CHAPTER EIGHT #3
"So tell me how to do it without it wrecking everything.
Because you didn't. With all your wisdom, Mama, you didn't, and I'm sitting here on the side of a road watching myself walk straight into the same fire, and I need — " Zola put the back of her wrist hard against her eyes.
"I need to not just repeat you. I need to know the part you never told me. "
"Mama. I have to ask you something and I need you to not give me the old water, let it lie this time.
Please. I'm in it now. I'm in the exact thing you were in.
I need to know how you survived it." Zola gripped the wheel.
"Why did you leave him. The real why. And why has neither one of you ever, in twenty-five years, let go. "
The silence this time was different. It had a decision being made inside it.
"Some of what I told you before was true," Yvette said finally, and the Geechee came up in her voice as it only did when she'd quit being Atlanta and gone all the way home, when it was just the two of them and the dark and the old country in her mouth.
"I lef' so you wouldn' grow up down inside de life.
Dat ain a lie. I watched what da club do to de women who stay, how it nyam dem up a piece at a time, an' I look at you in dat crib an' I say, not her.
Not my one girl. So I tek you an' I gone, an' I built you a life up here where de worst thing dat ever come to de door is a deacon mad about his potato salad. " A breath. "Dat part true."
"But."
"But ya daddy and me." Yvette stopped. When she came back her voice had gone somewhere far down.
"Some things between a husband an' a wife ain belong to de child, Zola.
I tol' you dat before an' I meant it an' I mean it still.
I'm not gwine put de whole of it in your hands tonight, 'cause it's mine an' his an' it ain finished, an' a thing dat ain finished, you cyan hand it off clean.
You'd carry it wrong. You'd carry it like a ending and it ain a ending.
" A sound that might have been a laugh, wet.
"I'll tell you dis much, more'n I ever tol' you.
I never stopped. Twenty-five years, three states, a whole other life, an' I never one day stopped lovin' dat hardheaded buckruh, an' he never stopped neither, an' dat — baby, dat is de thing I cyan explain to you, dat two people can love each other dat hard an' still not be able to live inside what de love cost. We didn' leave 'cause we quit lovin'.
Lord, I wish it had a been dat simple — quittin' you can get over.
We lef' 'cause stayin' was killin' somethin' in the both of us dat neither one could stand to watch the other lose, an' a person can love you with they whole chest an' still be the thing in the room dat's costin' you your life.
Da's the part I cyan hand you tonight, baby, an' I won' — not 'cause it's a secret, but 'cause it's still happenin'.
It ain a closed book wit a lesson in the back.
It's me an' him, still goin' on, twenty-five years out, two old fools too proud an' too hurt an' too much in love to either come home or let go.
An' a thing dat ain finished, you cyan give it away clean.
You'd hold it like it was the end of the story, an' it ain the end.
I don' know what the end is. Dat scare me worse than I'll ever tell you.
So what to do with a love dat big an' dat expensive — I don' have it, child.
Twenty-five years an' a whole gray head an' I still don' have it for myself, so God knows I cyan hand it down to you. "
Zola was crying again, openly now, the real thing, the break she'd been holding off since the garage. "Then what do I do. If you of all people don't have the answer, what am I supposed to do."
"You don' run from it 'cause it cost," Yvette said, and her voice firmed up into the very thing Zola had spent twenty-seven years reaching toward.
"Dat's de one piece I do know. I ran. I had my reasons an' some of dem was good an' I'd do parts of it again — but I ran, an' twenty-five years later I'm standin' in a kitchen in Georgia at midnight still in love with a man four hundred miles away dat I won' pick up de phone an' call.
Don' you do dat. You hear me, Zola Beaumont Crowne?
Love dat cost you somethin' is still love.
It might be the only kind that's worth the name.
You let it cost you. What you don' do — " and here the steel came all the way up, the free-woman steel that had raised a kingdom up out of rice and okra " — what you don' do is let any man shrink you to fit it.
Not de Saint. An' not ya daddy, much as I love him, much as he love you, 'cause makin' you small is de one wrong dat man has always called protection.
You stay your whole size. You make him love you at your whole size or you don' let him love you at all.
Dat's de inheritance, baby. Dat's what come down through de Beaumont women along with de rice. We don' shrink. We'd ruther leave."
And Zola sat on the dark shoulder of the road with the engine ticking and the marsh breathing out past the guardrail and cried into the phone while her mother hummed to her, low, the old wordless tune — the one Mae hummed, the one that came down through all of them, four hundred miles of phone line and sixty years of women carrying it.
And for the first time in these whole hard weeks she let herself be exactly as small and scared as she felt, because the woman on the far end of the line had already promised her she could come apart, so long as she got back up her whole size.
"I'm scared, Mama," she said, when she could get the words past it.
"I'm so scared. Of all of it. That he loses the club for me.
That my father never comes back from this.
That I'm just — that I'm just doing the whole thing over again, your whole life over again, and it ends the same place, with me in some kitchen in some other city in twenty-five years still in love with a man I won't call. "
"I know it, baby. I know." Yvette's voice was soft and sure down the long line.
"But hear me: you ain me, an' he ain ya daddy, an' this ain my story happenin' to you twice.
It rhyme. Lord, it rhyme so close it scare me too.
But a rhyme ain a repeat. You get to write your own ending on it, which is somethin' I'm not sure I ever truly believed I could do, an' maybe dat right there is de difference between us, an' maybe dat difference is de whole of what I was tryin' to raise into you all dem years.
Bein' scared an' doin' de thing anyway — baby, dat is most of what love turn out to be.
De rest is just showin' up the next mornin'.
" A breath, and Zola heard her mother smile.
"Now wipe your face an' drive home slow, you hear, the marsh roads is bad at night.
An' Zola — tell ya hardheaded daddy his ooman down in Georgia said to quit his sulkin' and act like he raised people.
Tell him just like dat. He'll know who said it. He always know."
They hung up. Zola sat on the dark shoulder a while longer with the engine ticking and the hazards she still hadn't turned off blinking soft against the marsh grass, and she let the call settle into her as you let a hard truth settle, in layers, each one heavier than the last. Her mother had given her more tonight than she'd given her in twenty years and it had still come up short of an answer, and Zola understood now that the short-coming was the answer — that there wasn't a clean one, that the people who'd loved hardest in her family had simply paid the price and stayed standing, and that this was the whole of the wisdom there was to hand down.
Love that cost was still love. You didn't run from it, and you didn't shrink to fit it.
You paid, and you stayed your size, and you got up the next morning.
She wiped her face on her sleeve. She turned off the hazards. And she drove home slow on the bad marsh roads, carrying her mother's message for her father like a stone in her mouth, not knowing yet that she wouldn't get the chance to deliver it before the world came apart.
* * *
The silence might have gone on a week. The war didn't give it three days.
Knox spent those three days as a man spends days he can't sleep through.
At the Forge before anyone else, doing the work nobody assigned because the work was the only thing that quieted his hands.
On his bike at night with no place to point it, riding the bridges and the dark roads out past the city until the engine and the wind drowned the thing in his head for a few miles at a time.
His phone face-up on every surface he set it on, waiting on two words from two people — one from Bishop that never came, and one from Zola that came every day, short and warm and exactly enough, the single light burning in the whole black stretch of it.
Thinking about you. The blue's still holding out here.
Eat something. He ate something because she told him to.
And under all of it ran the cold arithmetic that hadn't shifted by a decimal since the kitchen counter.
He had betrayed the only father he'd ever known.
Given the same hour to live over, he would do every part of it again.
There was no version of the sum where the debt to Bishop and the love for Zola both came out paid — he'd worked it from every side across three sleepless nights and the books would not balance, one column was always going to come up short, and he had already chosen, with his eyes open, which one.
That was the part he'd had to make peace with.
Not the cost. The fact that he'd pay it again on purpose.
He just had to live inside the choosing now, hour by hour, and Bishop's silence made certain he felt the weight of every single one.