“I wanted to see what you were like, how you were doing. I think you’ll survive,” she said.
“But Mama . . .”
“Mama let me go, M. I can’t forgive her for that.”
“She loved you, loves you. She takes out your picture often, and she cries,” I said.
“He let her keep a picture of me?”
“She kept it secret, but I think he always knew. If he hadn’t died, maybe . . .”
“Maybe I’d get an honorable discharge?”
“You went to his grave, you said.”
“Not to ask him for his forgiveness but to see if I could forgive him. I couldn’t,” she said.
The driver came around and opened my door.
“Just soldier on, M, and be the good little girl your father wanted you to be,” she said. I looked at the charm bracelet in my hand. “It’s better you keep it. It’s better I don’t have reminders.”
“No matter what you do, how far you go, you’ll always have reminders,” I told her. “It’s like trying to get rid of your shadow.”
I saw her eyes glisten, her lips quiver, and the muscles in her face tighten. “Yeah, well, I’ve got an appointment,” she said, nodding at the opened door.
I closed my fingers around the charm bracelet and stepped out. The driver closed the door. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see her anymore, but I had the feeling she was still looking at me. He got in and drove off. I stood there watching until the limousine disappeared around a turn, and then I looked up at our front door.
I put the charm bracelet in my purse.
It’s better if I don’t ever tell Mama about this, I thought.
It would break her heart.
It had nearly shattered mine.
13
Of course, when I entered the house, I was worried that Mama would take one look at my face and know that I was keeping a big secret from her. I heard someone else’s voice coming from the living room. We had company. That was good, I thought. It would be easier to hide what had just happened if Mama was distracted. I hurried in to see who was there. The voice was vaguely familiar.
Mama was sitting on the sofa, leaning against the arm of it as if the person next to her had bad breath. Beside her was my uncle Orman’s wife, my aunt Lucy. I hadn’t seen her for more than two years and had not seen her very often before that. Uncle Orman was five years older than Papa, and Aunt Lucy was only a year younger than Uncle Orman. She was one of those women who looked put together with superglue. I remembered her with the exact same hairdo, teased and sprayed so not a strand was loose. It looked more like a helmet than a hairdo, which probably pleased Uncle Orman. She was dressed in a gray tweed skirt suit with a white ruffled-collar blouse and wore what looked like shoes made for people with foot problems. They looked like claws. She still wore a little too much lipstick, a little too red for her complexion, and her cheeks were powdered a shade or two away from a clown’s. Her strong perfume permeated the room. She was the sort whose aroma remained in an elevator for at least five or six more trips. People who got in after she exited would look at each other and grimace, holding their breath.
“How big she’s grown, and how much like you she looks,” Aunt Lucy said, as if I were in a fishbowl and couldn’t hear her.
“Say hello to Aunt Lucy, honey,” Mama said, and sat up straighter.
“Hello, Aunt Lucy.”
“I knew Aunt Lucy was going to be close by and asked her to stop in,” Mama said.
“Oh?” I wanted to ask why she couldn’t have come to Papa’s funeral, but I bit my tongue.
I looked from Mama to Aunt Lucy and then back again as I sat across from them. There was something strange about the tone in Mama’s voice. She was never good at hiding the truth. I hesitate to say lie because I couldn’t imagine her being deceitful, but, like any mother, she would find ways to make unpleasant things sound more pleasant.
“That’s nice,” I said. “How is everyone in your family, Aunt Lucy?”
“They’re all doing well, thank you, Emmie. What a little lady,” she said to Mama. Mama smiled and nodded. “They grow up so quickly. Which means we grow old so quickly,” Aunt Lucy told me. “So make good use of your time. Orman is always telling me that youth is wasted on the young,” she told Mama, who nodded again. It was something Papa would say often, too.
I relaxed. Maybe there was nothing more to this than a nice visit. Ironically, it was a day for family, I thought, having just been with Roxy. Relatives were falling out of the trees.