Six #3
“I told her,” Claire says. “I’m sure it was very sad.”
“Very sad,” I say. A crab leg rests on the top of my bowl. I crack it open with my fists. “Illuminating, too.”
Al’s onto me. “How so?”
I could say it now, but I don’t. Maman’s eyes are fixed at a spot on the wall. “I’ll tell you another time,” I say.
Al looks to Lionel, but he’s bent over his bowl, spooning thick broth, picking around the pieces of sausage and chicken, pushing them to the side, giving nothing away.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says. “I forgot that you don’t eat meat.”
“No trouble,” Lionel says.
Maman takes a sip of her beer. The conversation from before we arrived resumes. The carpentry job handoff went well. Everyone’s packed, suitcases in the living room.
“We need to get some sleep now,” Claire says, dabbing her eyes. “Our last night living in this house. Oh, gosh. I don’t know if I’m ready.”
“You all go now,” Maman says. “I’ll clean up.”
“Yes,” Jean Pierre says. “You all go get some rest.” As though anyone asked his permission.
Chairs push back, my sisters and their husbands stand, carry dishes to the sink. “Go ahead and leave those,” Maman says. I hear Lionel serving himself another ladleful in the kitchen. He must be standing, eating over the stove.
“Aren’t you coming?” Adele asks me from the doorway.
“In just a minute,” I say.
I listen to their footsteps, leaving one by one. The candles are burning low, wax dripping. Maman’s in the kitchen. Dishes clinking in the sink. After a few minutes, it stops. Quiet now. Her steps so soft I barely hear them, and then she’s here, across from me at the table. We study each other.
“There’s dirt in your hair,” she says. “And all over your dress.”
“Yes. From Papa’s grave.”
She sighs, weary. “You shouldn’t have gone.”
“You mean I shouldn’t have found you out?”
“What I mean is that it’s better to forget.”
“How you sent him there to die?”
She rests her hands on the table. Long fingers, like mine and my sisters’. Hers are thicker around the knuckles from age and use. “I didn’t send him there to die. You know that.”
“You sent him there to be rid of him,” I say.
“So you could marry someone else.” A throat, clearing.
Jean Pierre, listening from the next room.
“What kind of person sends someone away like that? Sends him away and never visits and forbids their children to visit? All he has is a wooden cross. As though no one loved him. Strangers went to see him be buried. You told us we couldn’t.
” I’m leaning toward her, across the table.
All these months of avoiding her but now I can’t get close enough.
She’s small, diminished. Tears in her eyes. I don’t care.
“Your face,” she says. “You hate me.”
A stillness falls over us at the naming of it.
I make the walk back to the Laurent house, the air cool, the sky full of stars.
The house is silent, everyone tucked away.
I wash my body and throw my dirty dress into the trash.
No room in my suitcase, no desire to bring it with me.
I knock on Hattie’s bedroom door, softly.
My last hope for us: a night together in a bed.
More than enough, just for her to hold me.
But either she doesn’t hear me or she chooses not to answer.
And now it’s morning, sparrow out my window, chalk-blue walls and a shelf of Little League trophies.
My suitcase is packed with my clothes and Cyril’s brass paperweight.
I’m wide awake and Cyril’s voice is in my head saying, “Do you think we made a baby?” I hope not, I hope not, but I haven’t bled in a month and a half, and for the first time I bolt upright with it, can’t push it out of my mind.
I eat Mama Laurent’s fried eggs and grits with a ravenous hunger.
Let Papa Laurent hug and kiss me goodbye.
I search for Hattie but don’t find her until I circle back to Cyril’s room.
She’s kneeling on the wood floor, tying a box to my suitcase, knotting it with her practiced hands.
“A few things for your new life,” she says.
She finishes the knots and rises. I wait.
I reach for her arm. For the first time since New Year’s, we embrace.
Her body and mine, together, over too soon, she’s gone, back down the stairs, and I’m gone, too, walking the blocks through the early morning.
I never told her that I love her. Maybe someday.
I hope. I reach the blue house, faded by the sun.
Our family’s house, going back a hundred years.
I can’t bear to step inside. We’re loading up the borrowed car.
We’re stepping carefully over the uneven bricks by the ancient oak’s tree roots, where Papa tripped and stumbled, the morning he was taken away.
How many thousands of times had he stepped cleanly before, without looking, knowing each brick’s placement by heart?
I squeeze into the back seat with my sisters and Rudy, Bernard and Al and Lionel up front, Maman watching, stoic on the stoop. And I can feel it: I’m never coming home.