagined that dark girl appearing, again and again, and she clutched the armrest as the plane rattled gently onto the runway. Now, in the train station, the lanky porter smiling at her, knowing somehow, she was sure of it, that she had returned from a place she had never imagined that she could leave. He pointed at a bus stop.

“Puts you down right outside Mallard,” he said. “Have to walk from there, I’m afraid.”

She hadn’t ridden a bus in years. He nodded toward a pay phone.

“You could call your people,” he said. “Have someone come get you.”

But she wasn’t sure if she had people anymore. Instead she said, “It’ll be good to stretch my legs.”



* * *



—

ONCE MALLARD WAS NO LONGER MALLARD, some joked that the name of the diner ought to change also to the name people had long been calling it: Desiree’s. “Y’all goin by Desiree’s” became so common a refrain that by the 1980s, there were children born who had never remembered a time when the diner had been called anything else. The town ignored the faded coffee cup on the roof still bearing Lou’s name, which he didn’t appreciate, but he was old now. He leaned on Desiree for everything; she was head waitress and manager, she hired and fired cooks, she changed the menu when she felt like it. She was the face of the establishment, framed, for years, within its black-and-white windows. Lou would leave the diner to her when he died, he’d always said, although Desiree said that she didn’t want it.

“I got a life outside Lou’s,” she said. “I don’t wanna be stuck in here forever.”

But what was that life, exactly? Sometimes she didn’t even know herself. Early, still coming and going. Her mother’s unraveling memory. Her daughter, living across the country. She’d visited her in Minneapolis in the winter of 1985. The two had walked arm in arm down the slushy sidewalks, bracing themselves against the unexpected ice. She hadn’t seen snow like this, real snow, in almost thirty years; on one corner, she closed her eyes, fat flakes falling onto her lashes. She was thinking of her own first winter in D.C., Sam taking her ice-skating downtown, laughing at her wobbling. The whole rink filled with young colored people like them, holding hands, the flashier skaters twirling and slicing across the ice. Even the Santa Claus swinging his bell on the curb was colored. She had never seen a Negro Santa before and stared so hard, she nearly lost her balance.

“It’s supposed to snow all week,” her daughter said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

“What you sorry for? You can’t control the weather.”

“I know, but—I wanted it to be nice for you.”

She brushed ice out of Jude’s hair. “It is nice,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Inside the grocery store, the lights glowed brightly and her daughter trailed behind, slowly pushing the cart. Desiree grabbed a bundle of celery. She’d offered to cook—insisted on it, really, having seen the sad state of her girl’s cupboards. Nothing but cold cereal and canned food.

“I should’ve taught you how to cook,” she said.

“I cook.”

“Too many smart girls don’t know how to keep a house anymore.”

“Well, I do, and Reese cooks too.”

“Oh, that’s right. Y’all are—what’s it you call it?”

“Modern.”

“Modern,” she repeated. “He’s a nice boy.”

“But?”

“But nothin. He seems sweet. I just don’t understand why he won’t marry you. What’s he waitin for, the Grim Reaper?”

“Well, what about you?” Jude said.

“What about me?”

“And Early.”

Desiree reached for a bell pepper, startled by the sudden seize of tenderness she felt just hearing his name. She missed him. Imagine that, grown as she was, still missing him. She’d called him after she’d landed in Minnesota. She’d never been on an airplane before, felt as brave as if she’d leapt across the face of the moon. She wished he was with her but he’d offered to stay at home with her mother. Desiree was beginning to realize that it could be dangerous leaving her alone.

“Oh, that’s different,” she said.

“How?”

“Y’all are young. Don’t you wanna start a life together? Hand me that onion.”