Grace

by Natashia Deon

  “It’s strong, isn’t it?” he said. “Burns. But it’s the best around. Tastes a little woodsy?”

  “A bonfire in a glass,” I said.

  “And I already know I’m gon’ regret giving you a taste.”

  “’Cause now I know where you hide your costly whiskey?”

  “Naw, ’cause now I gotta hear you talk.”

  I LIKE THE way we think of each other—sister and brother. Adopted, maybe. It’s like I can read his mind and know what he wants to eat or drink before he’s hungry or thirsty. And he thinks of things I need before I even want ’em. Like the bag of candy he brought back from town this morning. He came in the door popping a piece of it in his mouth. The smell was clean lemon. He didn’t even ask if I wanted some ’cause that’s the difference between us—I give it freely and he wants me to ask. Teases me. “Sure is good,” he said.

  I wasn’t gon’ ask.

  I tried not to pay him no mind. Instead, I focused on greasing my feet. Took the grease jar from under the bench and twisted it open. I scooped two fingers in it like a spoon, pulled back a clear wad, smooth as jelly, then warmed it by rubbing my hands together. That’s when he got louder with his sweets, clicking that rock candy against his teeth, slurping sugar slobber.

  I laughed, “Let me rub some of this grease on your face. It’ll loosen your scars.”

  “Can’t you see I’m working my mouth to enjoy this tasty treat?”

  “Suit yourself,” I said and widened my legs so that my big belly could fit between ’em. I swiped the grease on my right foot, then my left, took a deep breath and collapsed back on the bench, exhausted ’cause bending over winds me now.

  “Why your feet need greasing again anyway?” Albert said. “You just greased ’em this morning.”

  I laid back, took some deep breaths. It’s like I grew in a half second. “Albert,” I said. “Come and rub some grease on my feet.”

  “I ain’t touching your feet.”

  “I wiped your ass.”

  “Thank you,” he laughed.

  “You said it yourself, I’m eight months pregnant. I cain’t do everything I used to. You could help me.”

  “Fine. But let this be the first and only time.”

  He came over and got down on one knee, lifted my foot to his thigh. He dug a finger in the grease pot and hesitated to touch my foot, said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

  I wiggled my toes and smiled.

  He closed his eyes and touched the grease to my foot, gentler than I woulda thought. He cupped my whole foot in his palms and rubbed his thumbs along the ridge.

  “There,” he said and dropped my foot. “Give me the other one.”

  “Thas all you gon’ do?” I said.

  “Fine,” he said and lifted my half-greasy foot to his thigh again.

  He buried two fingers in the jelly, rubbed it around both hands, slid ’em over my foot, then underneath it, kneading his knuckles firm but gentle into the flat of it. He twisted a hand around my heel turning it like a knob and moved up to the ball of my foot, then through my toes. They separate easily for him.

  He ran two fingers up each toe, one at a time, a soft pinch over the bulgy tip, then back down again.

  I didn’t want him to stop.

  But he grabbed my other foot.

  He took his time with it. More time. Like he was discovering every crease. Gave me the chills.

  He put my foot down softly and said, “Where’d you get this grease from?”

  My voice quivered, “Bernadette said it’ll make my feet look young and smooth.”

  “Don’t make no sense . . .” he said.

  I stuck out my leg to see my feet, told him, “Ain’t everybody gotta walk around ugly as you.”

  He cleared his throat, got up from the floor, and sat up on the bench.

  He wouldn’t look at me.

  I put my hands on his forearm and shook him. “Albert? Don’t be like that.”

  He kept his head down.

  “I don’t think you’re ugly, Albert. Albert?”

  For the first time since the accident, tears dripped from his eyes. Just one at first.

  “Albert, I’m sorry. You ain’t . . .”

  “I know what I look like, Naomi. We’ve come too far to start lying to each other.”

  That’s when I kissed his face. And kissed him there on the side of his lip, scabs and all—so rough on my lips. He stopped talking for my kisses and sat up straight.

  “Not ugly, at all,” I said.

  And I kissed him again. Kissed his bottom lip that time. Gently. Felt it soft and unburnt, let him feel me soft, too. My lips were wet and I held myself there. I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

  SOMETIMES, WHEN nothin happens between friends, it changes everything. Like them Charleston earthquakes Cynthia describe. She say the happening is over before you realize something went wrong. Just a tremor along the porch at first. Like somebody was walking up the stairs—the beams sway, the wood creaks, and by the time you bother to look and see who’s coming, nobody’s there, the quake is already over, and the damage is done. But it also leaves you uneasy, knowing you was part of something big and missed it at the same time. It’s what happened between me and Albert when I kissed him.

  I’m guilty.

  I started the quake that changed our normal—my kissing him and the way I let myself feel when he rubbed my feet. Those innocent things damaging us.

  He’s different now.

  More different than what the fire did to him.

  So I been avoiding him. Hard to do in this place so small. Three days and I already miss our card game. We cain’t play no more. The way he looks at me makes me shy. I lose my words in his glances. I just want to get out of his way.

  I hardly took a breath until a few hours ago when he went to town for Cynthia.

  He’ll be back soon and we’ll start our strange dance over again—he’ll step forward, while I’ll step back. He’ll go right and I’ll go left. Yesterday, he bumped into me in the space between our sleeping quarters and his shop. Started us both rambling off apologies. For a second I thought he wanted to say something more but before he could, I took off into the shop. I thought, maybe I could clean something in there.

  In this shop is where I spent last night sleeping and didn’t get up this morning ’til I heard him go out the side door next to me.

  THE SIDE DOOR jerks open.

  I make myself look busy in the shop. I grab my broom and start brushing the metal scrapings across the floor. I can feel him staring at me.

  I don’t say hi and stay busy, turn my back to him, hear him walk into our room. From the corner of my eye, I can see him holding a sack of potatoes. A few seconds more, I hear ’em thud against our cutting board in our bedroom area. One, two, three of ’em. We need five. Five potatoes for stew. And before I think to stop myself, I walk my broom over to the doorway and fix my lips to say, “We need five if the stew’s gon’ turn out right.”

  But when I get to the doorway, he’s already walking straight to me. No dance.

  Damn.

  He say, “We cain’t keep doin this, Naomi.”

  I sweep. I keep sweeping. I swing my broom over the edge of a thin piece of metal that’s melted and froze to the floor.

  “Naomi?” he say. “You listenin?”

  He grabs my broom from my hand and I don’t stop him. Instead, I look around to see what else needs doing.

  He say, “I don’t want to keep playing these games.”

  I think I’ll start the kettle for tea.

  I go in our room for the kettle. He follows behind me.

  “When I come in,” he say, “You go outside. Or you go out before I’m up.”

  I pour pitcher water in the kettle and go back to the shop, set it on the grates near his furnace.

  “We cain’t keep going around and around like this.”

  I think the dust on the windowsill needs wiping down.

  I take a cloth and wipe the
sill.

  “Is this about the kiss?” he say.

  Ain’t that somethin. All of that dust came off in just one wipe.

  “Naomi?” He’s too close to me.

  “Get away from me!” I say, harsher than I shoulda. “I just don’t want nobody touching me!”

  “You mean you don’t want me touching you?”

  “I’m going outside to stretch,” I say and grab my coat off the hook next to the door, reach for the doorknob, but he reaches around me and holds the door closed with the flat of his hand.

  “Open this door, Albert.”

  “Why’d you kiss me?”

  “Step away from this door, Albert. This baby . . . this baby . . .”

  “Just stop avoiding me and listen . . .”

  I don’t want to.

  I cross my arms over my belly. “I need to go outside and walk for this baby.”

  “Just be honest with me,” he say. “Tell me why you kissed me?”

  “Why’d you rub my feet like that?”

  “Like what?” he say. “How am I supposed to rub somebody’s feet? I just did what you asked me . . . I don’t know.”

  “Then I don’t know, either.”

  “You do know. Tell the truth.”

  “How can I?” I say. “There’s a lot of questions in just that one. If you don’t know why you touched me different, I don’t know why I kissed you.”

  “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he say.

  I wish I could disappear.

  “And if you feel this way, too, let me know now.”

  He unblocks the door.

  I cain’t look at him.

  “Do you?” he say.

  I wish we could go back to the way we was.

  Wish we could erase the lie my kiss told. It’s easier if you don’t love me, I want to say but don’t.

  “Naomi?”

  “You’re a good man, Albert. But ain’t no more room in my heart to love. Jeremy took all I had with him. And I’m sorry for it.”

  He nods his head.

  Clears his throat.

  “Don’t be sorry,” he say. “That’s all I wanted to hear. The truth.”

  I want to take it back. Take back everything I just said and lie. What’s wrong with somebody believing they’re loved in every way? I shoulda lied. Made an excuse for why we couldn’t be together like that. And that way, he’d always know he was loved.

  “And this baby?” he say. “Could you let it love me?”

  My heart breaks at his asking. Must be what sorrow is. Not being able to change the truth. Not even for love.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he say. “The child ain’t mine. But seeing as Jeremy’s gone, you can let her love me.”

  “I cain’t make somebody love somebody else, Albert. I cain’t promise that.”

  “But you’re the mother. Mothers can set a child’s heart to the way she should go. So set her heart on me.”

  I don’t know.

  “Say yes.”

  His softness right now—the way his eyes plead and his shoulder sag, defenseless—remind me of the way James was with Hazel. His surrender.

  “All right,” I say.

  He hugs me like his body ain’t still in pain or my belly ain’t a bridge between us. And for the first time, touching him this close feels right. For the first time since Momma and Hazel, I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.

  41 / FLASH

  Conyers, Georgia, 1848

  THE KNOCKING ON the door is hard and wild.

  I hobble to a stand on my swole toes. Cynthia yells my name from the door and pushes it open, barges in. She don’t never come out here. Not for months.

  “Gaw-lee, look at cha,” she say. “Ain’t grown a pinch. Belly’s still small as four months pregnant. Not the six or seven you claim. Albert, you sure this ain’t your baby?”

  “Can I get you a drink?” Albert say.

  “No,” she say.

  “Can I get you something else?” Albert say.

  “Privacy. With Naomi.”

  I don’t want him to leave. Albert reads my thoughts and don’t go. He say, “Let me get you whiskey. Or bourbon?”

  “I just want a minute with her,” she say.

  “What you need?” Albert say. “Naomi can’t do nothin for you in her condition.”

  “This is something I need to say to only her. Wait outside the door if you want to. What you think I’m here to do, Albert? I’m the one helped save your life.”

  “The past is the past,” I say, final. I nod to Albert. Let him go out.

  “You should sit down,” Cynthia say. “Your feet don’t seem right. Might be getting the swelling condition. Could make you seize if it gets too bad.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll stand.”

  “Could kill the baby, too.”

  She helps me sit.

  From her waistband, she wiggles out an old brown leather notebook. Her mother’s diary. The same one she’s held onto and cussed at on the nights she’s drunk.

  “Maybe things would’ve been different if I woulda read it before recent,” she say. “Maybe not. I don’t know.” She opens her diary to a folded page. “I need you to read something.” She sits next to me on the bench and holds the book out for me to take but I stare at it, think of all the private things I’ve ever done and never wrote down. But if I did, I’d never want a stranger to see it.

  I say, “I cain’t read this.”

  She flicks her wrist. “My momma wouldn’t mind. She’s dead.”

  I shake my head. I won’t.

  Cynthia lays the book flat on her lap, closed. “All right,” she say. “My mother was dying when I found her. I was eleven years old. She had been in bed all day and into the night when she called to me. She took my hand and what I remember most is how cold she was. Middle of the hot summer and she was cold. Her grip was so weak. Even her tears were weak. They dried just as they fell.

  “All she kept saying was, ‘I’m sorry.’

  “When she died, she left me with an empty box and a blade. The blade was on the end of a candlestick holder. The holder had a small lever inside that slid up and down. And when I pulled it down, a blade shot out the top of it and the holder itself became my handle.”

  Cynthia holds out her book to me again. “Please, Naomi. I want you to see. I need you to read it.”

  I reach out for it, hesitating.

  She jerks it away. “I just want you to know,” she say. “My momma was a saint. Remember that when you read this.”

  I say, “Cynthia, I don’t have to read it.”

  “She didn’t know much about nothing. Was just like you when you came.”

  “Cynthia . . .”

  “Some women hid Shakespeare, mine had Fanny Hill. Wasn’t her choice. A pauper gave it to her and Momma didn’t know no better. It’s all she had for literature. Pornographic novels have story, too. So don’t judge her. It gave her permission, I think, to write what she did.”

  “You giving me pornography to read?”

  “That ain’t what I said. I said my momma’s a saint.”

  She puts the diary in my hand.

  I don’t want to read it.

  I sit with it on my lap, then open it slowly, turn it to the creased page halfway in and start reading it to myself.

  21 October 1818

  Dear Diary,

  I fear I am with child.

  For a bundle of rags—I am.

  But I want to remember. Recall every moment of the happening so as to never forget what happiness feels like.

  I was drying my hair when the rag salesman rattled my door. I should have covered my head but I did not. It had been a long time since we welcomed company here, over a year since we settled, the first time I had been alone in our home for so long—just over a fortnight.

  He stood behind the haze of my screen wearing his out of place business suit, his silly smile, and his almost ugly face, saved only by his pretty blue eyes.
<
br />   Just twenty-five cents, he said, and pulled from his leather bag a bundle of thick pink cloths.

  I opened my screen door though I’d already decided his fee was thievish. But I thought my husband and I could have used some color, some softness, to make us alive again so I agreed he could attempt to sway me.

  After a moment of salesmanship, I bent over to look into his bag and—I’m almost ashamed to say, but—I smelled him. Not on purpose, but—I did. Maybe my inhale was, at first, a sigh but I certainly breathed him in and smelled him fresh like jasmine.

  I sorted through his bag pretending not to notice, chose the fluffy yellow bunch and smiled. He said, pure cotton.

  I liked the sweet smell of his breath. It was not like my husband’s—whiskey laden and cigar stale. His was like honey, his lips full, drawing me in too long. He touched my chin and told me I was pretty.

  I dropped his rags and told him I was married. He said he understood and asked if he could show me how well his rags dry. He unfolded a gold one from behind the fastened compartment of his bag. He touched it to my damp hair.

  He dried it slowly while I watched his hands squeeze down the length of my brown hair and near my breast. I did not pull away when his slender fingers returned to my cheek, grazing it . . . and again. I closed my eyes. Felt the hairs on my cheek rise from his strokes and hold themselves there after his pass. My head rested on his hand.

  I allowed him to step through my door and felt the hard and soft of him brush by me. In an instant, he woke the whole of my body.

  I closed the solid door and waited there. He dropped his bag, pushed me against the wall. His lips were as sticky-sweet as they promised.

  But I had to stop him, told him I could not. He said he understood, adjusted himself and picked up his bag. He said he knew what I needed, said, “I can be your first.”

  I had been married since I was thirteen, I told him, ten years since my wedding night—he was too late to be first at anything. I put my hand on the doorknob, ready to pull it open when he took my other hand and kissed it like a gentleman’s good-bye.

  When he raised his head from my hand, I was captured by the bliss of his baby blues.

  In my hesitation, he pushed me against the door, his tongue pressing on mine, then he released me, asked if I still wanted him to go.