CHAPTER THREE #5
"He learned it from me," Yvette said at last, and her voice had traveled off somewhere long ago and far away.
"Stood in my grandmother's kitchen and burned three pots before he got it right.
My mama loves that man better than she ever loved your daddy's club — Mae'd set him a place at her table before she'd set one for half her own blood, Buckruh from up the road and all.
He chose every bit of it, you understand.
The rice, the talk, all of us. A white man from up the road who fell in love and chose a whole world that was never his to inherit.
He was a good man living a bad life." A breath.
"Some of why I left was so you'd never grow up down inside the bad life.
And some of it is things between a man and a woman that belong to them and not to their child, and I love you too much to hand you half a story you'd only carry wrong the rest of your days.
So that's all you get tonight, baby. Old water. Let it lie."
Zola let it lie. You learned, with the women in her family, where the doors were that did not open, and you learned not to keep your hand on them.
But she sat with the picture of it a moment in the dark — a young man up from nowhere with bad in his blood, burning rice in a Lowcountry kitchen to win a woman and a world, and the woman who'd loved him enough to leave him so their daughter wouldn't grow up inside the bad.
Two people who'd chosen each other and then chosen, separately, to do the hard thing instead of the wanted thing.
She wondered if that was the whole inheritance the Beaumont women really passed down.
Not the rice. Not the coiling. The knowing how to want a thing all the way to the bone and walk away from it anyway, because love and right weren't always the same country, and you'd been raised to live in the second one.
"Okay, Mama."
"Okay." And then, softer, mother to daughter, the realest thing she would say the whole call: "Now you listen to me.
E ain right to want a thing you been told you can't have.
I won't lie to your face and call it right.
But it ain't always wrong, neither, and the two of those are not the same, and don't you let nobody — not even your hardheaded daddy — stand there and tell you they are.
" A pause. "Just be sure he sees you. Not your daddy's girl.
Not a thing to be stood in front of. You.
Da rest of it you can figure out as you go, but you start there. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Tek cyare. Go to bed. And call me 'fore a whole month next time."
The line went quiet, and the kitchen and the choir went with it, and Zola sat on her floor with her back to the couch and the November dark pressing flat against the windows.
She reached for the basket on the coffee table and worked a coil by feel, the grass gone soft and familiar under her fingers, and she hummed Grandma Mae's song under her breath, the old wandering one, and she let herself be honest in the one place left where she still could be, which was inside her own head with nobody to perform it for.
She'd started listening for his bike.
That was the truth she'd been keeping under all the others.
Every night when she got home she counted the minutes until she heard him pull into the lot behind her, that low even sound she could pick out now from any other engine in Charleston, and only when she heard it did the last knot in her shoulders come loose enough to let her sleep — not because the wall was in place, though that was the lie she told herself going down — but because he was.
Her mother had heard it in one syllable from six hours up the road. I can hear him in your mouth.
And the awful thing was that he saw her.
Her mother had said be sure he sees you like it was the hard part, the thing to hope for, and the truth was he already did.
Five days, and the man had seen more of her than people who'd known her for years.
He'd watched her run a frightened elder's pressure down off the ceiling through a pane of glass and known exactly what he was looking at.
He'd seen her tired and penned and spoiling for a fight and never once mistaken any of it for weakness.
He knew her coffee and her humming and the blind angle of her own front room where no window reached, and he held every piece of it the same as he held the door — like it was his job and his alone, like nobody owed him a thing for it.
Nobody had ever seen her like that and asked for nothing back.
She did not know what a person was supposed to do with a thing like that.
The coil she set down, pressing both hands flat over her face in the dark.
She wasn't going to say the word for it, not even alone, not even inside her own head, because the word would hand it a shape, and a thing with a shape was a thing you had to either reach for or refuse — and she was not ready to do either one to the only man in the world she'd been raised to leave alone.
Down in the lot, right on time, the engine she'd have known out of a hundred came up the block and went quiet under her window.
She let her shoulders down. She hated that she did. She slept anyway.