What's Mine and Yours(103)

“You should see her if you’ve got the time. How long are you in town?” León said.

“It doesn’t make sense to go now. You should have come sooner, when she was asking for you. She used to ask about you all the time.”

Jade was staring at him finally. Something in her had turned. Through the fog of his drunkenness, he felt himself quake. Maybe she’d let him have it, and that would be right. Someone ought to punish him.

León seemed to sense the charge between them. He announced he had rounds in the morning and was off to bed. He clapped Nelson on the shoulder, kissed Jade, and climbed the stairs too swiftly for a man in his sixties.

Jade and Nelson were left alone, their bare feet on the cold tile.

“Was my old friend there at the wedding? Lacey May?”

“I didn’t speak to her, but I saw her. She’s doing fine.”

Jade chuckled. “You know how they say the good die young? Well.”

The cat was perched now on the counter, sniffing at a pile of dishes waiting to be washed. Nelson offered a hand tentatively to the cat, who cowered away, hid behind Jade.

“You mad at me over Linette?”

“That’s my fault,” Jade said. “I realized a long time ago that if you didn’t understand you were supposed to come home, it was because I didn’t teach you.”

“You never asked me to come home either.”

“Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know any better?”

Her face was gaunt, minuscule wisps of gray curling out of her braids. Her fingers were still ornamented with gold rings, glittering black and white stones. He could see the residue of her dark eye makeup, partially scrubbed away. She seemed as invincible as ever. He knew he’d never be as remarkable as she was—the awareness snaked at the back of his mind every time he seemed to accomplish something: a fellowship abroad, a sleek redesign of his website. He’d been given so much more, and still he had disappointed her.

“I want to show you something,” Jade said, and she led him to the rear of the house.

The sunroom was three walls of glass looking out onto the dark. In one corner, there was a record player, a stereo, Jade’s collection of albums. An upholstered rocking chair nuzzled a side table stacked high with books. Big potted palms were strewn around the room.

“This is my place in the house,” Jade said. “León has a room in the attic that’s just for him. It’s where we each go when we want to be alone.”

Nelson looked around the sunroom, tried to imagine all the hours his mother spent there. He pictured them on different continents, living in parallel, in solitary, airy rooms, nursing glasses of whiskey or tending to plants, looking out the window onto different stretches of earth.

“We’ve got chickens in the yard,” Jade said. “I’ll have León make you some eggs in the morning.”

“I’ll be moving on by then.”

“All right.”

Still, she was letting him go, and it plunged him into an old sinking feeling.

He spotted the shrine on his own. It was a pine hutch littered with plants, their vines hanging over the shelves. It was filled with knickknacks that he couldn’t tell the meaning of—a postcard of a beach in Orlando, a folded red-and-pink plaid shirt, a half-dozen ceramic ramekins. There was the photograph of him and Ray, the one that had hung in the kitchen of their first apartment, then in his bedroom at Linette’s. Nelson looked at their sunlit faces. Jade handed him a newspaper clipping in a gilded frame.

It was the article about the shop, Linette and Ray and his devil’s food, the revival on Beard Street. The black-and-white photographs were too grainy for Nelson to see the pastries his father had made that day in the shop very well, but Jade had pasted a photograph of Ray onto the page. It was a faded snapshot of Ray smiling in his apron, his hands knotted behind his back. He looked earnest and dimpled, far younger than Nelson would ever have guessed. He looked at him now, and Nelson saw a man in his twenties, just beginning his life, too young for what would happen to him. He was older now than his father would ever be. He had been older than his father would ever be for nearly a decade.

“Since he missed getting his picture taken that day, I thought I’d put one in there,” Jade said.

“León doesn’t mind you keeping all this around?”

“Ray is a part of me. Where I go, he goes. León wouldn’t expect me to hide him.”

“Then why’d you take down his picture in the first place? Why’d it take you so long to put it back up?”

Jade sank into her armchair.

“I was so angry at what the world had put on you. I didn’t want you to miss him too much, to carry that burden any more than you had to.”

“He was my father.”

“I wanted you to know you’d be fine on your own, the way I was.”

“But we weren’t alone.”

“I see that now,” Jade said, her eyes on him. Her gaze was tender, serious. “I miss him. Did I ever tell you that? I’ve never stopped missing him.”

Nelson realized he was biting down on his cheek. Any harder and he’d taste his own blood. He unclamped his jaw and felt dizzy, sick. He sat on the floor across from his mother. He wanted to keep talking to her. He wanted to tell her everything.