Would the spirit of him come with me or stay in Odenville? Or did the spirit of him live within me because I had felt the beat of it in his last moments dancing around my wedding set to trail up my left arm and reside within my own heart? I wondered about the first question; I believed I knew the answer to the last.
“All right,” I said.
Her mouth formed a silent “o” as if she’d expected to fight harder for what she wanted. “Seriously?” she asked, her eyes wide. Michelle clapped like a teenager, then leapt up, crossed the room, and gathered me in her arms, kissing my cheek repeatedly. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love you to bits.”
I laughed with abandonment. “I love you, too, baby girl. To bits.”
I brought our bedroom furniture.
I brought my favorite chair and the sofa Westley stretched out on nearly every evening after dinner. I brought odds and ends. The day before I left, I drove out to see Ro-Bay who, thanks to Miss Justine, had invested well. She and her husband now lived in a quiet neighborhood of sprawling brick homes surrounded by tended gardens and made up of spacious rooms with thick carpets so “walking isn’t so hard on these old bones.”
After our last visit, she kissed my cheek soundly and said she would miss me “something awful.”
“I’ll call you every Sunday night,” I told her. “Without fail. Eight sharp.”
“You best.”
I held her amazingly unwrinkled face in my hands and stared into eyes that had grown cloudy with time but still held all the wisdom of the ages. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
“Haven’t I always?”
I released her, allowed my hands to travel down her arms, less muscular than they’d once been. Fleshier. Tears bit at the rims of my eyes, threatening. “We sure had ourselves a time, didn’t we?”
She chuckled. “Lawd, I remember that little girl who walked through the door with our sweet Westley that Sunday afternoon …”
“I didn’t have a clue.”
Her cool fingers cupped my chin. “But you had love.”
“I did have that,” I said, swallowing past the memory of how I’d almost thrown it away after Westley told me about Michelle, and then again with Biff, a man now retired and living in Key West doing, as Ro-Bay once put it, “God only knows what.”
But that near infraction was something only Ro-Bay and I knew about. Ro-Bay and God and me. Ro-Bay, I hoped, had forgotten. God, I prayed, had forgiven. But as for me, I would simply have to live with the truth of my own weaknesses. Although, as the years had passed, I’d finally been able to nearly convince myself that if I’d had more male attention as a teenager—as Elaine once argued—perhaps the second man in my life to show such attention wouldn’t have been able to turn my head with sugar-laced words and butterfly-wing touches.
“Go on, now,” Ro-Bay told me, bringing me back to the moment. “I got things to do and you got miles to go.”
We hugged a final time and then … I walked away from my dearest friend.
I sold off the things I would not take, then put the house Wes and I had raised Michelle in on the market. The movers loaded a truck with the items I kept, then hoisted themselves into their seats and drove away after assuring me, again, of their ETA. I took a final look around the rooms—cavernous and echoing in the absence of that which had given them life—allowing myself a precious memory from each room. Something to savor.
Michelle waited in the car—my car—with the garage door up in anticipation of our departure. Finally, when I knew I could wait no longer, I retrieved my purse from the kitchen counter, walked out the door into the garage, and locked it behind me. After I settled in the passenger’s seat and Michelle backed the car out, she pushed the remote to close the garage door. It jostled to life, then edged its way down until, with a shudder, it hit the cement.
My heart burst; the dam holding back my tears went with it. “Mom,” Michelle said, wrapping her arms around me. “It’s okay.”
“I know it is,” I said between sobs. “It’s just that … it’s my life, Michelle. And so much of it was here. Right here.”
“But you have so much more life to live,” she reminded me, her tone that of her father’s.
I reached for one of the brown Dunkin Donuts napkins I kept in the console, then dabbed at my eyes and blew my nose. “I know.” But something nagged at me. A puzzle with missing pieces. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Yet it was there all the same, hovering under the surface of my soul.
It wasn’t until we reached Wilmington, and, in my unpacking, I found the box of small photos that I began to find a few of those pieces. Pieces that revealed their precisely cut edges as I arranged the silver frames atop a marble and mahogany occasional table and stared at the faces of the women within them.
There was Hillie … with her sleepy eyes and wispy head of hair piled atop her head.
Miss Justine … with her bangles and jewels, her arched brows and bright, painted-on smile.
And Grand … who, even after all the years since her passing, spoke to my heart from time to time. I felt her spirit, strong and resolute, remembering my mother’s words concerning her. “Something rose up in your grandmother that day,” Mama told me time and again, speaking of the day Grand found my grandfather dead on the side of the road. “Something strong and powerful. She’s never lost it.” Well, I knew what it was, even if Mama didn’t. A fist holding a radish. Like Scarlett.
There was a childhood photo of me and Elaine … who, with her husband, had won countless awards and accolades for their work with Native American children,
