An American Marriage 7

 

CELESTIAL

Ours was a love story, the kind that’s not supposed to happen to black girls anymore. This was vintage romance made scarce after Dr. King, along with Negro-owned dress shops, drugstores, and cafeterias. By the time I was born, Sweet Auburn, once the richest Negro street in the world, was split in two by the freeway and left to die. Stubborn Ebenezer was still standing, a proud reminder of her famous son, whose marble tomb and eternity flame kept watch next door. When I was twenty-four, living in New York City, I thought that maybe black love went that way, too, integrated into near extinction.

Nikki Giovanni said, “Black love is Black wealth.” On a drunk night in the West Village, my roommate Imani tattooed this on her right hip, hoping for the best. She and I were both HBCU alums, so grad school was culture shock and dystopia at the same time. In art school there were only two of us who were black, and the other one, a guy, seemed to be mad at me every day for spoiling his uniqueness. Imani was in the same boat, getting her poetry degree, so we took jobs waiting tables at Maroons, a restaurant in Manhattan that specialized in black comfort food from all over the globe: jerk chicken, jollof rice, collard greens, and corn bread. Our boyfriends were our supervisors, smoldering men with colonial accents. Too old, too broke, and too handsome, they were as faithless as the weather, but like Imani said, “Black and alive is always a good start.”

Back then, I was trying to fit into the New York artsy scene. I was always on a diet, and I tried to stop saying “y’all” and “ma’am.” For the most part, I was successful, unless I was drinking. After three gin fizzes, all that Southwest Atlanta came pouring out like I never had an elocution lesson. Roy, back then, lived in Atlanta metro but only barely, renting an apartment so far out that he could hardly catch the R&B station on the radio. He worked a cubicle job that compensated him fairly well for agreeing to integrate their workplace. He didn’t like or dislike it; for him, a job was a means to an end. The travel part of it he did enjoy, since before signing on he hadn’t ventured west of Dallas or north of Baltimore.

Of course, I wasn’t aware of any of this when Imani seated his party at a big round table in my section. All I knew was that table 6 was a party of eight, seven of whom were white. Expecting him to be that kind of brother, I was all business. As I recited the specials, I could feel the black guy staring at me, even though the redhead to his left appeared to be his girlfriend, leaning toward him as she read the menu. Finally, she ordered a sorrel caipirinha. “And what will you have, sir?” I asked him, chilly as a tax auditor.

“I’ll have a Jack and coke,” he said. “Georgia girl.”

I flinched like someone slipped an ice cube down the back of my shirt. “My accent?”

All the people at his table grinned, especially the redhead. “You don’t have a southern accent,” she declared. “All of us are from Georgia. You’re all Yankee.”

Yankee was a white word, the verbal equivalent of the rebel flag, leftover anger about the civil war. I turned back to the black guy—we were a team now—and gave the tiniest of eye rolls. In response, he gave an almost imperceptible shoulder shrug that said, White folk gonna white folk. Then he leaned slightly away from the redhead, this time communicating, This is a work dinner. She isn’t my date.

Then, in words, he said, “I think I know you. Your hair is different, but didn’t you go to Spelman? I’m Roy Hamilton, your Morehouse brother.”

I never really bought into the SpelHouse mentality about us being brothers and sisters, maybe because I had been a transfer student, missing out on the Freshman Week rituals and ceremonies. But at that twinkle, it was as though we discovered that we were long-lost play cousins.

“Roy Hamilton.” I said the name slowly, trying to jog some sort of memory, but he looked too much like a standard-issue Morehouse man, the type who declared his business major in kindergarten.

“What was your name again?” He asked, squinting at my name tag, which read imani. The real Imani was across the room wearing a celestial tag.

“Imani,” the redhead said, clearly annoyed. “Can’t you read?”

Roy pretended like he didn’t hear her. “No,” he said. “That’s not it. Your name was something old timey, like Ruthie Mae.”

“Celestial,” I said. “I’m named for my mother.”

“I’m surprised you don’t go by Celeste now that you’re up here in New York City. I’m Roy, Roy Othaniel Hamilton, to be exact.”

At the sound of that middle name—talk about old timey—I did remember him. He had been a playboy, a mack, a hustler. All those things. My manager, who only yesterday insisted that he was not my man, cleared his throat. Game recognize game and all of that.

Is this nostalgia? Is this how it really happened? I wish we had taken a photo so I could remember how we looked later that evening standing outside the restaurant. Winter arrived early that year. Roy wore a lightweight wool coat, with a puny little scarf that probably came with it. I was bundled against the elements in a down coat Gloria sent me, so convinced was she that I would die of hypothermia before I finished my “artist phase” and came back home to get a master’s in education. Snow fell in wet clumps, but I didn’t tie my hood, wanting Roy to see my face.

Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now. Roy came into my life at the time when I needed a man like him. Would I have galloped into this love affair if I had never left Atlanta? I don’t know. But how you feel love and understand love are two different things. Now, so many years down the road, I recognize that I was alone and adrift and that he was lonely in the way that only a ladies man can be. He reminded me of Atlanta, and I reminded him of the same. All these were reasons why we were drawn to each other, but standing with him outside of Maroons, we were past reason. Human emotion is beyond comprehension, smooth and uninterrupted, like an orb made of blown glass.

ROY

Standing on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, I memorized her—the shape of her lips and the purple tint of her lipstick, which matched the streaks in her hair. I knew her accent, southern but not too much, and I knew her shape, thick through the hips but slim on top. I had said her name was “something old timey,” but I should have said “something classic.” I could remember the feel of her name in my mouth, like the details of a dream.

“Want to see Brooklyn?” she asked. “My other roommate works at Two Steps Down. If we go there, we can drink for free.”

My first mind was to tell her that we didn’t need free cocktails, but I had a feeling she would be more annoyed than impressed, so I said, “Let’s get a taxi.”

“You won’t get a taxi tonight.”

“How come?” By way of question, I tapped the brown skin peeking out between my camel-hair coat and my soft leather gloves.

“That,” she said, “and it’s snowing. Meter’s double. We better take the subway.” She pointed at a green orb, and we descended a staircase into a world that reminded me of that dark scene in The Wiz.

“After you,” she said, depositing a token at the turnstile, nudging me through.

I felt like a blind man who left his cane at home. “You know,” I said. “I’m here on business. Sales meeting in the morning.”

She smiled in a polite way. “That’s nice,” she said, but she didn’t care at all about my professional standing. Hell, I didn’t even care about it all that much, but the point was to remind her that I had something going on in my life.

I’m not a fan of public transportation. In Atlanta, there was the bus or the MARTA train, and you only took those if you couldn’t afford a car. When I first got to Morehouse, I had no choice, but as soon as I gathered four nickels at the same time, I bought myself the last remaining Ford Pinto. Andre called it the “Auto Bomb” on account of the safety issue, but it never stopped him or anybody else from bumming a ride.

The A train was nothing like you would think from the song. The New York subway was packed with people, and you could smell whatever stuffed their damp sleeping bag coats. The floor was covered with the kind of linoleum that you only find in the projects, and the seats were a fixed-income shade of orange. And do not get me started on the able-bodied men sprawled out, taking up two seats sometimes while ladies were left standing.

For the jerky ride, we stood in front of a black lady who clinched a large shopping bag to her chest and slept like she was at home in the bed. Beside her was a light-skinned dude, the type we used to call “DeBarge.” He had a portrait gallery inked all over his head. Over his cheekbone was a woman’s face, and she appeared to be weeping.

“Georgia,” I said into her hair. “How can you live up here?”

She turned around to answer me, and our faces were so close that she leaned back to keep from kissing me. “I’m not really living here, living here. I’m in grad school, paying dues.”

“So you’re pretending to be a waitress?”

She adjusted her grip on the strap and lifted her foot to show me a black shoe with a thick rubber sole. “Somebody needs to tell my feet I’m pretending, because they are killing me like I’m really working.”

I chuckled with her, but I felt sorry, thinking about my mama back in Louisiana who was always complaining about her arches. She claimed it was because of the high heels she wore on Sundays, but it was really from being on her feet all day, fixing trays at the meat-and-three.

“What are you in school for?” I hoped that she wasn’t getting a PhD, an MBA, or a law degree. It’s not like I had anything against women getting ahead in the world, but I didn’t want to have to explain why it was that I decided to cool my heels with just my BA.

“Fine arts,” she said, “concentrating on textiles and folk art.” I could see from the little turn-up at the corner of her eyes that she was so proud that she could have been her own mother, but I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Is that right?” I said.

“I’m an artisan,” she said, not like she was explaining but like she was sharing the good news. “I’m a doll maker.”

“That’s what you’re going to do for a living?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of Faith Ringgold?” I hadn’t, but she kept on. “I want to be like her. With dolls instead of quilts. I want to get a tax ID and go into business.”

“What’s the name of the corporation?”

“Babydolls,” she said.

“Sounds like a strip club.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, loud enough that it woke up the lady dozing on the seat in front of us. The guy with the face tattoos twitched a little bit.

“It’s just that my degree is in marketing,” I said. “It’s my job to think about things like that.”

She kept looking like she was offended in a pretty meaningful way.

“Maybe another name might be more effective.” Since it seemed like I was moving in the right direction, I kept going. “You could call it Poupées. That’s French for dolls.”

“French?” she asked, eyeing me. “You’re Haitian?”

“Me?” I shook my head. “I’m a standard-issue American Negro.”

“But you speak French?” She sounded hopeful, like she had a translation job that needed doing. For a second, I considered throwing down my Louisiana credentials, because women dig it when you claim to be Creole, but I didn’t feel like lying to her. “I studied French in high school and took a few hours toward a minor at Morehouse.”

“My supervisor, Didier,” she said. “He’s Haitian. Kind of Haitian. He was born in Brooklyn but still Haitian. You know how it is up here. He speaks French.”

I may seem like I fell off a turnip truck, but I knew enough to know that it’s never a good sign when a woman brings up another brother out of the blue like that.

After we changed trains, she finally said, “This is our stop,” and led me up a filthy little staircase tiled like a public restroom. As we emerged into the Brooklyn night, I was surprised to see trees up and down the sides of the road. As I looked up at their stripped branches, chubby snowflakes floated down. I’m a southern boy by birth and constitution, so a real snowfall was something to see. It was all I could do not to stick my tongue out to taste one. “It’s like TV,” I said.

“Tomorrow it will be all filthy and stacked up on the side of the road. But it’s nice when it’s fresh like this.”

We turned down the next street and I wanted to take her hand. The buildings on each side of the road were light brown, like pencil shavings, and the walls of one touched the other so that the road appeared to be flanked by castles. She explained that each of the brownstones was built to be houses for one family, all four stories, but now they were cut up into apartments.

“I live right there,” she said, pointing across the street and down. “Garden level. See?”

I followed her arm with my eyes.

“Oh, hell no,” she said. “Not again.”

I was squinting in the light, trying to peek between the snowflakes to see what she was worried about. Before I could figure out what from what, she hollered, “Hey,” and took off like she had been snapped from a slingshot. She got four or five seconds on me, just from the surprise factor. When I took off after her, I still wasn’t 100 percent sure what was going on. I gave it all I had, but I was still pulling up the rear. Like Spike Lee said that time: It’s the shoes. What I wore on my feet were for styling, not striding—oxblood Florsheims that would make a preacher covetous. Leather upper and sole. Celestial had on glorified nurse’s shoes, ugly as newborn puppies, but a plus in a street race.

When I spotted the dude running, I assessed the situation. In between her calling him all kinds of motherfuckers, she ordered him, “Put my shit down!” Apparently, we were chasing a burglar, one who could really move. She was going pretty good, but this dude was booking. He had on a pair of Jordans he probably stole from somebody, and like I said, it’s the shoes.

Carlton Avenue is a long street. Brownstones on each side, all the way, and trees with roots that buckled the sidewalk, turning the chase into an obstacle course. Apparently, I was the only one without prior experience. Celestial was hopping over the exposed roots without missing a beat. The burglar was even better, graceful even. You could tell this wasn’t his first rodeo.

He knew she wasn’t going to catch him. I knew she wasn’t going to catch him. As a sensible man, I’m not one to chase wild geese, but I had to keep running as long as she did. How would it look if I hung back while my date chased a criminal? So I kept pushing, even though I was struggling to breathe. A man does what he has to do.

How long did this chase go on? Forever. Between the cold air icing up my lungs and shoes pinching my feet, it occurred to me that I might be killing myself. Ahead, Celestial focused on the kid, and cussing like a longshoreman. I caught a charley horse, only it was in my heart. Even though all the profanity slowed her down a hair, it wasn’t looking good for me. I was bigger, late to start, and to cap it off, I was dressed like Louis Farrakhan. I’m no follower of the Nation, but the thought of Farrakhan gave me a little boost. He may be outrageous on some matters, but he has a grip on some basic things. No matter what Minister Farrakhan happened to be wearing, there was no way he would let a sister apprehend a burglar while he sat back and watched.

I swear, just then, the gods smiled on me. As I dug down in my inner reserve for strength and endurance, Celestial’s foot snagged on a chunk of jagged sidewalk and she went sprawling. In three strides, I caught up and jumped over her like Carl Lewis. For me, the race was over right then, before my dress shoes hit the ground. They could have played the theme music and rolled the credits with me in midair.

Too bad this wasn’t a movie. I landed, slid a few inches in the wrong direction, got my bearings back and kept moving. The kid was only a couple of sidewalk squares ahead, looking back. Now I went for the grand prize. I pumped my arms and legs harder, trying to recall anything I learned from high school track. Then he stumbled, costing him some ground. He was close enough now that I could read the label on the back of his shirt: Kani. My fingers closed around his skinny ankle as I hit the asphalt with my right knee taking the lead. He gave his leg a couple of vigorous shakes, but I was holding on for dear life.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he marveled. “What if I had a gun?”

I honestly stopped a second to think about it, and in that second, he jerked his foot free and kicked me in the face. To his credit, I will say that he didn’t kick me as harshly as he could have. He didn’t stomp my head into the sidewalk. As kicks go, it was more like a love tap, delivered straight to my mouth, knocking loose one of my bottom teeth.

Behind me, I could hear Celestial’s rubber-soled footfalls. I was scared that she was going to play me like a hurdle and continue this crazy chase, but she stopped and knelt beside me.

“I didn’t get your stuff back,” I said, gasping for breath.

“I don’t care. You’re my hero,” she said. I thought she was being funny, but her hands on the side of my face said that she wasn’t.

The dentist who fitted me for a bridge told me that he could have saved my tooth if I had gone to the hospital. Celestial even suggested it at the time, but I waved it away as we headed back to her small apartment that she shared with three people and a dozen baby dolls. She gave me a cold compress and called the police. The officer didn’t arrive for another two hours, and by then my nose was wide open. I was giddy like the Jackson 5. Do re mi. ABC. On the police report, she signed her full name and I would have tattooed it on my forehead: Celestial Gloriana Davenport.

ANDRE

The whole truth wasn’t anybody’s business but mine and Celestial’s.

On the Sunday before we laid Olive to rest, I visited the prison while Celestial stayed with Roy’s father. I say visit for lack of a better term. Maybe it’s best to say that I went to see him. As we shared three bags of chips from the vending machine, Roy asked me to take his place on Monday morning and carry his mother’s casket from the hearse to the altar. I agreed but not gladly; this wasn’t a task you take on with pleasure. Big Roy had drafted an extra deacon to carry the right-hand corner load, but I was to explain to him that Roy sent me and the deacon would step aside. We shook on it, like we were finishing a business deal. When we let go, I stood up to leave, but Roy didn’t move.

“I got to stay here until visiting hours are over.”

“You’ll just sit?”

He curled up one side of his mouth. “It’s better than going back in there. I don’t mind it.”

“I can wait another minute,” I said, returning to the plastic chair.

“You see that dude?” He pointed to a skinny man with a flat-top fade and Malcolm X glasses. “That’s my father. My Biological. I met him in here.”

I stole a glance at the older man who was speaking to a chubby brunette wearing a flowered dress.

“He met her from the classifieds,” Roy explained.

“I wasn’t looking at his lady,” I said. “I’m tripping. Your actual father?”

“Apparently so.” He went over my face, slowly, like he was searching a grid. “You didn’t know,” he said. “You didn’t know.”

“How would I know?”

“Celestial didn’t tell you. If she didn’t tell you, she didn’t tell anybody.” As he was pleased, I felt a little sting somewhere between a mosquito and a yellow jacket.

“You look like your pops,” I said, pointing with my chin.

“Big Roy is my pops. Him over there, we’re cool now, but back in the day, nigger went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Now I see him every day.” He shook his head. “I feel like it’s supposed to mean something—like in the whole scheme of things—but I don’t know what.”

I sat there silent, uncomfortable in the gray suit I would wear to the wake later in the day. I had no idea what it could mean. Fathers were complicated beings. I was seven when my father met a woman at a trade show and defected, creating a new family. My dad had pulled this sort of trick before, falling stupid in love with a stranger and threatening to set up house with her. His business—running an icehouse—required that he travel to conventions, where he got caught up in the excitement. He was a passionate man, clearly. When I was three, he fell for a woman who hailed from the world of dry ice and shipping, but she decided not to leave her husband, and he returned to Evie and me. After that, there were other zealous flirtations, but nothing stuck. He met the Ice Sculptress at an overnight trade show in Denver. After just under thirty-six hours in her marvelous company, he came home, packed up all his shit and was gone for good. For whatever it’s worth, they have a son and a daughter together and he hung tight and watched them grow up.

I spread my hands. “The Lord works in mysterious ways?”

“Something like that,” he said. “My mama is gone.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head, and contemplated his palms. “I appreciate you,” he said. “Carrying her for me.”

“You know I got you,” I said.

“Tell Celestial I miss her. Tell her I said thank you for singing.”

“No problem,” I said again, pushing up from my chair.

“Dre,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But she’s my wife. Remember that.” Then he smiled, big and broad, revealing a dark gap. “I’m just kidding, man. Tell her I asked after her.”

CELESTIAL ISN’T THE kind of singer you would want at your wedding. While her mother is a gravity-defying soprano, she is a scotch-and-Marlboros alto. Even when she was a little girl, her voice was like the middle of the night. When she gives a song, it isn’t entertaining; rather, it sounds like she is telling secrets that are not hers to reveal.

Just as Roy asked me to be a pallbearer, he asked Celestial to offer up a hymn. She walked to the front of the congregation not looking at all like herself. With her hair ironed straight and a navy-blue dress borrowed from Gloria, she seemed humbled. Not brought low, but there was respect in her decision not to be gorgeous.

“Miss Olive loved two things.” The microphone gave her words a ghost echo. “She loved the Lord and she loved her family, especially her son. Most of you know why Roy is not here. But he’s not absent.” As Celestial stepped back a few paces, the nurse ushers communicated with hand signals, ready to swoop in, in case she was about to break down, but she was stepping back only because her voice was too big for her to stand so close to the sound system.

She sang “Jesus Promised Me a Home” without the benefit of a piano accompaniment, looking past the casket of dark wood. Staring right at Roy Senior, she gave it all she had until women stood up and raised their fans, and a gentleman in the front room repeated, “Thank you, Jesus.” Singing, she wounded and healed both. “If He said it, I know it’s true.” She wasn’t grandstanding or trying to break him down, but she hollered out that melody, delivering both the Holy Spirit and earthly emotion until Big Roy’s shoulders bucked and the cooling waters came down. I’m no theologian, but there was Love in that room. She said that Roy was not absent, and when she finished, not one soul doubted this.

Celestial returned to the pew beside me, exhausted, and I took her hand. With her head on my shoulder she said, “I want to go home.”

After the eulogy, which was standard fare about wives and mothers, with talk of the book of Ruth, it was time for the pallbearers to take our places. Roy Senior insisted that we bear her weight in the formal way, balanced on our shoulders without the benefit of hands. The mortician directed us like he was conducting an orchestra, and at his command the six of us settled Miss Olive upon our shoulders and inched our way out of the sanctuary. There is no weight like the burden of a body. The load was shared by six, but I felt alone in my labors. With every step, the casket bumped my ear, and for a superstitious second, I thought I was maybe receiving a dispatch from the other side.

The three of us—Roy Senior, Celestial, and me—rode in a limousine driven by the undertaker’s son, who asked if we wanted air-conditioning. “No, Reggie,” Roy Senior said. “I prefer fresh air.” And he lowered the window, letting in a humid breeze, as thick as blood. I sat still, concentrating on breathing. Celestial was wearing a perfume that smelled like romance. Roy Senior sucked on peppermint, strong and sweet. On my left side, Celestial took my hand, and I enjoyed the cool feel of it.

“I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t do that,” Roy Senior said. She pulled her fingers away, leaving me with a vacant palm.

After a few miles, the hearse led the small processional down a bumpy, unpaved road. The jostling unlocked something in Roy Senior, who said, “I love Olive in ways you young people can’t even picture. I was the best husband I knew how to be and the best father I could manage. She showed me how to join with a woman. She taught me to take care of a little boy.”

I flexed my hand. “Yes, sir,” I said, and Celestial hummed a tune I recognized but didn’t know the title of. She was like a different person, deeper and broader, like she perceived something about life and death and love that I had the luxury of not knowing yet.

At the cemetery, we hefted the coffin again. As we made our way to the grave, I marveled at how a town so small had accumulated so many dead. Near the front were the modern headstones, polished granite, but in the distance stood timeworn markers, limestone probably. For this leg of Olive’s journey, we were allowed to use our hands to steady her, and then we set her down on the straps stretched across the gaping hole in the earth.

The minister was behind us, chanting as he took his place. He spoke about the corruptible body that worms would destroy and the immaculate, untouchable spirit. We all said dust to dust. The small crowd of mourners pulled apart the floral arrangements, tossing the bright flowers into the hole as workers loosened the straps and lowered Olive into the ground.

Under the green tent, Celestial sat next to Roy Senior, soothing him as the top of the cement vault was thumped into place. She dabbed at her eyes with wadded tissue while the workers unrolled the AstroTurf from the pile. They hung back, not wanting to start up the earth-mover tractor while the family was still there. It troubled me a little to think that Celestial, Roy Senior, and I constituted “the family,” but there we were.

I stood up. “I think it’s time for us to go, sir. People will be waiting for us at the church.”

Celestial stood, too. “Everyone will be there.”

“Who is everybody? Ain’t no everybody without my wife.”

Behind us, the grave diggers were antsy and ready to do what they had been hired to do. I could smell the grave, fertile and musty, like fishing bait. Finally Roy Senior stood and went over like he was going to grab a handful of soil and toss it over the coffin, already settled six feet down. Celestial and I walked close behind and were surprised when he sat down on the mound in a deliberate way, almost like a protest.

Celestial said, “Sir?”

And Roy Senior didn’t say anything. Celestial followed him and sat, too. I swiveled my head looking for someone to help us out here, but the few mourners had gone, likely heading back for the repast supper. Taking her lead, I joined them. The dirt was wet and the moisture seeped in through the seat of my trousers as the grave diggers spoke to each other in hushed Spanish.

Although I was close on his right flank, Roy Senior spoke only to Celestial, explaining to her that she was the one responsible now. “Olive went to see Little Roy every week right up until she was too sick to make the journey. She stays on top of Mr. Banks. She calls him every Wednesday around lunchtime. I can’t say what he has done so far, but she kept on him. She’s gone now, so it’s up to you, Celestial. I’ll do what I can,” he explained, “but a man needs a woman to care after him.”

Celestial nodded with wet eyes. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I understand.”

“Do you?” he said, regarding her with wary eyes. “You think you know everything, but you’re too young, girl.”

I stood up and brushed the back of my clothes. I held out a hand to Celestial and she pulled herself up. Then I extended my hand to Big Roy. “Sir, let’s go and let these men do their work.”

Roy Senior got up, but he didn’t use my arm for support. He is a big man, and beside him I felt narrow as a switch.

“It ain’t their work,” he said. “It’s mine.” Then he strode over to a tree and picked up the shovel resting against the bark. Though not a young man, Roy Senior moved the earth in heaping shovelfuls and heaved it onto Olive’s vault. I’ll never forget the sound of the landing dirt.

I picked up the other shovel, thinking of Roy and that I should be his understudy here. Roy Senior barked that I should put the shovel down, but then, kinder, he said, “This isn’t your job. I know you call yourself stepping in for Little Roy, but even if he was here, this wouldn’t be none of his work either. This is personal. Just me and my wife. I need to cover her with my own hands. You and Celestial take the Cadillac; I’ll meet you when I’m done with what I need to do.”

We obeyed him like he was our own father. We walked away, weaving through the headstones until we reached the sedan idling on the path. When we opened the door, we surprised the driver, who hastily shut off the dance music bumping through the speakers. As we pulled away, like children, we twisted to look through the back windshield, watching Roy Senior John Henry his wife’s grave.

Celestial sighed. “You’ll never see anything like that again, no matter how long you live.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Roy has been away so long,” she whispered. “I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. I haven’t thought about any other man, let alone touched one. But when I look at Mr. Roy out there, at his wife’s grave, I feel like I’ve been playing at marriage. That I don’t know what it is to be committed.” And then she sobbed a wet spot onto my dirty white shirt. “I don’t want to go to the church. I just want to go home.”

I shushed her and tilted my head in the direction of the driver and made my voice low. “This is a small town. No need broadcasting anything that could get misinterpreted.”

A quarter of an hour later, we walked into Christ the King Baptist Church, as filthy as coal miners, and ate a meal fit for royalty. People talked about us; I know they did, but to our faces they were polite and kept pouring more fruit punch. I looked Celestial in the eye and knew that, like me, what she wanted was a vodka martini, extra dry, but we made our way through the soul-food dinner, and we didn’t leave until it was clear that Roy Senior wasn’t going to show.

IT TOOK US a while, but we found a bar where we could crash. It would have been quicker to drive thirty miles up the road to the casino, where the drinks were cheap and the bartenders heavy-handed. When I steered the car in that direction, Celestial stopped me. “Don’t go that way,” she said. “I don’t want to pass the prison.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“Is it?” Celestial said. “It’s shameful that I can’t even look at the barbed-wire fence while he has to live behind it. Do I love him, Dre?”

I couldn’t answer her. “You married him.”

She turned toward the window, tapping her forehead against the glass. I reached in my jacket pocket and gave her my handkerchief, driving one-handed, on the lookout for a bar we could belly up to.

It’s not like there was any shortage of booze in Eloe. There were package stores and churches every hundred feet. Men stood on corners, tipping brown bags. If I didn’t find something soon, we would buy a bottle and pass it back and forth like winos.

Finally we ended up at Earl Picard’s Saturday Nighter, a joint that looked like it had been a 7-Eleven in its last incarnation. We chose two wobbly barstools and watched hot dogs ride around a red lightbulb. The windows were painted over, so although it was only two o’clock in the afternoon on the streets, it was perpetually 2 a.m. inside. Hardly anyone was there, but I guess that people with jobs were at work, and the unemployed weren’t wasting their money on liquor by the glass. When we sat down, the bartender looked up from the book she was reading with the help of a pocket flashlight.

“What can I get you?” she asked, setting down the flashlight and sending a circle of light to the ceiling.

This was not exactly a martini sort of establishment, so Celestial asked for a screwdriver and the bartender poured a good four fingers of Smirnoff into a flimsy cup before opening a can of juice. She rummaged under the counter and produced a jar of cherries, spearing them with a plastic sword.

We drank without tapping our cups together; we were so dirty that I tasted grit in my drink. “Do you think that Roy Senior is still out there with his shovel, or do you think he let the machines take over after we left?”

“He’s out there,” Celestial said. “He’s not going to let a tractor bury her.” Shaking her drink to chill it, she asked, “What about Roy? How’s he holding up?”

“He was okay, I guess. He said to tell you that he misses you.”

“You know that I love him, right, Dre? His mother never believed me.”

“Well, she didn’t know you, did she? Maybe she didn’t think anybody was good enough for her son. You know how black mamas are.”

“I want another round,” she said, and the bartender mixed more vodka and orange juice. I rooted in my pocket, fishing out some quarters. “Slow your roll, cowboy,” I told her. “Go put something on the jukebox.”

She took the money and walked to the back, unsteady, like she was walking on someone else’s legs. Her hair responded to the humidity, losing that funeral lankness and drawing up around her ears. The men sitting at the other end of the bar noticed her figure as she bent at the waist to peer into the jukebox.

“That’s your wife?” the bartender asked me, with what might have been a flirtatious flicker in her eye.

“No,” I said. “We’re old friends. We drove up from Atlanta for a funeral.”

“Oh,” she said. “Olive Hamilton?”

I nodded.

“So sad. Is she the daughter-in-law?”

I had a feeling she already knew. That little glint wasn’t anything more than small-town nosiness.

As Celestial made her way back to me, the bartender retreated like she was embarrassed. Suddenly Prince sang out of the jukebox, “I wanna be your lover.” I said to her, “Remember in the eighth grade? When we thought Prince was saying ‘I want to be the only one you cook for’?”

Celestial said, “I never thought that.”

“You knew what ‘come’ was? In the eighth grade?”

“I guess I knew it was something.”

We didn’t talk for a while. She pounded cheap vodka and I switched to beer and then to Sprite.

“She hit me,” Celestial said, rattling the ice in her cup. “Roy’s mother. When I stayed away too long. Next time she saw me, she slapped the tar out of me. We were having dinner at the casino and she waited until Gloria got up to go to the bathroom and she reached over and pow.” Celestial clapped her hands. “Right across my face. Tears came to my eyes and she said, ‘Listen here, little girl, if I don’t get to cry, nobody cries. I have suffered more just this morning than you have in your whole life.’ ”

“What?” I said, touching her cheek. “What the hell was that all about?”

“It was about everything. Olive slapped all the tears right out of me.” Then she covered my hand on her cheek with her own. “All through the services, except when I was singing, my face was on fire. Right here.” She rubbed my hand over the soft place. Then she turned her head and kissed my palm.

“Celestial,” I said. “You are so drunk, baby girl.”

“I’m not,” she said, reaching again for my hand. “Well, I am. But I’m still me.”

“Stop it.” I pulled my hand back. “People in here have figured out who we are.” I gave her a stern look with my head cocked to the side.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Small town.”

I nodded as her face fell a little. “Microscopic.”

Now the Isley Brothers were on the jukebox. There was something about those vintage, slow jams. Those old cats sang about a kind of devotion long since out of style. “I always liked this song,” I told her.

“You know why?” Celestial said. “It’s because this is the music we were conceived to. It speaks to you on a primal level.”

“I prefer not to imagine my conception.”

She was a little mopey now as she twirled the ice cube with her fingernail that was chewed down to the meat. “Dre, I’m so tired of this. Of all of this. This dirty little town. I’m tired of having in-laws. And prison. Prison isn’t supposed to be part of my life. I was married a year and half—that’s it. Roy got snatched up and my daddy was still writing checks to pay for my wedding.”

“I never got used to you as a Mrs. Hamilton.” I signaled for the check and asked for two glasses of ice water.

She rolled her eyes. “When you went to see him, did he seem mad at me? When I went last, he said he didn’t like my vibe, that I was coming out of obligation.” She set her glass down. “He wasn’t wrong, but what was I supposed to do? I work crazy hours at the shop, then I drive for hours to get to Louisiana and spend the night with his parents, who don’t really even like me. Then I go through . . .” She fluttered her fingers. “Go through everything, and he doesn’t think my smile is cheery enough? This isn’t what I signed up for.”

She was serious, but I laughed anyway. “I didn’t know there was a sign-up sheet. That’s not how it works.”

“You can laugh,” she said with angry eyes. “You know how I feel when I’m here? Black and desperate. You don’t know what it’s like to be standing in the line to get in to see him.”

“I do,” I said. “I was there yesterday.”

“It’s different for women. They treat you like you’re coming to visit your pimp. Every single one of them smiles with a little smirk like you should know better. Like you’re a delusional victim. If you try to fix yourself up and look respectable, it’s worse in way. They treat you like you’re an idiot because its clear you could do better if you weren’t such a fucking fool.” She popped her fingers to the music like she was trying to snap herself out of the spell of feelings coming over her, but she was buzzed enough that her emotions weren’t hers to control.

Had we been alone, I would have touched her, but under the eyes of the bartender and the three other men present, I didn’t lift my hands. I just said, “Let’s go.”

WHEN WE GOT back to the hotel, it was light out, but the casino parking lot was full. Apparently a ten-car giveaway was scheduled for this evening. When we were safe behind the doors of the elevator, I faced her. She fastened her arms around my torso, reminding me of our childhood when she used to hug the breath out of me. She smelled like vodka but also like lavender and pine trees. I held her until we reached the fifth floor, even as the doors opened revealing a family patiently waiting to get on board.

“Newlyweds,” the mother explained.

We stepped out of the elevator and stood facing the hall leading to our rooms.

“Everyone thought we would get married one day,” she said.

“You’re drunk,” I said. “Way drunk.”

“I disagree.” She made her way to her room and slid the key into the door. Tiny green lights twinkled. “I’m something, but I’m not drunk. Come in? Do you want to?”

“Celestial,” I said, though I felt myself leaning in her direction like someone tipped the world. “It’s me, Dre.” She laughed and it sounded playful like we hadn’t watched Roy’s daddy bury his wife with an old-fashioned spade. She laughed like this was a time before anything bad had ever happened.

“It’s me, too,” she said with a grin. “Celestial.”

I tried to laugh back, but no sound came. Besides, any laugh would be fake, and I never faked anything when it came to her.

It was all over when I stepped over the threshold and heard the door click shut behind me. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms like in a movie, with furious deep kissing and groping. For the first slow moments, we just looked at each other, like what we had chosen was a package that we couldn’t quite figure how to open. She sat on the bed and I did, too, and it reminded me of the other time when we crossed the line, in high school. Then, like now, we were dressed up and frazzled. Back then we had been in the dark basement, yet I could make out the outlines of the ruffles of her party dress. But now we were in the full light. Her hair swelled around her head in a dark halo; both our mouths were hot with alcohol and our clothes stained with graveyard soil.

I moved closer to her and wound my fingers in her thick hair. “We’ve always been together,” she told me. “Not like this. But always.”

I nodded. “I want to be the only one you cook for.”

We laughed, a real laugh, a shared laugh. This is when our life changed. We came to each other with joy on our lips. What came next may not have been legally binding; there was no clergyman or witness. But it was ours.

ROY

In Eloe, if you want to know who you’re supposed to be, you don’t have to go further than the family Bible. Right there, on a blank page, before “In the beginning . . .” is all you need to know. There were other truths in the world, but they weren’t often written down. These unofficial records of kin were passed from lips to ear. Much was made of white relatives, whispered about sometimes in shame, sometimes in satisfaction, depending on the details. Then there was other family on the right side of the color line, but the wrong side of the property line. I was the rare soul in Eloe with no family ties outside of my parents. Olive was born in Oklahoma City and there was family there, but I never met them. Big Roy was from Howland, Texas, and wandered to Eloe on his way to Jackson. Our family Bible they received as a wedding gift from Big Roy’s landlady. When you lift the leather cover, there are only our three names spelled out in Olive’s careful cursive.

Roy McHenry Hamilton + Olive Ann Ingelman

Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.

Olive never wrote Celestial’s name beside mine, but there was a lot of room on the page, space to list all the Hamiltons of the future, connected with diagonal lines and dashes.

Davina Hardrick was different. At least a dozen black Hardricks lived in town, even a few Hardriks, without the c, who changed their names when the family split like a feuding congregation. I envied her these robust roots, thick enough to buckle the sidewalk. She said she was living in Miss Annie Mae’s house, and I tried to remember who Miss Annie Mae was to her, what Bible lines connected them. I remembered Davina’s grandfather, Mr. Picard, or maybe he was her uncle? There had been something extended about her family, that much I did remember. Once I had known who all was kin to anybody else.

I had run into Davina at Walmart when I had gone to buy flowers for Olive. Davina, dressed in a blue uniform, unlocked the floral refrigerator and helped me select a bouquet that I couldn’t bring myself to deliver. Wrapping my purchase in clean white paper, she asked me if I remembered her from high school, even though she was a couple of years ahead of me. I told her that I did. She asked me if I would like to have a home-cooked meal. I told her I would. A few hours later I stood in front of the clapboard house outfitted for Christmas with multicolored lights and metallic ribbon.

I climbed up the three concrete steps and stood on the sloping porch. The little house must have been seventy, maybe eighty years old, built probably by Miss Annie Mae’s husband. This neighborhood was known as the Hardwood, where the colored mill workers lived, back when there was a mill, back when colored was a word of respect. I rapped on the silver-wreathed door, almost wishing I wore a hat so I could take it off and hold it in my hands.

“Hey,” she said through the screen door, looking inviting in a holiday apron that set off her skin tone, a lush brown with red underneath like a nice pair of loafers. She tilted her head to the side. “You look nice.”

“You, too.” Kitchen aromas spiced the air all the way out here, and I wanted more than anything in this world to cross her threshold.

“You’re early,” she said with a little smile, not like she was annoyed, but letting me know. “Give me a minute to fix my hair.” Then she shut the door. I sat down on the front stairs and waited. Five years away and you get good at that sort of thing. I sat there, but I didn’t turn my face on the diagonal to the orange-brick funeral home where they had taken care of my mother. Instead, I sat with my eyes on my own fingers, so much like Walter’s, knotty with yellowish calluses. I went in with bankers’ hands and came out looking like a mill worker. But at least I was out. Something you learn in there: keep your mind on what’s important.

Edwards Street was mostly quiet. A cluster of little boys used bacon and string to catch crawfish in the ditch that ran along the sides of the road. In the distance, I could see the reflection of the neon lights in the liquor store window and feel the faint vibration of the subwoofers that shook the air. This was my hometown. I skinned my knees on these streets; I learned to be a man on these same corners, but I didn’t feel like I was home.

WHEN DAVINA CAME to the door the second time, she wasn’t wearing the apron, and I missed it, though the burgundy dress she changed into highlighted everything captivating about a woman’s body. In high school, she had a perfect figure—small and thick at the same time, what we used to call a “brick house.” Big Roy warned me those girls that are fine at fifteen get fat by thirty, so you shouldn’t marry them. Thinking of Davina, that advice seemed childish and cruel. Yes, she had a lot going on in the bust and the hip, but she looked delicious.

“You still married?” she asked through the screen door.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She smiled, cocking her head, showing a tuft of tinsel tucked behind her ear like a gardenia. “Come on in,” she said. “Dinner will be ready in a minute. You want something to drink?”

“What you think?” I watched her splendid curves as she walked the few steps to the kitchen.

The old me, and I don’t mean the me before I went to prison, I mean the old me from way before I starting going out with Celestial, the me I was in my early twenties and running through women like water—that me would have known what to say. Back then, I knew how to focus. Keep my mind on my money and my money on my mind. I used to say that to myself under my breath, no matter what it was that I was zooming in on. One thing at a time. That’s how you win. But here I was, in front of one woman, one fine woman, and I was sitting here thinking about a wife I hadn’t talked to in two years.

I’m not saying that I was anybody’s angel during my marriage. As they say, mistakes were made and feelings were bruised, like that one time when Celestial happened upon a receipt for two pieces of lingerie, not just for the one I gave her for her birthday. She wasn’t livid, but it was going that way. I said to her, “Celestial, I don’t love anybody but you.” It didn’t necessarily explain the little piece of paper in her hand, but it was God’s truth, and I suspect that she understood that.

Sitting in Davina’s living room drinking up her liquor, I held Celestial’s face in my mind, her scent in my nose, her song in my ear. Even still, I looked at Davina and my mouth went wet. “When did Miss Annie Mae pass?” I asked her. “She was a nice lady. I remember when she sold sour pickles for a dime. When we were little. You remember that?”

“She’s been gone four years now. I was surprised that she left everything to me, but we were always close, and her son lives in Houston now. His name was Wofford. Remember him?”

I did remember him as the local boy made good who came to speak to us when we were in high school, telling us to not to drop out, get anybody pregnant, or smoke crack. “Yeah, I recall.”

Davina smirked. “With Miss Annie Mae gone, I don’t expect we will ever see him again in this town.” She shook her head. “My daddy was the same way. Halfway to Dallas before I even turned five years old.”

I said, “You don’t know for sure why he went.”

She smiled again, a real smile like she appreciated me trying to look on the bright side. “All I know is that he’s gone. Same trifling story everybody tells.”

“Don’t call him trifling,” I said. “Men have reasons.”

She shushed me. “You didn’t come here to talk about my daddy, did you?” And there was a question in her question. Women have that way of asking you more than what they want to know.

“Food smells good,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Louisiana women. I swear y’all come out of the womb gripping a skillet.”

I hoped that I would get to the table and see a bowl of crowder peas, pulled from the vines that grew along the fence that separated Davina’s property from the neighbors’. When I was coming up, Mr. Fontenot, the language teacher, had lived there. I ended up enrolled in French class by accident, the only black kid in the room. Me and Mr. Fontenot were close, both being onlies.

He told me about the French Club, how they met after school and practiced the language in preparation for a ten-day trip to Paris. I asked Mr. Fontenot if there were black people in Paris, and he said, “Both local and imported.” He gave me a novel by James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, that had nothing to do with France, but he assured me that the author was there as we spoke. I turned the book over and studied the sad but intelligent face. James Baldwin was plenty black. “Learn the language,” Mr. Fontenot said, “and I will help sponsor your journey.” But three things happened: I would have been the only black kid going on the trip and nobody thought much of that idea. “Something goes wrong over there and it will be your word against theirs,” Big Roy said. Another thing was the money. Seven hundred fifty dollars would have been my share even with Mr. Fontenot sponsoring me. That’s why no black kids were going. And the last thing was Mr. Fontenot himself.

When he hipped me to Go Tell It on the Mountain, he didn’t say one word about Jimmy being a homosexual. “Jimmy” is how Mr. Fontenot always talked about him, like they went way back. According to Mr. Fontenot, Jimmy started saving his papers for posterity when he was only eleven years old because he knew he was going to be important and that he was going to need “documentation of his trajectory.” He had then given me a little black notebook. “You should keep a journal for future generations,” he said. “When you get out of this town, people are going to want to know how you did it.” It was this journal that ended all my plans, more than the money. Big Roy didn’t like the look of the little book and neither did my mother. Eloe is a small town, claustrophobic and mean sometimes. Didn’t take more than a couple of phone calls for my parents to find out that Mr. Fontenot was “funny like that,” and there was no way they were sending me to Paris under his sponsorship.

“What happened to Mr. Fontenot?”

“He passed away in the early nineties,” Davina said.

“From what?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” she said. “Come on, you need to eat.”

I got up and headed to the oval-shaped table, like the one I grew up eating on. Six people could fit easy. I pulled back the chair and was about to sit down when she asked me if I would like to wash my hands. Shamefaced, I asked her where the bathroom was. Lathering up with soap that smelled like girls, I felt a little prickle of anger along the underside of my jaw, but I splashed water on my chin until it settled. Tilting my head under the faucet, I filled my mouth with the soft water and swallowed it down. It had been a long time since I could look into a real glass mirror, but what I saw I could have done without. My forehead was creased like the fan Olive kept in her purse. But at least I was clean; I was shaved. As soon as I got my money right, I would see a dentist and get fitted for a new bridge. Using a fluffy brown towel dangling from a hook, I dried my face and returned to the table, which Davina piled with a righteous feast.

It was like something out of the Bible. Pork chops swimming in gravy, macaroni and cheese—brown on the top and shiny with butter. Mashed potatoes heaped in a striped blue bowl and next to that a stack of the white rolls Olive used to make. When you tugged them, they came apart in buttery sections. There, snug in a shiny silver bowl, were a few of the crowder peas I had been craving.

“You want to say the blessing?” she said, reaching out for my hand.

I closed my eyes and bowed my head, but I didn’t get past “Dear Lord” when my throat started twitching. It took me two breaths to give up on talking. I clamped my eyes shut and swallowed hard against whatever it was that was trying to rise up and get out of me.

“Dear Lord,” Davina picked up. “Thank you for this food that will nourish our bodies. We thank you for this fellowship. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, Amen.” She squeezed my hand at the Amen, like the period at the end of the sentence, but I kept squeezing, even when she tried to pull away. I managed to say, “Bless the hands that prepared it,” before I let her go.

AS DAVINA SPOONED mounds of everything onto my plate, I imagined myself—a man just out of the joint, about to do some serious damage to some pork chops. I felt a little bit like a punch line, more self-conscious than I had ever been in corporate America, right here in my own hometown. Davina set the food down in front of me, and at the last moment I remembered my manners and didn’t touch my fork until she picked up hers.

“Bon appétit,” she said with a little smile.

I said it back and remembered Celestial, who said just that before she ate anything, even her morning cereal.

I was working my way through a second helping of food and a third round of sweet lemonade when Davina said in a tone that was too breezy for a question she asked twice already, “You still married?”

I slowly finished chewing, swallowed, and washed it all down with lemonade. “How you want me to answer that? This is what I got: I was married when I went in, and she didn’t divorce me.”

“You don’t have to talk in circles like a lawyer.” She seemed hurt, like I came here and ate her dinner under false pretenses.

I took a breath and gave her as much truth as I had on me. “I haven’t seen her in two years. Not since my mama passed.”

“You talk to her on the phone?”

“Not lately,” I said. “What about you? You with somebody?”

She looked around the room. “You see anybody up in here?”

We let the subject drop, like we were both satisfied that we had done our due diligence.

AFTER WE ATE, I jumped up to help clear the table. I scraped the plates and stacked them in the sink. Davina gave a little smile, like the way you might smile at a baby that tried to do something grown, like play the piano. “Don’t worry about the kitchen. You’re company.”

I swear to God, I didn’t come over here just to have sex with Davina. I swear to God that it wasn’t what I came over here planning for. Did I come here hoping for it? I can’t lie and say I wasn’t starving for a woman, like Walter warned me not to be. But I was also starving in general. I was starving for my mama’s cooking, been starving for it since the day I left for college. Davina Hardrick had invited me to dinner. If all we had done was eat, I would have left with more than I arrived with.

“You want coffee?” she asked me.

I shook my head no.

“Another drink?”

“Yeah,” I said, and she poured me another one, paler this time.

“Don’t want you to get a DUI,” she said, and I was disappointed that she was already thinking about sending me home.

“Can I ask you something,” she said. “About when you were gone?”

“You know I didn’t do it.”

“I know,” she said. “Nobody around here thought you did it. It was just the wrong race and the wrong time. Police are shady as hell. That’s why everybody is locked up.”

As a salute, I tipped my drink and finished in one hot gulp. I held out my glass to Davina.

“One question.” As she fell serious, I braced myself for another question about Celestial.

“Yes?”

“When you were gone, did you know someone named Antoine Guillory? Full name Antoine Fredrick Guillory?”

“Why,” I said. “That’s your man?”

She shook her head. “My son.”

“No,” I said, with condolence in my voice. If he was her son, he couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen at the most. “I never met him.”

“They call him Hopper? Or Grasshopper?”

The nickname I did know. Hopper wasn’t the youngest person there but still too young for adult prison, too frail and too pretty. I remembered his rouged lips and hair flattened with homemade lye.

“I don’t know him,” I said again.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “No Hopper.” I held my glass out to her again. “Please, ma’am?”

She shook her head. “I’m cutting you off. It’s for your own good.”

“Girl, I ain’t worried about no DUI. I walked over here. This town ain’t no bigger than a minute.”

“Roy,” she said. “A lot of things have changed. You’re not trying to be walking around at night. I don’t know what’s worse, police or everyday people. Hopper got caught up on a weapons charge. He was only trying to protect himself. Sixteen years old and they charged him as an adult.”

“Trust me. I am not afraid. You know where I been the last five years?” I said, this time with a laugh that scraped my throat. “You think I’m scared of some country motherfucker jumping out from behind the bushes talking about boogety-boogety?”

“If it’s a country motherfucker with a gun, yes.” Then she slapped my arm and gave me a real smile, one with dimples. “Boogety-boogety. You so crazy. I’ll get you one more. But I won’t make it strong.”

“Fix yourself another one, too. I can’t stand drinking by myself.”

She came back with the drinks poured into two little glasses like the ones my mama used for orange juice. “Ran out of ice,” she said. I held my glass up and we toasted without saying what to and then threw it back like a shot. It felt good, reminded me of my first job; at the company holiday party, the white folks poured top-shelf liquor and we sucked it down like water, like there was no end to money.

Davina got up and switched on some music, Frankie Beverly talking about “happy feelings.” She popped her fingers a couple of times as she made her way back. This time she folded herself back onto the cushion like she was showing off all her hinges. “Hey,” she said with a little play at the edge of her words.

I can’t say whiskey made her beautiful. Davina wasn’t a PYT any more than I was a young executive. But I used to be, and she used to be; something of it was left in us both, I think. Davina was everything I ever missed, transformed into warm brown flesh.

“You okay?”

I shook my head no because that was all I could do.

“What’s the matter?”

I shook my head again.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You just got home. It’s always tiring when you get back.” She said it like I had been released from the army or the hospital.

In a motion like a librarian, Davina touched her hand to her lips, and I leaned in behind it. Celestial—I couldn’t help thinking of her—isn’t a small woman; she is big-boned and stacked, but not soft like Davina, who felt like the robes at a four-star hotel. I tried holding myself back because I didn’t want to reach for her like a caveman, and I can say that every moment I spent fully clothed was a miracle. I kissed her deep when I let myself go, driving my tongue in her mouth, finding the spicy flavor of whiskey and liking it. She let her fingers roam around my body, as dainty as a firefly but with healing in her hands like a storefront preacher. She worked her way under my shirt and the feel of her very cool palms on my hot back was electric.

In the bedroom, we didn’t undress each other. We took off our clothes in our own separate patches of darkness. Davina hung her dress in the closet with a tinkle of hangers, and then she slid herself in bed beside me, smelling of whiskey but also like cocoa butter. She turned on her side and let her hair tumble into my face. I pulled back from its plastic texture because I didn’t want to touch anything that wasn’t real. I yearned to rub against something breathing. I craved something alive. She raised her thigh up to rest on my hip. “You okay?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” I said. “You?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’m sorry about your son.”

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

For normal people, talking about the lost would put out the fire, but for me it was like kerosene, gasoline, and a blast of pure oxygen. I kissed her again, shifting to position myself over her. Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to fuck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to fuck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to fuck her like a human being?

I wouldn’t call myself scared, but I hovered there, supporting my weight on my forearms, honestly unsure as to what to do next. I wanted to please her—not make her holler my name or anything ignorant like that. I wanted to make a good impression. She said she didn’t believe that I raped that woman in the Piney Woods Inn, but isn’t there always a little seed? The second side that every story is supposed to have?

“Baby,” Davina said, reaching up and crossing her arms over my back, pressing us together. Relying on muscle memory, I used my knee to spread her legs, but she escaped me, lying on her side, facing me. She pushed my chest with her index finger and I lay on my back. “Not yet,” she said, using the flat of her hand to nudge me down when I tried to sit up and reach for her.

Davina took care of me. That’s the only way that I can tell it. Two days after I got out of prison, she laid me out on her bed and took care of me. With hand and mouth, she touched my entire body, leaving no small parcel of skin unloved. She moved over, and under, and maybe even through me. Whichever part of me she wasn’t loving was on fire, hoping it would catch her attention next. You don’t know what you need until somebody gives it to you exactly the way you need it gave.

When she was twined around me in such a way that her foot was near my face, I dipped my head to kiss the arch. How someone that grew up here in Eloe could have such baby feet, I didn’t know. Celestial had smooth feet, too. The thought of my wife stirred something in me and I sprang up, like I was waking up from a nightmare. Davina paused, and whatever light was in the room reflected from her eyes. “You all right?”

“Naw,” I said.

“Come here,” she said, lying on her back and holding out her arms. Then she called me “baby” in the way that some women do, making it their own one-word language, meaning whatever she needed it to mean. This time it was an invitation. It was as though she said “please.” She wrapped her legs around my waist and I held on to her because my life depended on it. “Baby,” she said again.

“You got a rubber?”

“I think so,” she said. “In the medicine cabinet.”

“In the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Do I have to?”

Davina was quiet in the dark. I rose up on my elbows and tried to see her, but the moonlight didn’t fall on her face. “You want me to, I’ll get up and get it,” I promised, but I was kissing her again, biting softly on her sweet bottom lip. “Do we need it?” I was begging her, whether she knew it or not. I ached to do this, touch another person, no plastic in between. It was like it felt to touch her real hair, growing crinkly at the base of her scalp. It was the difference between talking on the phone and speaking breath to breath. “Please,” I heard myself say. “I’ll pull out. I promise. Please.” We were still touching. She hadn’t shoved me off of her or even drawn her knees together. “Baby,” I said, and it was me speaking the secret language this time.

“It’s okay,” she said at last. “It’s okay, baby. I’m safe.”

CELESTIAL

Gloria taught me to pray when I was three years old. She knelt beside me, showed me how to press my palms together under my chin like a cherub. Church was her thing, not my father’s. There is a certain type of Christian woman who can’t resist a godless man, keeping his soul safe on her knees. Sometimes I wish I were like her, born to save a man; then I could follow my mother’s bread crumb trail.

“Now I lay me down to sleep.” Gloria almost sang the words, and I repeated, a little baby echo, eyes screwed tight. Before “Amen,” I opened my eyes and asked her to explain “I pray the Lord my soul to take.” She said that it was up to God to see if you got to wake up the next morning, to decide if you’re afforded another day. If you died in the night, you asked to go with Him back up to heaven. Or at least this is how I took it. Stricken, I lay in my canopy bed, afraid to even blink my eyes for fear of falling into an eternal sleep.

Every night, she put me to bed this way, the two of us chanting. As she knelt beside me, I prayed the way she expected, but when Gloria had gone, I recanted, negotiating to keep my soul for myself.

Somewhere it is written that your sins fall on your parents, mostly on your mother, until you’re twelve years old. After that, your trespasses are on your own scorecard. Once I had a choice in the matter, I seldom accompanied my mother to services, preferring the easy company of my father. But always, I say my prayers.

When I lived alone, I spoke the prayers aloud, but now that Andre shares my bedroom, I move my lips around the words, but I don’t give them air. I pray for Roy. I ask for his safety. I ask for his forgiveness, although in the clean light of morning, I know I have done nothing wrong. I also pray for Andre, and I ask him to forgive me for asking for forgiveness. I pray for my father, and I pray that I’ll figure out how to be his daughter again.

My mother taught me that we have no secrets from God. He knows our feelings because He made them. When you confess your sins, He will bless you for your courage. He will bless you for your humility. He blesses you when you’re on your knees.

God must know that in the bottom of my jewelry case, snapped into a felt box, is Roy’s missing tooth. A root woman would know what to do with it; even I, not talented in the unseen, can feel its blazing comet energy in the palm of my hand. But I have no way to harness this power or command it to my will.

ROY

I spent about thirty-six hours straight with Davina Hardrick in what used to be Miss Annie Mae’s house. Life is full of wonders. Who would have predicted that a girl I knew only a little bit in high school would capture me so completely that I hardly remembered my way home? The only reason I left her bed at all was that she put me out so she could go to work. Between her good cooking and her good loving, I could have stayed there forever. When I finally showed up in the rumpled clothes I had been wearing (or not wearing) for the last day and a half, Big Roy was waiting on the front porch. The two Huey Newton chairs stood unoccupied while he sat on the concrete floor with his legs hanging over the side, his feet planted in the flower beds. His left hand was curled around my mama’s yellow coffee cup and the other was gripping a honey bun he ate straight from the wrapper. “You alive?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, bounding up the stairs. “Alive and well.”

Big Roy pulled his eyebrows up a couple of inches. “What’s her name?”

“I am sworn to secrecy to protect the innocent.”

“Long as she’s not married. I would hate to see you go through all you been through just to get shot by some hard-leg over a woman.”

“You’re right. My story is tragic enough as it is.”

“More coffee is on the stove,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the front door.

I fixed myself a cup, then returned to the porch and sat down next to my father. I looked up and down the road thinking about myself, a habit I picked up when I was gone. You sit there thinking about where you want to be, who you want to be with. What you wish you could eat. I used to sit there for as long as twenty minutes or so thinking about Kalamata olives and what I would eat them on. Now I was thinking about Davina and wondering if I could go back over there tonight.

Was I cheating on Celestial, or was I cheating on my memories of her? I suppose a man in my position should receive some sort of special consideration. I won’t say that Davina Hardrick saved my life with her plush thighs and her “baby” language, but she salvaged my something, if not my life, maybe my spirit.

Big Roy spoke over the rim of the yellow coffee cup. “You need to learn how to use the telephone, son. You can’t just disappear. Not after everything that has happened.”

I felt my shoulders round as I tucked my head almost to my chest. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I didn’t think about it.”

“You got to remember how to consider about other people.”

“I know.” I slurped some more coffee, and he handed me the half-eaten honey bun. I tore it in two pieces and stuffed the sweet bread in my mouth. “Trying to get used to being myself.”

Big Roy said, “You need to get in touch with your wife today. Let her know.”

“Let her know what?”

“Not about whoever got you over here grinning like Jiminy Cricket. But you got to let her know you’re back home. Trust me on this, son. Whoever you been with, she may seem special right now, but she’s not your wife.”

I threw my hands up. “I know. I know.” I hadn’t had a little scrap of happiness in five entire years and he wasn’t even going to let me have an hour of basking in the sun.

“But wait until you wash up,” he said.

He was right. I needed to make some plans to get back to Atlanta, to greet Celestial skin-to-skin and ask her whether we were still married. A part of me said, if you have to ask, the answer is no. Maybe I was setting myself up. Two years of no visits is a message; why did I need to hear it from her own lips? Whatever she had to say for herself would draw blood, and it wouldn’t be a clean cut. The truth would hurt jagged, like a dog bite.

But there was still the simple and undisputed fact that she didn’t divorce me. If she didn’t get out of the marriage officially, it was only because she didn’t want to. That carried some weight in my book. Besides, even a dog bite can heal.

WHEN THE PHONE started ringing, I hadn’t gotten dressed any further than my shorts. The outdated telephone rang with a loud metallic jangle. “Tell Wickliffe I’m waiting on the porch,” Big Roy shouted from outside.

Pussyfooting to the kitchen, half-naked and barefoot, I picked up the phone and said, “He’s waiting on the porch.”

The man on the other end said, “Excuse me?”

I said, “Sorry. Hello? Hamilton residence.”

The man on the other end said, “Roy, is that you?”

“Little Roy. You want Big Roy?”

“It’s Andre. What are you doing answering the phone? I thought you weren’t getting out until Wednesday.”

The last time I saw Dre, he wore the gray suit he would wear to Olive’s wake. I could feel the crowd in the visitors’ room watching him as we talked, trying to figure out the deal with us. I knew how I looked: like everyone else in there, worn jumpsuit, black skin. Everything else about me was details. In his dress clothes, Dre didn’t look like a lawyer; he presented more like a musician who moved to Europe because “cats in the States don’t get jazz.”

I had been glad to see him. Dre was my boy. He introduced me to Celestial the first time, even though it didn’t take until much later. When we got married, he stood up with me, signed his name. Now here he was on the last Sunday Olive would be aboveground.

“Will you carry her for me?” I asked.

Dre breathed deep and nodded.

It’s painful to even recollect it, but when he agreed, I felt thankful and furious all at once. “I appreciate you,” I said.

He whisked my words away with his piano-player fingers. “I’m sorry about all of this. You know, Banks is still working. . . .”

Now it was my turn to wave him quiet. “Fuck Banks. Even if he got me out tomorrow, it would be too late. My mama is already dead.”

HEARING HIS VOICE now, I felt that same mix of shame and rage I felt when he said he would carry Olive’s casket. It made my throat itch, and I had to clear it twice before I spoke.

“What’s up, Dre? Good to hear from you.”

“Likewise, man,” he said. “But you’re early. We weren’t expecting you for a few more days.”

We, he said. We weren’t expecting you.

“Paperwork,” I said. “Bureaucracy. Someone in the Department of Corrections said it was time for me to go and so I went.”

“I hear you,” said Dre. “Does Celestial know?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“No problem,” Dre said after a beat. “I hope you don’t mind holding steady for a couple of days.”

“Y’all are driving down together?”

“Just me,” said Dre.

I hung up the phone and went back out to the porch and stood over Big Roy. From this angle, I could see the little scars on the top of his balding head. I remember my mother kissing them when he would whack his head on the light fixture that hung a little too low over the dining-room table. She was crazy about that dinky little chandelier, and my father never asked her to take it down.

“It wasn’t Wickliffe,” I said. “It was Andre.”

“What did he say that got you so shook up that you’re standing outside in your drawers?”

I looked down at my bare legs, turning ashy already. “He says he’s coming down to get me. Just him.”

“That sound right to you?”

“I don’t know what’s right.”

Big Roy said, “You better get to Atlanta and see if you have any marriage left.” He paused. “If that’s what you want.”

“Hell yeah, it’s what I want.”

“I had to ask because ten minutes ago you didn’t seem so sure.”

The phone rang again and Big Roy jutted his chin toward the house. “Answer it. It’s either going to be Wickliffe or Celestial. If it’s Wickliffe, tell him I’m calling in. If it’s Celestial, you’re on your own.”

I let it jangle until she gave up.

I RETURNED TO the kitchen dressed in the best apparel Walmart had to offer, khaki pants and a knit shirt with a collar. At least I had good shoes. In the mirror, I looked like a budget Tiger Woods, but I didn’t look like an ex-con. “I want to go home.”

Big Roy was stooped in front of the refrigerator rummaging inside. “Atlanta, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“You made up your mind quick,” he said. “Andre lit some kind of fire under you.”

“I always knew I was going to go, but I didn’t know when. Now I know that when is as soon as I can.”

“You set to drive?”

I reached in my back pocket and pulled out my wallet. After all these years in prison storage, the leather was still soft and supple. Stuck to a punch card for lattes, was my driver’s license. The photo was of the successful me; cocky and sure in my button-down shirt and burgundy tie, I grinned, showing two rows of strong square teeth. According to the state of Georgia, I was clear to drive a vehicle for another six months. The Peach State also was under the impression that I lived at 1104 Lynn Valley Road. This license was the only thing I had left from before. I held it up and let the light play off the state seal. “All set, but I don’t have a car.”

“You can take the Chrysler,” Big Roy said, opening an egg carton and finding only one lonely egg. “I need to go make groceries. Two grown men need to eat breakfast.”

“Daddy, how you going to get to work without a car?”

“Wickliffe will ride me around if I help him with gas.”

“Let me think about it.”

“I thought you said you were ready to go.”

“I said I’m thinking about it.”

“You know, sometimes you can make up with bacon what you don’t have in eggs.” Big Roy opened the fridge wider and bent himself low enough to rummage in one of the drawers. “One sorry strip of bacon. I guess you could have the egg and I could have the bacon.” He went to the cabinet and opened it, showing neat rows of tin cans. “I got it! Salmon croquettes. You eat them, right?”

I looked at Big Roy like I was meeting a stranger. His body was too large for my mother’s kitchen, but he did all right, cracking the single egg one-handed and whipping it with a dainty fork.

“What?”

“Nothing, Daddy. It’s just that the entire time I was growing up, I never knew you to touch a pot or a pan. But now you putter around the kitchen like Martha Stewart.”

“Well,” he said, with his back to me as he kept whipping that solitary egg, “losing Olive left me with two options: learn to cook or starve to death.”

“You could marry somebody else.” I hardly got the words out. “It’s legal.”

“When I want somebody else, I’ll find somebody else.” Big Roy said. “But if all I want is a meal, then I’ll cook.” He held up the can of salmon and smiled. “They don’t tell you, but a lot of foods have recipes on the back of the can to tell you how to fix it.”

I watched him for a while longer, and I wondered if this is what it meant to move on, to learn to live in a new way without someone. He was busy over the little bowl and sprinkled in some cayenne pepper. “The problem is that they don’t tell you how to season it right. It’s a smart rule of thumb to shake some pepper anytime you dealing with a can recipe.”

“Mama cooked from the top of her head,” I said.

Big Roy glugged some oil into a cast-iron skillet. “I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

When he finished cooking, he divided the food onto our plates. We each got two good-size croquettes, one-half of the bacon slice, and an orange cut into triangles.

“Bon appétit,” I said, reaching for my fork.

“O Lord,” Big Roy began, saying grace, and I set the fork down.

The food wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad.

“Tasty, right?” Big Roy said. “The can asked for bread crumbs, but I crunched up Ritz crackers instead. Gives a nutty flavor.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, eating my half slice of bacon in one bite.

I couldn’t help thinking of Olive, a virtuoso in the kitchen. On Friday nights, she baked cakes, pies, and cookies to sell on Saturday afternoon, to be served after Sunday dinners at homes all over town. Other women practiced the same hustle, but Olive had the nerve to charge two dollars above the going rate. “My desserts are worth a little extra,” she used to say.

We ate slowly, engrossed in our thoughts.

“You will need a haircut before you go,” Big Roy said.

I ran my hand over my woolly head. “Where can I get a haircut on a Monday?”

“Right here,” Big Roy said. “You know I cut hair when I was in the army. I always keep my barber papers current. Worse come to worse, you can always make money cutting heads.”

“All these years?”

“I cut your hair every Saturday night until you were ten years old.” He shook his head and bit into one of the orange slices. “Seems like fruit used to have more taste to it.”

“That’s the thing I missed most when I was in there. Fruits. I paid six dollars one time for a pear.” As soon as I said it, I gave a quick shake of my head to dislodge the memory, but it was dug in. “I can’t forget that pear,” I said to Big Roy. “I drove a hard bargain for it. I sold this one dude a garbage bag. He wanted to give me just four dollars, but I kept pushing.”

“We tried to provide for you when you were in there. We may not have put as much on your commissary as your in-laws, but what we gave was more to us.”

“I’m not comparing,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you something. Let me tell you this, Daddy. I sold a garbage bag and I didn’t ask myself why someone would want to pay good money for it. I just worked him till I had every cent he had, because I needed cash to get a piece of fruit. I was craving that fresh taste.” The pear had been red like an autumn leaf and it was as soft as ice cream. I ate the whole thing: seeds, core, and stem—all of it. I ate it in the filthy bathroom because I didn’t want anybody to see me with it and take it from me.

“Son,” Big Roy said, and I knew just from the loosening of his face that even he knew the rest of the story. It felt like I was the only person in the world who didn’t understand how a man in prison uses a garbage bag. I had tried to share the pear with Walter, but he wouldn’t touch it, not when I told him how I got it.

“How was I supposed to know?” I asked my father.

In prison, you learn quick that anything can be a weapon to be used against the other man or yourself. A toothbrush becomes a dagger, a chocolate bar can be melted into homemade Napalm, and a garbage bag makes a perfect noose. “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have given it to him, let alone taken his money.”

I remembered myself retching over the metal commode, hoping the foul odor would help me vomit that pear, but nothing came up but my own stomach juices, bitter and sharp.

“I’m not blaming you, son,” Big Roy said. “Not for anything.”

THEN THE PHONE started up, like it knew that we were sitting there and it refused to be ignored.

“That ain’t Wickliffe,” Big Roy said.

“I know.”

It rang until she got tired. And it rang again.

“I don’t want to talk to Celestial until I have something to tell her.”

“You just told me that you’re going up there. That’s something to tell.”

Now was the time to say the words I didn’t want to say. “I don’t have money.”

Big Roy said, “I can help you some. It’s close to payday, but you’re welcome to what I have. Maybe Wickliffe can spot me a few.”

“Daddy, you already offered me your car. You can’t take money from Wickliffe.”

“This is no time to be pigheaded. You either drive up there with what money I can scrape together for you, or you wait for Andre to come get you. It may hurt your ego to take money from a senior citizen, but it’s going to hurt you more if you wait till Wednesday.”

It was amazing how much Big Roy reminded me of Walter right then. I missed my Biological something terrible. I wondered what he would have to say about all of this. I always figured that Walter was as far away from Big Roy as two people could get, and not just that Big Roy was the kind of man to make a junior out of another man’s son, while Walter was a borderline deadbeat. Knowing them both, I can see that my mama had a type, and I guess we all do. Her type of man is one with a point of view. Somebody who thinks he has figured out how this life thing works.

“YOU KNOW,” BIG roy said, “There’s the money your mother saved for you when you were just born. Might be a couple hundred dollars in your name. With your driver’s license and your birth certificate, you should be able to draw it down. Olive kept all your papers in her dresser drawer.”

The bedroom was set up the way it was when Olive was alive. Spread on the bed was the quilt with the overlapping circles she bought at the swap meet. On the west wall was a framed picture of three girls wearing pink dresses, jumping rope. I’d bought it for her with money from my first check. It wasn’t an original, but the print was signed and numbered. On top of the dresser, like a mischievous angel, was the poupée dressed in my john-johns.

When Big Roy said the bank book was in “her” dresser drawer, he meant the one on the top right, where she kept her most personal things. I positioned my hand on the brass drawer pull and froze.

“You see it?”

“Not yet,” I said. Then I yanked the drawer like I was snatching off a bandage. The draft in the room collided with the neatly folded clothes, releasing the scent I’ll always associate with Olive. If you were to ask me what it smelled like, I couldn’t answer any more than you would know what to say if someone asked you to describe the fragrance of coffee. It was the scent of my mother and it couldn’t be broken down into parts. I lifted up a flowered scarf and held it to my face. Pressure amassed behind my eyes, but nothing came. I inhaled deep from the cloth in my hand, and the strain became heavier, almost a headache, but the cry wouldn’t come. I tried to fold the scarf, but it looked rolled up, and I didn’t want to disrupt the orderly stacks.

A clutch of papers fastened with a green rubber band fit into the back corner of the drawer. I gathered the little stack and took it back to the kitchen where Big Roy was waiting.

“You never cleared out her things?”

“I couldn’t see the purpose,” he said. “Not like I needed the extra room.”

I took the rubber band off the bundle. On the top was my birth certificate, indicating that I was a Negro male born alive in Alexandria, Louisiana. My original name was on it, Othaniel Walter Jenkins. Olive’s signature is small and cramped, like the letters were hiding behind one another. Underneath that was the revised document with my new name and Big Roy’s signature laid down in a flourish of blue ink, and my mother’s handwriting is loopy and girlish. The first page of the bank book showed a $50 deposit the year I was born and $50 every year thereafter. The deposits picked up when I was fourteen and I added $10 every month. When I was sixteen I pulled down $75 to get the passport I now held in my hands. Opening the little blue booklet, I gazed at the black-and-white photo taken at the post office in Alexandria. Turning my eyes back on the bankbook, I noted the withdrawal I made after high school, $745 to take to college, leaving a $187 balance. With more than ten years of interest, there was probably a little more. Maybe enough to get me to Atlanta without having to shake down my father and Old Man Wickliffe.

I didn’t get up right away. One more item remained in the bundle. A little notebook that I had sworn was leather, but time showed it to be vinyl. It was the journal Mr. Fontenot had given me when I thought I was going to be like James Baldwin. I hadn’t written more than a handful of entries. Mostly I wrote about trying to get the passport, about buying the money order, and me and Roy going up to Alexandria to get my picture made. The last entry said, “Dear History, The world needs to get ready for Roy Othaniel Hamilton Jr.!”

THERE ARE TOO many loose ends in the world in need of knots. You can’t attend to all of them, but you have to try. That’s what Big Roy said to me while he was cutting my hair that Monday afternoon. He didn’t have a set of clippers, so he was doing it the old-school way, scissors over comb. The metallic slicing was loud in my ears, reminding me of the time before I knew that a boy could have more than one father. This was back when the words in the front of the Bible told the whole story, when we were a family of three.

“Anything you want to tell me?”

“No, sir,” I said, my voice squeaking.

“What was that?” Big Roy laughed. “You sound like you’re four years old.”

“It’s the scissors,” I said. “Reminds me of when I was little.”

“When I met Olive, you had one word you could say, which was ‘no.’ When I came courting your mother, you would holler ‘no’ whenever I got near her and ball up your little fist. But she made it clear to me that what she was offering was a package deal. You and her. I teased her and said, ‘What if I only want the kid?’ She blushed when I said that, and even you stopped fighting me. Once you gave your seal of approval, she started coming around to the idea of being my wife. You see, even before she said it, I knew that you were the one I was going to have to ask for her hand. A big-headed baby.

“I was just out of the service. Just back. I met Olive at the meat-and-three. My landlady pushed me to steer clear. For one, she was trying to find husbands for her own daughters—might have been six of them. So she whispered to me, ‘You know Olive has a baby,’ like she was telling me she had typhus. But that made me want to meet her more. I don’t like it when folks mutter against other folks. Six months later, we were married at the courthouse with you riding her hip. As far as I was concerned, you were my son. You will always be my son.”

I nodded because I knew the story. I had even told it to Walter. “When you changed my name,” I asked, “did it confuse me?”

“You could barely talk.”

“But I was old enough to know my name. How long did it take me to straighten it out in my mind?”

“No time at all. It started as a promise to Olive, but you’re my son. You’re the only family I have left now. Have you ever felt like you didn’t have a father? Has there ever been one time when you felt like I didn’t do all I could do?”

The scissors stopped their clacking and I swiveled in the chair to face Big Roy. His lips were tucked under and his jaw was tight. “Who told you?” I asked.

“Olive.”

“Who told her?”

“Celestial,” Big Roy said.

“Celestial?”

“She was here when your mother was in hospice care. We had the hospital bed set up in the den so your mother could look at TV. Celestial was by herself, not with Andre. That’s when she gave Olive the doll she wanted so bad, the one that favors you. Olive wasn’t getting enough oxygen, even with the mask on. Still, your mama was fighting. Hanging tough. It was terrible to watch. I didn’t want to tell you about all this, son. They say it was ‘quick.’ Two months from when they tested her, she was gone. What we call ‘Jack Ruby cancer.’ But it was a slow two months. I’ll say this for Celestial, she came twice. The first time was when she first got the news. Celestial drove all night and Olive was sitting up in bed, more tired than sick. She came back again, right at the end.

“On the last time, Celestial asked me to leave the room. I thought she was helping Olive clean up or something. After about fifteen minutes, the door opened and Celestial held her purse like she was leaving. Olive was lying in the bed so still and quiet that I was scared that she had passed. Then I heard that struggling breathing. On her forehead was a shiny place where Celestial kissed her good-bye.

“After that, I coaxed Olive into letting me give her a dose of morphine. I squirted it under her tongue, and then she said, ‘Othaniel is in there with him.’ This wasn’t her last words. But it was the last thing she said that really mattered. Then, two days after, she was gone. Before Celestial’s visit, she was fighting it. She wanted to live. But after that, she gave up.”

“Celestial promised to keep it to herself. Why would she do something like that?”

Big Roy said, “I have no idea.”

ANDRE

When I was sixteen, I tried to fight my father, because I thought Evie was going to die.

The doctors had said this was it, that lupus had finally gotten her, so we were going through the phases of grief in double time, trying to come out the other side before the clock ran out. I got as far as anger and drove to Carlos’s house and punched his jaw as he worked in his front yard, clipping the shrubbery into globes. His son—my brother, I guess you would call him—tried to jump in and help, but he was small and I pushed him to the grass. “Evie is dying,” I said to my father, who refused to lift his fists to hit me back. I punched him again, this time in the chest, and when I pulled my arm back again, he blocked the blow, but he didn’t strike me. Instead, he shouted my name, freezing me in place.

My little brother was on his feet now, looking from me to our father, awaiting instructions. Carlos, in an affectionate tone I’d never heard from him, said, “Go on in the house, Tyler.” Then to me he said, “Time you wasted driving over here and fighting me, you could be spending with Evie.”

I said, “That’s all you have to say about it?”

He spread his hands like suffer the little children. At his neck, I made out the glint of a braided chain. Hidden under his shirt was a gold disc the size of a quarter. His mother had given it to him a lifetime ago and he never took it off.

“What do you want me to say?” He asked the question mildly, like he actually wanted to know.

And it was a good question. After all these years, what could he say? That he was sorry?

“I want you to say that you don’t want her to die.”

“Jesus, boy. No, I don’t want Evie to die. I always assumed that eventually we would work it out, get back to being friends some kinda way. I thought that down the line we could patch things up. She’s a remarkable woman. Look at yourself. She raised you. I’ll always owe her for that.”

I know it’s a very humble declaration, but it felt like a gift.

A week later, Evie rallied and was moved out of ICU to a regular room on the hospital’s third floor. On her night table rested a cheery bouquet, a half-dozen pink roses and some green leaves. She invited me to read the card. Feel better. Sincerely, Carlos. After that, things between us improved a little. Out of kindness, he now extends invitations to holiday dinners, and out of kindness, I refuse. Any day now, I should receive a Christmas card, and tucked inside will be a chipper letter from his wife. I don’t read these annual bulletins; I can’t stomach her reports on how healthy and thriving her children are. I don’t begrudge them anything, but I don’t know them.

This is one thing I envied Roy: his dad. It wasn’t that I had never seen anybody with a responsible father before. After all, I grew up right next door to Celestial and Mr. Davenport. But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.

I don’t think about Carlos all the time, like some kind of tragic black man who grew up without a daddy and is warped for life. Evie did right by me and I’m a basically solid person. But sitting behind the steering wheel of my truck, stranded in the middle lane of an eight-lane highway, I wanted to talk to my dad. Roy Hamilton was out of prison, seven years early. Not that this changed the dynamic tremendously, but the accelerated clock churned my guts and spun my head.

I longed for a mentor or maybe a coach. When I was a kid, Mr. Davenport would step in from time to time, but now he acts like he can’t stand my face. Evie clucked her tongue and said that no man likes the rusty-butt who is laying up next to his daughter. I tried to explain to her that it was deeper than that. Evie said, “Was he loving all over Roy before he got sent away?” No, he hadn’t been, but that was irrelevant. Now Mr. Davenport was loyal to Roy above his own daughter. In a way, the whole black race was loyal to Roy, a man just down from the cross.

“Stop by anytime,” my father had said casually last year when I ran into him and his wife in Kroger on Cascade Road. He was pushing a buggy heaped with chicken, ribs, Irish potatoes, brown sugar, red soda pop, and everything else you need for a barbecue. He saw me before I saw him, or else we never would have talked. As his wife conveniently drifted off to the salad bar, Carlos placed his hand on my arm and said, “It has been too long.”

How does this happen to families? I’ve seen the pictures. There I am, riding on his shoulders, afro like Little Michael Jackson. I remember day-to-day things like him teaching me how to pee without splashing the floor. I even recall the sting of his belt against my legs, but not often. He used to be my father, and now we never talk at all. It occurs to me that maybe a man can love his son only as much as he loves the mother. But no, that couldn’t be true. He was my father. I wasn’t his junior, but I wore his last name as easily as I wore my own skin.

“You’re always welcome in my home,” he had said.

And so I decided to take him at his word.

I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight. There is something to shared genetics, but the question is, what exactly is that something? It matters that I didn’t grow up with my father. It’s kind of like having one leg that’s a half inch shorter than the other. You can walk, but there will be a dip.

CARLOS LIVES ON Brownlee Road in a house almost identical to the one where he lived with my mother and me. It was like he wanted the same life, but with different people. His wife, Jeanette, even favored Evie a little bit, redbone with a generous build. When they first got married, Jeanette somehow managed to make a living making ice sculptures for weddings and such. Back then, she had been much younger than Evie, but after all these years, their ages have come together in that uncanny way of passing time.

Carlos answered the door shirtless, with his bald head covered with shaving foam. As he used a nubby towel to blot his forehead, the gold Saint Christopher medal gleamed bright against his dark chest hair. “Andre, everything okay, my man?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you right quick.” When he paused, I added, “You said I could come by anytime.”

He opened the door wide to let me in. “Of course. Come on in. I’m getting dressed.” Then he announced to whoever was home, “Andre’s here.”

I stepped inside and was met with the scent of breakfast—bacon, coffee, and something sweet, like cinnamon buns. Before me in the foyer stood a Christmas tree, pine-scented and littered with shiny silver balls. Already, dozens of glittery gifts rested upon a red cloth trimmed in white, like Santa Claus. And like a child, I worried that there wasn’t a present there for me; then like an adult, I worried that I shouldn’t have come by empty-handed.

“Nice tree, isn’t it,” he said. “I let Jeanette handle the decorations. I haul it in, that’s all a man can do.” He bent and connected a green wire to the wall and the tree was ablaze with white lights so clean and radiant that they glowed, even in the sunny room.

Just then Jeanette appeared, dressed in a kimono the color of peacocks. Arranging her hair, she said, “Hello, Andre. It’s nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you, too, ma’am.”

“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” she said. “We’re family. Will you join us for breakfast?”

“No, ma’am,” I said.

She kissed my father on the cheek, as if to remind me that this is her house, her husband, and the father of her children. Or maybe it was affection, still blooming after all these years. Whatever it was, I felt disloyal to Evie just being there, even though my mother has been much more relaxed on the subject now that she has found true love of her own.

“C’mon with me while I finish up with this head.” He pointed at the froth on his dome. “When I was young, ladies knew me for my hair. Half black and half Puerto Rican? Jet black and waves for days. A little pomade and a wet comb? Perfection. But now?” He sighed as if to say, Nothing lasts.

I trailed him through the house, which was quiet but for the pots and pans clanging in the kitchen.

“Where are the kids?” I asked.

“College,” my father said. “They both get in tonight.”

“Where did they go?”

“Tyler is at Oberlin and Mikayla is at Duke. I tried to get them to go to black schools, but . . .” He shook his head as though he didn’t remember agreeing to pay for my college only if I went to the school of his choice.

In the bathroom he situated himself between two mirrors and carefully scraped the foam from his head. “Michael Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to black men my age. We can shave our heads and say we’re bald on purpose.”

I studied our reflections in the mirror. My father was a good-size man. There is a picture of him holding me as a newborn, and against his chest, I look to be no bigger than a hickory nut. He must be sixty by now. His muscular bulk has softened some. On his chest, on the left side, is a keloid scar to honor his fraternity. Seeing me looking at it, my father covered it with his hand. “I’m embarrassed by this now.”

“I’m embarrassed that I didn’t pledge,” I said.

“Don’t be. I’ve learned a few things over these last thirty years.”

He returned to the business of shaving his head, and I regarded myself in the mirror. It was as though God knew that Evie would end up raising me alone, so he made me entirely in her image. Wide nose, healthy lips, and hair the color of cardboard but nappy as Africa. The only trait I picked up from my father was cheekbones that jutted like collarbones.

“So,” he said, stretching the word out like a drum roll. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m getting married,” I said.

“Who is the lucky lady?”

I stumbled, surprised that he didn’t know, probably in the same way he was surprised that I didn’t know where his kids were in college. “Celestial. Celestial Davenport.”

“Aha!” he said. “I peeped that when you were babies. Did she grow up fine like her mama? But wait a minute. Wasn’t she married to some dude that ended up being a rapist? Morehouse cat. Was he Greek?”

“But he was innocent.”

“Who said he was innocent? Her? If she’s still claiming he didn’t do it, then you have a real problem.” Meeting my eyes in the mirror, he adopted a thoughtful tone. “Forgive me for being such a straight shooter. Nowadays they say it’s being direct, but your mama called it being an asshole.” He chuckled. “I’ve been down here in the South thirty-eight years, but I still run my mouth like a New Yorker.”

When he said New Yorker, he switched his accent like he was speaking a word in another language.

“You don’t have all the details,” I said, feeling defensive of both Celestial and Roy. “That’s what I’m here to tell you about. The lawyer got his conviction overturned. He’s out right now. I’m on my way to Louisiana to see him.”

My father put down the razor, rinsed it at the sink. He closed the lid on the toilet and sat upon it like a throne. He beckoned, so I sat opposite him on the rim of the spacious bathtub. “And you’re talking about marrying his ex-wife. I see the challenge.”

“She’s not his ex-wife,” I said. “Not technically.”

“Whoa, doggie,” Carlos said. “I knew it had to be something to bring you over here to talk to me.”

I told him the whole story from soup to nuts, and when I was done, my father pinched the bridge of his nose like he felt a migraine coming on.

“This is my fault,” he said with closed eyes. “This never would have happened if you were trained up under me. I would have taught you to steer clear of a snake pit like this. There can’t be a winner. First off, you should have sense enough not to mess with that man’s wife. But,” he said with a courtly nod, “who am I to judge? When I got with Jeanette, I didn’t have no business doing it. Evie put me out. Granted, I had someplace to go, but it was her call. You know that, right? I didn’t leave her.” He ran his finger over his damp head, feeling for stubbly patches that he skipped over with this razor.

“This isn’t what I came over here for.”

“Then what did you come for?”

“Obviously, I need advice. Guidance. Words of wisdom, something.”

“Well,” he said, “I have been one of the legs in a love triangle, this you know. You also know that there isn’t a happy ending for anyone. I miss your mother every day. We grew up together, too. But she can’t be in the same room with Jeanette and—”

“You could have come to visit us by yourself.”

“Jeanette is my wife now. Then we had Tyler and Mikayla. You can’t say that I made a choice, because your mother was the one who put me out. Don’t forget that.”

“Enough,” I said. “Enough of this historical shit. She put you out because you were chasing tail. She put you out and you married tail, and then you want to blame it on her. What about me? I didn’t put you out. I was in second grade.”

The air in the closed bathroom was warm, despite the noisy exhaust fan. His shaving cream smelled like cloves and made me feel nauseous. What was I even doing here? My father didn’t know me, he didn’t know Celestial, and he didn’t know Roy. How could he steer me in this storm?

From the other side of our silence, Jeanette sang, “Breakfast is ready!”

“C’mon, Dre,” my father said. “Have some eggs and bacon.”

“I didn’t come here hoping for a seat at your table.”

Carlos stuck his head out into the hallway, “I’m coming, Jeanette.” Then he turned to me, with a buzz of urgency like he had bought himself only another minute or so. “Let’s start over,” he said. “You say you want my advice. Here’s what I have. Tell the truth. Don’t try to cushion the blow. If you’re bad enough to do it, you’re bad enough to tell it. You can ask your mama. She’ll tell you she was so unhappy because I didn’t drop lies into her morning coffee. The whole time, she knew exactly who she was married to.

“You go let that man know what you have done, what you’re still doing. That’s all he’s entitled to. You don’t tell him with your chin on your chest. You tell him to inform him, for him to see the kind of man you are—however he sizes it up.”

“Then what do I do?”

“Depends on what he does. My guess is that he gets physical. I don’t think he’ll kill you over it. He’s not trying to get reincarcerated. But, son, you got a real ass whooping coming. Just take it and get on with your life.”

“But—”

“Here’s the ‘but,’ ” he said. “The good news is that he can whip your ass all up and down the state of Louisiana, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t beat Celestial out of you. It’s not a to-the-victors proposition.”

Then he laughed. I didn’t.

“Okay, son, I’m going to get serious. Just because I think you deserve what you’re about to go to Louisiana to get, it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you well with Celeste. Every relationship requires that you go through some shit.” He ran his fingers over the figure scarring his chest. “This was stupid. We branded each other like cattle. Like slaves. We beat the shit out of each other. But it bound us together. I love every single one of them. When I tell you we went through it, I mean it. Maybe what has held me and Jeanette together all these years is what I had to go through and give up to be with her.”

And with that, he opened the bathroom door and we walked out into the cheerful house. In the hallway, I zipped my jacket against December and headed toward the doorway, past the twinkling tree. Something in me that was still very young hung back in case a gift was set aside, in case he had remembered me for the holidays.

“Come back Christmas,” he said. “There will be a box under the tree for you.”

My face burned at being so transparent, and because I shared Evie’s coloring, he could see it.

I turned away, but my father spun my shoulder. “I never forgot about you,” he said. “Not during the year and never at Christmas. I just wasn’t expecting to see you.” Then he patted his pockets like he was hoping to find something there. Downhearted, he lifted his gold necklace over his clean-shaven head. “My ma bought it in Chinatown when I finished high school. Other boys got typewriters to take to college, or maybe a briefcase, stuff like that, and she gives me a saint. Saint Christopher is for safe travels and buena suerte for bachelors.” He kissed the engraved face before holding it out to me. “I hate that you didn’t get to meet her. There is nothing like a Puerto Rican grandmother. A summer or two in East Harlem would have got you right.” He bounced the gold in his palm like dice. “Look, it’s yours. It says so in my will. But I don’t see why you have to wait.”

My father took my wrist and forced the jewelry into my hand, squeezing my fingers around it with so much force it hurt.

ROY

Good-bye” isn’t my strong suit; I’m more of a “see you later” kind of person. When I left prison, I didn’t even say good-bye to Walter. He picked a fight on the yard and got himself put into the SHU the day before my release. As I gathered all my belongings and stacked it all on Walter’s side of the cell, I wondered if maybe good-bye wasn’t his forte either. Missing him in advance, I wrote a note on the first page of the notebook I was leaving behind.

Dear Walter,

When the door is open, you have to run through it. I will stay in touch. You have been a good father to me these years.

Your son,

Roy

Before this, I had never called myself his son. I meant it, but I was struck by a silly fear that Big Roy would find out or even that Olive would know from the grave. But I let the note stay put. On his pillow, I left a picture that Celestial sent of me and her on the beach in Hilton Head. Other men had pictures of their kids, why shouldn’t Walter? Your son, Roy, that’s who I was.

Now it was time to pay my respects to Olive, down at what used to be called the “colored cemetery.” This graveyard dated back to the 1800s, to right after slavery ended. Mr. Fontenot took me here once to rub etchings off the crumbling tombstones; now he was under this ground himself. There were other places to be buried; these days cemeteries are integrated along with everything else, but I never knew of anyone who didn’t choose to lay their family down at Greater Rest Memorial.

Big Roy sent me on my way with a big bouquet of yellow flowers wrapped with green holiday ribbon. I drove the Chrysler along the potholed road in the middle of the cemetery and stopped when the pavement ended. Exiting the car, I walked ten paces to the east and then six to the south, with my flowers behind my back like it was Valentine’s Day.

I passed trendy grave markers engraved with the likeness of the person buried below. These stones were shiny like Cadillacs, and the faces transferred onto rock were almost all young guys. I paused at one, covered with pink lipstick kisses, and did the math in my head: fifteen years old. I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”

Using Big Roy’s directions like they were a pirate’s map, I turned right at the pecan tree and I found Olive’s resting place, exactly where he promised it would be.

The dusky gray of her tombstone dropped me to my knees. I landed hard on the packed dark earth where grass grew only in determined little patches. Across the top of the stone was etched our family name. Underneath was olive ann and to the right of that roy. I lost my breath, thinking a grave had already been laid for me, but then I realized that this resting place beside my mother was my father’s. I know Big Roy and I imagine he figured that he may as well get his name on there since he already hired the stonecutter. When it came time to bury him, I wouldn’t be charged for anything but the date. I ran my hands over both their names and I wondered where I would be planted when the time came. It was crowded in the cemetery. Olive had neighbors on all sides.

On my knees, I stuffed the flowers into the tarnished metal vase affixed to the stone, but I didn’t stand. “Pray,” Big Roy had said. “Tell her what you need her to hear.” I didn’t even know where to start.

“Mama,” I said, and then the crying came. I had not cried since I was sentenced and I had humiliated myself before a judge who didn’t care. On that horrible day, my snotty sobbing had merged with Celestial and Olive’s mournful accompaniment. Now I suffered a cappella; the weeping burned my throat like when you vomit up strong liquor. That one word, Mama, was my only prayer as I thrashed on the ground like I was feeling the Holy Ghost, only what I was going through wasn’t rapture. I spasmed on that cold black earth in pain, physical pain. My joints hurt; I experienced what felt like a baton against the back of my head. It was like I relived every injury of my entire life. The pain went on until it didn’t, and I sat up, dirty and spent.

“Thank you,” I whispered to the air and to Olive. “Thank you for making it stop. And for being my mother. And for taking such loving care of me.” And then I was still, hoping to maybe hear something in return, a message in a birdsong. Anything. But it was quiet. I gathered myself and stood up, dusting the dirt off my khakis the best I could. I laid my hand on the tombstone. “Bye,” I mumbled, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

I was at the BP station, filling up my daddy’s Chrysler with gas, when I finally heard what I think was my mama’s voice in my ear. Any fool can up and go. Whenever she started saying what “any fool” could do, she followed up with how a “real man” would handle the problem. Another favorite of hers was talking about what dogs were capable of. As in, “Even a dog can make a bunch of puppies, but a real man raises his kids.” She made dozens of those observations. She aimed them at me constantly and I did my best to be the real man she had in mind. But she never told me anything about saying good-bye, because as far as she was concerned, real men didn’t have any need for farewells because real men stay.

With the gas nozzle in my hand, I paused to hear if she had any more wisdom to share, but apparently that was all I was going to get.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said aloud, and turned the Chrysler in the direction of the Hardwood.

I OWED DAVINA HARDRICK a real good-bye and some kind of thanks, too. Maybe I should give it to her straight and point out that she would be smart to rid herself of me, damaged goods that I was. I wasn’t what they call “relationship material.” All that was the truth, and I wouldn’t even have to mention Celestial. But even as I was going over this in my head, I knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. What transpired between Davina and me was sexual, but it was more than that. It wasn’t on the level of me and Celestial when we were trying to have a baby. It was kind of like dancing late at night when you’re so drunk that the beat is in charge, so you look the woman in the eyes and you both move to the music the same way. That was part of how it was, and the other part was that she fucked me back to health. I would never actually say that—some words women don’t care to hear—but that’s what happened. Sometimes the only thing that can cure a man is the inside of a woman, the right woman who does things the right way. This is what I should thank her for.

When I arrived at her place, I rang the doorbell and waited, but I knew she wasn’t there. I contemplated dropping a note, kind of like the one I left for Walter, but that didn’t feel right. A Dear John was bad, and a Dear Jane was worse. This wasn’t about me trying not to be cliché. It was about me trying to remember how to be a human being. How you would go about paying somebody back for reminding me what it felt like to be a man and not a nigger just out of the joint? What kind of currency would make us even? I didn’t have anything to give but my sorry self. My sorry married self, to be a little more exact.

I went back to the car, turned over the ignition, and flipped on the heat. I couldn’t sit there until she got back, wasting time I couldn’t afford to lose and burning gas I couldn’t afford to waste. I rummaged through the glove compartment and found a golf pencil and small pad. I should at least use a full-size sheet of paper if I was going to leave a note. I got out of the car and searched the trunk, but there was nothing in it but my duffel bag and an atlas. I sat on the fender, using the palm of my hand as a desk as I tried to think about what to write. Dear Davina, Thank you very much for two days of restorative sex. I feel much better now. I knew better than to even press pencil to paper with that idea.

“She at work,” said a voice behind me.

There stood a little knucklehead about five or six years old, a felt Santa hat crooked on his peanut head.

“You talking about Davina?”

He nodded and forced a candy cane into a sour pickle wrapped in cellophane.

“You know what time she’s coming back?”

He nodded and sucked on the pickle and peppermint.

“Can you tell me what time that is?”

He shook his head no.

“Why?”

“Because it might not be your business.”

“Justin!” said a woman from the porch next door, where the French teacher once lived.

“I wasn’t talking to him,” Justin said. “He was the one talking to me.”

To the woman on Mr. Fontenot’s porch, I explained, “I’m trying to find Davina. Justin said she’s at work and I was wondering what time she would be home.”

The woman, whom I took to be Justin’s grandmother, was tall and dark-skinned. Her hair, white at the temples, was braided across the top of her head, like a basket. “How do I know it’s your business?”

Justin smirked at me.

“She’s my friend,” I said. “I’m leaving town and I wanted to say good-bye.”

“You could leave her a note,” she said. “I’ll give it to her.”

“She deserves more than a note,” I said.

The grandmother raised her eyebrows like she figured out what I was talking about. Not a see you later but a true farewell. “It’s Christmastime. She won’t get off until midnight.”

I couldn’t spend the whole day waiting for the opportunity to disappoint Davina in person; it was 4:25 p.m., and I needed to get on the road. I thanked the grandmother and Justin before getting back in the car and headed toward Walmart.

I walked through the store, scanning all the aisles until I found Davina in the back, near the craft supplies, cutting off a length of something blue and fuzzy for a thin man wearing glasses. “Give me another yard,” he said, and she flipped the bolt a couple of times and whacked at it with a pair of large scissors. She noticed me as she was folding the fabric and attaching the price tag. Handing it to the man, she smiled at me, and I felt like the worst person in the world.

When the man walked away, I advanced to the table like I, too, needed something measured and cut.

“Can I help you, sir,” she said, smiling like this was some kind of holiday game.

“Hey, Davina,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“You okay?” she asked, eyeing my dirty clothes. “Did something happen?”

“Naw,” I said. “I just didn’t get a chance to change. But I need to talk to you right quick.”

“I don’t have a break coming up, but grab some fabric and come back. I can talk to you here.”

The fabrics, arranged by color, reminded me of Saturdays with my mother, the way she would drag me to Cloth World in Alexandria. Grabbing a bolt of red fabric flecked with gold, I returned to the cutting table and handed it to Davina, who immediately started pulling the cloth free.

“Sometimes people ask how much we have so we have to measure it all. So I’ll do that while you talk. What’s up? You here to say you miss me?” She smiled again.

“I’m here to say that I’m going to miss you,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“Back to Atlanta.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You going back to her?”

I nodded.

“That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?”

She snatched hard at the cloth until the spool was bare and the fabric was stretched out on the table, looking like a movie-star red carpet. She measured it against the yardstick at the edge of the table, counting under her breath.

“I don’t mean it like that,” I said.

“I distinctly asked you if you were married.”

“And I told you I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t act like you didn’t know.”

“I want to say thank you. That’s why I’m here, to say thank you and good-bye.”

Davina said, “I want to say fuck you. How about that?”

“What we did was special,” I said, feeling like a jackass, although I had not uttered a single lie. “I care about you. Don’t be like this.”

“I can be however I want.” She was mad, but I could see that she was trying not to cry. “Go on then, Roy. Go on back to Miss Atlanta. But I want two things from you.”

“Okay,” I said, eager to do something and show her that I was cooperating, that I didn’t want to hurt her.

“Don’t scandalize my name by talking about how when you got out of jail you were so desperate that you knocked off some girl from Walmart. Don’t say that to your friends.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t like that.”

She held up her hand. “I mean it. Don’t taste my name in your mouth. And Roy Hamilton, promise me you will not ever come banging on my door.”

CELESTIAL

Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.

If my mother were here now, she would see that what we had chosen was anything but convenient. It was Christmastime, and I own a business with a staff of two, and now my wrongfully incarcerated husband is released and I have to tell him that I’m engaged to another man. The situation was a lot of things—tragic, absurd, unlikely, and maybe even unethical—but it was not convenient.

As Andre ran his lines, rehearsing the speech that we agreed would explain ourselves to Roy as gently as possible, I looked up into the empty branches and wondered aloud how long Old Hickey had been here. Our houses were constructed in 1967. As soon as the last brick was mortared into place, our parents moved in and commenced making babies, but Old Hickey predated all of that. When workers cleared the land to build, scores of pine trees were cut down and the stumps blasted from the ground. Only Old Hickey had been spared.

Andre slapped his hand against the rough bark. “Only way to tell is to cut it down and count the rings. I don’t want to know that bad. The answer is old. Hickey has seen it all.”

“You ready?” I asked him.

“There’s no ready,” Dre said, leaning back on the tree and pulling me close. I didn’t resist and pushed my fingers through his dense hair. I leaned to kiss his neck, but he gripped my shoulders and held me away so we could see each other’s faces. His eyes reflected back the grays and browns of winter. “You’re scared,” he said. “I can feel shaking beneath your skin. Talk to me, Celestial.”

“It’s real,” I said. “What we have is real. It’s not just convenience.”

“Baby,” Dre said. “Love is supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be easy. Don’t they say that in First Corinthians?” He held me close against him again. “It’s real. It’s convenient. It’s perfect.”

“Do you think Roy will come back with you?”

“He might. He might not,” Andre said.

“What would you do if you were him?”

Andre let me go and stepped over the raised roots of the tree. The air was chilly but clean. “I can’t say because I can’t imagine being him. I’ve tried, but I can’t even walk around the corner in his shoes, let alone a mile. Sometimes I think that if I were him, I would be a gentleman, wishing you well and letting you go with dignity.”

I shook my head. Roy wasn’t that type of man, although he had dignity in spades. But for a person like Roy, letting go wasn’t a self-respecting option. Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst. For herself, she identified her ability to adapt. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.” She told me that since I was very small, I have embraced my appetites. “You always run toward what you want. Your father always tries to break you of this, but you are just like him, brilliant but impulsive and a tiny bit selfish. But more women should be selfish,” she said. “Or else the world will trample you.” Roy, in my mind, was a fighter, a characteristic whose double edges were gleaming and sharp.

“But I don’t really know,” Andre said, thinking aloud. “He feels like everything was taken from him—his job, his house, his wife—and he wants all his shit back. He can’t get his job back; corporate America waits for no man, let alone a black man. But he’s going to want his marriage back, like you have been in cold storage all these years. So now it’s my job to snatch the fantasy away.” He motioned to take in our houses, our bodies, maybe even our city. “I feel guilty as hell. I can’t lie.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“For what?” he asked, slipping his arms around my waist.

“Since I could remember, my father has told me how lucky I was. How I never had to struggle. How I eat every day. How nobody has ever called me ‘nigger’ to my face. He used to say, ‘Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.’ Once Daddy took me to the emergency room at Grady, so I could see how poor black folks are treated when they got sick. Gloria was mad when I came home, eight years old, shook to the bone. But he said, ‘I don’t mind living in Cascade Heights, but she needs to know the whole picture.’ Gloria was furious. ‘She is not a sociological test case. She is our daughter.’ Daddy said, ‘Our daughter needs to know things, she needs to know how fortunate she is. When I was her age . . .’ My mother cut him off. ‘Stop it, Franklin. This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine. Don’t treat her like she stole something.’ To which my daddy said, ‘I’m not saying that she stole it. I just want her to know what she has.’ ”

Dre shook his head as though my memories were his own. “You deserve your life. There are no accidents—of birth or anything else.”

Then I kissed him hard and sent him on his way to Louisiana, like I was sending him off to war.

ROY

PO Box 973

Eloe, LA 98562

Dear Walter,

Hello from the other side. Ignore the return address on this letter because I don’t know where I’ll be by the time you get this. Right now, I’m in a rest stop outside of Gulfport, Mississippi, where I’m going to get a room for tonight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll head to Atlanta to find Celestial and see if I have any life left there. It could go either way. I don’t think I’m making too much of the fact that she didn’t divorce me, and this time tomorrow I will know.

I have money in my pocket, and I’m grateful for that. When I was a boy, I had a little savings account. I went to the branch this past Tuesday to clean it out, and there I experienced a minor miracle. Olive stopped adding to my commissary after it was clear that Celestial was handling that, so she started saving for my future. The money she made from selling cakes on Saturdays, she put away for me, so I have nearly $3,500. This means I don’t have to show up on Celestial’s doorstep like a homeless person. But that’s what I am, I guess. But at least I don’t have to be a broke homeless person.

Celestial doesn’t know that I’m coming and I’m glad that I don’t have to hear your wisdom on that! It’s complicated, but she sent Andre to Eloe to come and collect me. By my calculations, he should be hitting the highway first thing tomorrow morning. This is why I didn’t tell her I was coming. I need to see her by herself, not with Dre hanging around. I’m not saying that there is anything between them, but I’m saying that there has always been something between them. You know what I mean? Or am I the one being a Junior Yoda? But the point is that I need to talk to her without anyone blocking. So if he drives way out to Louisiana, it will take him another day to get back. So that gives me two days to get done what I need to do.

Admit it. It’s a smart plan.

Maybe I am your kid after all.

Anyway, I’m going to put some of this money on your books. Don’t spend it all in one place (ha!). And take care of yourself. And if you can, pray for your boy.

Roy O.