“Good girl,” Mrs. Grant said, like I was a pet.
I unfolded the page. It was a Xerox copy; I could stil smel the chemicals. I was looking at a wedding license issued to James Lee Witherspoon and Gwendolyn Beatrice Yarboro in the state of Alabama the year after I was born.
“This is bul shit,” I said, not to Gwendolyn but to Dana. Gwendolyn kept her arms crossed over her chest and Dana held her hands at her sides like a church usher. Gwendolyn said to my mother, “I am so sorry to have to tel you like this.”
The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. Dana, silvery Dana, was my flesh-and-blood sister. James, my ordinary daddy with his Coke bottle glasses was nothing but a dog. And what did that make me? A fool. I’d invited Dana into my house. Every time I wanted to hang out, she made me beg. And I did. Every single time. “You’re not sorry,” I was speaking to Dana, but I couldn’t look away from the paper in my hands.
“I didn’t send her over here. That’s between the two of you,” Gwendolyn said. “What’s on that document is between your mother and me.”
“Give it here, Chaurisse,” my mother said. I handed her the page and she looked it over. She crumpled the Alabama license and tossed it on the floor. “You think I’m scared of a piece of paper?”
Gwendolyn looked a little confused, like we had fal en off the script. Supporting her large patent-leather handbag with her left hand, she began to rifle through it with her right. With a distressed glance at Dana, she dropped to one knee and rummaged through the bag. “I have something else,”
she said to my mother.
“You don’t have anything I need to see,” my mother said. “So take your little raggedy pocketbook and your raggedy little daughter and get out here.”
At this, Mrs. Grant pul ed up the top of the dryer and started a standing ovation. The clipped noises of her hand bounced off the tension in the room.
“What is wrong with you?” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “This is not a TV show. This is our life.”
“I have it right here,” Gwendolyn said. “What is done in the dark wil come to the light. That’s what the Bible says.”
“Don’t you even try to confuse me with scripture.” My mother nudged the patent-leather purse with her bare foot darting out from under the white gown. Gwendolyn scooted her bag back in front of her, pouring the contents of her handbag on the tiled floor of the Pink Fox. There were the usual purse contents — lipstick, chewing gum, emery boards, and a hank of keys. In addition, there was a compass, the kind you use to draw circles. She then shook the purse. “It’s in here.” Dana got down beside her and helped repack. Gwendolyn had lost that triumphant look and seemed a little lost, the way Grandma Bunny had when she was on a medication that made her forget who we were.
“I have it, Mama,” Dana said, quietly, but not so soft as a whisper.
“Wel , give it here,” Gwendolyn said. “Why did you make me get on my knees before these people?” She waved her arms to take in not just me and Mama but the customers, maybe especial y Mrs. Grant, who was stil standing, as though this were a basketbal game in the final seconds.
“Mama, don’t do it. I have it, but don’t do it.”
“It has to be done,” Gwendolyn said. “Give it here.”
“Please,” Dana said. “Don’t make me.”
“You started this,” Gwendolyn said. “You started this whole thing.”
“Just go,” Mrs. Grant said. “Take whatever you have and just go. It’s not right, you coming. This is her home. You cannot come to her home. ”
“Shut up,” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “You just shut the hel up. You don’t know us.”
Mrs. Grant straightened herself to her ful height. She was gaunt, like she spent her whole life dining on nothing but chicken broth and saltine crackers. “I don’t know you. But I know what you are.”
“Give it here, Dana,” Gwendolyn said. “These people don’t care about you.”
But I did care about her, and I cared about my mama. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to Dana. I couldn’t imagine anything more devastating than the black-and-white document she had already given me, but just because I couldn’t imagine it didn’t mean that there was not a blow beyond my imagining. “Dana.” She final y looked at me, and I hoped that there was something on my face that deserved mercy. I had never done anything to hurt her. I had scraped al the skin off my shoulder for her.
“Dana,” said Gwendolyn. “Look at me.”
Dana sighed and reached into her purse, the same fake LV she was carrying that day we met in the SupeRx. She looked exhausted. I couldn’t believe that it had been only last summer that we were stealing from the drugstore. Fast friends is what they cal it when you connect with someone like that. When you talk about it, you say you are like sisters.
She kept her fist closed tight around the object and passed it to her mother. Using her free hand, she tried to close Gwendolyn’s fingers into a fist as wel , postponing the moment that we would see the flush of aquamarine and flash of crystal. For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
“No,” my mama said.
“Miss Bunny left it to Dana.”
“No,” my mother said. “Miss Bunny would not do me like that. We buried Miss Bunny in her brooch.”
I shook my head, remembering the day we prepared Miss Bunny and Raleigh took his awkward picture. I remembered my father’s long hug and the star-shaped press against my cheek.
“No,” my mother said. “No.”
“Ask Raleigh,” Gwendolyn said. “You know Raleigh can’t tel a lie.”
Mrs. Grant, stil on her feet, walked toward Dana and Gwen wagging her finger. “You cannot do this.”
I was close enough to Dana to touch her. “Look at me. You are not my sister.”
She turned and said, “Yes, I am.”
Mrs. Grant said, “What’s your last name, then?”
Gwendolyn said, “This isn’t about names. It’s about blood.”
Cold as anything, Mrs. Grant said, “I didn’t catch your family name, either.”
Not for one second did I forget whose side I was on, but I felt a little ashamed for Dana and her mother. Every time Gwen went to speak, Mrs.
Grant cut her off, asking again about her name, like it was an exorcism. Meanwhile, my mother, stuffed into her party dress, held her mouth open like she was singing a silent opera.
“Get out,” I final y said.
Seeming exhausted and maybe even grateful to be dismissed, Gwen took a step toward the door, but Dana took a step in my direction. “Can I have it back?”
“What?”
“Miss Bunny’s pin. It’s the only thing I have.”
I squeezed my hand around the brooch, letting the sharp pin press against my palm. “It’s mine.”
AS THEY LEFT, Dana looked over her shoulder mournful y and mouthed something that I couldn’t decipher. Al my life, I’d wanted a sister. How many times had my mother said how sorry she was that I was an only child? That’s what happened when you want something too much. Life, it seemed, was a long con, rotten with dirty tricks.
Near the door, Mrs. Grant knelt as my mother sank to the floor in her pale almond gown. I know I should have been at my mother’s side, but I went to the glass door and watched Dana and her mother walk to the curb, struggling against the steep grade in their heels. Maybe I could have run after them, shoved Gwendolyn to the ground to defend my mother’s honor. Perhaps I should have demanded some sort of truth from them, but at that moment I didn’t want to know anything more.
24
A MIGHTY POOR RAT
MY MOTHER BANISHED my father from 739 Lynhurst with nothing but the uniform on his back. Didn’t even let him in the house. He didn’t fight, didn’t beg for forgiveness or for his toothbrush. He walked away at a quick clip, like an embarrassed deliveryman after knocking on the wrong door. Once we heard the quiet crank of his engine my mother said, “That wasn’t so bad,” but then she burst into tears and asked me to bring her a Tylenol PM.