by Brit Bennett
At home, Reese stirred soup over the stove. He was shirtless, barefoot in jeans. He was always shirtless these days. You would’ve thought they were living in a cabana in Miami, not freezing in the north.
“You’re gonna catch pneumonia,” she said.
He smiled, shrugging. “I just got out the shower.”
His hair was still wet, tiny beads of water dotting his shoulders. She wrapped her arms around his waist, kissing his damp back.
“My grandma died,” she said.
“Jesus.” He turned to face her. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “She’s been sick—”
“Still. Are you all right? How’s your mama?”
“She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. The funeral’s Friday. I wanna fly down.”
“Of course. You should. Why didn’t you call me?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking. I couldn’t even look at the cadaver. Isn’t that stupid? I mean, I knew it was a dead body before. What makes today any different?”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Today is different.”
“We weren’t really that close.”
“Don’t matter,” he said, pulling her into a hug. “Kin is kin.”
* * *
—
THAT AFTERNOON, in a Burbank makeup trailer, the telephone rang seven times before the hairdresser yanked it off the hook, then shoved it at the blonde sitting in his chair. “I’m not your personal secretary,” he whispered loudly, handing over the phone. He didn’t know why the talent—which she was, in spite of his own taste—didn’t respect his time, why she was always late, why she didn’t tell her stalker boyfriend, or whoever kept calling, to bother her later. She told him that she wasn’t expecting a call but rose to answer anyway, hair half teased in a style that would mortify her decades later when she saw grainy clips from Pacific Cove on the internet.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s Jude,” the voice said. “Your grandma died.”
Stupidly, Kennedy thought first about her father’s mother, who’d died when she was little, her first funeral. It was the your that threw her off, not our grandmother. Her grandmother, the one she had never met. Would never meet. Dead. She leaned against the counter, covering her eyes.
“Oh Christ,” she said.
The hairdresser, sensing tragedy on the other end of the line, excused himself. Finally alone, Kennedy reached for a pack of cigarettes. She’d been trying to kick the habit. Her mother finally succeeded, now she nagged her about it all the time. Sometimes she told herself she’d quit cold turkey. She’d throw out every pack of cigarettes she owned. Then she’d always find loose ones hidden in her drawers, in the glove compartment of her car, tucked away for her future self. She felt like a junkie, really. Quitting was the only time she felt addicted. But she could quit later. Her grandmother had died. She deserved a cigarette, didn’t she?
“You should really work on your bedside manner,” she said.
On the other end of the line, she imagined Jude smiling.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know any other way to put it.”
“How’s your mom?”
“Okay, I think.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. She’s your grandmother too.”
“It’s not the same,” she said. “I didn’t know her like you did.”
“Well, I still thought you should know.”
“Okay,” she said. “I know.”
“Are you gonna tell her?”
Kennedy laughed. “When do I tell her anything?”
She did not tell her mother, for example, that she still talked to Jude. Not all the time but often enough. Sometimes Kennedy called her, left messages on her answering machine. Hey Jude, she said, every time, because she knew it drove her crazy. Sometimes Jude phoned first. Their conversations always went like this one—halting, a little combative, familiar. They never talked long, never made plans to meet, and at times, the calls seemed more perfunctory than anything, like holding a finger to another’s wrist to feel for a pulse. A few minutes they kept their fingers pressed there and then they let go.
They did not tell their mothers about these phone calls. They would both keep that secret to the ends of the twins’ separate lives.
“Maybe she’d want to know this,” Jude said.
“Trust me, she doesn’t,” Kennedy said. “You don’t know her like I do.”
Secrets were the only language they spoke. Her mother showed her love by lying, and in turn, Kennedy did the same. She never mentioned the funeral photograph again, although she’d kept that faded picture of the twins, although she would study it the night her grandmother died and not tell a soul.
“I don’t know her at all,” Jude said.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, late in bed, Jude asked Reese to fly home with her.
She was tracing her finger along his thick eyebrows, the beard he hadn’t trimmed in so long, she’d started calling him a lumberjack. He was changing, always. His jawline sharper now, his muscles firmer, the hair on his arms so thick that he couldn’t walk across the carpet without shocking her. He even smelled different. She noticed every little change about him since they’d broken up, right before she moved to Minnesota. He didn’t want to leave his life in Los Angeles. He didn’t want to follow her to the Midwest, hanging off her like dead weight. One day, he told her, she would wake up and realize that she could do much better than him.
All spring, they’d broken up slowly, one piece at a time, picking little arguments, making up, making love, then starting the whole cycle all over again. Twice, she’d almost moved in with Barry; it was better to break up now than delay the inevitable, she told herself, but each night, she slept in Reese’s bed. She couldn’t fall asleep anywhere else.
That year, the first snow had arrived earlier than she’d expected, tiny flurries falling on Halloween. She’d stared out the window of Moos Tower, watching undergraduates scurry past in their costumes. She was thinking about her cowboy sitting on the couch in that crowded party and, again, tried not to cry. But that night, she found him outside her apartment door in a black knit cap covered in snowflakes, a canvas bag slung over his shoulder.
“Goddamn,” he said. “I’m so goddamn stupid sometimes, you know that?”
At the university, she met a black endocrinologist willing to write Reese a prescription for testosterone. They had to scrimp each month to afford it out of pocket, but those street drugs would wreck his liver, Dr. Shayla said. She was blunt but kind—she told Reese, scribbling onto her pad, that he reminded her of her own son.
Now, lying in bed across from him, Jude kissed his closed eyelids.
“What do you say?” she asked.
“Really?” he said. “You want me to?”
“I don’t think I can go back there without you.”
She’d fallen in love with him when she was eighteen. She hadn’t slept a night away from him in three years. In a dingy New York City hotel room, she’d slowly unwrapped his bandages, holding her breath as cool air kissed his new skin.
* * *
—
ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE WAS HEREDITARY, which meant that Desiree would always worry about developing it. She would begin filling out crossword puzzles because she’d read in some women’s magazine that brain puzzles could help prevent memory loss.
“You’ve got to exercise your brain,” she would tell her daughter, “just like any other muscle.”
Her daughter didn’t have the heart to tell her that the brain was, in fact, not a muscle. She tried her best to help her with the clues while she imagined Stella out in the world somewhere, already forgetting.
* * *
—
<
br /> JUDE WINSTON’S HOMETOWN, which had never been a town at all, no longer existed. And yet, it still looked the same. She stared out the window of Early’s truck, which surprised her when he’d met them in Lafayette. She still expected the El Camino. “That car’s older than you,” Early said, laughing. “I had to junk it.” He was wearing his refinery coveralls, which also struck her, Early in a uniform. He pumped Reese’s hand and pulled her into a hug, kissing her forehead. His beard scratchy like she’d remembered it.
“Look at you,” he said. “All grown up. Can’t hardly believe it.”
He still looked strong even though his hair was beginning to gray, silver creeping up his sideburns, threading through his beard. When she teased him about it, he laughed, touching his chin. “I’m gonna cut it off,” he said. “Rather walk around babyfaced than lookin like Santa Claus.”
“How’s Mama?” she said.
He wiped his forehead, pushing back his baseball cap.
“Oh she all right,” he said. “You know your mama. She tough. She’ll push through.”
“I wish I’d been here,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if she meant that. She’d never known what to say around her grandmother anyway. But she wished she could have been there for her mother, who was never supposed to endure this alone. There were supposed to be two women comforting her grandmother at the end, one on each side of the bed, one holding each hand.
“It’s all right,” Early said. “Nothin you could’ve done. We just glad to have you now.”
She squeezed Reese’s thigh. He squeezed hers back. He was staring out the window, lips slightly parted. She knew he missed this, not sun-dappled beaches or frozen city sidewalks but brown countryside rolling flat into acres of woods. The white shotgun house appeared, looking the same as she’d remembered, which seemed wrong since her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.
You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.
* * *
—
SHE SPENT THE EVENING helping her mother cook for the repast. Early went to finalize everything at the funeral home and brought Reese with him. She stared out the kitchen window, watching both men climb into the truck, wondering what on earth they’d find to talk about.
“Y’all still happy?” her mother said. “He treat you good?”
Desiree wasn’t looking at her, bent over the oven to pull out the tray of yams.
“He loves me,” Jude said.
“That’s not what I asked. That’s two separate things. You think you can’t ever hurt nobody you love?”
Jude chopped celery for the potato salad, feeling that familiar surge of guilt. Four years she’d known about Stella and hadn’t said a word. She’d never expected that Stella would reemerge on her own, that one morning her mother would call her, fighting tears, and expose her lies. She’d apologized as much as she could, but even though her mother said she forgave her, she knew that something had shifted between them. She’d grown up in her mother’s eyes, no longer her daughter but a separate woman, complete with her own secrets.
“Do you think—” She paused, scraping the celery into a bowl. “Do you think Daddy loved you?”
“I think everybody who ever hurt me loved me,” her mother said.
“Do you think he loved me?”
Her mother touched her cheek. “Yes,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait around to see.”
* * *
—
THE MORNING OF THE FUNERAL, Jude awoke in her grandmother’s bed because, her mother told her, two unmarried people would not be sharing the same bed in her house. She was still trying to nudge them down the aisle, if a statement that obvious could be considered a nudge. She did not know that Jude and Reese had talked, once or twice, about marriage. They wouldn’t be able to, not without a new birth certificate for Reese, but still they talked about it, the way children talk about weddings. Wistfully. Her mother thought they were hip intellectuals who considered themselves too cool for marriage. Which was better than her understanding just how romantic they were.
Jude carried clean sheets to her old bedroom, helped Reese make the bed, not even pointing out that her mother and Early were also unmarried, in the eyes of the law and the Church. She couldn’t fall asleep until morning. She wondered, foolishly, if she might feel her grandmother’s presence somehow. But she felt nothing and that was worse.
In the hallway, she turned, pinning back her hair, while Reese zipped her black dress.
“I could hardly sleep last night,” she said. “Without you there.”
He kissed the back of her neck. He was wearing his good black suit. Her mother had asked him to help carry the casket. She’d heard them talking last night in the kitchen while she brushed her teeth. Her mother told Reese that she considered him a son, wedding or not, but she hoped at least that he wouldn’t make her wait forever to become a grandmother.
“I’m not sayin it has to be now,” her mother was saying. “I know y’all both busy. But someday, that’s all. Before I’m old and gray and can’t hardly move around. You would make a good daddy, don’t you think?”
He was quiet a minute. “I hope so,” he said.
* * *
—
NEAR THE END OF HER LIFE, Adele Vignes had told Desiree stories about her childhood that were so vivid, Desiree wondered if her mother was confusing them with her soap operas. A girl she’d hated in school who’d tried to push her down a well. Her brothers dressed in all black to steal coal. A poor boy bringing her a carnation corsage for senior prom. She’d bring up one of these anecdotes in front of the television, where she sat watching her soaps each afternoon. The shows seemed like the perfect form for her. Each day, the stories inching forward, but at the end of the week, the world essentially unchanged, the characters exactly who they had always been.
The first time her mother called her Stella, Desiree had just helped her into her chair. She was searching for the remote in the couch cushions but stopped suddenly.
“What?” she said. “What’d you call me?” She was so confused that she’d sputtered, “It’s me, Mama. Desiree.”
“Of course,” her mother said. “That’s what I meant.”
She seemed embarrassed by the slipup, as if it had only been poor manners. Dr. Brenner told them not to correct her mistakes. She said what she believed in her mind to be true; correcting her would only agitate or confuse her. And normally, Desiree didn’t. Not when her mother called Early Leon, not when she forgot the names for ordinary things—pan, pen, chair. But how could her mother forget her? The daughter who’d lived with her for the past twenty years? The one who cooked her meals, eased her into the bathtub, slowly administered her pills. Dr. Brenner said that was the nature of the disease.
“The far stuff, they remember,” he said. “Nobody knows why. It’s like they’re living their lives backward.”
Here was the backward story: the present and its tedium receding, all those doctor visits, the endless pills, the strange man shining lights in her eyes, the television programs she could never follow, the daughter watching her, rising each time Adele lifted out of her chair, any time Adele tried to go anywhere. She found herself in the strangest places. She went out to take a walk and fell asleep in a field for hours until the daughter, crying, wrapped her in a blanket and brought her home. She was a baby, maybe. The girl was her mother, or her sister. Her face switched each time Adele looked at her. Once there had been two. Or maybe there still was, maybe every time she closed her eyes, a new one appeared. She only remembered the name of one. Stella. Starlight, burning and distant.
“Where did you go, Stella?” she asked once.
This was toward the end, or, rather, the beginning. She was waiting for Leon to come home from the store. He had promised her daffodils. Stel
la was sitting next to her, rubbing a powdery lotion into her hands.
“Nowhere, Mama,” she said. She wouldn’t look at her. “I’ve been here the whole time.”
“You did,” Adele said. “You went somewhere—”
But she couldn’t think of where. Stella climbed into bed with her, wrapping her arms around her.
“No,” she said. “I never left.”
* * *
—
DESIREE VIGNES UP and left Mallard, people would say, as if there were anything abrupt about her departure. No one had expected her to stay past a year; she’d remained for almost twenty. Then her mother died, and she decided, finally, that she’d had enough. Maybe she couldn’t live in her childhood house after losing both her parents, although their final moments could not have been more different. Her father died in the hospital, staring into the faces of his killers. Her mother had simply gone to sleep and not woken up. She might have still been dreaming.
But it wasn’t only the memories that pushed her out. She was thinking, instead, of the future. For once in her life, looking forward. So after she buried her mother, she sold the house, and she and Early moved to Houston. He found a job at the Conoco refinery, and she worked at a call center. She had not worked in an office in thirty years. Her first morning, she shivered under the air-conditioning as she reached for the phone, trying to remember her script. But her supervisor, a thirtysomething blonde girl, told her that she was doing a fine job. She stared at her desk, shadowed by the praise.
“I don’t know,” she told her daughter. “It just seemed like time to move on.”
“But you like it there?”
“It’s different. The traffic. The noise. All the people. It’s been awhile, you know, since I been around so many people.”