by Tayari Jones
I went back to the car, turned over the ignition, and flipped on the heat. I couldn’t sit there until she got back, wasting time I couldn’t afford to lose and burning gas I couldn’t afford to waste. I rummaged through the glove compartment and found a golf pencil and small pad. I should at least use a full-size sheet of paper if I was going to leave a note. I got out of the car and searched the trunk, but there was nothing in it but my duffel bag and an atlas. I sat on the fender, using the palm of my hand as a desk as I tried to think about what to write. Dear Davina, Thank you very much for two days of restorative sex. I feel much better now. I knew better than to even press pencil to paper with that idea.
“She at work,” said a voice behind me.
There stood a little knucklehead about five or six years old, a felt Santa hat crooked on his peanut head.
“You talking about Davina?”
He nodded and forced a candy cane into a sour pickle wrapped in cellophane.
“You know what time she’s coming back?”
He nodded and sucked on the pickle and peppermint.
“Can you tell me what time that is?”
He shook his head no.
“Why?”
“Because it might not be your business.”
“Justin!” said a woman from the porch next door, where the French teacher once lived.
“I wasn’t talking to him,” Justin said. “He was the one talking to me.”
To the woman on Mr. Fontenot’s porch, I explained, “I’m trying to find Davina. Justin said she’s at work and I was wondering what time she would be home.”
The woman, whom I took to be Justin’s grandmother, was tall and dark-skinned. Her hair, white at the temples, was braided across the top of her head, like a basket. “How do I know it’s your business?”
Justin smirked at me.
“She’s my friend,” I said. “I’m leaving town and I wanted to say good-bye.”
“You could leave her a note,” she said. “I’ll give it to her.”
“She deserves more than a note,” I said.
The grandmother raised her eyebrows like she figured out what I was talking about. Not a see you later but a true farewell. “It’s Christmastime. She won’t get off until midnight.”
I couldn’t spend the whole day waiting for the opportunity to disappoint Davina in person; it was 4:25 p.m., and I needed to get on the road. I thanked the grandmother and Justin before getting back in the car and headed toward Walmart.
I walked through the store, scanning all the aisles until I found Davina in the back, near the craft supplies, cutting off a length of something blue and fuzzy for a thin man wearing glasses. “Give me another yard,” he said, and she flipped the bolt a couple of times and whacked at it with a pair of large scissors. She noticed me as she was folding the fabric and attaching the price tag. Handing it to the man, she smiled at me, and I felt like the worst person in the world.
When the man walked away, I advanced to the table like I, too, needed something measured and cut.
“Can I help you, sir,” she said, smiling like this was some kind of holiday game.
“Hey, Davina,” I said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“You okay?” she asked, eyeing my dirty clothes. “Did something happen?”
“Naw,” I said. “I just didn’t get a chance to change. But I need to talk to you right quick.”
“I don’t have a break coming up, but grab some fabric and come back. I can talk to you here.”
The fabrics, arranged by color, reminded me of Saturdays with my mother, the way she would drag me to Cloth World in Alexandria. Grabbing a bolt of red fabric flecked with gold, I returned to the cutting table and handed it to Davina, who immediately started pulling the cloth free.
“Sometimes people ask how much we have so we have to measure it all. So I’ll do that while you talk. What’s up? You here to say you miss me?” She smiled again.
“I’m here to say that I’m going to miss you,” I said.
“Where you going?”
“Back to Atlanta.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You going back to her?”
I nodded.
“That was your plan the whole time, wasn’t it?”
She snatched hard at the cloth until the spool was bare and the fabric was stretched out on the table, looking like a movie-star red carpet. She measured it against the yardstick at the edge of the table, counting under her breath.
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said.
“I distinctly asked you if you were married.”
“And I told you I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t act like you didn’t know.”
“I want to say thank you. That’s why I’m here, to say thank you and good-bye.”
Davina said, “I want to say fuck you. How about that?”
“What we did was special,” I said, feeling like a jackass, although I had not uttered a single lie. “I care about you. Don’t be like this.”
“I can be however I want.” She was mad, but I could see that she was trying not to cry. “Go on then, Roy. Go on back to Miss Atlanta. But I want two things from you.”
“Okay,” I said, eager to do something and show her that I was cooperating, that I didn’t want to hurt her.
“Don’t scandalize my name by talking about how when you got out of jail you were so desperate that you knocked off some girl from Walmart. Don’t say that to your friends.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It wasn’t like that.”
She held up her hand. “I mean it. Don’t taste my name in your mouth. And Roy Hamilton, promise me you will not ever come banging on my door.”
Celestial
Is it love, or is it convenience?” Gloria asked me that Thanksgiving Day after my father had stormed upstairs and Andre went to gather our coats. She explained that convenience, habit, comfort, obligation—these are all things that wear the same clothing as love sometimes. Did I think this thing with Andre was maybe too easy? He is literally the boy next door.
If my mother were here now, she would see that what we had chosen was anything but convenient. It was Christmastime, and I own a business with a staff of two, and now my wrongfully incarcerated husband is released and I have to tell him that I’m engaged to another man. The situation was a lot of things—tragic, absurd, unlikely, and maybe even unethical—but it was not convenient.
As Andre ran his lines, rehearsing the speech that we agreed would explain ourselves to Roy as gently as possible, I looked up into the empty branches and wondered aloud how long Old Hickey had been here. Our houses were constructed in 1967. As soon as the last brick was mortared into place, our parents moved in and commenced making babies, but Old Hickey predated all of that. When workers cleared the land to build, scores of pine trees were cut down and the stumps blasted from the ground. Only Old Hickey had been spared.
Andre slapped his hand against the rough bark. “Only way to tell is to cut it down and count the rings. I don’t want to know that bad. The answer is old. Hickey has seen it all.”
“You ready?” I asked him.
“There’s no ready,” Dre said, leaning back on the tree and pulling me close. I didn’t resist and pushed my fingers through his dense hair. I leaned to kiss his neck, but he gripped my shoulders and held me away so we could see each other’s faces. His eyes reflected back the grays and browns of winter. “You’re scared,” he said. “I can feel shaking beneath your skin. Talk to me, Celestial.”
“It’s real,” I said. “What we have is real. It’s not just convenience.”
“Baby,” Dre said. “Love is supposed to be convenient. It’s supposed to be easy. Don’t they say that in First Corinthians?” He held me close against him again. “It’s real. It’s convenient. It’s perfect.”
“Do you think Roy will come back with you?”
“He might. He might not,” Andre said.
�
��What would you do if you were him?”
Andre let me go and stepped over the raised roots of the tree. The air was chilly but clean. “I can’t say because I can’t imagine being him. I’ve tried, but I can’t even walk around the corner in his shoes, let alone a mile. Sometimes I think that if I were him, I would be a gentleman, wishing you well and letting you go with dignity.”
I shook my head. Roy wasn’t that type of man, although he had dignity in spades. But for a person like Roy, letting go wasn’t a self-respecting option. Gloria once told me that your best quality is also your worst. For herself, she identified her ability to adapt. “I’ve likely rolled with punches when I should have hit back,” she said. “But I rolled my way into a life I love.” She told me that since I was very small, I have embraced my appetites. “You always run toward what you want. Your father always tries to break you of this, but you are just like him, brilliant but impulsive and a tiny bit selfish. But more women should be selfish,” she said. “Or else the world will trample you.” Roy, in my mind, was a fighter, a characteristic whose double edges were gleaming and sharp.
“But I don’t really know,” Andre said, thinking aloud. “He feels like everything was taken from him—his job, his house, his wife—and he wants all his shit back. He can’t get his job back; corporate America waits for no man, let alone a black man. But he’s going to want his marriage back, like you have been in cold storage all these years. So now it’s my job to snatch the fantasy away.” He motioned to take in our houses, our bodies, maybe even our city. “I feel guilty as hell. I can’t lie.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“For what?” he asked, slipping his arms around my waist.
“Since I could remember, my father has told me how lucky I was. How I never had to struggle. How I eat every day. How nobody has ever called me ‘nigger’ to my face. He used to say, ‘Accident of birth is the number one predictor of happiness.’ Once Daddy took me to the emergency room at Grady, so I could see how poor black folks are treated when they got sick. Gloria was mad when I came home, eight years old, shook to the bone. But he said, ‘I don’t mind living in Cascade Heights, but she needs to know the whole picture.’ Gloria was furious. ‘She is not a sociological test case. She is our daughter.’ Daddy said, ‘Our daughter needs to know things, she needs to know how fortunate she is. When I was her age . . .’ My mother cut him off. ‘Stop it, Franklin. This is how progress works. You have it better than your daddy and I have it better than mine. Don’t treat her like she stole something.’ To which my daddy said, ‘I’m not saying that she stole it. I just want her to know what she has.’ ”
Dre shook his head as though my memories were his own. “You deserve your life. There are no accidents—of birth or anything else.”
Then I kissed him hard and sent him on his way to Louisiana, like I was sending him off to war.
Roy
PO Box 973
Eloe, LA 98562
Dear Walter,
Hello from the other side. Ignore the return address on this letter because I don’t know where I’ll be by the time you get this. Right now, I’m in a rest stop outside of Gulfport, Mississippi, where I’m going to get a room for tonight. Tomorrow morning, I’ll head to Atlanta to find Celestial and see if I have any life left there. It could go either way. I don’t think I’m making too much of the fact that she didn’t divorce me, and this time tomorrow I will know.
I have money in my pocket, and I’m grateful for that. When I was a boy, I had a little savings account. I went to the branch this past Tuesday to clean it out, and there I experienced a minor miracle. Olive stopped adding to my commissary after it was clear that Celestial was handling that, so she started saving for my future. The money she made from selling cakes on Saturdays, she put away for me, so I have nearly $3,500. This means I don’t have to show up on Celestial’s doorstep like a homeless person. But that’s what I am, I guess. But at least I don’t have to be a broke homeless person.
Celestial doesn’t know that I’m coming and I’m glad that I don’t have to hear your wisdom on that! It’s complicated, but she sent Andre to Eloe to come and collect me. By my calculations, he should be hitting the highway first thing tomorrow morning. This is why I didn’t tell her I was coming. I need to see her by herself, not with Dre hanging around. I’m not saying that there is anything between them, but I’m saying that there has always been something between them. You know what I mean? Or am I the one being a Junior Yoda? But the point is that I need to talk to her without anyone blocking. So if he drives way out to Louisiana, it will take him another day to get back. So that gives me two days to get done what I need to do.
Admit it. It’s a smart plan.
Maybe I am your kid after all.
Anyway, I’m going to put some of this money on your books. Don’t spend it all in one place (ha!). And take care of yourself. And if you can, pray for your boy.
Roy O.
Three
Generosity
Andre
We were not abandoning him. We were not telling him that he was unwelcome. I was to go to Eloe, and we were going to sit down, alone, and talk. I would explain that Celestial and I had been seeing each other for the last two years, that we were engaged. But this didn’t mean he didn’t have a home to go to. If he wanted to settle in Atlanta, we would set him up with an apartment, whatever he needed to get on his feet. I was to stress how glad we were that he was out and how grateful we are to finally see justice done. Celestial suggested the word forgive, but I couldn’t give her that. I could ask for understanding. I could ask for temperance, but I wouldn’t ask him to forgive me. Celestial and I were not wrong. It was a complex situation, but we were not on our knees before him.
Right before we drifted off to sleep, Celestial murmured, “Maybe I need to go, be the one to tell him.”
“You got to let me do this,” I said.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all I had, that and a Styrofoam cup leaching chemicals into my truck-stop coffee.
Once I exited the interstate, I handled my vehicle like I was taking my driver’s exam. The last thing I needed was to attract police attention, especially on the back roads of Louisiana. If it could happen to Roy, it could happen to me. Besides my conspicuous skin, my car was a stunner. I’m a humble man about most things; I care nothing for kicks, and Celestial sometimes throws away my favorite old shirts when I’m not looking. But I do like myself a fine vehicle. The truck—Mercedes M-Class—had gotten me pulled over a half-dozen times in the last three years, and once I was even slammed against the hood. Apparently, make plus model plus race equaled drug dealer, even in Atlanta. But this was mostly when I drove through neighborhoods that were all-out hood, or hood-ish, although tony suburbs like Buckhead weren’t safe either. You know what they say: if you go five miles outside of Atlanta proper, you end up in Georgia. You know what else they say? What do you call a black man with a PhD? The same thing you call one driving a high-end SUV.
I almost didn’t recognize Roy’s house without the Chrysler parked in the yard. I circled the block twice, confused. The Huey Newton chairs on the porch convinced me that I was in the right place. As I pulled in close to the house, my bumper kissing the porch, a bank of floodlights hit me, and I shielded my eyes like I was staring into the sun.
“Hello,” I called. “It’s me. Andre Tucker. I’m here for Roy Junior.” The neighbors played music, zydeco, loud and jaunty. I walked slowly, like I was worried that someone might want to shoot me if I made any sudden moves.
Roy Senior stood behind a screen door, wearing a striped butcher’s apron. “Come on in, Andre,” he said. “You eat yet? I’m fixing to make some salmon croquettes.”
I shook his hand and he led me to the built-on living room I remembered from the last time I was here. The hospital bed was gone, and the green recliner looked new.
“I’m here to pick up Roy, you know.”
Big Roy walked toward the center of the house with me clos
e behind. In the kitchen he readjusted his apron strings, knotting them around his barrel torso. “Little Roy is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Atlanta.”
I sat down at the kitchen table. “What?”
“You hungry?” Big Roy asked. “I could fix you some salmon croquettes.”
“He’s gone to Atlanta? When did he leave?”
“A while ago. Let me get you something to eat. Then we can talk about the details.” He handed me a glass of purple Kool-Aid, which tasted like summertime.
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate your hospitality, but can you give me the broad outline? Roy is gone to Atlanta? How? Plane? Train? Automobile?”
He pondered this like a multiple-choice test as he cranked the lid off of a can. Finally he said, “Automobile.”
“Whose car?”
“Mine.”
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Nope.”
I took my phone out of my pocket. We were probably a hundred miles from the nearest cell tower, but I had to try.
“Cell phones don’t work so well out here. All the kids want them for Christmas, but it’s a waste of money.”
I checked the screen. My battery was good to go, but there were no signal bars. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being set up. On the wall was mounted a green phone, rotary model; I nodded toward it. “May I?”
Crumbling Ritz crackers, he slumped his shoulders and said, “They cut it off yesterday. With Olive gone, it has been hard making ends meet.”