Perhaps it was unfair of me to arm Pea with that old story. Were it not for the extremity of our circumstances, I never would have breathed a word of it. Understand, I never blamed you, Tammy—I just saw what you did not wish to see. I wish I could apologize, but you would smack me for insincerity—I would do it again, and gladly, for her sake. So I was unfair to you, because I cannot force your hand.
No matter what: she has loved well, as we have loved. We live in hard times. I drown in screams by day and dreams by night, here beneath the desert’s open sky. I dream of her knives in the garden. I dream of your cards. Your stub-legged king of diamonds. You called him a suicide king, didn’t you? But I know the four of us well enough—though we all go in the end, we will none of us go willingly. Do you remember that book of poetry I lent you? I left it behind, along with the rest of me, so you will forgive imperfect memory:
“Tarry a while, till I am satisfied
Of love and grief, of earth and altering sky;
Till all my human hungers are fulfilled,
O Death, I cannot die!”
She took out the cards that afternoon. They hadn’t so much as snuffled at her since she’d let those old roots crowd her heart, but Dev’s letter had left her with a scratching unease. Pea’s hands were docile as two lapdogs. Clyde was safe. Even the mournful smudge of Victor’s ghost did not seem, in these late days, like any great burden. Dev had written before she’d made her choice. She just needed to check. But when she rousted the cards from their slumber and laid them on the yellow Formica of the kitchen table, they muttered of old wars and new battles, of crabbed hands and tender shooting hearts. Danger everywhere. A new age—
“Yes,” Tamara snapped. This pulled a long cough out of her, while Little Sammy’s ghost fiddled with a bit of fishing wire on the floor at her feet. She caught her breath. “But what about us? What about Dev? What about Pea?”
She shuffled again. The jack of diamonds slid right off the top, upside down. Jack o’ diamonds, she hummed to herself, he did rob a friend of mine. “Course he did,” she muttered, sweeping up the cards in her left hand and smothering them with the handkerchief in her right. That smug little white man, what part of the world didn’t he think was his?
Phyllis’s sister came to visit with her children. Gloria was light-skinned enough that some would call her pitch-toed, but just dark enough that she could never have followed Pea downtown. At least, not through the front doors. For a long time Tamara had thought that passing made Pea’s life easier, but now she could see how it had separated her from her family, from the world she belonged in.
Gloria had married a man who hated Phyllis for that and other reasons, who had given more than a drop of that resentment to his oldest child. Sonny sat on the farthest edge of the porch all morning, his gaze fixed on a book whose pages he turned only occasionally. The youngest was running around the yard, hunting flowers which she had declared she would weave into a wreath for her aunt. Tamara was helping Ida, though it had been fifteen years since her last spring garland. Better to run barefoot across the soft grass than sit by and endure that at once awkward and intimate conversation between Phyllis and her older sister.
“Tom will be gone for months at a time if he takes the promotion,” she heard as Ida gleefully uprooted the crocuses from the garden.
“Does he want to?”
“He says it’s for the war. He wants to do his duty.”
Pea didn’t say anything to that, which was its own response.
“Ida,” Tamara said, tugging her elbow. “Why don’t we keep walking? I don’t think your uncle will be happy if we take all his flowers.”
“Uncle Dev won’t mind,” she said, with admirable perception, “but Aunt Pea might.”
They went down to the river and a little ways along the path that the spring rains had nearly washed out. Sonny joined them five minutes later, while they were squatting in a patch of clover, looking for luck.
“I don’t know how to braid a wreath,” he said. He held his book, The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes, in both hands, like an offering. It was one of Phyllis’s—she must have given it to him.
“It’s okay, Sonny,” Ida said, very kindly. She took the book from him and settled it against a raised tree root. “We can teach you.”
Tamara’s first wreath broke and fell apart. Her fingers were clumsy creatures with anything but the cards. Ida laughed. “Look, Aunt Tammy, even Sonny’s got farther than you!”
Tamara laughed with her. “You want to make me one too, Sonny? It’ll be our secret.”
He smiled. “Nuh-uh. You gotta do your own work, Aunt Tammy.”
She turned her head up to the dappled light coming down through baby green leaves. She smacked her hand against her thigh. “Where’d you get that mouth on you, boy?” she cried. “Why, I have a mind to—” She tickled his stomach. He pinned her to the ground and tickled under her arms and they all fell to shrieking, there in the copse by the river.
A half hour later, they started back up the hill. Ida ran ahead, eager to show off her wreath to her mother and her aunt.
“Aunt Tammy,” Sonny said softly. “Is my aunt all right? She looks…”
Tamara stopped short. What had he seen? The lingering effects of the curse? Her bloated fingers, her wandering gaze? But they’d made the two-hour drive to the doctor the week before.
“It’s been a hard pregnancy, that’s all.
