by Lorene Cary
———
Jewell stood, making sure not to lean on Jack as she did.
“You gonna call the home number?” he asked. “Maybe you should do it now before you lose heart.”
“Not while I’m still sniveling,” she said. “I’ll run the dog, and then I’ll do it when I come back. Promise.”
“Want me to do it? Hi, I’m Jack Thompson, your mother’s white husband. I’m just calling to ask you to be nice to her.”
Jewell laughed. “Oh, God. That’ll fix it.”
“Or, hi, I’m your mother’s husband. What’s my angle? Well, I’ve got lung cancer, and even if I beat it for now, well, I just figure it’ll be good for her to have some more family. Even if it’s complicated.”
Jewell knelt down next to the chaise and kissed Jack. His breath had almost lost the sickly medicinal taste. “I’ll do it when I get back. I will, really.”
———
In the cold air, toxic memories rose to her skin as sweat. She’d move the blood faster. She opened the parka and trotted up the gravelly path. Jack used to ask her what she was trying to outrun, and she hadn’t had the decency to tell him, this man who’d loved her all these years, until the letter had arrived last month.
———
Right in her belly was where Lonnie had buried his face when the conductor had appeared. They held up the train for a minute or two while he reminded Lonnie how fast the train would go, and how he’d soon see it all from the engineer’s seat up front. Lonnie’s arms eased. Jewell bent down and rested her hands on his shoulders. She looked up at his battered luggage, and the conductor followed her gaze and nodded—Yup, he’d see to it.
She was sweating into the white piqué blouse and gray suit that her neighbor had let her only borrow, even though, after five children, she’d never fit into it again. With their faces close together, she kissed the boy’s cheek and gave him the only thing she had—a smile. Just for him to keep. It was smallish, fresh, a touch sad.
“Good-bye, sweetie,” she said.
“September, right?”
“Lonnie rhymes with Mommy!”
“Almost.”
She held her secret smile. The muscles around her eyes strained to keep it in place for him when she looked back before she stepped off the car, and then as the train pulled away from the platform.
Good-bye, sweetie, she mouthed, smiling and waving up to the open doorway where Lonnie stood, his wild, uncut hair in bold, shaggy relief against the conductor’s starched white shirt. She wanted that last moment to trump the others stored in his memory. That one, at least, would square with what she knew Selma would tell him years hence, because she heard her say it about her own mother: It’s the best she could do for you, honey. She knew you’d be better off. Better off. Selma would say it so as not to hurt him. She’d give him plenty of work and a safe, regular childhood. Jewell was pretty sure that Selma would be able to resist trying to make Lonnie hate her. Bobo, she knew, would not.
CHAPTER 7
When Rayne’s construction cell phone rang, Lillie almost didn’t answer it. She was studying for her nursing midterms. The most important, in her mind, was Senior Integration, a title that no one but the black nursing students thought sounded funny; it referred to students’ integrating classroom learning about drugs and disease with their clinical learning about direct patient care. The faculty also threw in an intensive review for the dreaded NCLEX licensing exam. Why they chose Easter week, Lillie could not figure. Public schools were on vacation, and nursing students with children scrambled for child care. Otherwise, she might have made more of an objection to Khalil’s going with Rayne without her.
Instead she decided to stop fussing and be grateful. Except that, really, she hadn’t stopped fussing: right as they left she’d insisted on their taking the old booster seat, and Rayne had put down his construction cell phone in the vestibule to take it from her.
She knew he worried about the new job. He had left a message with his foreman about the locks, and left the keys, labeled, with Lillie. For that reason, she’d clipped his cell next to hers on her waistband. When it rang and vibrated in a loud buzz, she startled and answered abruptly: “RayneDance Construction.”
A woman’s slow, liquid voice asked: “Hello? Hello?”
Lillie repeated more slowly, “RayneDance Construction Company. May I help you?”
Speaking in a low voice, and minding her words, the woman answered, “Yes, please. My name is Jewell Thompson. I’m calling in response to a letter from Alonzo Rayne. Do I have the right number?”
“Yes, you do. Oh, my goodness,” Lillie answered. “You certainly do.”
———
Jewell perched on a settee next to Jack’s chaise. He was inspecting her lemon wafers, which she’d begun to make for him when the chemo made him nauseous. The wafers seemed to stay down. Besides, he said, even if he couldn’t eat them, it was worth it in amusement value to watch Jewell take them out of the oven: cursing the papery wisps as they cooled and began first to scrunch and frill, then to tear, then to stick fast to the cookie sheet like so many bits of dripped plaster.
Jewell patted his arm to let him know that this was the correct number. He opened his eyes in acknowledgment.
“Oh, so he’s not there?” Jewell said. “I got the other number, and he said he was driving. I was hoping that maybe he’d arrived wherever he was headed.”
“No, he’s not. He just left this morning to go out of town. Oh, you know where he is—I was about to do a whole explanation, but you know: he’s going to his Nana Selma’s for Holy Week.”
Jewell thought: All those years, while we did Mexico, he went to Selma’s. It was an eerie feeling, connecting the two. Of course, he was going to Selma’s. Selma had raised him. Jewell tripped her teeth: “Oh, Selma’s.”
“I’ll give you his cell. He should be there in, maybe, like, around six more hours or so. And after that, you can call Nana Selma’s landline. The reception, when he’s down there, out in the country, can be kinda iffy.”
“Thank you, my dear. I know the number, unless something forced Selma to change it since Truman.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing, dear.”
They exchanged numbers. Jewell was eager to end the conversation: “Evenings are usually good, you can tell him. Thanks so much. Good-bye.”
“Was it a she?” Jack asked.
“Yes.” Jewell sat up straight on the settee.
“His wife?”
“Something makes me think maybe not.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. He and the boy I saw have gone down to Selma’s for Holy Week. The young woman suggested that I call him there, but I think I’ll wait. Talking to him is one thing. Selma is another story.”
Jack patted her hand and smiled crookedly. “The whole family: you said it.”
Then, because he’d slept badly the night before, and could finally relax, Jack dozed. And Jewell, although she meant to get up and plant tomato and pepper seeds indoors, lay down next to him as if there were nothing else in the world to do. I’ve exhausted us both, she thought as she, too, fell asleep.
When she awoke, Jack was watching her. Jewell thought he looked more rested—less sick, actually, than he had in weeks. “Did you dream?” she asked.
“It was one of those funny dreams. I think it’s the drugs. I was back in the hotel, remember, when we decided to get married…”
“We decided?”
“Whatever it was. I was back in the room, thinking to myself: If she says yes, we’re gonna be all right. This is gonna be a blast.
“How did I know that?”
“Is that really what you were thinking?”
“I was also thinking—although this wasn’t in the dream—that this was going to be the best sex of my entire life.”
“And was it?”
“Yeah,” he said earnestly. “It was.” He realized that he’d been out of the cancer bunker and time tra
veling. It hadn’t been simply a dream. He’d been back there, and, at her simplest suggestion, he was in bed with her again, this time in Barcelona, with her lips and tongue tasting of anisette. Why that moment, he wondered, after the train ride where they’d teased each other in the bathroom with little signs telling them not to drink the water in the sinks?
“Remember Barcelona?”
“Oh, my God, yes, I remember Barcelona.” Jewell stood, stretched, and began to tidy their area, as if she could not sit still with the memory. “I remember the last night when we drank that licorice liquor and got so drunk that we didn’t put in my diaphragm, and I was scared to death for a month.”
“I’d forgotten,” he said, although now he thought maybe that was why his mind had indeed picked that moment.
Jewell bent over Jack’s face to kiss him. His eyes were closed. Tears had formed in the corners.
Barcelona was their celebratory trip, the one they took after his first cancer episode went into remission. “You didn’t want me to be pregnant, did you?” The thought had never occurred to Jewell before this moment. She tried to recall whether he had said anything or indicated anything that she should have noticed.
“No,” he whispered, too tired to voice the words. “But right about now, a son might be nice, so I’m glad you have yours back… At this point, the mind goes where it wants. I’m sorry.”
———
Khalil, who seemed to be sleeping on the back bench seat, threw himself forward to grab Rayne’s cell phone when it let out Lillie’s ringtone.
“I thought you was ’sleep,” Rayne said with only half-hearted pique.
Khalil giggled into the phone as he answered, his hearty, throaty laugh: “Hi, Mom. We’re in Virginia, and while I was ’sleep, Rayne ate up all the food.
“Sike! But he did eat the oranges… I know I don’t eat oranges. But maybe I might like to try some.”
“Tell your mom they were good.”
“You hear that, Mom? He said they were good. The oranges.” Then to Rayne, he said: “Mom says it’s impor’ant. Can you talk? Or you want to call ’er back?”
“Tell ’er there’s a rest area in fifteen miles. Can it wait, like, fifteen minutes?”
Khalil was holding the phone up in the air. Then he put it to his ear. “You hear that?
“Okay, she says, don’t forget. Mom, you know I won’t forget.” He turned the phone off and sat stiffly with it in his hand.
“You gonna come up front again?”
“You wanna know the truth?”
“Sure.”
“I gotta go to the bathroom pretty bad.”
“What? And you’re afraid to jump over the seat?” Rayne looked at Khalil in the rearview mirror to see how much tension his face revealed. “Can you make it another ten or twelve minutes?”
Khalil shook his head no. Rayne drove on, looking for a stretch of road with a good shoulder and some bushes. He told Khalil the criteria, too, hoping that watching the side of the highway would occupy his mind. As soon as he’d finished explaining what makes a suitable pull-off, Khalil shouted, “Dad, look, right here, right here.”
Rayne steered the Ford to the side of the road, as close to the grass as possible. Weather threatened. A gray sky and damp air made them pull on their coats as they crossed the weedy strip to the bushes, Khalil trotting to keep up with Rayne’s wide strides. They found a spot, used it, and walked and ran back to the truck. Khalil allowed as how he was ready for a sandwich.
“Where’d your mother put the hand sanitizer? Hey-hey, do not touch that food without wiping your hands.” He shouted it at Khalil’s back, because the boy was sprinting to the car.
Not sure whether Khalil had heard him, Rayne jogged to catch up.
“Here.” Khalil sat sideways in the front seat, facing out the open door. He held out a small tube of antibacterial lotion in one hand and a bottle of similar stuff in the other.
“What’s the difference?”
Khalil shrugged. Rayne wiped his hands and gave back the bottle. A truck’s wake rocked the Ford. Rayne swiveled Khalil’s body forward by the knees and closed the door. He was chilled by the time he walked around the front of the truck, so he turned on the engine, blasted the heat, which was still warm, and took the cell phone that Khalil handed him.
“Hey, babe,” he said, waving at Khalil simply to hand him any sandwich rather than point to each one. “What’s up?”
“Your mother called.”
“Good. That’s real good. She called me here, and I couldn’t talk. I’ll wait to call back,” Rayne said evenly into the phone.
“How can you stand it, not calling back? Don’t you want to hear her voice? She’s got a great voice. It’s like honey.”
He heard Khalil opening the door, looked over to shake his head to say no, and saw the boy slip down off the seat, pantomime peeing again, and turn away. Then Rayne snapped his fingers loudly to get the boy’s attention. He did not want to shout at him and have Lillie go ape because her son was out on the highway alone. “I heard her voice. Look, baby, me and Khalil are sitting on the side of the road, the trucks are rockin us every time they pass, and I’ve got another seven hours to drive. Lemme just drive it in peace without, like, drama.”
“Yeah, I hear the traffic. You got the windows open?”
“Unh-huh.” In fact, Rayne was watching Khalil slip down from the passenger side and motioning for him to leave the door open, so that he could watch him go back to the bushes to pee again. Every few steps Khalil would turn around. Rayne made big dips with his head to nod okay.
“Isn’t it still cold there?” Lillie continued, nervous. “It’s just, like, awful here. I’m about to call the number for those body bag Snuggie things. Hot pink. You come home, I’ma look like a big ole fuzzy tongue sittin on the couch reading about electrolytes.”
Rayne laughed. “Don’t sound like you.”
“Dear Lord,” she asked, “is that all highway noise? Sounds like a racetrack.”
“Yeah, it’s loud, all right.”
“Still, you could close the window and call ’er real quick. She’s easy to talk to. At least on the surface, I mean.”
“Yo, baby, all I wanna do is one thing at a time, okay? She and I been waiting twenty-something years. We can wait a few more hours.” Rayne was watching Khalil, thinking that the boy had not gone back to the exact spot the two of them had used the first time. It irritated him.
“Okay, okay. I thought you’d be excited. I was excited.”
“Yep. I know. I thought I would be, too.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Khalil’s got to pee again. Lemme go.”
Lillie laughed. “That’s just a George-of-the-Jungle pee, ’cause you probably let ’im go in the bushes, and I make ’im go in the ladies’ room with me.”
“No doubt. I’ll call you when we get there.”
Before Rayne hung up, Khalil scrambled back into the truck and slammed the door.
“What was that?” Lillie asked.
Rayne frowned at Khalil, who was rubbing hand sanitizer with ostentatious care into his palms and over the backs of his hands up to his wrists before taking off his coat. “That’s your son playing games. I gotta go.”
“Want me to talk to him? No, I know, I know. Okay. Drive safe. It’s been a hard week.”
CHAPTER 8
Rayne spoke sharply to Khalil about leaving the truck while he was on the phone. He poured a cup of coffee from the thermos into the convenience-store travel mug Lillie had packed, and the two rode away in silence. When they passed the rest area full of cars, Rayne drove by, glad that he did not have to stop, and realized that he hadn’t thanked Lillie for the food. Khalil sat quietly, chastened only a little, playing his handheld video game.
Rayne put in an old homemade CD of heavy reggae hip-hop and dance hall music. It had been a hard week, especially for Lillie. He and Lillie had sent a card and a check to the lady up the street who watched Khalil. Ten
years earlier she’d awakened to find her husband dead in the bed beside her; last week, after her daughter had failed to respond to calls, Mrs. Towers had gone to her apartment and found the forty-two-year-old dead, where she’d collapsed, the medical examiner said, the day before. Mrs. Towers kept saying that she’d just saved up enough money for her husband’s gravestone. Her daughter had helped.
Then, Lillie’s best friend Temika’s two-year-old was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer—detected after Lillie told her that the child seemed to tire too easily and might have an infection. Lillie filled a basket with violets for healing, because she said she didn’t know what else to do.
And Beanie, the young boy, just twenty-two, who’d been working with Rayne since he started his business, had died on Sunday night after riding with a cousin whose license was suspended. Rather than pull over when cops flashed their lights, the cousin tried to outrun them, crashing and killing Beanie and another passenger. They’d had a funeral in a driving rain in North Philadelphia, where the grief and the storm drains backed up into the streets and spilled over onto the sidewalks, sloppy pools that splashed everyone nearby.
That was why there’d been the haphazard handling of the padlock at the job: with one foreman having moved to Atlanta and Beanie dead, his two most conscientious men were not on point to run quality control.
———
Rayne turned up the music and searched through different songs for the grittiest he could find, the harshest voices and heaviest bass lines. Too much. This morning, after they had made love, and knowing that Rayne would be leaving, Lillie and Rayne’s fears returned: that two people without happy nuclear families might just be kidding themselves that they could succeed in creating their own; that this island of calm and pleasure might not be real, or else that it couldn’t last; that they would ruin it out of ignorance; or that it would be taken from them. They felt it most when they were about to separate or when trouble struck near them, which it did so often that it became regular, like girls having babies. It was more regular in their lives to hear of deep stresses and tragedy than not. So they were always afraid.