Brit Bennett - The Vanishing Half

“It’s supposed to snow all week,” her daughter said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

“What you sorry for? You can’t control the weather.”

“I know, but—I wanted it to be nice for you.”

She brushed ice out of Jude’s hair. “It is nice,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”

Inside the grocery store, the lights glowed brightly and her daughter trailed behind, slowly pushing the cart. Desiree grabbed a bundle of celery. She’d offered to cook—insisted on it, really, having seen the sad state of her girl’s cupboards. Nothing but cold cereal and canned food.

“I should’ve taught you how to cook,” she said.

“I cook.”

“Too many smart girls don’t know how to keep a house anymore.”

“Well, I do, and Reese cooks too.”

“Oh, that’s right. Y’all are—what’s it you call it?”

“Modern.”

“Modern,” she repeated. “He’s a nice boy.”

“But?”

“But nothin. He seems sweet. I just don’t understand why he won’t marry you. What’s he waitin for, the Grim Reaper?”

“Well, what about you?” Jude said.

“What about me?”

“And Early.”

Desiree reached for a bell pepper, startled by the sudden seize of tenderness she felt just hearing his name. She missed him. Imagine that, grown as she was, still missing him. She’d called him after she’d landed in Minnesota. She’d never been on an airplane before, felt as brave as if she’d leapt across the face of the moon. She wished he was with her but he’d offered to stay at home with her mother. Desiree was beginning to realize that it could be dangerous leaving her alone.

“Oh, that’s different,” she said.

“How?”

“Y’all are young. Don’t you wanna start a life together? Hand me that onion.”

“We have a life together,” Jude said. “We don’t have to be married for that.”

“I know, I just—” She paused. “I don’t want you to be gun-shy. Because of what happened to me.”

Desiree studied a bruised tomato, unwilling to look at her daughter. She didn’t like to think about the fights her daughter might have seen, that brutal education in love. Jude wrapped her arms around her.

“I’m not,” she said. “I promise.”

—

FOR DINNER, Desiree cooked shrimp creole and rice in their tiny kitchen. She stirred the saucepan, gazing around the apartment at the mismatched dining chairs, the orange loveseat, Reese’s photographs framed on the wall. He’d started freelancing for the Minnesota Daily Star . Small assignments, usually, like Little League games or business openings. On slow days, he worked bar mitzvahs and weddings and proms. Sometimes he wandered around for hours until his fingertips turned red, shooting the tentacles of ice freezing across a lake, or a homeless man huddled in a doorway, or a worn red mitten wedged in a bank of slush. He said that he hated the cold but he’d never been so productive. He’d sold one photograph for two hundred dollars. He wanted to save up to buy a house.

“I just want you to know I’m serious,” he told her. “About your daughter.”

And he did look serious, perched on the edge of the couch, wringing his hands, so serious that she could have laughed at his earnestness. Instead, she squeezed his arm.

“I know, baby,” she said.

When she’d first moved back to Mallard, she never imagined herself here, sitting on a used couch in Minnesota across from a man who loved her daughter. All week, she went with Jude to campus, staring out at the students trudging past, bundled to their eyes, and couldn’t believe, still, that her daughter was one of them. Her girl had gone out into the world, like Desiree had done when she was young. A part of her still hoped that she had time left to do it again.

“It’s foolish,” she’d told Early when she’d called. “I don’t have no business startin over. But I don’t know. I wonder sometimes. What else is out there.”

“Ain’t foolish at all,” he said. “What you wanna do?”

She didn’t know, but she was embarrassed to admit that when she imagined leaving Mallard, she only saw the two of them in his car, driving a long road to nowhere. Just a fantasy, of course. She would never leave Lou’s, not now, not while her mother still needed her.

Her last night in Minneapolis, snow thundered on the roof and Desiree cracked the blinds open, peeking outside. She was holding a coffee mug that Reese topped off with whiskey while Jude cleared the dishes. His photographs spread across the table, snapshots from their life in Los Angeles. Jude rested her hand on the back of his neck as he leaned forward, pointing out the different parts of the city he’d shot. The pier at Manhattan Beach, the Capitol Records building shaped like a spindle of records itself, a humpback whale they’d seen in Santa Barbara. The people they’d known, the friends left behind, shots of crowded rooms during parties. It was strange, seeing a city she had only watched on television, through her daughter’s eyes.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

She was pointing at one photo in particular, shot in a crowded bar. She wouldn’t have noticed it at all if not for the blonde girl in the background, grinning over her shoulder, as if she’d just overheard a joke. Her daughter shuffled the picture back into the pile.

“Nobody,” she said. “Just some girl we knew.”

Later that night, falling asleep in bed beside her daughter, the boyfriend gallantly offering to sleep on the lumpy couch, a little embarrassed as he carried over his pillow and blanket—as if Desiree didn’t know what went on between the two of them when she wasn’t under their roof, as if she didn’t know what would probably go on the moment she left, between two people who were young and in love and so relieved to be freed of that old lady who kept asking when they would get married—she kept thinking about the blonde girl in the photograph. She didn’t know why she was so struck by her. The girl just looked like California, or what she imagined it to be: slender and tan and blonde and happy. She thought about calling Early if it wasn’t so late, if she wasn’t going to see him one day later, if she wouldn’t have been so embarrassed by the fact that she still wanted to call him in spite of all of that. And did you know Jude does things like this, she would’ve asked him, befriends white girls? It’s a new world, ain’t it? Did you know the world is so new?

—

BY 1986, Big Ceel was dead, a fact that Early Jones only discovered reading the paper in Dr. Brenner’s office. He was waiting with his mother-in-law, or, rather, a woman he had begun to think of as such, when he saw a photo of the man, pages deep into the Times-Picayune , below the headline LOAN SHARK FOUND DEAD. Stabbed, it turned out, over a card game gone wrong. Seemed fitting, in a way, that Ceel, a man who’d built a life on lending and collecting, would meet his end over money. At the same time, it seemed disgraceful, dying over such a small sum. Forty dollars, the paper said. Forty dollars, shit. Of course by then, Early knew well enough how little men were willing to die or kill for. He’d seen worse, more risked for less. Still, it stunned him to learn about Ceel’s demise in such dispassionate black print, almost as much as it shocked him to discover that Ceel’s government name was Clifton Lewis.

Oh, he realized. C. L. It dawned on him, closing the paper as Dr. Brenner called Adele’s name, that, in a way, Ceel had been his oldest friend.

By then, he hadn’t run a job for Ceel in three months. “I oughta throw you a retirement party already,” Ceel had told him, in their last phone call. “You ain’t that kid no more I first met. You lost your killer instinct.” Early hung up, knowing that Ceel was just trying to goad him, knowing that Ceel still needed him, the old man telling Early, more than once, that he was the best hunter he’d ever had. Once, his insults might’ve worked. But now life was different. Early wasn’t a kid anymore. He had responsibilities. A woman he loved. Her mother, whom he loved too, who had nearly burned the house down when she had turned on the stove to boil water for coffee, forgotten about it, and gone back to sleep. He had gone out to Fontenot’s that day, bought a Mr. Coffee for the kitchen, taught Adele how to use it. But after that morning, she never made coffee again. When Desiree left to open Lou’s Egg House, he woke up and made a cup for Adele. And if he was off working for Ceel, who would be home to do that?