What's Mine and Yours(24)
Hank paced the living room, on his third cup of coffee. He swept the curtains aside.
“We got some clouds moving in,” he said, as if the beach weren’t one hundred miles away.
By now, the girls knew their father had been in jail. Lacey gave up on the story about the fishery job when they moved in with Hank and rented out the house. They had never visited him, but Lacey May kept on depositing money in his commissary. Hank couldn’t begrudge her that. The money she earned at the store was hers to keep, and Robbie was still her husband, at least legally.
“I’m off for a smoke,” Lacey May said, and Hank didn’t stop her. He must have figured out they were all stalling, and there was nothing he could do.
It was as quiet as usual on the street. The bungalows down the lane were small and attractive, houses that had been built and sold after the war. Hank had inherited his from his father. It was simple, with brick columns, a shingle roof, a picture window that looked out on the hydrangeas on the lawn. Honeysuckle grew in the back, and there was an inflated pool covered in leaves, the yellow film of pollen. It was a fine place for her and her girls, although it wasn’t the kind of place she’d have ever chosen for herself, except, of course, she had.
She had lived on this side of town before, west of Main Street, when she was in high school. Robbie had lived on the east side, where the South and Central Americans tended to land. The town had been largely split this way—white and black, then white and not white, for as long as Lacey could remember. It had been true even before they were born, when the millworkers dispersed at the end of each day. It had remained true, even as the west side had emptied out, and most people who could afford to leave the city did. Lacey’s family had stayed. But she’d been grateful to move to the northern edge of the county when Robbie bought their house. Out there, they made more sense. Their neighbors were the river and fruit farms, a dairy plant, the old Civil War battleground.
Here, she’d caught some of the neighbors looking a little funny at her Diane. While nobody said anything, Lacey May couldn’t help but notice. Noelle was the fairest, limber, big eyed, long haired. Margarita looked like her father: dark eyes and full lips, something alien about the way her face was put together. And Diane looked like neither of them with her high cheekbones and coiling hair, how brown she became in the summer. But Lacey May didn’t see her daughters that way; as far as she was concerned, they were all the same to her, hers. Colombia was just a place their father was from, like Ireland, or France. Everybody was from somewhere else. Even the Native Americans. And what did it matter? The earth used to be all one continent; she had heard about it on a program.
Lacey was renting the house to two Brazilians. They were a pair of graduate students, hippies growing herbs in the yard, leaving their fat books out in piles on the porch. She often wondered what Robbie would think about some other couple living in their house, reading books and drinking wine or whatever it was they drank, talking about the future and where they’d live next. She and Robbie had never wanted to live anywhere else.
She heard him before she saw him. He was humming. She hadn’t even lit her cigarette.
He was wearing the clothes he’d had on the day they took him in: jeans and a black button-up. He carried a plastic bag, and he wore all his usual jewelry: a stud in each ear, his gold watch. When he got close enough, she saw his wedding ring swimming on his finger. He was thinner, bronzed, as if he really had been working on the shore all this time.
He climbed the porch, still humming. It was one of his ballads. Lacey knew the tune. She could hear the horns, the congas, a piano in her head. She wondered whether she’d still look beautiful to him. She had painted her toenails pink. Her blouse was the color of sunflowers.
Robbie stood before her and smiled. He was missing a tooth on the right side, a molar. It tore her in two.
“Welcome back,” she said finally, and a sorrow washed over Lacey that she didn’t understand. She didn’t want him to stay in jail, but she didn’t want him here either. He reached for her, and she let him wind his arms around her shoulders. He held her too close, for too long.
The door swung open.
“Look who it is,” Lacey said, waving at Robbie as if he were a guest, a surprise, not the man who had given her a life and then taken it away. Hank stood in the doorway, clenching his coffee mug and squinting at them. He looked jittery, feeble. Before he could speak, the girls came storming out the door, the dog barking after them.
Margarita came first, her long legs launching her off the ground. Robbie caught her in his arms as Diane grabbed him by the knees, crushed her face into his legs. Noelle was last, and she pushed past her sisters, thrusting them aside. She was the only one crying, her face contorted as if she were hurting physically. Lacey May knew the feeling. Robbie smiled and tousled her hair. “My girls, my big girls,” he said, his voice as bright and easy as if he were telling a joke, as if his time away had all been a trick. Even now, he wanted to be the one who could make them laugh.
At the kitchen table, Robbie told a story about the man he sat next to on the bus ride home. He had more than a hundred multicolored tattoos, including a pouty pair of lips he could make blow kisses if he flexed his bicep. The girls laughed, ensnared by him. Even the dog sat at his feet, his ears flattened with pleasure whenever Robbie reached down to rake under his chin. Only Lacey May seemed to be ignoring him as she gathered up things for the beach—extra towels, baby powder to shake off the sand—but Hank could tell she was listening. Her eyes flitted to Robbie and then away, every time she came into the room.