by Brit Bennett
“Oh fine,” she said. “You know how it is. Where you off to right now?”
“Eula, Texas,” he said. “You ever been to Eula?”
“No,” she said. “What’s it like?”
“Dry,” he said. “Dusty. Lonesome. I feel like the only man alive out here. Like I fallen off the edge of the earth. You ever know that feeling?”
He imagined her on the other end, clutching the phone as she leaned against the kitchen door. The diner would be emptying now, near closing. Maybe she was all alone, willing the time to pass. Thinking about her sister, or maybe even thinking about him.
“I know it exactly,” she said.
* * *
—
IF YOU’D ASKED BACK THEN, nobody believed that Desiree Vignes would stay in Mallard. The bet around town was that she wouldn’t last a month. She’d tire of the crude whispers about her daughter, whispers she must have sensed, even if she could not hear them, each time the two walked around town. Some hoped, watching Desiree hold the hand of the little dark girl, that the two wouldn’t even stay that long. They weren’t used to having a dark child amongst them and were surprised by how much it upset them. Each time that girl passed by, no hat or nothing, they were as galled as when Thomas Richard returned from the war, half a leg lighter, and walked around town with one pant leg pinned back so that everyone could see his loss. If nothing could be done about ugliness, you ought to at least look like you were trying to hide it.
Still, a month passed, startling everyone. If Desiree didn’t leave because of her daughter, surely boredom alone would root her out. After all her city adventures, how could she endure small-town living? The endless carousel of church bake sales, bazaars, talent shows, birthday parties and weddings and funerals. She’d never cared much for participating even before she’d left—that was the other one, Stella, who’d baked pecan pies for St. Catherine’s bake sale, or sang dutifully in the school choir, or stayed two hours to celebrate Trinity Thierry’s seventieth birthday. Not Desiree, who only attended the party after Stella dragged her, then looked so bored you wished you hadn’t even invited her before she skipped out while you cut the cake.
Somehow that same Desiree was back, kneeling between her mother and daughter during Sunday Mass. She was as surprised as anyone to realize, one morning, that she had been home for an entire month. By then, she’d fallen into a routine, walking Jude to school, cleaning the house, working the sedate dinner crowd at Lou’s as Jude read books at the counter. Each evening, she waited for Early Jones to call. She never knew where he would be calling from, or if he would call at all, but when Lou’s phone rang near closing, she always answered. The shrill bell jolted her from mindlessly refilling sugar canisters or wiping down tabletops.
“Just checkin in on you,” Early always said. How was her day? Her mama? Her daughter? Fine, fine, fine. Sometimes he asked about her shift and she told him that she’d had to send back three orders of eggs because the line cook, distracted as all get out, gave her scrambles instead of over easys. Or she asked about his drive and he told her that he’d been caught in a dust storm in Oklahoma, couldn’t see his own hand in front of him, and he’d had to inch slowly down the road, hoping he wouldn’t get hit. His stories excited her, even the dull ones. His life seemed so different from hers. Over time, he started to talk about the past, like how he’d been raised by his aunt and uncle after his parents dropped him off one night. She’d heard of children like this who had been given away. After her father died, her mother’s sister offered to take one of the twins.
“It’s too much,” Aunt Sophie had said, clasping their mother’s hands. “Let us lighten your load.”
The twins pressed against their bedroom door, listening hard, each wondering if she would be the one to go. Would Aunt Sophie take her pick, like choosing a puppy out of a basket? Or would their mother decide which daughter she could live without? Eventually, their mother told Aunt Sophie that she could not separate her girls, but later, Desiree learned that her aunt had asked for her. Aunt Sophie lived in Houston, and Desiree used to imagine her life there, a city girl whisking around in starched dresses and shiny leather shoes, not the faded calico her mother salvaged from the church bin.
After Mallard, Early said, he was sick of farming other people’s land, so he set off to Baton Rouge to try his luck. Well, the only luck he found was the hard kind. He spent a year there, stealing car parts in order to feed himself, until he got caught and shipped off to Angola State Prison. He was twenty then, already a man in the eyes of the law and truth telling, he’d felt like a man since the night his parents left him without saying good-bye. The world worked differently than he’d ever imagined. People you loved could leave and there was nothing you could do about it. Once he’d grasped that, the inevitability of leaving, he became a little older in his own eyes.
He spent four years in prison, a time he leapt over and would never, in all his life, talk much about.
“Does that change anything?” he asked her.
She imagined him in a phone booth somewhere, his boot kicked up on the glass.
“What would it change?” she said.
He was quiet a minute, then said, “Oh, I don’t know.”
But she knew what he meant: would she think about him differently now? She wasn’t sure what she thought about him at all. She’d had a crush on him once, long ago, but she didn’t know the man he’d grown up to be. She had no idea what he wanted from her. Weeks before, he’d offered to find Stella, and when she told him that she couldn’t pay him right away, he said, “That’s all right.”
“What you mean that’s all right?” she said.
“I mean, I don’t need it right off. We can work somethin out.”
She’d never met a working man who was so casual about his money, but then again, she’d never met a working man who did what Early did for a living. He hunted bail jumps who’d disappeared without a trace, hoping to start over somewhere new. But there was always a trail if you looked closely enough—no one disappeared completely. Again, she thought about the envelope of photographs he’d given her. In the diner, she’d held the package, her heart thudding.
“Don’t worry,” he’d said. “I’ll send that sonofabitch far away from here.” She must have looked unsure because he said, “Trust me. I won’t give you up.”
But why wouldn’t he? He barely knew her and Sam had offered him good money. What reason did he have to be loyal to her? For weeks, she’d wondered if she and Jude should move on again. If Sam was looking, wouldn’t he eventually find her? Wouldn’t he just travel to Mallard himself? But maybe now, Mallard was the safest place to be. Sam’s hired man told him she wasn’t in Louisiana, and what reason would Sam have to doubt him? Maybe she could trust Early—if he’d wanted to hurt her, Sam would have found her already. But just because she could trust him didn’t mean that he didn’t want anything.
“He just tellin you what you wanna hear,” her mother said one night, handing her a wet plate. “That man don’t know where Stella is any more than you do.”
Desiree sighed, reaching for the dish rag.
“But he knows how to look,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we try?”
“She don’t want to be found. You gotta let her go. Live her life.”
“This ain’t her life!” Desiree said. “None of it woulda happened if I didn’t tell her to take that job. Or drag her to New Orleans, period. That city wasn’t no good for Stella. You was right all along.”
Her mother pursed her lips. “It wasn’t her first time,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Bein white,” her mother said. “New Orleans was just her chance to do it for real.”
* * *
—
HERE WAS THE STORY her mother had been keeping:
A week after Stella disappeared into the city, Willie Lee came by the shotgun house, hangdog. He
had something to tell Adele—something he should’ve told her weeks before Founder’s Day. One afternoon he’d driven Stella into Opelousas. She helped him around the butcher shop on weekends because she was quick at adding figures in her head. She could eyeball a pound of ground chuck more accurately than him, and whenever he weighed her measurements, she was never off. She was a smart, careful girl, but that last summer, he’d noticed something different about her. She seemed sadder, wrapped up in herself. Because she’d dropped out of school, he figured, although he didn’t quite understand it, having flunked out of ninth grade himself. A girl who could eyeball a pound of ground chuck would do fine in life, college or not. But not everybody was practical minded like him, so when Stella sullenly stood behind the cash register, he figured that she was still disappointed that she wouldn’t be off to Spelman someday like she’d hoped.
So he’d invited her to Opelousas one afternoon. He had to make deliveries and figured, hell, she might want to get out of town for a bit. He’d given her a nickel to buy a Coke, and when he’d finished unloading, he found her standing beside his truck, breathless and flushed. She’d gone inside some shop called Darlene’s Charms, where the shopgirl mistook her for white.
“Isn’t it funny?” she’d said. “White folks, so easy to fool! Just like everyone says.”
“It ain’t no game,” he told her. “Passin over. It’s dangerous.”
“But white folks can’t tell,” she said. “Look at you—you just as redheaded as Father Cavanaugh. Why does he get to be white and you don’t?”
“Because he is white,” he said. “And I don’t wanna be.”
“Well, neither do I,” she’d said. “I just wanted to look at that shop. You won’t tell my mama, will you?”
In Mallard, you grew up hearing stories about folks who’d pretended to be white. Warren Fontenot, riding a train in the white section, and when a suspicious porter questioned him, speaking enough French to convince him that he was a swarthy European; Marlena Goudeau becoming white to earn her teaching certificate; Luther Thibodeaux, whose foreman marked him white and gave him more pay. Passing like this, from moment to moment, was funny. Heroic, even. Who didn’t want to get over on white folks for a change? But the passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse. Desiree only knew the failures: the ones who’d gotten homesick, or caught, or tired of pretending. But for all Desiree knew, Stella had lived white for half her life now, and maybe acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether. Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.
* * *
—
“FINISHIN UP,” Early said, two nights later, calling outside of Shreveport. “Headin back your way, if you still wanna look for your sister.”
She had never imagined that Stella kept big secrets from her. Not Stella, who’d slept beside her, whose thoughts ran like a current between them, whose voice she heard in her own head. How could she have spent that whole summer not knowing that Stella had already decided to become someone else? She didn’t know who Stella was anymore, and maybe she’d never quite known her at all.
She twirled her finger tighter around the phone cord. Inside the empty diner, Jude sat at the counter, reading a book. She was always reading, always alone.
“Yes,” Desiree said. “I suppose so.”
* * *
—
THE MORNING EARLY JONES ARRIVED, the sky hung heavy and hot with rain. From the edge of the couch, Desiree listened to the spring storm as she braided Jude’s hair, remembering those first weeks in New Orleans, ducking with Stella under eaves when the showers caught them unaware. She eventually grew used to the capricious rain, but back then she’d shrieked at every sudden storm, laughing with Stella as they pressed against the side of a building, water splattering against their ankles. On the rug in front of her, Jude squirmed, pointing at the porch.
“Mama, a man,” she said, and there was Early standing on the front steps, jacket collar flipped up, his beard flecked with raindrops. Desiree scrambled to her feet, feeling strangely nervous, and she didn’t realize until she opened the door that they were standing exactly where they’d first met a lifetime ago.
“You can come in,” she said.
“You sure?” he said. “Don’t wanna make no mess.”
He looked as nervous as she felt, which emboldened her. She beckoned him inside, and he kicked his boots against the porch, shucking off mud. Then he followed her, standing in the doorway, one hand balled up in his jacket pocket.
“This is Jude,” she said. “Jude, come say hi to Mr. Early. I’m goin on a little drive with him, remember?”
“It’s just Early,” he said. “I ain’t nobody’s mister.”
He smiled, holding out his hand. Jude slid hers into his for a second, then darted off into the bedroom to fetch her book bag. Later, on the interstate, Early asked if Jude was always so quiet.
Desiree gazed out the window, watching the sunlight glint off Lake Pontchartrain.
“Always,” she said. “She ain’t like me at all.”
“Like her daddy, then?”
She didn’t like talking about Sam to Early, didn’t even want to imagine both men existing within the same expanse of her life. Besides, Jude wasn’t like Sam either. She was, in a way, like Stella. Private, like if she told you anything about herself, she was giving away something she could never get back.
“No,” she said. “Not like anybody but herself.”
“That’s good. For a girl to be herself.”
“Not in Mallard,” she said. “Not a girl like Jude.”
Early touched her hand, surprising her, then remembering himself, he pulled away.
“Won’t be easy,” he said. “Wasn’t easy for me. You know a man smacked me once at church? Right on the back of my neck. All because I put my finger in the holy water before his wife. Like I ruined it somehow. I thought my uncle was gonna stick up for me. I don’t know why, I just thought. But he told the man sorry like I done somethin wrong.”
He let out a bitter laugh. On the other side of the interstate, a freight train rumbled along, rainwater sloughing off the tracks. She turned back to him, eyes also wet.
“I should’ve said somethin,” she said. “When my mama run you off like that.”
He shrugged. “Long time ago.”
“So why you helping me then? Why really.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Guess it make me sad, thinkin about you and your sister.” He stared ahead, refusing to look at her. “And I guess I just like talkin with you. Ain’t talked to no woman so much in all my life.”
She laughed. “You ain’t said but two words at a time.”
“It’s enough,” he said.
She laughed again, touching the back of his neck, and later, he would tell her that was the first time he knew. That gentle hand on the back of his neck as he steered the car across the bridge.
* * *
—
THEY WERE CHASING THE PAST, searching for Stella down streets and stairwells and alleyways.
Trampling up the steps of the twins’ three-story walk-up, where an elderly colored couple now lived. Desiree asked, as politely as she could, if they might have received any mail intended for a Desiree or Stella Vignes, but they’d only lived there for two years. The lives of the twin girls had already faded into the apartment walls long before they’d arrived. Sisters cooking together, listening to the little transistor radio that had been their first luxury purchase. Sisters staying up until dawn, feeling finally like the grown women they believed themselves to be. Sisters signing the lease to that first apartment, although maybe even then, Stella had known that the arrangement would be temporary. Maybe she had already started searchin
g for a way out.
All afternoon, they hunted Stella in the old spots. They asked after her in Dixie Laundry and the Grace Note. Desiree searched for old friends in the phone book but nobody had heard from Stella. Farrah Thibodeaux, married now to an alderman, laughed when Desiree called.
“I can’t believe little Stella’s run off,” she said. “Now you, I would’ve thought . . .”
“Thanks anyway,” Desiree said, starting to hang up.
“Wait a minute,” Farrah said. “I don’t know what your hurry is. I was going to tell you I saw your sister.”
Her heart quickened. “When?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Before you left. She was walkin down Royal Street, just as carefree as she could be. Arm in arm with a white man too. Looked right at me, then looked the other way. I swear she saw me.”
“You sure it was her?”
“As sure that it wasn’t you,” Farrah said. “It’s all in her eyes, honey. Her white man was handsome too. Must’ve been why she was smiling like that.”
Stella leaving her to chase after some man. Stella secretly in love. Stella, who had never been boy crazy, who had rolled her eyes at Desiree mooning over Early, who had never even had a boyfriend before. The frigid twin, the boys called her. But Early told her that the simplest explanation is often the right one.
“You be surprised by what emotion make people do,” he said.
“But I know her,” she said, then stopped herself. She couldn’t assume anything about Stella anymore. Hadn’t she learned that already?
She was exhausted by the time Early suggested she try the Maison Blanche building. She’d only ventured inside once before, days after Stella first disappeared. She’d told herself, riding the streetcar down Canal, that Stella couldn’t be gone for good. This was Stella, fallen into one of her bad moods. Stella playing hide-and-seek, ducking behind the drying sheets. She told herself lots of reassuring things she didn’t believe. Stella would pop back up. She would appear on their apartment stoop and explain herself. She wouldn’t walk away from the best job she’d ever had. She wouldn’t leave her sister behind.