VenCo(43)

Covington, Louisiana, 2021



Lettie was sitting on the settee when the first roll of thunder hit.

“Shooting dice, I guess,” she said to the sleeping boy in the laundry basket. He was too big to be in there, but he liked to sleep all curled up like a fiddlehead. Her grandma was the one who told her thunder was God throwing dice. She liked that image. Made him seem less smite-y.

She watched her son’s eyes flutter as he dreamed. She wanted nothing more than to join him in slumber, but these boxes were not going to unpack themselves. And since she was the only parent now, it fell to her to get it done. There weren’t all that many; after all, she had only what she could fit into her ’96 Bronco. Clothes mostly, some linens, keepsakes that hadn’t been smashed, a photo album, and the baby’s things—diapers, blankies, his books, a plush fox.

Flash of lightning.

“Or maybe he’s just welcoming us home.” She smiled at her reflection in the front window, hair in a messy braid, eyes bagged and dark. “Throwing us a party.”

Then her smile faltered. Parties were part of why they left. Parties and Smith. After-parties and Smith. Mornings after and Smith. Emergency rooms and Smith. Then the sickness hit, and the world shut down, and the parties stopped. Trapped at home, he got meaner, and with more frequency, having full access and nothing to distract him.

The lightning clicked off, and the sky returned to black, and more thunder rumbled. Her reflection, having flashed on the windowpane with the sudden light, disappeared. She had to touch her hands to her own elbows to make sure she was still there. Edges made the best checkpoints.

“Okay then, little man, time for your mama to run a bath upstairs,” she whispered, picking up the laundry basket. “Uh, Christ, you’re getting too big for this.” She carried the bundle to the wooden stairs and ascended, slow and careful, watching his face as she went. “Should have called you Moses, little basket boy.”

Smith was the one who had named him Everett, after his own father, the only gift he bestowed, the only thing that mattered to him—a name, a mark, a declaration of ownership. He’d been furious when she showed him the plus sign on the wet stick, but also confused. “How the fuck did this happen? You’re old as dirt.”

She was thirty-three.

She promised him she’d keep working, keep up the house, wouldn’t let the pregnancy interfere with them, convinced him it made him more of a man and so even more desirable to her, and she acted on that notion, even when her back ached and her stomach turned over into her spine.

So he’d allowed the swell and push of a new life between them. It was a big leap, really, since he hadn’t let her keep her cat when she moved in. He’d already made her quit grad school and refused to allow her to take a job at the tech company that wanted to hire her even without the PhD, convinced those “jack-off nerds” only wanted to look at her tits all day. She stepped carefully around him, trying to carry the clumsy sway of her new weight, but not too much weight; she still watched what she ate, substituting prenatal vitamins for lunch in case he complained about extra padding on her thighs.

“You’re not carrying the kid in your hips, are you?” He pinched her side so hard she teared up. “Maybe hold back on the baked goods.”

“I’ll do better,” she promised. She had to be quiet in her humiliation. Crying angered him, but no response also angered him. She was always picking her way through thorny patches. Any direction she went, she was bound to get hurt; it was all about which way hurt the least.

She couldn’t have her dream job, but she still had to work, so she worked at a car rental place. She worked until the day her water broke, right there at her counter while she was explaining to a man from New Jersey that the insurance fee was an additional charge. “I’m sorry, sir, if I could just leave you for a moment to grab my manager to finish up here . . .” The fear in that man’s eyes when he realized she had gone into labor was the first time she thought maybe Smith was more scared than angry—scared of her and all the possibilities of her, especially now. Motherhood was the beginning of immortality, and that meant she was becoming more, not less, no matter how he worked to contain her, to make her small enough to fit in his pocket.

When she left Smith, she headed south. South was the direction of home, even if her mother wouldn’t be there waiting.

“Don’t marry a white man,” her mother warned before she passed. “Come home and find a nice Creole to sing you the right songs, the ones that make your muscles all long with pull.”

Her mother would have loved Baby Everett, white daddy or not; would have sung about his loose curls and dark brown eyes. She would have loved him even more for bringing Lettie home, or almost home. At least they were out of Atlanta and back in Louisiana, even if the town wasn’t Abita Springs. She needed some time on her own before she went all the way back home.

At the top of the stairs in her new rented house, Lettie flicked on the hall light because she could. Because no one could tell her not to. “Boxes can wait,” she told that same no one, and carried her son to the bathroom.

This was the room that sold her on the house. She’d first seen it on her work computer, a slideshow of images taken with a shaky hand. Two weeks later she signed the lease through email and transferred the first and last months’ rent, crossing her fingers it would work out. And now here she was, under the wrought-iron chandelier that held real candles, barefoot on the cold black-and-white checkered tiles.