Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

“I knocked, but I got no answer,” Sharon said. “Is Neil here? I brought his book back.” The woman tilted her head to the side as though to better consider what she had heard. “Is he here?” The children were silent and their eyes were big as though Sharon was a creature they had not seen before. Sharon told the woman again that she was looking for Neil. It would be better, Sharon thought, if I could see her eyes. Finally, the woman moved her face toward the next room. “Thank you.”

The dining room was crowded with boxes, the state it must have been in since the first day they moved in. The dining table’s missing leg had been replaced with one that had yet to be painted the color of the rest of the table.

“Hello, Neil? Neil?” She stepped into the kitchen, and she was not prepared for what she saw. It was immaculate, the kind of room her mother would be happy with. “Hello?” The floor was clean, the counters were clean, the stove was clean, the tiny table and its three chairs were clean. “Hello?” She turned and looked about the room with great curiosity. When she turned back, Derek was standing at the open screen door to the backyard, watching her.

“You lost?”

“No, I’m sorry. I knocked but no one answered.”

“The May maid swayed away to pray in the day’s hay,” Derek said, not smiling. “Thas why you got no answer.”

“I just came to return Neil’s book. Is he here?”

Derek shouted twice for Neil. “Well, you can just leave it on the table, lady from across the street.”

“He said I could borrow another. A book of Irish stories the library doesn’t seem to have.”

He shouted for Neil again, and as she listened to his voice thunder through the house, she noticed the small bookcase beside the refrigerator. Four shelves, each a little more than two feet across. He saw her looking at it. “Just leave it on the table. That readin fool’ll get it.”

“I can come back for it another time.” She set the book on the table.

“Which one was it?” He was wearing an undershirt, and it hung on him in a way that did not threaten the way those shirts seemed to on other men. The bare muscular arms were simply bare muscular arms, not possible weapons. It was a small moment in the kitchen, but she was to think of those arms years later as she stood naked and looked down at the bare arms of her husband as the red light of the expensive German clock shone down on him. A night-light.

“A book of stories—Mary Lavin’s Tales from Bective Bridge. My teacher shared two with me and I’m hooked.”

“Hooked is good cept with junk, ask any junkie,” Derek said, and he looked across at the bookcase. “The almighty reader might have it upstairs or in some box somewhere. His shit is all over the fuckin place.” Shit, fuckin, she thought. Shit, fuckin. In a few quiet, swift steps, he was at the table. He took up the book and looked at the spine and wrinkled his face. “Hooked, hooked,” he said. The same kind of steps took him to the bookcase. He knelt, peered for a moment, and put the book between two green books on the second shelf up from the bottom. “L is for Lavin,” Derek said and found the book. “M is for Mary.” He looked at it front and back. “I know one thing for sure: He loves this woman’s work so you bet not lose it. I think the almighty reader is part Irish and don’t know it yet.” In two more steps he was before her, and she took the book and promised to return it just as it was. There was nothing untoward in his face, the lust, the hunger, the way it was in all the boys except Neil, boys with pimples, and boys without. There was no smile from him and he did not look into her eyes, the twinkling and the brown. He turned and went to the refrigerator and opened it. “You know,” he said, his back to her, his head bent to look in, and the light of the refrigerator pouring out over him, “you shouldn’t be afraid of wearin blue.” He took out a beer and closed the icebox with great care. “Forget the red. You wear too much red.” He did not turn around but found on the counter beside the icebox an opener for the beer.

“What?”

Neil came in, and Derek pointed to him. “Where you been, boy?” Derek said. “Your girlfriend been waitin. You the worse fuckin boyfriend in the world.”

“She ain’t my girlfriend,” Neil said and raised his hand Hello to Sharon.

“I gave your girlfriend one of Lavin’s books, man.”

“I told you she’s not my girlfriend, Dee.”

“Whatever, man.” He still had not turned around and he drank from the beer as he walked to the back door. “You should tell your girlfriend that red doesn’t suit her. She ain’t believe me so maybe if it comes from her boyfriend.” He went out the screen door, and Neil walked her back to the front of the house.

Three neighbors saw Sharon Palmer leave the Bennington house that day—her father Hamilton from his upstairs bedroom, Terence Stagg next door to the home of Sharon and Hamilton Palmer, and Prudence Forsythe next to the Benningtons. This was a little more than a month before that January thing between Terence and Derek. Terence was standing at his living room window and watched Sharon walk down the Bennington steps with a book in her hand. Neil Bennington was a wisp of a boy, not worth noticing to a young man like Terence. But Terence had seen Derek about, and like most of the men on 8th Street he didn’t think much of him; men like Derek had never seen the inside of Howard University, where Terence was in his second year, and they never would. As Sharon waited for the few passing cars going up and down 8th, she lowered her head in a most engaging way, lowered it only for a second, as if to consider something, and Terence could see how Sharon had filled out. Filled out in her pink sweater and her blue jeans not trampy tight, but tight enough to let a man know if he should bother or not. She had filled out since the last time he had really taken a look at her, and that was a time he could not remember.

Terence was at her door that evening, asking a beaming Hamilton Palmer, who had also gone to Howard, how he was doing these warm days and then asking the father if he might talk a bit with his daughter this evening. He and Sharon stepped out onto the porch and Terence invited her to a movie and a meal on Friday night. She had had two dates before—and one of those had been with a young man who was brother to her cousin’s husband. Sharon was not one to keep a diary, but if she had been, the meeting of a few minutes with Terence would have taken up at least two pages.

Terence stepped back into her house and called good-bye to Hamilton Palmer, who came out of the kitchen with Sharon’s mother. The parents said they hadn’t seen much of him lately and then wanted to know how his studies were going and Terence told them they were going very well and that he was hitting his stride. He was, in fact, going with a fellow Howard student, but Howard students not D.C. natives were taught from day one never to venture into Washington neighborhoods except where they could find a better class of people, meaning white people for the most part, and so that Newark girl would never know about 8th Street. That girl at Howard was so clingy, with her Terence this and her Terence that. And as he had watched Sharon earlier come across 8th, he remembered something his father Lane had recently told him: You are young and the world is your oyster. You shuck it, don’t let it shuck you. What oyster would Derek ever shuck? Well, fine, Hamilton said about Terence hitting his stride, and Hamilton came across the living room with his hand extended. And he added that Terence was way ahead of the game, because Lord knows he didn’t hit his own stride until he was a junior at least, isn’t that right, honey? And his wife just smiled.