Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“I can think of a few reasons,” Willie Lee told her.

But hadn’t the world changed a little since she’d been gone? And hadn’t she walked into the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Department with all the confidence in the world? She had stepped right inside that grimy tan building, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, and told the sheriff’s deputy, a portly man with sandy blond hair, that she wanted to apply for a job. “The Federal Bureau, did you say?” he’d asked, raising an eyebrow, and she allowed herself to feel hopeful. She sat in the corner of the waiting room, racing through the latent print examiner test, grateful for a thinking activity for once, not the type of thinking she had done lately—logistics, like how long her money would last—but real analytical thinking. She’d finished quick, the deputy said, laughing a bit in amazement, might have been a record. He pulled out the answer guide from a manila folder to check her work. But first, he glanced at her full application, and when he saw her address listed in Mallard, his gaze frosted over. He slid the answer key back in the folder, returned to his chair.

“Leave that there, gal,” he said. “No use wasting my time.”

Now she stepped inside the Surly Goat, passing under the welcome sign—COLD WOMEN! HOT BEER!—and pressed past a row of men in greasy coveralls to find an empty booth.

“Well, look what the cat drug in,” Lorna Hebert, the old barmaid, said. She dropped off a shot of whiskey that Desiree hadn’t even asked for.

“You don’t look too surprised to see me,” Desiree said. She’d been in town two days by now, of course everyone knew.

“Got to come home sometime,” Lorna said. “Now let me get a good look at you.”

In the darkness of the bar, she was still wearing her blue scarf. If Lorna noticed anything, she didn’t say so. She disappeared back behind the bar and Desiree downed the shot, comforted by the burn. She felt pathetic, drinking alone in the middle of the day, but what else could she do? She needed a job. Money. A plan. But those children staring at her daughter. The deputy dismissing her. Sam gripping her throat. She waved over Lorna again, wanting to forget it all.

One shot then another and she was already tipsy by the time she saw him. He was sitting at the end of the bar wearing a worn brown leather jacket, a dirty boot kicked up on the stool. The man beside him said something that made him smile into his whiskey. Those high cheekbones pierced her. Even after all those years, she would know Early Jones anywhere.

—

HER LAST SUMMER in Mallard, Desiree Vignes met the wrong sort of boy.

She’d spent her life, up until then, only meeting the right sort: Mallard boys, light and ambitious, boys tugging on her pigtails, boys sitting beside her in catechism, mumbling the Apostles’ Creed, boys begging her for kisses outside of school dances. She was supposed to marry one of these boys, and when Johnny Heroux left heart-shaped notes in her history book or Gil Dalcourt asked her to homecoming, she could practically feel her mother nudging her toward them. Pick one, pick one. It only made her want to dig her heels into the ground. Nothing made a boy less exciting than the fact that you were supposed to like him.

Mallard boys seemed as familiar and safe as cousins, but there were no other boys around except when someone’s nephew visited or when tenant farmers moved to the edge of town. She’d never spoken to one of these tenant boys—she only saw them when they passed through town, tall and sinewy and caked brown. They looked like men, these boys, so what could you talk to them about? Besides, you weren’t supposed to speak to dark boys. Once, one had tipped his hat at her and her mother tutted, gripping her arm tighter.

“Don’t even look his way,” her mother said. “Boys like that don’t want nothin good.”

Dark boys in Mallard only wanted to go girl hunting, her mother always said. They wanted to give it to a white girl but couldn’t, so they thought a light girl was the next best thing. But Desiree had never met a dark boy until one June evening when she was washing the living-room windows and spotted, through the hazy glass, a boy standing on the front porch. A tall boy, shirtless in overalls, his skin caramelized into a deep brown. He held a paper bag in one arm and took a bite from a purplish fruit, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“You gonna let me in?” he said. He was gazing at her so directly, she blushed.

“No,” she said. “Who’re you?”

“Who you think?” he said. He turned the bag toward her so that she could see the Fontenot’s logo. “Open the door.”

“I don’t know you,” she said. “You could be an ax murderer.”

“Look like I got an ax on me?”

“Maybe I can’t see it from here.”

He could’ve left the bag on the porch. When he didn’t, she realized that they were flirting.

She dropped her rag on the windowsill, watching him chew.

“What you eatin anyway?” she asked.

“Come see.”

She finally unlatched the screen door and stepped barefoot onto the porch. Early eased toward her. He smelled like sandalwood and sweat, and as he neared, she thought, for one breathless second, that he might kiss her. But he didn’t. He lifted his fig to her lips. She bit where his mouth had been.

—

LATER, SHE LEARNED HIS NAME, which wasn’t even a name at all, although it made her smile when she rolled it around her mouth. Early, Early, like she was calling out the time. All month, he left fruit like flowers. Each evening when the twins came home from the Duponts, she found a plum on the porch banister, or a peach, or a napkin filled with blackberries. Nectarines and pears and rhubarb, more fruit than she could finish, fruit she hid in her apron to savor later or bake into pies. Sometimes he passed by in the evening on his way to deliver groceries, lingering on her porch steps. He told her that he made deliveries part time; the rest of his days were spent helping his aunt and uncle on a farm near the edge of town. But when the harvest ended, he planned to skip off and find himself in a real city like New Orleans.

“Don’t you think your folks’ll miss you?” Desiree said. “When you go?”

He scoffed. “The money,” he said. “They gonna miss that. That’s all they thinkin about.”

“Well, you got to think about money,” Desiree said. “That’s how all grown folks are.”

Who would her mother be if she wasn’t worried about money all the time? Like Mrs. Dupont, maybe, drifting around the house dreamily. But Early shook his head.

“It’s not the same,” he said. “Your mama got a house. All y’all got this whole dern town. We got nothin. That’s why I give this fruit away. Don’t belong to me nohow.”

She reached for a blueberry in his napkin. By now, she’d already eaten so many, her fingertips were stained purple.

“So if all this fruit belonged to you,” she said, “you wouldn’t give me nothin?”

“If it belonged to me,” he said, “I’d give you all of it.”

Then he kissed the inside of her wrist, and her palm, and slipped her pinky inside his mouth, tasting the fruit on her skin.

—

A DARK BOY stepping through the meadow behind the house to leave her fruit. She never knew when Early would come, if he would come at all, so she began waiting for him, sitting along the porch rail as the sun faded. Stella warned her to be careful. Stella was always careful. “I know you don’t wanna hear it,” she said. “But you hardly know him and he sounds fresh.” But Desiree didn’t care. He was the first interesting boy she’d ever met, the only one who even imagined a life outside of Mallard. And maybe she liked that Stella distrusted him. She never wanted the two to meet. He would grin, glancing between the girls, searching for differences amongst their similarities. She hated that silent appraisal, watching someone compare her to a version that she might have been. A better version, even. What if he saw something in Stella that he liked more? It would have nothing to do with looks, and that, somehow, felt even worse.