Cherry 51
The box arrived on Saturday morning.
No note. No name on the outside — just my address in handwriting I didn't recognize, which was a lie I told myself for approximately four seconds before admitting I recognized it fine.
I'd spent enough time looking at his signature on church documents to become stupidly familiar with it.
The loops and lines — you could read his entire mood in the way he wrote a name.
My name.
Mercy,
Isaiah 1:18.
—J.
I reached for the Bible before I did anything else. Looked up the verse.
“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.”
I had to sit down after reading it.
The dress was burgundy. A color that you had to look at twice before you understood what it was doing.
Heavy silk; it moved like water and cost more than my monthly rent had back in Hattiesburg.
I held it up in the light from the window and the silk caught it and threw back warm and deep.
I stood there for a long moment not thinking anything useful.
The dress would’ve looked stunning on someone… taller, I told myself. Which was nonsense because I was tall enough. 5’9” was taller than the average. It was tall enough for the dress.
The shoes were in a separate box underneath. Heeled, dark leather, simple. Bespoke. They fit perfectly, which I decided not to think about too hard — the fact that he'd known my size without asking, the fact that he'd thought about my feet at all.
I put the dress on Saturday evening just to see.
Stood in front of the bathroom mirror in the small apartment with the ceiling fan turning overhead and looked at myself and thought: this is what he wanted to see.
Not me dressed up. Me dressed as something specific.
Old money. Earned rather than performed.
A woman who belonged in a house like his without having to try.
The thought should have bothered me more than it did.
Darlene arrived Sunday evening wearing her good pearls and drove us out without asking if I was ready.
I had done my best to be. I put on the dress, the shoes, styled my hair in loose waves — the kind that you saw in old Hollywood movies, and had looked up a YouTube tutorial — on a constantly dying network — for my make-up.
I didn’t look like myself, but I think that was the point.
The road to the Beaumont estate was like any other road with the exception that it led past an old cotton plantation. There were no signs, only cotton and old Spanish moss hanging from trees, so low it brushed the roof of the car if you drove close enough.
The house at the end of the road wasn’t really a house — to say that would be to undersell it. The Beaumont estate included in it one of those antebellum manors sitting next to a vast lake, acres upon acres of manicured land, and all the Spanish moss you could wish.
I counted seven cars already on the gravel. Then I stopped counting because more were coming up the drive behind us.
“How many people?” I asked.
“Varies.” Darlene patted my hand once. “Stay close to me until you get your bearings.”
I noticed she didn't answer the question.
Inside, the house smelled like beeswax, something slow-cooked and old wood, and the crowd was not what I expected.
Not congregation. Not the deacons and their wives and Sister Ruth holding court near the fireplace — though they were there too, at the edges, familiar faces I reached for like handholds.
The rest were different. Men in suits that hadn't come off any rack I'd ever walked past. Women in jewelry that had stopped being accessories two or three generations ago and become simply part of what the family looked like.
They were people who had never once in their lives had to think about whether they belonged somewhere because the belonging was determined whether they thought it worth a dime.
I took a glass of wine from a passing tray and understood, slowly, that this was not a fundraiser in any sense I'd previously meant the word.
Something was being funded, alright. But it wasn’t a Godly affair, I could tell you that much.
Judah was across the room when I arrived, deep in conversation with two men I didn't recognize — older, both of them. He didn't look up when I came in.
But he knew. I couldn't have said how I was certain of that. I just was.
The room had a texture to it I couldn't name at first. I moved through it with my wine glass and smiled at the people Darlene introduced me to and noticed things I wasn't sure I was meant to notice.
The way certain conversations paused when I passed and resumed after.
The way the men from out of town looked at me — not the way men usually looked, not admiration exactly, something more assessing than that.
Clinical almost. Like I was being considered for something that hadn't been explained to me yet.
I told myself I was imagining it. That surely not.
Surely.
That I was just getting used to this town and it wasn’t scary. Just eerie. All things had secrets — it didn’t mean this one came with actual skeletons in the closet.
I was very good at telling myself things as we all may have noticed.
As I drifted around the room, the burgundy silk wrapping around my legs while I walked, I noticed women.
Or… rather girls that I hadn’t seen before.
Young — younger than seemed right for a room like this, younger than the event seemed to call for.
They moved carefully, not trying to draw too much attention and yet at the same time drawing all of the attention because of how young they were.
Their eyes didn't meet anyone else's for long.
I noticed one near the window in a pale dress that fit badly, like it had been chosen by someone who didn't know her.
Still expensive, of course. But meant for someone…
smaller. She was holding a glass she hadn't drunk from and looking at a fixed point on the wall.
I knew that look. I'd worn it.
I moved toward Darlene and found her absorbed in something with Sister Ruth and decided to not interrupt.
Found a chair instead, near the back veranda doors where the night air came through and the sound of the party was slightly muffled, and sat with my wine.
I watched the room and thought about the girl in the pale dress.
That was when a man sat down beside me.
He hadn't been there a moment ago. He was simply present, the way very wealthy men sometimes were — as though the room rearranged itself to produce them wherever they wanted to be.
Seventies, perhaps. White-haired, immaculate, with a face that had been handsome once and now was something more durable than handsome.
He smelled like expensive cologne and underneath it something stale that the cologne was working hard to cover.
“You must be new,” he said. His accent wasn't Louisiana. Something flatter, further north.
“A few weeks,” I said.
“Judah's acquisition.” A small smile. “He has excellent taste.”
Something about the word acquisition sat wrong. Made me want to punch him in the throat. But I was nice, and agreeable. I kept reminding myself that. In case I forgot it.
“I work for the church,” I said, trying to sound boring. “Food bank coordination, mostly.”
“Of course you do.” He said, somehow charmed by the very prospect of my words. His eyes moved over me and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. “That dress is extraordinary.”
“Thank you,” I managed, my fingers growing tighter around the flute glass.
He reached into his jacket pocket. What he produced was small — a charm, I thought at first, the size of a coat button, gold-colored, shaped like a cherry, stem and all — a thing you might find in a Christmas cracker if the Christmas cracker cost five hundred dollars. He held it out between two fingers.
“A small token,” he said. “We have a tradition here. The women wear them. It's nothing — a silly old custom.”
I looked at it. Looked at him.
Mercy, remember, you are a God-fearing woman. But God wasn’t always passive. Anyone who’d read Old Testament knew that. And right now, God was repeating a verse in my head:
“Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord.”
So do with that what you will.
“Here,” he said, continuing to smile that silly smile. “Take it.”
In truth, nothing about his expression was silly.
Nothing about his expression was old-fashioned or harmless or the least bit charming.
But I was twenty-three years old and sitting in a room full of people more important than me, and he was a donor at a church fundraiser.
And I had absolutely no reason not to accept a small gold cherry.
I took it.
He smiled. Closed my fingers around it with both of his hands — a brief pressure, dry and warm — and stood and moved back into the room as smoothly as he'd arrived.
I sat with the charm in my closed fist, watching him go and felt, without being able to say why, like I'd just signed something.
Break their teeth, O God.
Do not ask me why — perhaps because I didn’t want to lose it, or maybe because I did think it cute — I found the clasp on the back of the cherry, a small loop, and pinned it to the strap of my dress and moved back into the party.
A server refilled my glass. A woman from Baton Rouge, by the name of Eloise, came to me and we talked about the food bank.
She asked me good questions and seemed genuinely interested in the answer — at least more so than the men I had passed some sentences back and forth with.
They had been spectacularly interested in the way the dress sat on my hips, or the way my breasts moved when I breathed.