“Get out of my shop,” my mother said. “Get out of my shop. This is my place. Get out.”
Mrs. Grant, under the dryer, began to applaud, looking to the other women to join her in this odd banging together of hands, but they didn’t. Like me, they couldn’t stop looking at the folded page.
“Get out,” my mother said. “I don’t care what you got in your hand. You don’t have any paper that has anything to do with me.”
“Take it,” Gwendolyn said. “Take it before I have to read it aloud.”
My mother’s breasts heaved over the sweetheart neckline. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. At her sides, they pumped like a pair of hearts. Gwendolyn opened the paper. She looked at it slowly before glancing up and taking a breath, surveying the room before touching her hair. Gwendolyn licked her lips and although she meant her face to be rigid and stern, I know I saw a flicker of delight tickle her cheeks as she prepared to read. Whatever she had in store, she had been waiting for a long time. I took three steps forward, tripping over Mrs. Grant’s ankles a bit, but I managed to pul the page from Gwendolyn’s hand.
“Good girl,” Mrs. Grant said, like I was a pet.
I unfolded the page. It was a Xerox copy; I could stil smel the chemicals. I was looking at a wedding license issued to James Lee Witherspoon and Gwendolyn Beatrice Yarboro in the state of Alabama the year after I was born.
“This is bul shit,” I said, not to Gwendolyn but to Dana. Gwendolyn kept her arms crossed over her chest and Dana held her hands at her sides like a church usher. Gwendolyn said to my mother, “I am so sorry to have to tel you like this.”
The truth is a strange thing. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. Dana, silvery Dana, was my flesh-and-blood sister. James, my ordinary daddy with his Coke bottle glasses was nothing but a dog. And what did that make me? A fool. I’d invited Dana into my house. Every time I wanted to hang out, she made me beg. And I did. Every single time. “You’re not sorry,” I was speaking to Dana, but I couldn’t look away from the paper in my hands.
“I didn’t send her over here. That’s between the two of you,” Gwendolyn said. “What’s on that document is between your mother and me.”
“Give it here, Chaurisse,” my mother said. I handed her the page and she looked it over. She crumpled the Alabama license and tossed it on the floor. “You think I’m scared of a piece of paper?”
Gwendolyn looked a little confused, like we had fal en off the script. Supporting her large patent-leather handbag with her left hand, she began to rifle through it with her right. With a distressed glance at Dana, she dropped to one knee and rummaged through the bag. “I have something else,”
she said to my mother.
“You don’t have anything I need to see,” my mother said. “So take your little raggedy pocketbook and your raggedy little daughter and get out here.”
At this, Mrs. Grant pul ed up the top of the dryer and started a standing ovation. The clipped noises of her hand bounced off the tension in the room.
“What is wrong with you?” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “This is not a TV show. This is our life.”
“I have it right here,” Gwendolyn said. “What is done in the dark wil come to the light. That’s what the Bible says.”
“Don’t you even try to confuse me with scripture.” My mother nudged the patent-leather purse with her bare foot darting out from under the white gown. Gwendolyn scooted her bag back in front of her, pouring the contents of her handbag on the tiled floor of the Pink Fox. There were the usual purse contents — lipstick, chewing gum, emery boards, and a hank of keys. In addition, there was a compass, the kind you use to draw circles. She then shook the purse. “It’s in here.” Dana got down beside her and helped repack. Gwendolyn had lost that triumphant look and seemed a little lost, the way Grandma Bunny had when she was on a medication that made her forget who we were.
“I have it, Mama,” Dana said, quietly, but not so soft as a whisper.
“Wel , give it here,” Gwendolyn said. “Why did you make me get on my knees before these people?” She waved her arms to take in not just me and Mama but the customers, maybe especial y Mrs. Grant, who was stil standing, as though this were a basketbal game in the final seconds.
“Mama, don’t do it. I have it, but don’t do it.”
“It has to be done,” Gwendolyn said. “Give it here.”
“Please,” Dana said. “Don’t make me.”
“You started this,” Gwendolyn said. “You started this whole thing.”
“Just go,” Mrs. Grant said. “Take whatever you have and just go. It’s not right, you coming. This is her
“Shut up,” Dana said to Mrs. Grant. “You just shut the hel up. You don’t know us.”
Mrs. Grant straightened herself to her ful height. She was gaunt, like she spent her whole life dining on nothing but chicken broth and saltine crackers. “I don’t know you. But I know what you are.”
“Give it here, Dana,” Gwendolyn said. “These people don’t care about you.”
But I did care about her, and I cared about my mama. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to Dana. I couldn’t imagine anything more devastating than the black-and-white document she had already given me, but just because I couldn’t imagine it didn’t mean that there was not a blow beyond my imagining. “Dana.” She final y looked at me, and I hoped that there was something on my face that deserved mercy. I had never done anything to hurt her. I had scraped al the skin off my shoulder for her.
“Dana,” said Gwendolyn. “Look at me.”
Dana sighed and reached into her purse, the same fake LV she was carrying that day we met in the SupeRx. She looked exhausted. I couldn’t believe that it had been only last summer that we were stealing from the drugstore. Fast friends is what they cal it when you connect with someone like that. When you talk about it, you
