Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
Greer drove me to Mari’s grandmother’s on the third Mari-less day, and she did not ask whether I wanted to go.
She put Mari’s last paycheck and a Tupperware of something in my hands, said “you’re coming,” and drove, which is how Greer moves a person who would otherwise build a four-page plan to avoid being moved.
“I’m not going in there to be forgiven,” I said, on the bridge road.
“Good, because you won’t be. Ruby Estes does not forgive on a schedule, and you’d try to make it efficient.
” Greer kept her eyes on the road. “You’re going in there because you cut a dead woman off a menu and you’ve never once had to stand in front of what that means.
You’ve apologized to a ledger. You haven’t apologized to a person, because people don’t reconcile in under a minute, and you don’t know what to do in the part that takes longer.
” She pulled into a sand driveway under a live oak the size of a weather system.
“So. We’re going to go take Mari her check, like neighbors, and you’re going to meet the woman whose recipe you crossed out, and you’re going to let it take as long as it takes.
Bring the Tupperware. It’s deviled crab.
You do not get to give it to her empty-handed, and you do not get to make a speech. ”
Miss Ruby Estes was on the porch, because women of a certain age and authority on this island are always already on the porch, having seen your dust on the road a full minute before you arrive and arranged themselves to receive you.
She was small and straight-backed and held a flyswatter the way a judge holds a gavel, and she watched me come up the steps with the Tupperware with an expression that informed me, before a word was spoken, that she knew exactly who I was and exactly what I’d done and was not going to make either of us pretend otherwise.
“You’re the one runs the parlor now,” she said. Not a question. “The one with the pen.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I had not called anyone, ma’am, and meant it since I was Mari’s age. “I brought your — Greer made deviled crab.”
“Greer made deviled crab, and you carried it, which is the most useful thing about you so far, by my information.” She took the Tupperware and set it on the rail without looking at it.
“Sit down. Not that chair, that’s Mari’s, she’s inside, and she’s not coming out, so don’t go looking hopeful at the screen door.
The other one.” I sat in the other one. “You cut my Lena’s milkshake. ”
There it was, on the porch, in the heat, with a flyswatter pointed loosely in my direction. I had crossed an ocean of my own competence to arrive at exactly this sentence, and there was nowhere left to put a slide.
“I did,” I said. “I didn’t know whose it was. That’s not a defense. I’ve stopped offering defenses; they don’t travel well down here. I cut it because it sold twice a day and took four minutes, and I was wrong, and I can’t unknow now what it was I cut.”
Miss Ruby looked at me for a long moment.
Then she did a thing I did not expect, which was almost smile, the same sideways island almost-smile I was coming to dread for how much it saw.
“Well,” she said. “At least you don’t grovel.
I can’t abide a groveler. Lena groveled, God rest her, sweetest girl ever drew breath and apologized for the weather.
” She set the flyswatter down. “Sit there. I’m going to tell you about a milkshake, since you’ve decided to start a war over one without knowing what it is, which is the most expensive way to do anything, and you’d think a businesswoman would know better. ”
She told me about the milkshake. I will not put all of it here because some of it was hers and Lena’s, not mine to spend, but I will tell you the shape, because the shape is the thing I drove home with and have not put down.
Ruby’s mother made banana pudding in a tin-roofed kitchen for a white family that did not learn her name in thirty years of eating it.
Ruby took the pudding and made it hers and put it in a milkshake at a lunch counter in Brunswick, the year the lunch counters were still deciding whether she could sit at them.
Lena took the milkshake to Pearl, who put it on the board at the Whippy Dippy in 1974 — PEARL, 1974, I thought, the index card at the bottom of the shoebox, the one I’d set aside without understanding because the house had plainly decided it mattered — and lettered it LENA’S in nicer script, on purpose, so that a girl whose grandmother’s name nobody ever learned would have her own name up on a wall in a town that would, by God, learn it.
And Lena poured it for forty years, and taught it to Mari, and then Lena died, and the milkshake became the last place a seventeen-year-old could still find her mother’s hands.
And I had drawn a red line through it for ninety seconds of margin, because it did not pay.
“You didn’t cut a flavor,” Miss Ruby said, when she was done, gently now, which was worse than the flyswatter.
“You cut the one place that child’s grief gets to be useful.
That’s all that milkshake is, baby. It’s a job grief can do.
You take that away, the grief’s just got nowhere to go but to sit on her chest, and you’ve met my granddaughter, you know she’d rather die than let it.
” She picked the swatter back up, the audience concluding.
“I’m not going to tell you it’s all right.
It isn’t. But you came, and you carried the crab, and you didn’t grovel, and you let me say the whole thing without once trying to fix it, which I’m told is not your nature.
” She nodded at the screen door, behind which I could feel, rather than see, a seventeen-year-old listening to every word.
“That girl’ll come back when the milkshake’s back on the wall and not one minute sooner, and not because you put it there.
Because of why. You figure out the why, you’ll know what to do.
Now go on. Take the Tupperware when it’s empty. I’m keeping the crab.”
I got up to go. And as I came down off the porch, I saw her — Mari, behind the screen door, in the dim of the front room, where she’d been the whole time, close enough that she’d heard her grandmother hand me the entire weight of her mother in a flyswatter and a story.
She did not open the door. She did not say anything.
She just stood there on the other side of the mesh, a seventeen-year-old with her arms crossed and her chin up and her eyes red, looking at the woman who’d cut her mother off a wall, and I made myself stop and look back, because she had earned the right to do this to my face even through a screen, and I owed her the standing still.
For a second, we just held it, the two of us, the screen door between us, turning her to a thing seen through gauze.
Then she gave me one small nod — not forgiveness, nothing like forgiveness, just an acknowledgment, the bare receipt that I had come and stood and not made it about myself — and she turned and went back into the house, and it was the most she would give me for weeks, and it was, I understood, carrying it down the steps, enormous.
I went home and did not, for once, find a task to bury it under.
I sat in the dark over Earl’s and held the thing she’d handed me — a job grief can do — and turned it over, and could not make it pay, and understood, slowly, that this was the entire point, that I had finally been handed a thing whose whole value was that it would never once show up in a column.
I did not know yet what to do with it. But for the first time all summer, I did not reach for the pen to make the not-knowing stop.
I just held it, the way you carry the thing you mean to keep, and let it be heavy, and that — Miss Ruby would have been insufferable about it — was the first genuinely useful thing I had done since I crossed the causeway.