I wonder what Mae makes of the summary dismissal of charges that came through a week before. Would she have let her son go down for the murders she committed? Or would she have turned herself in, eventually?
“And you, Mae? Are you still thinking of killing me?”
She stills momentarily. Then her chin dips. “They always said you could tell when someone wanted to hurt you. But they say a lot of things about saint’s hands.”
“Someone did, that morning I saw you and Pea at River House. I never could figure that out—whose hatred had been strong enough to pull me out of my bed, but only that once? But now I’m betting it wasn’t Bobby Senior.”
“How would you know? Could’ve been. He was a big man, full of malice. He could have fit you in.”
“Did he fit you in?”
Mae bares her teeth. “Never even occurred to him. Not until he saw the light at the end of his own gun.” She puts a hand on my elbow. “My boy had a purpose. God gave him that gift and until those white men took it away, it was my duty to protect him however I could. He did his best. I know he did. But he was too young…” She looks away. Gets a hold of herself. “He had secrets in him he needed to get out. Other powerful men he could bring down with just a touch. Junior told me one of those men at the party might have hired you and Phyllis for a hit.”
“So you’d have killed us, just in case? But then Pea somehow convinced you otherwise.”
Her stare is straight ahead. “I would have done anything to protect that gift.”
“But not the boy?”
“Them both—”
“And what were you protecting when you helped Craver turn the groundbreaking into a funeral pyre?”
“That,” she says, as full of holy fire as Craver had ever been, “was to make things right.”
I let out a long sigh. “But they aren’t, are they, Mae?”
Her eyes grow red and glassy. “The Lord giveth and he taketh away, Dev. It’s better for Alvin. I know it. I just wish … I wish I’d gotten Bobby Junior. I wish that dream had come to me instead.”
You don’t, I think. But for all I know, with that deep fury in her eyes—maybe she does. Maybe the hands are a joke on all of us—just enough to make us wonder, and never enough to change.
“And now?”
“I’m done. What’s happened to Alvin … it’s long past time. Let the bank take the land and we’ll move to Poughkeepsie, we have family there. We can be regular, like we were before.”
I nod, but I wonder what Alvin will think. Bell family sins hurt her longer, and perhaps worse. But she was not their only casualty. And it’s Alvin who guards the secrets.
In the dining room Gloria clinks her glass amid laughing cries for the groom. Mae and I share one last look, a tense understanding, and then I rejoin the others.
Pea takes my hand. “Walter’s promised me a dance.”
“Walter can dance?” I rub her fingers between my own.
“That’s what I said!”
Gloria raises her glass for the toast. We all quiet. Pea is tense beside me. Gloria came with her husband, who has never liked Pea and doesn’t seem inclined to like me any better. But she is soft-spoken and unoffensive, with a quietly moving reference to their parents and their brother, long departed. I’m astonished to realize that she is happy for us. That most of the people standing around our dining room table this Christmas Eve are happy for us—delighted, counting Tamara.
We eat until we can hardly stand, then dance until we collapse. Pea tries a lindy with Walter, who is nearly as terrible as we feared. Tamara laughs until she has tears in her eyes.
“Walter, Walter,” she says, hugging him when the song is over, “I think that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Walter, ever so faintly red, just smiles and squeezes her shoulder.
I dance with Gloria and Mae and Tamara and Ida. Pea dances again with Walter, then Alvin, then Tamara just for the competition. My feet throb with sympathetic blisters watching them go. Dessert comes out of the oven. We’re somehow all hungry again. Ida falls asleep by her pie. Pea carries her to bed, but the rest of the family slip upstairs soon after. The music still plays. We holdouts tap stockinged feet to the rhythm as we open up bottles of a 1935 Bordeaux that Walter gave as a wedding present. We argue politics: the war, the Japanese, our tactics, Roosevelt, Hitler, when we’ll all come back home.
No one mentions that I’m to be shipped with a Negro unit in a week’s time; no one mentions Tamara’s beau, set to fly transport runs in the Pacific. In the midst of a heated discussion over the draft expansion, Pea turns to me with something I’d call panic if it weren’t so happy.
“What was your grandmother’s name?”
“Kate?” I slide my hands along her rib cage. Too easy to find even beneath the aged silk and lace of her wedding dress.
“No,” she says, “the other one.”
The one who made me batata bhaji and poori and cool drinks with yogurt and mint and rose petals. The one who loved me when my father loved me. Before I met death. Before I killed a man. Before I learned of blood and desire and their cost.
“Durga,” I say, and Pea’s breath catches.
“That’s her name. So you’ll know when you write.”
Pea’s lips are stained red with wine and her cheeks are bright with blood. I kiss her softly. “Just going out for some air,” I say.
Walter watches me go. Pea is saying something to Tamara, her back trembling with laughter.
The snow has stopped, but the wind kicks up the drifts. Ice stings my cheeks. It takes three tries to get my cigarette to catch. The light from inside the house is warm. Spilled generously, like their laughter.
