But she came back.
“We have aphids.”
Pea’s tracked garden mud into the kitchen again. Bits of leaf and straw stick out of the floating mass of hair that has changed, slowly but unmistakably, over the last month. A burn from two days ago peels on her shoulders. She frowns at the curling skin and smears dirt when she picks at it. It catches me, the sight of her. I have been sitting at the kitchen table, holding myself very still, trying not to remember. Then she walks inside and the avalanche falls. The stink of shit and his gamy dumpling soup. What he called her, the curse he laid on us, the ache in my wrist as I pushed her knife into his head—
“Dev?”
Pea touches me. The avalanche slows and settles. I look up at her brown eyes, wide and limpid as a cow’s. She is still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
“Aphids,” I repeat. She looks about to cry, and then wrestles it back down. A flashing truth, and when the glare fades all she leaves me is her curious smile.
“Tiny plant-killing monsters? Sucking the lifeblood from my tomatoes?”
“Oh, you mean the greenflies.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Is that British?”
I smile. “Why not spray them?”
“With what, darling?”
She starts to lean against the table, so I intercept her muddy hands and bring them to my cheek. She winces, and then laughs. “I’m a mess, aren’t I? Sorry, Dev. I did remember the boots this time.”
“I was very proud of you.” I reach and pluck a green corkscrew from her brown ones—a remnant of the sprawling snow pea vines she has been beating back from the damask roses. “I don’t suppose vinegar would do anything?”
“You know, despite what your mother—”
“It’s my aunt Rose, really—”
“—your appropriately named aunt believes, vinegar doesn’t solve every gardening problem.”
She kneels so her face is level with mine, and settles those lips in some hollow between my shoulder blade and neck, a perfect touch, quickly withdrawn.
“What should we do, then?” My voice is light. Sometimes she guesses how much that costs me.
A flush spreads from Pea’s cheeks to her ears. Neither of us moves. We’ve tried to make love only once in the past month, and even then I had to stop. Everything we say echoes forward and backward, with meanings on the surface and layered in tight folds beneath. We hear them all, but our game is to pretend that we don’t.
No—my game. It always has been, and now my hands reach for those worn-out cards even when I know I could play it differently. When I’m at last with the woman who doesn’t need my tricks. Or not as many.
“Evaluate the situation,” Pea says, softly. Dirt crumbles to my collar as she traces curving bone around my eye. “Seek advice. Assemble appropriate tools. Save the tomatoes.”
“How is it you sound so dangerous even when proposing to save something?”
Pea’s eyes get that hard look, one I used to associate with days in the Pelican. But her lips turn up and she laughs, false and knowing. “Because I was always proposing to save something, darling,” she says, and strokes me, like a punch, on the cheek.
Killing eyes and killing hands. Only, those killing hands have spent the last three hours working the soil, and her eyes—
I lean in and kiss her, searching for truth and finding joy, complete and evanescent. The bloom is off the rose by the time she opens her eyes. A breath hollows out my chest.
“Let’s go to town,” she says, “to the general store. I can ask Mr. Craver.”
Do I regret what I did for her? Taking that sin onto myself when she has so many others, so many kills? Should I blame her for it? Should I love her so much?
That n—r bitch—
I will hold Victor’s ugly, dying words inside me for the rest of my life. But she might not.
“Dev?”
I wrap my arms around her and she opens against me. “If you think that old puritan has anything useful to say, of course. We will stop the greenflies.”
“If you call them that, no one will have any idea what you’re saying, Dev.” Her words are muffled against my shoulder.
“Then translate, Pea.”
I go to check the mailbox while Pea showers. I slide lightly down the steep gravel driveway. My father meant to surface it properly for the new Chrysler he had purchased the winter we moved. Then he died, and there was the end to all that. I stayed here with Mother until I went to college, then she moved to Devon and married the younger son of a peer. I became a naturalized citizen, instead.
A single letter sits in the box. Bright white, with a seal in the corner familiar to me from filing my draft card with the rest of the precinct. Back when I thought Victor could grease the wheels of any serious trouble. Back before I killed him.
I am steady and sharp as one of Pea’s old knives when I leverage my thumb under the loose edge and rip along the seam. I have dreaded this for months, but I do not flinch. Our lives have taught us that much.
ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION
Following which arresting headline the president himself requests my presence at my local draft board at eight in the morning two weeks hence.
Perhaps they won’t want me. My neighbors are still wary at the best of times, though they tended to tolerance for my mother’s sake. Since Pea came it’s been worse. Either one of us alone seems to occupy that liminal space between “acceptable” and “colored,” but together we are unequivocally Not White.
We are unequivocally Not White, but one can get damned tired of it mattering. If they decide that I’m white enough to enlist—or if they ship me to one of the Negro units, like Tamara’s boyfriend—then what will I do? Ignore them? Take my chances as a conscientious objector? Kill?
Might be it’s like that first taste of whiskey: the more you
