“But what about me,” I asked her, feeling smal even to ask.
“What about you, honey?”
“What about what I want?”
“This is al about you, baby. We are a family. This is about making our family whole. Isn’t that what everybody wants?” She smiled at me. “This is the third time the world tried to make an orphan of me. The first was when I got pregnant and my mama put me out. But then Miss Bunny saved me.
After that, your brother died, but you saved my marriage. This is the third time. God didn’t mean for us to be alone. Can’t you see that?”
I crossed my arms and made a nest for my head on the kitchen table. I breathed in my own smel . Life was turning into a quiz show, ful of trick questions, and wagers. “I don’t know what I see,” I said to her.
“You just have to trust,” my mother said. “Trust and believe.”
EPILOGUE
Dana Lynn Yarboro
MY DAUGHTER, FLORA, looks just like me and I am sorry for this. It’s not that I have any quarrel with my own appearance, but I would have liked to give her a face of her own. In so many ways, you can’t choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.
Flora is four years old, born in 1996, the year that Atlanta hosted the Olympics and the whole world came to our country town. I was in labor during the opening ceremonies, but I heard the fireworks as my bones shifted to make way for this new life. My mother was beside me, speaking my name. Flora’s father was there, too, but we are not together as couple. He’s not married to me, but he’s not married to anyone else, either, so I suppose that counts as progress. She doesn’t have his last name, but he picks her up on some Sundays and he loves her in public.
She and I live in a town house on Cascade Road, across from John A. White Park. You can’t say it’s a far cry from Continental Colony, but it’s my own home. I pay the mortgage each month and it feels good even without covered parking. It also feels good to send her to the same kindergarten where I first saw Chaurisse so many years ago. My daughter is smart. The teachers love her.
THIS IS THE YEAR 2000. In high school, Ronalda and I were convinced that the world was going to end at the start of the new mil ennium. Part of it was the round number, 2000, and the other part of it was that I couldn’t imagine having survived to be thirty-one, but here I am. I don’t have much hair these days, I keep it Caesar shorn and brushed flat, but there are silver strands there. I’m not aging as beautiful y as my mother, but she works a lot harder at it than I do.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Flora’s school lets the children out early. I was there even earlier — I never want her to wonder where I am. She and I were headed toward the car, when I noticed a blue Lincoln in the space beside mine. I held Flora’s hand tighter and ignored the itching in my throat. My mother and I joke that there should be a medical term for the condition we have, the irrational fear of Town Cars.
As I got closer to my car, the driver’s door of the Lincoln opened, and Chaurisse Witherspoon stepped out wearing a uniform that was tailored for a man. It had been twelve years, but I would have known my sister anywhere. She looked like her mother from her dul figure to the sil y mop of fake hair.
“Hey, Dana,” she said.
I suppose the real question was what was she doing here, but I have always known I would see her again.
“Hey, Chaurisse,” I said. “What’s up?”
She shrugged. “I just wanted to see you. I was driving by the other day and I saw your daughter playing outside. She looks just like you.”
Flora liked it when people talked abut her, so she smiled.
“What’s her name,” Chaurisse wanted to know.
“Flora,” my daughter piped up.
The smal parking lot was busy with parents and little children. Al the kids carried cardboard cutouts of their hands decorated to look like turkeys.
I waved at some of the mothers. I hoped I looked normal, wel adjusted, and happy. I leaned against the side of my car. “Wel ? Is somebody dying?” I said it with a sort of flippant attitude, but I real y wanted to know. Al these years later my mother stil scanned the obituary page every Sunday. If James Witherspoon died, she would be there in widow’s black.
“Nobody’s dying,” she said. “I just saw your girl and I wanted to say hel o and see how you are.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
She sighed and leaned on the car next to me. As we talked, we watched the cars fly down Cascade Road. “I’m okay.”
“How are your parents?” I asked.
“Stil together,” she said.
“Figures.”
She shifted her weight to her other side and took a real y deliberate breath. “You ever see him?”
I could have laughed at her. After al these years, she couldn’t quite believe that she and her mother had won.
I hadn’t seen my father since the day he and Laverne renewed their vows at the big party at the Hilton twelve years ago. I had gone on my own and spent most of my time riding the glass elevator al the way to the twenty-third floor and then back down again. Looking at the city lights, I wondered if James had other children like me. I had gone to the soiree, not looking for my father, not trying to spoil anything, but hoping to see Chaurisse. I was going to ask her if maybe we could be sisters. It wasn’t our fault what our parents had done to each other.
THEY CALLED IT a “recommitment ceremony” and held it in the Magnolia Room, the same space where Ruth Nicole Elizabeth had her Sweet Sixteen. When the elevator stopped at the twenty-third floor, I was too afraid to step out. The ceremony was under way behind a pair of closed doors decorated with bunting. I could imagine Mrs. Grant, silently applauding with her satin gloved hands as Chaurisse pranced down the aisle clutching a bouquet of cal a lilies. Behind her would be Raleigh and Laverne in her almond-meat dress. I could see Raleigh bending to kiss her cheek before handing her over to James.
My mother had taken to her bed and I didn’t like leaving her alone, but I al owed myself an hour more. I took the elevator underground and walked the aisles of the parking ramp until I found the Lincoln. I sat on the hood as the engine beneath me ticked like a patient bomb.
My father approached the car at quarter after eight. He had to smoke. I may not have been his “legitimate” daughter, but I knew him wel enough to anticipate his cravings.
I said, “Hey, James.”
He said, “You can’t be here.”
I said, “I know.”
“Then how c-c-come y-y-you’re out here.”
I told him the truth, that I wasn’t sure. I think I wanted him to hug me and tel me that I was stil his daughter, that blood meant something. Yes, he could walk away from my mother, but could he walk away from me? My mother could find another man, but there wasn’t any way for me to replace my father.
“Don’t you love me?” I asked him.
“It’s not about loving people,” he said. “You have to go home now. I’ve m-m-made my choice, just like you made your choice when you went bothering Ch-Chaurisse. You almost took my whole life away from me.”
“What did you think was going to happen?” I asked him. Did he think that I could live my entire life tucked away a dirty photograph? “I’m your daughter.”
“Everybody knows that now,” James said. “That’s what you wanted. You got it.”
EVEN NOW, I cringe to remember it. I fought him. I threw myself at my father, fighting like a girl, al windmil ing arms and shrieking. My voice bounced off the concrete wal s, but no one came to stop us. No one helped even when he shoved me away like I was a grown man. I didn’t fal . I didn’t crumple. And I am proud of this smal moment of dignity.