Chapter 4 #2
Three days later, Aurora drove Imari to see her parents.
The Akande house on Andrews Street was a modest two-story in faded blue clapboard with a deep porch and a swing on it.
The back yard had Errol's workshop, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot post-and-beam structure he had built with his own two hands the year Aurora went to college, the smell of cedar shavings and tung oil pouring out of the open windows even from the curb.
Errol was on the back porch when they pulled up. He had on his Saturday shirt, the soft blue one Ayanna had sewn a button back onto the cuff of twice. He came down the porch steps before Aurora had the car in park.
Imari was unbuckled and out of the passenger seat before Aurora had her own seatbelt off, and she hit Errol in the stomach at hip height. Her grandfather, who was built like a cottonwood, picked her up off the ground and spun her in a small careful circle without a word.
“Grandpa Errol.”
“Hi, baby. Hi, sweet pea. Look at you.”
He set her down and kissed her forehead twice. He looked at Aurora over the top of his granddaughter's head, and Aurora saw, plain on her father's face, the relief of holding a Larkin grandchild he had loved since the day she was born.
Imari spent two hours on the back porch with Errol, whittling a small wooden bird out of a block of cottonwood. Aurora sat on the porch swing with Ayanna and a glass of lemonade and watched her father teach.
Imari spoke more in those two hours than she had in the last two weeks combined. She asked Errol if the bird could be named after her. Errol said it absolutely could. She asked Errol if he would carve one for her every year of her life. Errol said he absolutely would.
Ayanna passed her a second glass of lemonade.
"He's been drawing something all week," Ayanna said softly. She was watching Errol and Imari; her hands folded around her own glass. "Out in the workshop till all hours. He won't tell me what it is, and he thinks I haven't noticed he started something new on Tuesday."
"Started what?"
"I don't know yet. Your father in his workshop is a closed door."
Aurora smiled, despite herself. "Yes, he is."
They sat in silence. The cicadas were louder here in the Third Ward than they were out at the bay. Aurora had not realized she had missed the sound until that moment.
“Mama,” she said quietly. “Are you all right?”
Ayanna did not answer for a long moment.
“I am not all right, baby,” she said finally. “I'm not. But I will be. You don't worry about me. You worry about that little girl over there.”
Something passed across her mother's face that Aurora could not entirely identify. A flicker. A tightness. Something that looked, for the briefest second, like guilt.
Aurora did not ask. Not yet. She had too many other things to hold.
She tucked it away.
*****
That night, after Aurora had driven Imari back to the estate and Yvette had fed them both gumbo, Halston had carried the half-asleep child up to her bed and read her two chapters of the elephant book in a voice so quiet Aurora had heard it only because she had been standing in the doorway in the dark, Aurora sat on the edge of her own bed in her own enormous guest suite with the bay outside her window catching moonlight.
She looked at the framed photograph of Maeve that she had set on the dresser opposite the bed.
Maeve was laughing in the photograph. Capri, six years ago. Sun on her face. Cyrus's arm around her waist.
Aurora's hand twisted in the sheets.
“Maeve,” she whispered into the empty room. “What did you do? Why did you do this to us, Maeve? Why?”
Maeve did not answer.
The bay outside the window kept doing its slow shining work.
Somewhere down the hall, behind a door Aurora was not supposed to open, the man Aurora was going to marry was probably still awake, still in his clothes, probably reading something at the desk in his temporary bedroom.
She knew that about him still.
She turned out her own light.
In the dark, Aurora lay on her back in a thousand-dollar set of sheets in a house her mother had cleaned for thirty years, and she felt, for the first time since the phone had rung in her studio, something that was not grief.
It was a much more frightening thing.
It was hope.
*****
The afternoon before the wedding, Aurora and Halston went up to Imari's room together.
Imari was in the window nook with a book in her lap. Aurora sat on the rug. Halston took the slipper chair and folded his forearms on his knees so he was closer to Imari's height.
"Sweet pea, we need to talk to you about something important," Aurora said. "Mr. Halston and I are getting married tomorrow."
Imari closed her book over her thumb.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow afternoon. In Houston.”
"Why?"
"Your mama and your daddy left a paper. The paper said that if anything ever happened to them, they wanted me and Mr. Halston to take care of you. They picked us together."
"Both of you?"
"Both of us. And in Texas, when two grow n- ups take care of a little girl together like that, they get married. So tomorrow we are going to do what your mama and your daddy asked us to do. The three of us are going to be a family. In this house."
Imari looked at Halston.
"And you live here too."
"Yes squirt. This is my house. Yours now too."
"All right."
She straightened Archie's tag against her thumb.
"Aunt Rory. You promise you're not going anywhere."
"I promise, sweet pea. Not ever."
"Mr. Halston. You promise."
"I promise, Imari."
Imari nodded, very small and looked down.
"I miss mommy and daddy so much."
"We know, sweet pea," Aurora said softly. "We know. We've got you. Both of us."`
In the hallway, Aurora leaned her back against the wall. Halston stood across from her.
"She is going to be fine," he said.
"I hope so."