“I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he say.
I wish I could disappear.
“And if you feel this way, too, let me know now.”
He unblocks the door.
I cain’t look at him.
“Do you?” he say.
I wish we could go back to the way we was.
Wish we could erase the lie my kiss told. It’s easier if you don’t love me, I want to say but don’t.
“Naomi?”
“You’re a good man, Albert. But ain’t no more room in my heart to love. Jeremy took all I had with him. And I’m sorry for it.”
He nods his head.
Clears his throat.
“Don’t be sorry,” he say. “That’s all I wanted to hear. The truth.”
I want to take it back. Take back everything I just said and lie. What’s wrong with somebody believing they’re loved in every way? I shoulda lied. Made an excuse for why we couldn’t be together like that. And that way, he’d always know he was loved.
“And this baby?” he say. “Could you let it love me?”
My heart breaks at his asking. Must be what sorrow is. Not being able to change the truth. Not even for love.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he say. “The child ain’t mine. But seeing as Jeremy’s gone, you can let her love me.”
“I cain’t make somebody love somebody else, Albert. I cain’t promise that.”
“But you’re the mother. Mothers can set a child’s heart to the way she should go. So set her heart on me.”
I don’t know.
“Say yes.”
His softness right now — the way his eyes plead and his shoulder sag, defenseless — remind me of the way James was with Hazel. His surrender.
“All right,” I say.
He hugs me like his body ain’t still in pain or my belly ain’t a bridge between us. And for the first time, touching him this close feels right. For the first time since Momma and Hazel, I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.
41 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1848
THE KNOCKING ON the door is hard and wild.
I hobble to a stand on my swole toes. Cynthia yells my name from the door and pushes it open, barges in. She don’t never come out here. Not for months.
“Gaw-lee, look at cha,” she say. “Ain’t grown a pinch. Belly’s still small as four months pregnant. Not the six or seven you claim. Albert, you sure this ain’t your baby?”
“Can I get you a drink?” Albert say.
“No,” she say.
“Can I get you something else?” Albert say.
“Privacy. With Naomi.”
I don’t want him to leave. Albert reads my thoughts and don’t go. He say, “Let me get you whiskey. Or bourbon?”
“I just want a minute with her,” she say.
“What you need?” Albert say. “Naomi can’t do nothin for you in her condition.”
“This is something I need to say to only her. Wait outside the door if you want to. What you think I’m here to do, Albert? I’m the one helped save your life.”
“The past is the past,” I say, final. I nod to Albert. Let him go out.
“You should sit down,” Cynthia say. “Your feet don’t seem right. Might be getting the swelling condition. Could make you seize if it gets too bad.”
“I’m fine. I’ll stand.”
“Could kill the baby, too.”
She helps me sit.
From her waistband, she wiggles out an old brown leather notebook. Her mother’s diary. The same one she’s held onto and cussed at on the nights she’s drunk.
“Maybe things would’ve been different if I woulda read it before recent,” she say. “Maybe not. I don’t know.” She opens her diary to a folded page. “I need you to read something.” She sits next to me on the bench and holds the book out for me to take but I stare at it, think of all the private things I’ve ever done and never wrote down. But if I did, I’d never want a stranger to see it.
I say, “I cain’t read this.”
She flicks her wrist. “My momma wouldn’t mind. She’s dead.”
I shake my head. I won’t.
Cynthia lays the book flat on her lap, closed. “All right,” she say. “My mother was dying when I found her. I was eleven years old. She had been in bed all day and into the night when she called to me. She took my hand and what I remember most is how cold she was. Middle of the hot summer and she was cold. Her grip was so weak. Even her tears were weak. They dried just as they fell.
“All she kept saying was, ‘I’m sorry.’
“When she died, she left me with an empty box and a blade. The blade was on the end of a candlestick holder. The holder had a small lever inside that slid up and down. And when I pulled it down, a blade shot out the top of it and the holder itself became my handle.”
Cynthia holds out her book to me again. “Please, Naomi. I want you to see. I need you to read it.”
I reach out for it, hesitating.
She jerks it away. “I just want you to know,” she say. “My momma was a saint. Remember that when you read this.”
I say, “Cynthia, I don’t have to read it.”
“She didn’t know much about nothing. Was just like you when you came.”
“Cynthia. .”
“Some women hid Shakespeare, mine had Fanny Hill. Wasn’t her choice. A pauper gave it to her and Momma didn’t know no better. It’s all she had for literature. Pornographic novels have story, too. So don’t judge her. It gave her permission, I think, to write what she did.”
“You giving me pornography to read?”
“That ain’t what I said. I said my momma’s a saint.”
She puts the diary in my hand.
I don’t want to read it.
I sit with it on my lap, then open it slowly, turn it to the creased page halfway in and start reading it to myself.
21 October 1818
Dear Diary,
I fear I am with child.
For a bundle of rags — I am.
But I want to remember. Recall every moment of the happening so as to never forget what happiness feels like.
I was drying my hair when the rag salesman rattled my door. I should have covered my head but I did not. It had been a long time since we welcomed company here, over a year since we settled, the first time I had been alone in our home for so long — just over a fortnight.
He stood behind the haze of my screen wearing his out of place business suit, his silly smile, and his almost ugly face, saved only by his pretty blue eyes.
Just twenty-five cents, he said, and pulled from his leather bag a bundle of thick pink cloths.
I opened my screen door though I’d already decided his fee was thievish. But I thought my husband and I could have used some color, some softness, to make us alive again so I agreed he could attempt to sway me.
After a moment of salesmanship, I bent over to look into his bag and — I’m almost ashamed to say, but — I smelled him. Not on purpose, but — I did. Maybe my inhale was, at first, a sigh but I certainly breathed him in and smelled him fresh like jasmine.
I sorted through his bag pretending not to notice, chose the fluffy yellow bunch and smiled. He said, pure cotton.
I liked the sweet smell of his breath. It was not like my husband’s — whiskey laden and cigar stale. His was like honey, his lips full, drawing me in too long. He touched my chin and told me I was pretty.
I dropped his rags and told him I was married. He said he understood and asked if he could show me how well his rags dry. He unfolded a gold one from behind the fastened compartment of his bag. He touched it to my damp hair.