Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

He ran over to her. She didn’t have time to move herself. When he reached her, she collapsed into his chest, clung to the sandy pocket flap on his uniform shirt. There was an assortment of smells, some from the station, some from his coat, some from him, all congregating to hide his main one, the smell she had been carrying in her mind of him. She burrowed her head through his clothes now that he was in front of her, searching for it, but it wouldn’t be found.

“What’s the matter with you, girl?” he asked, looking down at her shaking her head back and forth like a dog in a hole.

“I can’t smell you.”

“What?” He was smiling, but he moved his head a touch away from her.

“Different countries got different smells, baby,” he said laughing.

“But you’re not a different country. You’re just yourself.”

“Yeah, I’m still myself.” He raised her head up as close to his as it would stretch and kissed her. He pressed her into him, then pushed her back.

“What’s this?” he asked, eyeing her middle, putting the context together but not so certain he didn’t need an explanation.

She just stared at him, objective and resolute. This was the moment when she would learn if her daddy had been right.

“You remember what we did last time you were here?” she asked.

“Do I remember? It’s all I could think about back there.” Then a smile spread slowly on his face.

“You serious, baby?” He opened her coat wider and squealed. “Baby, you serious?” he repeated. He tried to spin her around but stopped himself, then patted her belly with the flat palm of his hand.

He jumped up on the station platform. “Yes!” he shouted. People turned their heads, but he only repeated it. “Yes.”

Evelyn still couldn’t let herself believe his reaction.

“You mean it?” she asked. “You’re happy? You’re not upset?”

“Not upset? Baby this is what I always wanted, what I’d go to bed dreaming about since I was a boy, and for the woman to be carrying it to be you, well, that’s more than I could have dreamed, that’s more than I could have imagined deserving.”

He marched her straight to her father’s house with her hand cupped in his. When Mama said her daddy was out tending to a breached baby, Renard just waited, devoured every dish Mama offered, drank her tea, nibbled on her petit fours.

“I know you must be hungry being away all this time,” Mama said. “What was the food like over there?”

“Slop,” he said, “nothing like this.”

She smiled. “Well, you’re home now.”

When her father came in, he didn’t seem to sink at the sight of them; if anything, he just seemed resigned.

He changed clothes and washed his hands before he walked back out to the table.

Renard stood to greet him, and when he sat back down, Evelyn gripped her man’s hands under the table. She could feel them shaking, and she expected his voice to shake too the way it did in those early days, but it came out like steel.

“I know you must be disappointed. You’ve done so well for yourself, and you expected your daughter to uphold the standard you set.”

Her daddy didn’t say anything, only nodded, but he kept his eyes on Renard’s, and that was more than she’d seen him do in the last few months.

“Then we go and embarrass you further with this.” He pointed to Evelyn’s stomach.

“Don’t go calling my baby an embarrassment,” Mama snapped.

“It’s not the baby, it’s us, it’s me, and I admit that. I admit that I might be disappointing. I’ve always wanted to be like you. From the day I was born I wanted to be a doctor. Unlucky goal for a Negro, but I wanted to sew people up, fix the problems that were wrong in their bodies, in their lives, and I still intend to do that. I do. My father was a janitor, and my schooling hasn’t come easy to me. I work two jobs, and I still get help, but I’m not trying to complain. I’m trying to explain to you that I’m the type of man who will do anything to accomplish his goal.”

Then he turned to Evelyn in front of Mama and Daddy, bent his left knee until it touched the floor. “I love you, Evelyn; one of the things I love most about you is that you’re such a proud woman. It pains me that you had to walk around in this condition, and I haven’t been able to do anything to help you. I vow to you, I vow to you, sir, ma’am”—he turned to her parents then—“I will never diminish that pride again.” He leaned back into Evelyn, lifted her hand.

“If you will have me, Evelyn, I would be honored to be your husband, to serve you for the rest of your life, to spend the rest of my own life ensuring that you never feel shame.”

Evelyn didn’t allow herself to speak, not with her father there whose disdain she could sense from where she sat. Her tears started anyway, the heft of all those years of girlhood dreaming, these last months of yearning, culminating now on the verge of release.

Still she didn’t say a word. She thought if she said the word yes in her father’s presence it would doom her life and everything it yielded to a gloomy, stunted fate, so she clipped her great rush of emotion, and she nodded instead, wrapped her arms around Renard, and exhaled into his neck.

That was enough for Mama, who yelped, dabbing her eyes, but her father just sat looking at Renard as though he wanted to slap him but didn’t have the energy.

Evelyn’s father turned to her finally, gave a look of sad surrender, and said, “Okay.” Then he stood, shook Renard’s hand, picked up the sandwich Evelyn’s mama had packed for his next round, and left the table.

When her father was gone, Evelyn let out a squeal she thought Miss Georgia might be privy to across the street. She let her tears stream out hard and fast, and when Renard stood up and spun Mama around, she cocked her head back and laughed and laughed.

When they were done celebrating, Renard asked Evelyn if he could take her to his own people’s house to show her off, and she said nothing would make her happier. They rode the bus all the way to Amelia Street. She had never been to this part of town, and she was alarmed by the dust on the road, the narrow brown double houses, their old crumbling wood. Dozens of people crowded into them, standing on upper-level stoops looking down. Shoeless little boys danced outside to beats they made from pans and tin cans. Mules pulling garbage trucks passed with their pungent stench.

“It doesn’t usually smell like this,” Renard said.

“I know,” she said, as if she hadn’t been wondering the same.

There seemed to be as many people in Renard’s daddy’s house as there were in her own family’s for a holiday, and everyone was overjoyed to see Renard in one piece. They said they had heard about her. They said she was too pretty for Renard. They kept lifting his uniform pants and tapping his legs to make sure they were real. They offered him liquor, they rubbed her belly, they said the baby was a boy, had to be because of how her round belly pointed out. They said Evelyn and Renard could both come and live with them if they needed. They said they’d watch the baby while the newlyweds were in school, and Evelyn couldn’t remember being so happy.

That night when Evelyn and Renard walked back home, Renard pulled the picture he’d been keeping above his nightstand out of his pocket. It had one crease in it from where he’d folded it to fit his wallet but otherwise looked the same as it did when she’d given it to him at the train station nearly a year earlier.

“Seems like it was just yesterday that I gave it to you.”

“Not to me,” he said.

Evelyn wasn’t ready to part from him when they reached her house, so they sat on the porch like they always had. They didn’t talk for a while; she just held on to his jacket, and he rubbed her stomach with the fervor of a man who had to make up for lost time.