by Brit Bennett
“I know, Mama. But you like it?”
“Sometimes I think I should’ve left sooner. For you and for me. We could’ve been anywhere. I could’ve been like Stella, lived a big life.”
“I’m glad you’re not like her,” her daughter said. “I’m glad I ended up with you.”
At the call center, she sat down each morning to dial the lists of phone numbers. It wasn’t easy work, her young supervisor told her on her first day. You have to be okay with rejection, people hanging up on you, cursing you out.
“Won’t be worse than nothin folks have said to my face,” she said, and the supervisor laughed. She liked Desiree. All the young girls did. Called her Mama D.
After her first week, she’d memorized the script, reciting it to herself when she sat on the bench outside the office, waiting for Early to pick her up. Hello Name—you were always supposed to personalize it—my name is Desiree Vignes with Royal Travel here in Houston. As a seasonal promotion, we’re giving away three days and two nights of hotel accommodations in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area. Now I’m sure you’re thinking what’s the catch, right? She always paused here, laughing a little, which either endeared her to the caller or gave him an opportunity to hang up. She was surprised by how often they stayed on the line.
“You got a sweet little voice,” Early told her once, grinning at her across their porch.
But what seemed more likely is that people were lonely. Sometimes, she imagined cold-calling Stella. Would she recognize her voice? Would it still sound like her own? Or would Stella sound like a lonely person who wanted her to keep talking, just to hear another voice on the line?
* * *
—
ADELE VIGNES WAS BURIED on the colored side of St. Paul’s Cemetery. Nobody expected any different. This was the way it had always been, the white folks in the north side, the colored folks in the south. Nobody complained until the year the eucharistic ministers at the white church that owned the cemetery cleaned tombstones for All Souls Day but only on the north side. When Mallard protested, the deacon did not want a fight, so he dispatched two grumbling altar boys with sloshing buckets to scrub the headstones on the colored side too. Jude almost laughed when her mother had told her—that was the solution, not desegregating the graveyard, just cleaning the headstones on both sides. A strong hurricane could flood the cemetery, the old caskets swinging open, filling with brown water. Some gravedigger rooting through the mud for gold watches and diamond rings, marveling over his good fortune, would step over bones, not knowing the difference.
At the cemetery, she watched Reese lift her grandmother, Early lined up across from him, four other pallbearers behind. Across the open earth, the priest blessed the body, his hand tracing the sign of the cross through the air, and like that, her grandmother was lowered into the earth. She rubbed her mother’s back, hoping that she wouldn’t turn around. She couldn’t look at her face, not right now. During the service, she’d held her hand, imagining another woman sitting in that pew, Stella worrying her fingers along a strand of rosary beads, joining her sister in silent grief.
At the repast, the town gathered inside Adele Vignes’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mallard’s lost daughter. She was in medical school now, they’d heard from her mother; half the room expected her to walk in wearing a white coat. The other half was skeptical, figuring that Desiree Vignes was exaggerating. How could that dark girl have done all those things Desiree said?
But they did not find her amongst the dead. She had slipped out the back door with her boyfriend, holding his hand as they ran through the woods toward the river. The sun was beginning to set, and under the tangerine sky, Reese tugged his undershirt over his head. The sun warmed his chest, still paler than the rest of him. In time, his scars would fade, his skin darkening. She would look at him and forget that there had ever been a time he’d hidden from her.
He unzipped her funeral dress, folding it neatly on a rock, and they waded into the cold water, squealing, water inching up their thighs. This river, like all rivers, remembered its course. They floated under the leafy canopy of trees, begging to forget.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Endless thanks to: my agent, Julia Kardon, for always believing; my editor, Sarah McGrath, for helping me wrangle this unwieldy book and challenging me to grow as a writer; to everyone at Riverhead but especially Team Brit, past and present: Jynne Dilling Martin, Claire Mcginnis, Delia Taylor, Lindsay Means, Carla Bruce-Eddings, and Liz Hohenadel Scott.
To every friend who has listened to me wail about the impossibility of writing a second novel, but especially Brian Wanyoike, Ashley Buckner, and Derrick Austin, whose support kept me sane. To my early readers Chris McCormick, Mairead Small Staid, and Cassius Adair, whose incisive and generous feedback encouraged and guided me. To all the librarians, booksellers, and readers who supported The Mothers. And lastly, to my family. I’m grateful for your love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brit Bennett is the author of the New York Times–bestselling novel The Mothers; a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize for the best first book, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award; and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
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