“Hey!” I called, stopping the mover before he could punch the down button. He paused, moving his chin toward me in answer to my call. Standing in front of him, I’d guess he might have been 5’6 but no taller than that and had small, glassy blue eyes. “The woman who booked this gig, where is she?”
He shrugged, ignoring me as he elbowed the button on the wall. “I just move the boxes and furniture, man.” The bell chimed and he walked inside the elevator, adjusting the lamps. “There was a car outside next to our van, but it’s full. Pretty sure she’s gone already.”
Twenty-Three
Willow
My great grandfather liked to talk about the old days, especially when he’d smoked too many stogies and had too much bourbon.
“It’s not the same, Buttercup. It’s not how it used to be.” Normally “it” had something to do with the government and the mess politicians made of it. But my grandfather wasn’t a typical grumpy old man. He didn’t bemoan the world because he missed the way things were in the past. He complained because we still, in his view, hadn’t gotten our shit together.
“Two hundred years and only one black president and still, after all this time, no women. If I had my way…”
He’d go on and on, hours sometimes, and when he had gone quiet, when the fire had gone out of him, he’d sometimes talk about the things that normally were shut up inside of him. My great grandfather was the last. After him, there’d be no grandparents on my father’s side of the family. He knew it. Often, he’d apologize about it.
“No man should have to bury his children or his bride, Buttercup, and I’ve done that more than once.”
Those nights he’d gotten quiet and the anger and loneliness inside him had rushed through him like a windstorm. Those were the nights he’d played Coltrane loud and told me about his childhood. “No one should live the way they made me. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy and, cher, I’ve had plenty.” That also came out when he drank a lot—the hidden French words he never used when sober. The childhood back in New Orleans had done something to him, but it had never left him completely. That’s the way of things, I guessed. We never really lose who we are.
“Who would be your enemy, Gramps?” I’d asked him, not understanding how this gentle old man could ever piss anyone off. “You’re the best of them all.”
“No, Buttercup. Not by a long shot. That was your granny, God rest her. Your granny and our sweet girl.”
He never talked much about either of them. Only when the bourbon came out and Coltrane came on and even then, it was the same stories—the time his daughter had learned to ride a bike; the day his wife came down the aisle of a tiny Berlin church wearing a borrowed dress and her hair up in pin curls. “Perfection,” he’d called them and he’d meant it. I’d always wondered if anyone would ever think that of me.
I almost thought Nash had.
The boxes were pushed one on top of another, as tight in my car as I could get them, with quilts and throws tucked between them and the seats as I stuffed my things inside. The decision to leave had come after my mother promised to clear out the old cottage on Lake Winfred. It would be warmer there, warmer than the city had been. I had never liked the winters in New York. Something set in my bones made me long for a lake and the peace inside a cottage no one knew about.
“You can have it for as long as you want, sweetie.” There was a pause in my mother’s voice, something that told me she was worried. “But why do you want to give up that apartment in the city? I thought you liked Brooklyn. I thought you were doing well with your booth at the Farmer’s Market, and you'll never find a rent control like that again, you know.”
If I’d told her the truth, I’d spend an hour on the phone promising my mother my heart wasn’t as broken as it felt. I’d have to lie to her and say that Nash hadn’t hurt me, that what I felt between us was one-sided and stupid.
“Just want a change of pace,” I’d told her, knowing that she’d pick up my tone, that she’d hear the small lie behind the elevated, forced inflection.
“Willow—”
“Mom, I promise.” Another pitch higher this time and I threw in a laugh. “So tell me about the trip to Costa Rica this spring.”
She had. My mother had gone on for twenty minutes about the group of teenagers she and dad were bringing with them to help build wells in the thick of the jungle, while I pushed my clothes, my dishes, and books into boxes. Already I planned to walk away from Brooklyn because staying hurt too badly. It wasn’t enough that the dreams consumed me. They kept me up. They blocked my sleep patterns and diluted my aura. I felt it heavy on my skin. Like a bruise that covered my entire body.
Those memories soaked into my mind like oil—clinging until there was only the sight of Sookie holding that rope and the horror I felt, the terror on her beautiful face as she stared down at me. I could still smell the thick smoke choking me, I still heard Sylv’s prayers as he said them over and over. Then, she fell and part of me, of Dempsey, died. I felt it slip away like a second skin. I felt it leave and knew it wouldn’t return.
And Riley… my God. The slip of her world as it went away, the soft weight of her baby on her chest. The warm press of Isaac’s sweet kiss against her… against my mouth.
“God.”
This was not the time to think of it. Not when there were taxies zipping through the streets and a construction crew coming closer to our building; tar from their truck puffed great swells of thick liquid into the air and the smell made me a little queasy. I had a lot to do anyway miles and miles to go tomorrow before I made it to Lake Winfred.
I ran the back of my wrist against my eyes to dry my face and picked up another box, stuffing it between three frames and my father’s old turntable. It was an ancient thing, something Grandpa Ryan, my father’s father, had given to him, something I was sure he’d gotten from his dad, my great-granddaddy O’Bryant. It had been broken for years when I found it after Grandpa Ryan’s death and my father wanted me to have it. “A family heirloom,” my father had joked, handing it over to me along with old Fats Domino and Muddy Waters vinyls. “Use them well,” he’d told me.
Now that turntable was snug on the floorboard of my car, ready to go with me to the cottage. There would be no neighbors to disturb with my music and, God willing, no memories to haunt me when I got there.
“Where do you want these?” a mover asked, motioning with the two lamps in his hands.
“Those can go in the van. They’re headed to storage.”
No need to bring those along to the cottage, when my mother had likely already seen to it that the place was outfitted with food, dishes, and toiletries, not to mention lamps. The rest of my things would go to a storage facility in the city. My rugs and tapestries, many of my books, most of my cooking supplies all would be there, forgotten until I’d licked my wounds for an appropriate amount of time and decided where I’d start over again.
I shut the trunk of my car and opened the passenger side door, pushing the seat back to feel around for my cell when my elbow shoved against something I thought was my jewelry box, but instead turned out to be the small wooden box my parents dropped off just a week ago.