Honey Girl(71)

“I know you won’t,” Sharone says, “because I would be on you like white on rice, little girl.”

Grace huffs. “I won’t,” she repeats. “I swear. Can you be nice to me now?”

“Can’t hear you,” she says. “Colonel’s asking for the phone. Bye, Porter!”

Grace’s stomach flips. She hears the soft murmur of Sharone’s voice and the low timbre of Colonel’s. In her mind, she comes up with a dozen different excuses that aren’t the truth, but she knows she has not spent the last few weeks wading through insecurities and doubts, little by little, just to tell a lie.

A throat clears, and she straightens against her will. “Porter,” Colonel says. “How nice of you to call. It’s been a while.”

Grace winces. “Hi,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

“Are you?” he asks. “The last time I spoke to you, you gave no indication that you were planning to disappear to Southbury after your research ended. I’m assuming that means they didn’t offer you a more permanent position.”

Fuck. “So, you should probably sit down,” she says carefully. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

“And sitting down would make it more palatable?”

She lets out a silent, drawn-out scream. “Probably,” she ends up saying. “I didn’t—there was no summer research project in New York,” she confesses.

Colonel is quiet. Grace knows his processing face, the way he looks like a robot rebooting. “You quit the project?” he asks.

“There was no project,” she blurts out, frustrated. “There was never any project in New York.” She goes for it. “I lied. I was in New York all summer, but not for that.”

The call ends. Grace blinks at the screen. Not even a whole thirty seconds later, it rings again. Colonel.

“Explain yourself,” he says immediately.

Grace sits up in the bed. “You didn’t listen to me,” she stresses. “I told you I needed to stop for a second, and you just wanted me to keep going!”

“That’s what parents do, Porter,” he says calmly, evenly, but she can hear the thunder in his voice. “We don’t tell our kids to stop. To give up. To quit. Mine didn’t teach that to me, and I certainly wasn’t going to pass it down to you.”

She feels frustration burst in her. “I didn’t give up. I went to college. I went to grad school. I got my fucking doctorate—”

“You will watch your lang—”

“I didn’t quit,” she snaps. “You don’t get to say I quit, because I didn’t, because I wanted to make you proud, and you still aren’t. That’s the only thing I need to give up on.”

She’s breathing hard, the words ripped from the disturbed earth within her. It’s slow-going, hammering away at all the things that have been buried deep. But those words split through and feel like a relief.

Now neither of them says anything. She checks to see if he hung up again. No, he’s still there.

“Do you think that’s what this is about?” he asks finally. Grace can’t place his tone. It’s unfamiliar. “Do you think I’m not proud of you?”

She shrugs, unsure. She angrily wipes her eyes, frustrated they’re betraying her.

“Grace?” he calls, and she inhales sharply, because he hasn’t called her that in years. She was still a kid, a little kid, the last time Colonel called her by her given name.

“I’m here,” she croaks. “What else am I supposed to think? You walked out of my graduation.” She sniffs. She hates this. She’s used to having that good old-fashioned Porter control, but now that she’s started exploring her feelings instead of shoving them down, it’s like they have a mind of their own. “Everyone knew you were there for me, and then you weren’t. You just left.”

She wants to say You left me, but that isn’t true. By the time Sharone and Grace emerged from the small auditorium, Colonel was sitting right out front on the steps.

He makes a small, aborted noise. “I didn’t leave,” he says, like he’s picking the thoughts right from her brain. “I was right outside. I could still hear them calling your name, and the way the kids in your program clapped for you. God knows, I could hear Sharone’s loud ass,” he says. He pauses, and Grace’s fingers clench around the phone. When he speaks again, his voice is rough and almost angry. “I have never left you. Not once. Not once since the war messed up my leg, and I was sent home. Not once, Porter.”

She goes to argue, but stops short. Once Colonel was home, really home, he took her everywhere with him. To the base, out in the groves to help him work until his leg couldn’t take any more pain, and he refused her help as he limped back to the house. He took her to physical therapy, where Grace watched him push himself almost to the brink of tears, but he never stopped. He left the groves and life here, and he took Grace with him, kicking and screaming as they flew away from the only home she ever knew.

Colonel never left Grace.

“You want to know what I saw that day?” he asks. “At your graduation?”

“Yes, sir,” she says. She wants to know what he thought of her that day.

He takes a deep breath. “You were the only Black girl in that doctorate program,” he says. “You were the only Black person in that room besides me and Sharone. I saw those kids, and I saw their parents. While you were backstage preparing, I saw those parents talking to the faculty like they had known each other for years. I knew in my gut, Porter, those parents would do anything for their kids. Not—” He stutters. He never stutters. “Not just that. They could do anything. There was no resource or connection they couldn’t use to make sure their kids made it. And I couldn’t blame them, because I would do the same. That made me angry. It made me so angry, I walked out of the auditorium.”