Tayari Jones: Silver Sparrow

“What about two weeks away from me?” I said. “You talk to me every day, too.”

“Oh, Buttercup,” he said, “Don’t be like that. Of course I miss you.”

“Do you love me?” I asked him.

“Of c-c-ourse, I love you. Your uncle Raleigh loves you, too.”

“But do you love me better?”

“Better than your Mama? What kind of question is that?”

“No,” I said. “Do you love me better than Dana?”

Now, it was his turn to back away from the glass. “What’s the p-p-point of asking that?”

I didn’t want him to leave. Not yet. I needed to ask him when exactly he had taken Gwendolyn Yarboro to be his “lawful y wedded wife.” Had he real y done it when I was in the hospital, underweight, and stuck through with al those tubes? I’d snuck into my mother’s drawer and looked at the marriage license, but I wasn’t quite sure. If Gwen was tel ing the truth, I had a problem because I could never tel my mother and I didn’t want to join the party of people who loved my mother and lied to her.

“Y-you know, Chaurisse,” he said. “Open up this door. You are trying my patience. When you act like this, people grow cal uses on their heart. I don’t want any cal uses on my heart when it comes to you.”

Hearing the threat in his voice, I put my hand on the knob to let him in. “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then why did you marry Gwen when I was stil in the incubator?”

“Who said I d-d-did that?”

“Gwen,” I said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” my father said, “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

It was easy to take him at his word, as easy as taking off a heavy pack, as easy as fal ing down a flight of stairs, as easy as shutting my eyes at bedtime.

26

EPITHALAMIUM

SHE TOOK HIM BACK. Was there ever any question? Of course I had doubt at the time, but I wasn’t old enough to know anything about the how the world works. When my mother asked me to join her at the kitchen table, she looked like herself again. She wore a green spangled warm-up suit and her hairpiece hung over her shoulders in optimistic ribbon twists. When she spoke, I concentrated on her mouth, her teeth stained by her lipstick.

“Your father never meant for this to happen. He is a good man at his very heart. When we got married, he came forward on his own. There were a dozen wrong things he could have done and only one right thing. We were just children. Chaurisse, when I was your age, I was three years married, had buried a child. Wel , that’s not ful y true. There’s nothing under that headstone in the churchyard next to your Grandma Bunny. By the time I got two feet on the floor, the people at the hospital had already put his little body through the furnace. Nothing was left. No ashes, no nothing. He was so teensy that he just evaporated. Al this happened before I was your age now, and your daddy wasn’t much older. And that was his baby, too, turned into nothing but smoke and air.

“Nobody turned me away. No matter what is happening in this house today, I can’t forget that. Your daddy married me because I was having his baby, and even when I didn’t have no baby to show for myself, he al owed me to stay and be part of his family. That’s history. That’s solid, and there is no changing that. No matter how mad I am, how hurt, no matter what may be going on in your head, there’s no undoing that kindness.”

“But what about me,” I asked her, feeling smal even to ask.

“What about you, honey?”

“What about what I want?”

“This is al about you, baby. We are a family. This is about making our family whole. Isn’t that what everybody wants?” She smiled at me. “This is the third time the world tried to make an orphan of me. The first was when I got pregnant and my mama put me out. But then Miss Bunny saved me.

After that, your brother died, but you saved my marriage. This is the third time. God didn’t mean for us to be alone. Can’t you see that?”

I crossed my arms and made a nest for my head on the kitchen table. I breathed in my own smel . Life was turning into a quiz show, ful of trick questions, and wagers. “I don’t know what I see,” I said to her.

“You just have to trust,” my mother said. “Trust and believe.”

EPILOGUE

Dana Lynn Yarboro

MY DAUGHTER, FLORA, looks just like me and I am sorry for this. It’s not that I have any quarrel with my own appearance, but I would have liked to give her a face of her own. In so many ways, you can’t choose what you give to your daughter, you just give her what you have.

Flora is four years old, born in 1996, the year that Atlanta hosted the Olympics and the whole world came to our country town. I was in labor during the opening ceremonies, but I heard the fireworks as my bones shifted to make way for this new life. My mother was beside me, speaking my name. Flora’s father was there, too, but we are not together as couple. He’s not married to me, but he’s not married to anyone else, either, so I suppose that counts as progress. She doesn’t have his last name, but he picks her up on some Sundays and he loves her in public.

She and I live in a town house on Cascade Road, across from John A. White Park. You can’t say it’s a far cry from Continental Colony, but it’s my own home. I pay the mortgage each month and it feels good even without covered parking. It also feels good to send her to the same kindergarten where I first saw Chaurisse so many years ago. My daughter is smart. The teachers love her.

THIS IS THE YEAR 2000. In high school, Ronalda and I were convinced that the world was going to end at the start of the new mil ennium. Part of it was the round number, 2000, and the other part of it was that I couldn’t imagine having survived to be thirty-one, but here I am. I don’t have much hair these days, I keep it Caesar shorn and brushed flat, but there are silver strands there. I’m not aging as beautiful y as my mother, but she works a lot harder at it than I do.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Flora’s school lets the children out early. I was there even earlier — I never want her to wonder where I am. She and I were headed toward the car, when I noticed a blue Lincoln in the space beside mine. I held Flora’s hand tighter and ignored the itching in my throat. My mother and I joke that there should be a medical term for the condition we have, the irrational fear of Town Cars.

As I got closer to my car, the driver’s door of the Lincoln opened, and Chaurisse Witherspoon stepped out wearing a uniform that was tailored for a man. It had been twelve years, but I would have known my sister anywhere. She looked like her mother from her dul figure to the sil y mop of fake hair.

“Hey, Dana,” she said.

I suppose the real question was what was she doing here, but I have always known I would see her again.

“Hey, Chaurisse,” I said. “What’s up?”

She shrugged. “I just wanted to see you. I was driving by the other day and I saw your daughter playing outside. She looks just like you.”

Flora liked it when people talked abut her, so she smiled.

“What’s her name,” Chaurisse wanted to know.

“Flora,” my daughter piped up.

The smal parking lot was busy with parents and little children. Al the kids carried cardboard cutouts of their hands decorated to look like turkeys.

I waved at some of the mothers. I hoped I looked normal, wel adjusted, and happy. I leaned against the side of my car. “Wel ? Is somebody dying?” I said it with a sort of flippant attitude, but I real y wanted to know. Al these years later my mother stil scanned the obituary page every Sunday. If James Witherspoon died, she would be there in widow’s black.