An American Marriage(61)

“Sometimes people ask how much we have so we have to measure it all. So I’ll do that while you talk. What’s up? You here to say you miss me?” She smiled again.

“I’m here to say that I’m going to miss you,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“Back to Atlanta.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You going back to her?”

I nodded.

“That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?”

She snatched hard at the cloth until the spool was bare and the fabric was stretched out on the table, looking like a movie-star red carpet. She measured it against the yardstick at the edge of the table, counting under her breath.

“I don’t mean it like that,” I said.

“I distinctly asked you if you were married.”

“And I told you I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t act like you didn’t know.”

“I want to say thank you. That’s why I’m here, to say thank you and good-bye.”

Davina said, “I want to say fuck you. How about that?”

“What we did was special,” I said, feeling like a jackass, although I had not uttered a single lie. “I care about you. Don’t be like this.”

“I can be however I want.” She was mad, but I could see that she was trying not to cry. “Go on then, Roy. Go on back to Miss Atlanta. But I want two things from you.”

“Okay,” I said, eager to do something and show her that I was cooperating, that I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Don’t scandalize my name by talking about how when you got out of jail you were so desperate that you knocked off some girl from Walmart. Don’t say that to your friends.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t like that.”

She held up her hand. “I mean it. Don’t taste my name in your mouth. And Roy Hamilton, promise me you will not ever come banging on my door.”





Celestial


Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.

If my mother were here now, she would see that what we had chosen was anything but convenient. It was Christmastime, and I own a business with a staff of two, and now my wrongfully incarcerated husband is released and I have to tell him that I’m engaged to another man. The situation was a lot of things—tragic, absurd, unlikely, and maybe even unethical—but it was not convenient.

As Andre ran his lines, rehearsing the speech that we agreed would explain ourselves to Roy as gently as possible, I looked up into the empty branches and wondered aloud how long Old Hickey had been here. Our houses were constructed in 1967. As soon as the last brick was mortared into place, our parents moved in and commenced making babies, but Old Hickey predated all of that. When workers cleared the land to build, scores of pine trees were cut down and the stumps blasted from the ground. Only Old Hickey had been spared.

Andre slapped his hand against the rough bark. “Only way to tell is to cut it down and count the rings. I don’t want to know that bad. The answer is old. Hickey has seen it all.”

“You ready?” I asked him.

“There’s no ready,” Dre said, leaning back on the tree and pulling me close. I didn’t resist and pushed my fingers through his dense hair. I leaned to kiss his neck, but he gripped my shoulders and held me away so we could see each other’s faces. His eyes reflected back the grays and browns of winter. “You’re scared,” he said. “I can feel shaking beneath your skin. Talk to me, Celestial.”

“It’s real,” I said. “What we have is real. It’s not just convenience.”

“Baby,” Dre said. “Love is supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be easy. Don’t they say that in First Corinthians?” He held me close against him again. “It’s real. It’s convenient. It’s perfect.”

“Do you think Roy will come back with you?”

“He might. He might not,” Andre said.

“What would you do if you were him?”

Andre let me go and stepped over the raised roots of the tree. The air was chilly but clean. “I can’t say because I can’t imagine being him. I’ve tried, but I can’t even walk around the corner in his shoes, let alone a mile. Sometimes I think that if I were him, I would be a gentleman, wishing you well and letting you go with dignity.”

I shook my head. Roy wasn’t that type of man, although he had dignity in spades. But for a person like Roy, letting go wasn’t a self-respecting option. Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst. For herself, she identified her ability to adapt. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.” She told me that since I was very small, I have embraced my appetites. “You always run toward what you want. Your father always tries to break you of this, but you are just like him, brilliant but impulsive and a tiny bit selfish. But more women should be selfish,” she said. “Or else the world will trample you.” Roy, in my mind, was a fighter, a characteristic whose double edges were gleaming and sharp.