Chapter 11
The custody hearing was two weeks out.
Aurora counted in days now. She did not mean to. She had a calendar pinned up over the worktable in the sunroom, the same calendar she had used for her book deadlines, and she had penciled fourteen small dots in a row along the second-to-last week. She crossed one off every morning.
It was the smallest, most controllable thing she could do, and she did it before she did anything else, even before she drank her coffee.
Halston had taken her to bed the night before, slowly and quietly in the master suite, without saying very much, and he had not let her out of his arms until well after she had fallen asleep.
When she had woken up, he had already been awake for an hour, his hand resting at the curve of her hip under the sheet, his eyes open in the dark.
She had said, without opening her own, “Have you slept?”
“Some.”
“Halston.”
“Some, Aurora. I promise.”
She had not believed him. She had not pressed.
*****
The Sunday dinner at the Akande house came up before the hearing did.
Halston dressed for it appropriately. A clean white shirt, dark jeans, brown leather loafers without socks. His circle beard was freshly trimmed.
He looked, when he came down the marble staircase with Imari's small hand in his, like a man who had thought about what to wear into Errol's kitchen and had decided on the version of himself that conveyed the message that he was trying.
Aurora drove.
Halston sat in the passenger seat with Imari behind him in her booster, both of them quiet. Aurora glanced at her husband. His hand was open on his thigh. He kept flexing the fingers, then relaxing them, then flexing them again. He caught her looking.
“Halston.”
“Mm.”
“It's going to be fine.”
“I know.”
“You look like you are walking into a deposition.”
“I would be more comfortable walking into a deposition. Aurora. Your father raised you. I am asking your father to let me belong to that. Don't take this away from me by pretending it is small.”
She did not.
She set her hand on top of his on his thigh. He turned it over and laced his fingers through hers, and they drove the last twelve minutes into the Third Ward in silence and Imari quietly singing to her wooden bird that Errol had made her, in the back seat.
The smell hit them on the front porch.
Smothered chicken, red beans and rice and peach cobbler. The deep slow-burned brown smell of a Black Southern kitchen that had been cooking since seven in the morning, and the lower note of bourbon vanilla and butter from the cobbler in the oven.
Ayanna opened the front door before Aurora had her hand on the screen.
She had her hair tied back in a soft pale gold scarf today, the one Errol had brought her back from a furniture exhibition in New Orleans three years ago.
Her face was composed, but Aurora could see, in the small puffiness under her mother's eyes, that she had been crying that morning.
Aurora had not, in the days since the kitchen table, asked.
She had not called her either. But she was here now, on her mother's porch. That was something.
Ayanna's eyes went straight past her daughter to Imari.
“Oh, baby. Look at you in that pretty dress.”
“Hi, Grandma Ayanna.”
“Hi, sweet pea. Come on in. Come on, come on in.”
Halston came up the porch step behind Aurora with his hands in his pockets, because he had been told not to bring flowers which he did, but this meant he did not know what to do with his hands. He stopped at the threshold. Ayanna looked at him over Imari's head.
For one half second, Aurora saw her mother's mouth tighten and her eyes go wet.
“Halston,” Ayanna said.
“Mrs. Akande.”
“Come in, son. Come on in. He's in the kitchen.”
Halston stepped into the small foyer of the Akande house for the first time in his life.
He took it in. Aurora watched him take it in. The narrow stairwell. The framed family photographs going up the wall, Aurora at four with two missing teeth, at college graduation, her first gallery opening and Maeve and Aurora at Maeve's wedding.
He stopped at the wedding picture.
“That was a good day,” he said quietly.
“It was,” Ayanna said.
She did not say anything else.
Errol sat in his Saturday shirt, the soft blue one, at the head of the kitchen table. A cup of coffee in front of him. His forearms bare to the elbow. A small carving knife and a half-finished second wooden bird on the table beside the salt and pepper.
He looked up when they came in, then stood up.
“Imari,” he said , Aurora watched her father's whole long face break into a smile that almost undid her, “come here and tell me about that bird. I am working on a friend for him. I need your opinion.”
Imari ran to him. She climbed up into the chair next to him with her wooden bird in both hands. Errol picked up the carving knife and got to work.
Errol looked up at Halston, very briefly, over the top of Imari's braided head.
“Iverson,” he said. “Sit.”
“Yes, sir.”
Halston sat at the table across from Errol. Ayanna started bringing food to the table, and Aurora helped, and for the first thirty minutes Errol did not address Halston directly except to pass him a serving spoon.
It was not unfriendly but it was not friendly either.
Halston ate. He praised Ayanna's chicken twice and sincerely. He told Ayanna that her cobbler was the best peach cobbler in the State of Texas. He let Imari take the last piece of cornbread when she reached for it without thinking.
He talked to Errol about the chair Errol had been sanding the morning he had come to the workshop.
“American black walnut,” Errol said. “Pegged, no screws. The legs are turned by hand.”
“How long does a chair like that take to make, sir?”
“Three weeks. About.”
“Three weeks for one chair.”
“Yes.”
“That is a beautiful object, Mr. Akande.”
“It is just a chair, son.”
“No, sir,” Halston said quietly. “It is not just a chair, it’s a work of art.”
Errol did not look up from his plate. But Aurora, watching from the seat beside her husband, saw her father's mouth move at the corner.
Imari, after second helpings of chicken and a piece of cornbread, fell quietly into the slow heavy near-sleep of an eight-year-old whose Sunday dinner had been bigger than she was. Her head dropped slowly toward her plate.
Halston, without looking at her, slid his arm along the back of her chair and let her head fall sideways onto his bicep. He did not interrupt his conversation about chair joinery. Imari's eyes closed.
Errol, at the head of the table, watched this happen.
He kept eating. But he kept watching.
After a while, Ayanna stood up to clear the plates and Aurora got up to help her. Halston started to stand up too.
“Sit, son,” Errol said. “She's asleep on you. You move, you wake her.”
Halston lowered himself back down.
Aurora and Ayanna carried plates into the small kitchen. Aurora rinsed; Ayanna stacked. Neither of them spoke for the first minute.
Then Ayanna, into the rush of the tap water, said quietly, “Aurora.”
“Mama.”
“I am not asking you to forgive me yet. I am just glad you came.”
Aurora's hand stopped on the plate.
She set the plate down in the sink and turned off the tap but did not look at her mother.
“I know you are, Mama.”
“Aurora.”
“I came for Daddy and Imari, and I came because Halston was coming and I was not letting him walk into this house alone the first time. But you should know, Mama, that I will not be coming most Sundays for a little while. I have to figure out where to put this. I will get there. But I am not there yet.”
“I know, baby.”
“I love you.”
“Aurora.”
“I love you, Mama. I just need time to process it all.”
Ayanna pressed her hand over her mouth for a second. Then she put both her hands flat on the counter beside the sink and leaned forward. She did not cry out loud, but her shoulders shook.
Aurora reached out and laid her hand on her mother's back, between her shoulder blades, very lightly. Not a hug. Not yet. Just a hand.
Ayanna did not move under it. She just stayed there, with her daughter's hand on her back, for one slow careful breath. Two. Three.
Then she straightened up and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
“Pass me that towel, baby.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“And the cobbler is going to burn if we don't take it out in about ninety seconds.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Aurora handed her the towel.
Ayanna pulled the cobbler out of the oven. The kitchen filled with bourbon, butter and brown sugar. The whole house smelled, suddenly, like Sundays from twenty years ago.
In the dining room behind them, Errol was watching Halston tease Imari, very gently, about the size of the second helping of cornbread she had taken, even though Imari was nearly asleep on his arm and not in any condition to defend herself.
Imari, into Halston's bicep, murmured, “Grandpa Errol. Can I come back next week.”
The table went quiet.
Errol looked at his son-in-law across the table, then at Imari sleepily laying on his shoulder. He took a slow swallow of his sweet tea.
“That'll be up to Halston, sweet pea,” he said.
Aurora, coming back into the doorway of the dining room with the cobbler in her hands set it down on the table.
She turned the second wooden bird, the one Errol had been working on while they had been eating, gently on the wood with one finger. The new bird had a tiny rounded breast and a slightly tilted head. It was, plainly, a hummingbird.
“For you, sweet pea,” Errol said softly to the sleeping child against Halston's arm.
*****
Three days later, Folake flew into Houston Hobby from Los Angeles with a soft leather weekender bag and an enormous straw sun hat, and Halston sent a car for her.