Chapter 8
Aurora left the estate at six in the morning, before anyone was awake. She left a note on the breakfast room table for Yvette: Going to the Third Ward. Back by noon. Tell Imari I'll be home for lunch.
She left no note for her husband.
She drove the coast road back to Houston in grim silence. The sun came up white over the bay on her left. Her hands were tight on the wheel of her car. The gold ring on her left hand glinted every time she turned the wheel.
There was a contract. My father. Your mother.
She repeated those nine words to herself the entire drive home from his bedroom to her own last night.
She'd said them another six hundred times between two and five in the morning, then again on the elliptical at four-thirty, because she had not been able to lie still anymore.
They had followed her into the shower, and into the closet as she pulled on jeans, a soft white T-shirt and a blue cardigan that had belonged to Maeve — one Aurora had not, until this morning, been able to take out of her suitcase.
By the time she pulled up to the curb outside her parents’ house, Aurora was no longer entirely sure how she felt towards her mother.
Errol's old Ford truck was not in the driveway.
Then she remembered. He had a commission delivery this morning. He had told her last week that he would be in Galveston with a client until the afternoon.
So Ayanna was alone in the house.
Good.
Aurora put the car in park and sat for a moment twisting her gold ring round her finger.
Then she got out.
She climbed the front porch but did not use her key. She knocked, twice, three knuckles on the screen door.
A short pause. Then her mother's voice, faintly, from inside.
“Coming.”
The inside door opened. Ayanna, in her Saturday housedress, her hair tied back in a white printed cotton headwrap she only wore when she was cleaning the house, a feather duster in one hand, opened the screen door and saw her daughter standing there with no warning and a look on her face she had not seen in some time.
Ayanna's mouth opened. The feather duster slipped a quarter inch in her grip.
“Aurora?”
“Mama.”
“Baby, what's wrong?”
Aurora walked into the house without answering. Walking past her mother into the small yellow kitchen of her childhood and set her keys on the counter. She turned around.
Ayanna was in the doorway of the kitchen with the duster still in her hand.
“Aurora. Talk to me.”
“Mama. I need you to sit down.”
“Aurora.”
“Sit down, Mama.”
Ayanna had never heard her daughter use that tone with her in her life She sat down, set the feather duster on the kitchen table and folded her hands in her lap on top of the housedress.
Her face had gone, very slowly, the color of a woman who had been bracing herself for this conversation for fifteen years and who had just realized it was here.
Aurora pulled out the chair across from her and sat down. She did not say anything for a long second. Her own hands, on the table, were shaking.
“Halston told me something last night, Mama.”
Ayanna closed her eyes.
She closed her eyes and Aurora knew, in the deepest and most lonely part of her chest, that everything Halston had said in bed last night was true. Whatever the contract was, it existed.
“Mama?”
“Aurora.”
“Mama, look at me.”
Ayanna opened her eyes, which were now wet.
“He said there was a contract, Mama. He said my mother and his father…my mother. Mama. Tell me.”
Ayanna was silent. She lifted her hand from the table, put it over her mouth and held it there. She closed her eyes again. A single tear slid down her brown cheek.
She took her hand off her mouth.
“Wait,” she whispered.
She stood up from the kitchen table. Her knees did not quite hold her, and she set one hand on the back of the chair for balance. Aurora's hand went out, instinctively, to steady her mother, who waved her gently off.
“I'm all right. Aurora. I'm all right. Wait. I have to get something.”
Aurora sat at the kitchen table for a long time, her own breath very shallow in her chest. She listened to her mother go upstairs, slowly, one step at a time.
She opened the door of the spare bedroom that had been Aurora's bedroom until she was twenty.
She listened to her mother open a drawer Aurora knew the squeak of, then to her mother come back down the stairs.
Ayanna came into the kitchen with a sealed white envelope in her hand. The envelope was yellowed at the corners. Whatever had been in it had been in it a long time.
She sat back down across from Aurora and set the envelope on the table between them.
Then Ayanna pushed the envelope across the table.
“Read it,” she said quietly. “Then I will tell you the rest.”
Aurora picked up the envelope. The flap had been sealed and never opened. She had to slide her thumb under it to break the dry old gum. She drew out a single sheet of cream linen letterhead.
IVERSON HOLDINGS.
Confidential.
PRIVATE AGREEMENT.
The letter was dated fifteen years ago. The first day of the month after the boathouse summer.
Mrs. Ayanna Akande,
Pursuant to our conversation of the previous evening, I am confirming the terms of our agreement in writing for both our records.
In exchange for the immediate severance of all personal, social, and romantic contact between your daughter, Aurora Akande, age 18, and my son, Halston Iverson, age 19, I will deposit the sum of $200,000 USD into a personal account in your name at the First National Bank of Houston before the close of business on Monday next.
These funds may be used at your discretion for any purpose, with the understanding and expectation that the bulk of the sum will be used to fund Miss Akande's continued tertiary education and to settle the outstanding medical bills of your mother-in-law, Mrs. Comfort Akande, currently a patient at Ben Taub General Hospital.
In exchange, I require your full and binding personal undertaking that your daughter will not contact, write to, attempt to visit, or otherwise communicate with my son for the duration of his enrollment at Stanford University, and that you will personally ensure she does not do so.
The funds are non-refundable. The agreement is nontransferable.
The arrangement is between you and me directly, and is not to be communicated to your daughter, your husband, or any other member of your family, including my son.
Yours,
Theodore Ellsworth Iverson
There was a signature at the bottom.
There was, half an inch under the signature, in the same fountain pen, a second line of writing: Mrs. Akande, please counter-sign and return to my office by Monday morning.
The countersignature line was empty.
But on the back of the page, when Aurora turned it over, was her own mother's handwriting.
I am sorry. I am so sorry. May God forgive me. Comfort cannot die in that place, and my baby cannot leave school. May God forgive me.
It was in pencil. It was undated. It had been written by a thirty-eight-year-old housekeeper at a kitchen table somewhere, on the back of an Iverson Holdings letterhead, fifteen years ago.
Aurora set the letter down on the kitchen table very slowly.
She did not look up at her mother.
The kitchen was the same kitchen. The same yellow walls, same braided rug, same half-finished crossword in her father's handwriting on the corner of the table, four down still empty.
“Mama,” she said. Her voice was a stranger's.
“Aurora.”
“You took the money?”
“I took the money.”
“You let me think he left me.”
“Yes.”
“You let me cry myself to sleep for two years. You let me stop drawing for a year. You let me think I was not the type of girl he kept. Mama. You let me believe it. Every day. For fifteen years.”
“Yes, baby.”
“Mama. Mama. Why?”
Ayanna hands had come up onto the table. They were trembling.
“Baby. Listen to me for one minute. Your grandmother.
Your father's mother. Mother Comfort. She had three months left. She was at Ben Taub, sharing a room with five other women, on a ward so short-staffed nobody came for an hour when you pressed the button. And I watched them, Aurora. Same ward, same beds — I watched them bring the other women their pain medicine and leave the Black women to wait, and tell themselves they were imagining it, and know they were not. Your father had used every cent he had. He had taken out a second mortgage on this house. There was nothing left. Aurora. There was nothing left. Your daddy had not slept in a week. He had cried in the kitchen one Sunday and he did not know I saw him, I went into the bathroom and I prayed, baby. I prayed for an answer.”
“Mama. Stop.”
“Aurora, please.”
“Mama. Stop.”
But Ayanna would not stop. The dam had cracked. Ayanna had been carrying this secret for far too long.
"The next afternoon, baby, Theodore called me up to his office at the estate.
He had the letter in his hand. I had not asked him.
I had not gone to him. He called me up. He said he did not believe his son was going to recover from his hesitation about Stanford if my daughter was in his ear.
He did not believe you were the right girl for him.
He did not believe you would benefit from a future with him either.
He was willing, he said, to make a one-time arrangement that would resolve our family's medical situation and your school costs.
He had the figure right there on the letter, Aurora.
Two hundred thousand. It was non-negotiable, and it had to be that day.
If I said no, the offer would never come again — he was going to send Halston to Stanford on Friday and make sure the boy came back in four years married to a girl from California.
And then he told me I should think very carefully about whose future I was destroying.
Aurora. He said it like that. Like I was destroying somebody's future no matter what I did. "
“Mama. Stop. Stop!”