Tayari Jones: Silver Sparrow

“Dana,” said Gwendolyn. “Look at me.”

Dana sighed and reached into her purse, the same fake LV she was carrying that day we met in the SupeRx. She looked exhausted. I couldn’t believe that it had been only last summer that we were stealing from the drugstore. Fast friends is what they cal it when you connect with someone like that. When you talk about it, you say you are like sisters.

She kept her fist closed tight around the object and passed it to her mother. Using her free hand, she tried to close Gwendolyn’s fingers into a fist as wel , postponing the moment that we would see the flush of aquamarine and flash of crystal. For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

“No,” my mama said.

“Miss Bunny left it to Dana.”

“No,” my mother said. “Miss Bunny would not do me like that. We buried Miss Bunny in her brooch.”

I shook my head, remembering the day we prepared Miss Bunny and Raleigh took his awkward picture. I remembered my father’s long hug and the star-shaped press against my cheek.

“No,” my mother said. “No.”

“Ask Raleigh,” Gwendolyn said. “You know Raleigh can’t tel a lie.”

Mrs. Grant, stil on her feet, walked toward Dana and Gwen wagging her finger. “You cannot do this.”

I was close enough to Dana to touch her. “Look at me. You are not my sister.”

She turned and said, “Yes, I am.”

Mrs. Grant said, “What’s your last name, then?”

Gwendolyn said, “This isn’t about names. It’s about blood.”

Cold as anything, Mrs. Grant said, “I didn’t catch your family name, either.”

Not for one second did I forget whose side I was on, but I felt a little ashamed for Dana and her mother. Every time Gwen went to speak, Mrs.

Grant cut her off, asking again about her name, like it was an exorcism. Meanwhile, my mother, stuffed into her party dress, held her mouth open like she was singing a silent opera.

“Get out,” I final y said.

Seeming exhausted and maybe even grateful to be dismissed, Gwen took a step toward the door, but Dana took a step in my direction. “Can I have it back?”

“What?”

“Miss Bunny’s pin. It’s the only thing I have.”

I squeezed my hand around the brooch, letting the sharp pin press against my palm. “It’s mine.”

AS THEY LEFT, Dana looked over her shoulder mournful y and mouthed something that I couldn’t decipher. Al my life, I’d wanted a sister. How many times had my mother said how sorry she was that I was an only child? That’s what happened when you want something too much. Life, it seemed, was a long con, rotten with dirty tricks.

Near the door, Mrs. Grant knelt as my mother sank to the floor in her pale almond gown. I know I should have been at my mother’s side, but I went to the glass door and watched Dana and her mother walk to the curb, struggling against the steep grade in their heels. Maybe I could have run after them, shoved Gwendolyn to the ground to defend my mother’s honor. Perhaps I should have demanded some sort of truth from them, but at that moment I didn’t want to know anything more.

24

A MIGHTY POOR RAT

MY MOTHER BANISHED my father from 739 Lynhurst with nothing but the uniform on his back. Didn’t even let him in the house. He didn’t fight, didn’t beg for forgiveness or for his toothbrush. He walked away at a quick clip, like an embarrassed deliveryman after knocking on the wrong door. Once we heard the quiet crank of his engine my mother said, “That wasn’t so bad,” but then she burst into tears and asked me to bring her a Tylenol PM.

She was stil mopping her face with a dishrag when the telephone mounted on the kitchen wal rang. Startled, I looked at my mother. “Answer it,” she said. Although what happened that afternoon had made it clear to both of us that we didn’t know anything at al about our own lives, we stil had enough intuition to know that my father was on the other end of that jangling phone. “T-t-tel you m-m-mama that I understand that she doesn’t want to talk to me. Tel her that I’m sleeping at Raleigh’s. And t-tel her I love her.”

I said, “Yes, sir. I wil deliver that message.”

“Chaur-r-rise,” he said. “How can you be so cold? I’m stil your daddy. This is between your mama and me.”

“This is between al of us,” I said, winding my fingers in the spiral cord, thinking of how many people made up the us. Gwen had left in our mailbox a fat envelope stuffed with al kinds of paperwork, including Dana’s birth certificate. Negro female born alive four months before I was born and nearly died in the very same hospital. Raleigh’s signature skimmed the line beside the word father. (Clipped to it was a ruled index card that said, Do not be misled by this. ) And what about Dana and me? There was no scrap of paper making an official connection between us. I am not the one to believe that our shared blood made us sisters, but having shared a father gave us something in common that looped around our ankles and pul ed tight around our wrists. This was between al of us. The six of us were hog-tied, fastened in place by different knots.

“Bye, Daddy,” I said, so he couldn’t say that I hung up on him.

It went on like this for two weeks, going on three. Mama refused to answer the telephone but also refused to take it off the hook. Phones back then were built with bel s inside, so the ringing was like a fire alarm until I final y picked up. “Just put your mama on the phone,” Daddy said, his voice unstable like an eighth-grade boy’s. “Tel her I’m at Raleigh’s. She can cal back at Raleigh’s number if she don’t believe me.”

Right before Johnny Carson’s monologue, Raleigh would cal himself. “My mama doesn’t want to talk to you, either,” I told him before I even said hel o.

“What about you, Chaurisse?” Uncle Raleigh said. “Can you find it in your heart to talk to ole Raleigh?”

I wasn’t sure what was in my heart. I went to school every day as usual. I scored C’s on my tests, performed passable arpeggios on my flute, as average and as invisible as before Dana Yarboro bul ed our china shop. For the first time in years, I was grateful that my father encouraged me to attend Northside, so far from my neighborhood — the ride to school was about twenty-five minutes by car and forty-five if I took MARTA. Dana was over at Mays High, just down the street. The word had no doubt trickled down a generation from Mrs. Grant to Ruth Nicole Elizabeth and outward from there. Even if she never heard the whispers, Dana was likely on edge like Mama and me as we kept on working in relaxers, scrunching in finger waves, and sewing in weaves. There was no way to know for sure who had heard what, so al you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything.

During the seventeen days and eighteen nights of my father’s absence, my mother slept beside me in my canopy bed. It wasn’t my idea, but on the second night she tapped on the door frame, boozy-peachy and pleading. I rol ed over until my backside bumped the wal . The bed sank a little under her weight. “You awake, Chaurisse? I can’t sleep.” She rol ed over on her side, arranging herself around me. My mother’s body was soft and warm, smel ing of schnapps and the oily silk wrap wound around her head. “You’re al I have now,” she said.

“No,” I said. “That can’t be right. You stil have the Pink Fox.”

“Maybe. If I divorce your father, al of our stuff wil be split up. He could buy me out. Him and Raleigh could together, and then they could move that lady and her daughter right in here.”

“Daddy and Raleigh wouldn’t do that.”

“There’s no tel ing what they might do, Chaurisse. Don’t you get it? Anybody could be doing anything at any time.”