Chapter 5 #2
Aurora looked at Yvette across the table.
Yvette inclined her head, once. Yes, chère. I know. They are missed.
Aurora reached for her water glass and could not, for a mere moment, lift it.
The food was Creole and it was perfect. Gumbo so dark it was almost black.
Two kinds of cornbread. Smothered chicken with onions.
Candied yams Ayanna had cooked at her house and brought in a Pyrex dish.
A small wedding cake Yvette had baked herself from a recipe she had inherited from a Lafayette aunt, vanilla and lemon with a thin coat of buttercream and a single white camellia laid on the top.
Rhett did most of the talking because he did most of the talking everywhere he went.
He told Aurora the story of Halston's first day at the prep school in eighth grade, when Halston had been the only boy who could read Latin and the entire eighth-grade class had pretended to be unable to read Latin in retaliation.
Halston had spent six weeks being shoved into lockers before Rhett had figured out he liked the kid and had, in Rhett's own words, imposed a Talbot family treaty on the entire grade.
He told them about the new house he was building in the Heights. A forty-year-old bungalow he had bought to renovate himself on the weekends, except he had no idea what he was doing and was now considering hiring Errol to consult on the kitchen cabinets.
“Sir,” he said to Errol across the table, “I have been told by Halston that I should not even ask you, but I'm asking you anyway.”
Errol looked at the man, considered him, took a slow drink of water, and said, “Drop by the workshop next week. We'll talk.”
Rhett looked at Halston, triumphant.
Halston, sitting beside Aurora at the head of the table in a navy suit with no tie, said dryly, “Sir. I have been losing arguments to my best friend since the eighth grade. Welcome to it.”
Errol laughed, and Aurora was so surprised she almost dropped her fork.
It was a small laugh, short but it was a laugh.
The cake came out. Imari ate two slices. Halston let her.
By the time Yvette was carrying the dishes back to the kitchen, Imari had slid out of her chair and climbed up into Aurora's lap, her head on Aurora's collarbone, very nearly asleep before the buttercream was off her bottom lip.
“I'll take her up,” Halston said quietly. He stood from his chair and held out his arms.
Imari was eight and did not like being carried by people who were not Aurora. She did not, in fact, like Halston to touch her at all yet, in any of the small careful ways adults touched children.
She lifted her arms anyway.
Halston scooped her up like she weighed nothing. Imari's head dropped onto his shoulder. His hand came up to cradle the back of her braided buns, very carefully so as not to mess them up.
Aurora watched her husband of three hours carry her dead best friend's daughter out of the dining room with a tenderness that did not look performed at all.
Yvette, returning to the dining room with a tray, stopped in the doorway and watched him go.
“Mon dieu,” she whispered. “Mon dieu, chère.”
Aurora did not answer. She could not.
Across the table, her father had set down his fork. He was watching Halston too.
He caught her looking, took a careful drink of water and put the glass back down.
But he did not look away from the doorway.
*****
Later, after Errol and Ayanna had hugged her at the front door and Rhett had clapped her gently on the shoulder and said, Welcome to it, sister-in-law, and after Yvette had pressed a small piece of leftover cake into a Tupperware and into Aurora's hands with a kiss on both cheeks, Aurora walked up the wide marble staircase of her husband's house in her bare feet, with her stilettos hooked over two fingers.
She paused on the landing.
Halston was standing at her bedroom door.
He was holding his jacket over one arm. He had loosened his collar. His beard and mustache were a little less neat than it had been at the courthouse. He had been reading to Imari in the next room and had heard Aurora come up the stairs.
His eyes traveled, just once, over her in the cream silk dress. Just once. They lingered for a heartbeat on the gold ring on her finger.
He looked back up at her face.
“She fell asleep on the third page,” he said quietly. “She would have been waking up in her dress.”
“I'll fix it.”
“I already did. I changed her into her pajamas.”
Aurora stared at him.
“Halston,” she said before she could stop herself, “you cannot just change an eight-year-old girl.”
“She woke up halfway through. She told me which pajamas, the unicorn ones. She also told me I had to look away when she got into them.”
“And did you?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Aurora's mouth twitched. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep it down. He had not earned that smile yet, she told herself. Not a single inch of it.
He was watching her mouth like he knew it.
“Aurora,” he said.
“Don't.”
“All right.”
She held his eyes in the hallway of the house she now lived in.
She had walked into that hallway as Aurora Akande and she was standing in it as Aurora Iverson.
There was a gold ring on her left hand. There was a man one inch closer than he should be standing at her bedroom door, looking at her like he had been waiting for the bay to come back to the dock.
She did not know what to do with any of it.
He stepped back and inclined his head to her, very slightly. The same small inclination he had given her at the graveside; except this time it had a hundred new things layered into it.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Iverson.”
He turned and walked down the long hallway to the bedroom on the far side of Imari's, and he closed his door behind him without looking back.
Aurora stood at her own bedroom door for a long time.
She did not sleep that night. Not at all.