It's All Love

by Marita Golden

  And you were.

  We rode through all of the Alleghenys in silence. Leleti dozed off as we neared the end of the turnpike, and John lifted a lock of her hair, twirling it absently around his finger.

  He began to hum a song that of course I couldn't recognize. It was mid-tempo and minor, more melancholy than the music I remembered them listening to. He hummed it through to the end, and the more notes he revealed, the more familiar the melody became. I knew it somehow, suddenly. I felt eager then but decided not to say anything. I joined in, harmonizing the higher notes, hoping he couldn't hear. But as soon as I began, John gave a little start and glanced back. I wasn't looking in his direction when he did, and he turned back to the road, the corner of his mouth slightly upturned then.

  “Huh,” he exhaled when our song ended. “Huh,” he repeated, bemused. He turned his head again and parted his lips. Then Leleti stirred in front of me and John frowned, facing forward.

  I'm not sure when I dozed off, but when I finally woke up, we were in Albion and Leleti was at the wheel. John sat sleeping in front of me.

  It was still dark when we arrived in Albion, but first light would likely be creeping over the horizon in one or two hours. I was surprised to find Evan's house bursting with gilded light and grateful laughter at four in the morning. Family milled inside, passing the sheer-curtained windows. Friends gathered on the side of the place, in front of the garage, passing bottles of liquor and crass jokes they'd first heard from Evan.

  Tan siding, kelly green shutters, brick steps. This was the kind of warm, solid house that forgave and welcomed, accepted and embraced. Relief swept over my arms, legs, and neck, raising the fine hairs there. This was a good place for a man to have died.

  I was the first to open my car door. Leleti and John didn't follow. I slammed the door behind me, and John stirred in his squeaky bucket seat. “John?” Leleti tearfully ventured. He went from zero to attentive in about a nanosecond, and they sat staring moonily at each other for longer than I cared to watch. It was cold. I wanted to go in. But I didn't know these people well enough to go in before Leleti did.

  I looked back into the Cooper. John rocked Leleti in his arms, sort of shushing and composing her. I didn't have time for all that. I went to the door and knocked.

  Uncle Devin opened it. His face, tear-stained and bright, sort of trembled when he saw me. I pulled him into a hug before I had time to think better of it. Strange that under any other circumstances, I would've second-guessed wrapping my arms around him. Strange how quickly death can close the gaps of estrangement.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I nodded over his shoulder. “You?”

  He sucked in a deep breath and didn't answer. I wanted to say something comforting. Instead, I pulled back, squeezed his arm, and brushed by him.

  There were so many introductions, so many opportunities for people I didn't know to explain, “This is Evan's oldest grandchild. Leleti's baby”

  Friends of the friends of Evan's family were clasping my hand between both of theirs, cooing their condolences for my loss.

  I was an automaton, fixed with a polite permasmile, echoing small hellos.

  “Now, which one is Leleti?”

  This went on for at least a half hour. Even now I can't remember when Leleti and John came in (or if they did at all). I remember the tipsy anecdotes carried from room to room on a nicotine mist and how tightly they all hugged me, dozens of people whose names I still don't know, people who knew Evan longer and better than I realized possible. They enveloped me, these neighbors and friends and coworkers. I remember how, looking at them and feigning a calm resignation, I started to bawl. I cried until I was possessed, cried until I was exorcised. And then Wife Three, whose name was Dorothy, led me to the kitchen.

  I have always loved repasts. Repasts are where I try to get the hollowing of a good cry to fill with folks’ offerings of food. I've never succeeded, but it's always a nice redirection of effort.

  EVAN'S FAMILY CHURCH was small and genial, just like the town itself. Every Black person in Albion seemed to have shuffled in and settled themselves into the long, crimson-cushioned pews. Most of them had stopped off to view his body. Not many wept. Evan's chrome casket was lined with lavender velvet and stretched out just under the pulpit at the front of the sanctuary.

  I sat about five rows behind my parents and waited. I'm still not sure what for. Maybe I expected Leleti and John to make spectacles of themselves by waving the stalks of sandalwood incense to cleanse the air of sorrow or attempting to hum one of Liberia Kightlinger's wordless dirges.

  A convoy of acquaintances marched to the microphone, saying the kinds of flat and flattering things that are always said at funerals. No one mentioned Evan's addictions. I was glad that there was such willingness to recuse in a room where so many could choose to indict.

  I didn't think I'd cry, but I did. It was Uncle Devin who'd caused it. I watched him throughout the eulogy, bravely sucking in such large gusts of air. He was trying to be the kind of man his father was, a man whose grief was complicated and quiet and tearless. But I saw only the little boy who'd tagged along to visit me one summer, on a day trip with his parents, and proudly emptied his pockets of change, standing in front of me. He let his little six-year-old fists hover over my open twelve-year-old palms before opening his hands and letting the coins fall. As I caught them, he declared, “Here's a little money for you. You know, because that's what uncles are supposed to do.” I wanted to reach up and rub his head that day—like I was the Wally to his Beave or something. He was vulnerable and earnest then, so tiny and so deliberate.

  Holding composure would be impossible for him now.

  He sobbed, his head thrown back in a kind of agony that couldn't exist on its own. We were all pulled into it. I was pulled into it, the unrelenting echo of vacancy. His mother pulled him close, but her gesture didn't quiet him. Her embrace freed him to really convulse, and she held him, squaring her shoulders.

  I wondered if I'd cry that way when my own parents died.

  But it was impossible for me to predict. Hotter tears coursed over the ones already cooling on my cheeks.

  When the service ended, I saw Uncle Devin in front of the church, face awash in mourning, and I tried pressing toward him. The crowd was too thick. The closer I inched, the more the gap between us widened with well-intentioned strangers. I wanted to say that I loved him, because I never had before. I wanted to insulate him from the overabundance of condolences he wasn't composed enough yet to hear. But before I got to him, he was herded into the limousine, the last of Evan's immediate family to enter, and with his exit, the rest of us rushed to our cars to join the processional to the cemetery.

  I remember standing frozen for a moment, almost shocked by the swiftness with which I'd ended up alone in the parking lot. Everyone had cleared out without noticing me, trembling, planted on the fringe of the asphalt.

  Leleti and John were already in the Mini when I finally found them. I thought they'd make a snide remark about my having taken so long getting back to the car, but when I crawled clumsily into the backseat, John stayed still. The engine wasn't even running. Leleti's tears were slowly drying, and John and I listened as her clipped breaths grew steady. The last car of the processional disappeared down a street at the end of the block.

  Leleti knew Albion well, even though she'd never lived there. Without announcement or ceremony—maybe without even admitting it to herself—she'd made her father's life an ongoing study. Learning the names of the streets he'd run and the haunts he'd frequented was a big part of her cherished firsthand knowledge about him. I knew she'd have no problem finding the gravesite. Still, I wondered why we had let the group drift into the early-afternoon haze. I wondered why none of her siblings had waited for us and if anyone would miss us when they arrived at Evan's interment.

  The swell of closeness I'd felt just the night before receded in the ghostly still of the parking lot and I was grateful for the steady dr
one of Leleti's breathing, settled by the occasional sigh John released into the silence. I stared at their hands, clasped atop the arm rest, and before long, Leleti threaded her fingers through John's and nodded. He unknit their hands and started the ignition, peeling across the lot with a jolt.

  WHEN WE GOT THERE, the minister was finishing his commitment of Evan's body to the ground. Ash to ash. I thought of the nicotine Evan claimed was calling him, the last time I'd seen him alive. I thought of him existing among cigarette cinders, some of which may have once been his own. Evan knew quite a few of the folks buried out here. Albion legend had it that Evan was the only brother in town brave enough to spend whole nights in the cemetery. He'd passed out by his older sister's grave a few times. On one or two other occasions, it was said that he'd deliberately camped there to spare his wife and kids the sight of him haggard and high.

  After the congregants dropped their white roses into the grave, they ambled on by Dorothy and Devin and Evan's other, older children, as interchangeable to me as members in a Greek chorus, sitting in metal folding chairs in the first row of the tented interment, offering their last, pat expressions of sympathy.

  We didn't even bother to approach the fray or look for extra roses to toss into the ditch. We stood behind it all, watching the crowd thin, watching everyone resignedly walk away.

  Leleti and John aren't joiners. It occurred to me then that neither am I.

  We meandered back to the Mini and climbed in without saying a thing to one another. John pumped the gas pedal, trying to get the engine to turn over. It wouldn't start. Though I'm certain the last few straggling cars must've noticed that we'd stalled, no one asked, before leaving, if we needed a jump.

  When we resigned ourselves to the reality that the car wouldn't start without a call to AAA, the three of us climbed back out of it, but not before Leleti pulled two stalks of san-dalwood incense from the glove compartment. We trudged through the soft, muddy grass, back to Evan's open grave. When we were alone, we walked up to the chasm where my grandfather lay and all leaned forward to look, together. Leleti dropped to her hands and knees and just stared and stared and stared.

  John pulled out his lighter and burned the tips of the incense orange, then joined his wife on the ground. They waved the stalks around themselves and over the grave, while I stood a few feet off and watched.

  “I don't know why I love you,” I started to sing, softly, confusedly. “I don't know why. I love you. …”

  “I don't know why I love you,” John joined in. “But I love you.

  “Always treat me like a fool. Kick me when I'm down— that's your rule …”

  Stevie Wonder. He was one of the few mainstream artists Leleti and John played, and this was their favorite of his songs. They used to sing it to me before bed.

  I folded my arms around my chest and hugged myself, harmonizing lowly. Neither of my parents turned to acknowledge me, but they didn't have to. It was enough that they'd helped me sing.

  Why We Jump

  WILLIAM HENRY LEWIS

  for Dieudonne

  WHEN LYNETTE SIMMONS sees Samuel Cates for the first time in twenty-five years, she is not sure if it is the Mr. Cates she remembers. She's on the train home, Green Line to Columbia Heights, when she sees him. He stands facing the darkness of the Metro tunnel, rushing past the double door windows. He fidgets, clutches his bag, shifts his weight, anxious for the next station. When he lifts his head to look at the reflection of the people in the car, she sees his face. Lynette recognizes the small ears and the thin, carefully kept mustache. Mr. Cates, the man who, when she was twelve, took a running leap from the floor above her apartment and crashed through the deck roof her daddy had just built. The apartments were terraced: The Sim-monses’ family-size apartment on the fourth floor pushed beyond the outer wall of the fifth floor, where a two-foot ledge jutted out from the large windows of Mr. Cates's single-unit apartment. Talk got around the building that he was trying to make it to the alley, five floors down. That meant a talented leap past the Simmonses’ small deck, and though he took to it as if it were his only way out, he never made it. Sammy Cates, whom she hasn't seen since.

  He gets off at LEnfant Plaza station. Before reasoning on the wisdom of it, she follows him as he heads for the Blue Line. Mr. Cates carries a faded Washington Bullets bag under his arm as he rides the escalator from the platform. His wool blazer looks tailored, recently pressed, with whalebone buttons. The back of his shirt collar—for that's all she can see after he has turned from her—is clean but frayed. Too much bleach, she thinks to herself. As he rises, she holds back, takes notice of his shirt collar, blazer, then his pressed, well-worn khakis and running shoes.

  She eases onto a bench, rests her grocery bags, catches her breath before she decides to proceed. For a moment she's disturbed: She feels unsettled in having seen him but doesn't know why. She wants to feel that seeing Mr. Cates is a sign—a revelation, as folks at church might call it; an incarnation, as she'd like to call it—but of what? There are gaps and voids in how she has imagined him. She can't abide by what has slipped her mind for so long, and in this forgetfulness sits herself down longer than she would like. Lynette Simmons gets this way when the what-should-be of her life clashes with the what-is. Like when she finds herself frozen at the breakfast table, spoon in hand, cereal in the bowl, no milk in the fridge. But she has three cartons of juice, five boxes of cake mix, enough canned beans for ten meals—supplies that a fixed shopping list provides. Everything but milk, which, because she always buys it, she leaves off the list, along with tampons and coffee.

  SHE REMEMBERS THAT DAY, twenty-five years ago, as a hot one. Most of the days she recalls from childhood were hot, when sweat came from double dutch and bicycle races, when she heard the off-key warble of the ice cream truck more often than the wail of sirens. If she ever explains that day to anyone, she knows she would start with the heat; the day was hotter than most she remembers. It was the heat that made folks crazy: Kids dropping bricks onto Military Road from the Six teenth Street overpass, rich White folks cursing at each other on the sidewalk in Georgetown. The police were everywhere, it seemed, busy with arresting someone or wanting to. It was hot all over D.C., even up on Meridian Hill, where a breeze might catch you by surprise.

  The Orioles game had just gone off the air. Her father was turning ribs on the grill. Her mother had been out for cigarettes and beer to replace what Lynette's father and her uncle Norman had already drunk. Lynette was mixing instant ice tea in the kitchen. Auntie Berthine, from across the hall—more close friend than blood aunt—was over to visit, along with her cousin, Odessa, from down the street. When Berthine wasn't teasing Lynette's father about his sorry Orioles, she was on Lynette about how much she didn't carry herself like the girl she was supposed to be. When her mother wasn't around, Berthine and Odessa took turns working their finishing-school ideals into Lynette. They called it babysitting. On that day they were sitting on the deck like two doves—pretty dark eyes and big breasts on the both of them. They worked the dozens on Lynette's father while he looked after the ribs and Uncle Norman finished off the beer.

  Lynette was bringing the pitcher of ice tea out to the deck when she heard heavy footsteps running above their living room ceiling, two heavy steps toward the outside wall, and then down came Mr. Samuel Cates, through the green deck roof and right onto her father's lounger.

  All of them looked to the hole in the roof first. Through that hole, Lynette could see the top of the window of Mr. Cates's apartment. He didn't have a deck like the Simmonses’ apartment, just a small ledge and a railing.

  Then they looked to Mr. Cates. The pitcher tipped in Lynette's hands as she looked him over, and she spilled ice tea down her front before dropping the pitcher. It broke, but no one seemed to care about that.

  Blood trickled from the top of Mr. Cates's head to his temple. He kept his hair cut close to the skin, and that made the gash in his head look larger than it really was. Lynette had already made a
hobby of observing Samuel Cates. In her little girl's mind, it was spying; that was more exciting. She might catch a glimpse of him in the laundry room of the building, or standing on the elevator with her mother in between them, she would crane her head ever so slightly to stare at his hands. His fingernails were pristinely kept. Her daddy's carried thin lines of dirt nearly every day other than Sunday.

  She mostly saw Mr. Cates from behind, awkwardly backing onto the elevator to avoid eye contact, or rushing out of the building and down the street; he was always in a hurry. But now he was right in front of Lynette. Her mother wasn't there to scold her for staring. It seemed to her that she never had a chance to look at anyone for long. But now he was in the middle of her deck, dazed and bleeding. He was wearing a tan suitcoat and pants, a nice tie to match, though the collar of his shirt was red with blood. But right then none of that seemed strange to her.

  BY THE TIME Lynette rises from the bench, Mr. Cates is stepping from the escalator to the Blue Line platform. She catches a glimpse of his black socks and running shoes. Those surprise her, the running shoes. More than surprised, she's curious. She heads for the Blue Line.

  For years she had imagined him in worsted wool slacks and loafers. She deduces that the running shoes support all the walking he must do from place to place. He doesn't own a car; it's been years since he stopped driving. She decided this a long while back. She imagined he didn't drive because he is a man who distracts easily, making esoteric the mundane of what's around him: faulty green light, flickering rather than solid; road construction sign, bent so that it reads SLOW MEN; flurry of pigeons across the reflection of a sedan's tinted windows; the wide eyes of four children in a bus, staring at the pigeons; a fifth child, two seats back, fascinated with a feather the flurry has cast to the wind. No, driving would be too risky for Samuel Cates. He'd be watching that feather or absorbed with the child, watching the feather, and sideswipe somebody's car. Then he'd have to deal with that. She's certain he's cut out the risk of accidents he can't afford or attention he'd rather not face.