In a few minutes Kit arrived at a faded white house on a three-acre parcel. A split-rail fence, badly in need of repair, enclosed the overgrown yard in which bug-eaten zucchini, melons, beans, tomatoes, and lettuces grew at random. A cube of chicken wire filled with straw and a large crate housed a cheerful crew of orange chickens, which were scattered around, burbling, debugging the lawn. Something about the peacefulness of the scene frightened Kit, as if she might at any moment see Manny ambling toward her, with sweet words in his mouth and a gun in his hand. But as she drove away, she had seen those men tackle him. He was drunk and outnumbered and she’d taken the car. There had been nowhere for him to go, nowhere but down. Her heart thumped around and her lips began to buzz.
“Shhhhhh,” she said aloud. The sound merged with the rustling trees. I’m safe, she thought. No—we are safe. She calmed and focused on the cast-iron knocker in front of her.
Before she even lifted her hand, an elderly white woman with a nest of rusty silver hair, twisted and pinned on top of her head, answered the door.
“I heard you walk up,” the woman said, casual and curious. “How may I help you?”
“Are you Eleanor?”
“I am she,” Eleanor said, quizzically.
This woman seemed the right age, but her oatmeal-colored skin gave Kit pause. She had always imagined her mother’s family looked like her. Kit turned to leave.
“Sorry, I think I got the wrong Eleanor.”
“I’m the only one in town, dear,” the old woman called out. “The other one is dead, so you might as well talk to me.” She hung there in the doorway scouring Kit from head to toe with her gaze.
Kit didn’t know what to say; her tongue felt as thick as foam. She was afraid of finding out that she had come all this way for nothing. If the other Eleanor was her aunt, then her only known family was dead and she was back at the start. This woman sure didn’t look like a relation, but she had an inviting sort of presence.
“All right then,” Kit said.
Eleanor chewed on the corner of her mouth. “Won’t you come in?” She shuffled in her quilted polyester housecoat to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair. Kit followed her inside.
“Sit, sit,” Eleanor told her, continuing to look her over, with a dozen wrinkles gathered like bunting between her pinched, penciled-in brows. “Well, there’s not much can be said on an empty stomach. Let’s eat, shall we?”
She pulled a jar of pimento cheese and a loaf of white bread from the refrigerator and made a thick sandwich for Kit. Kit took it and ate it in four bites and washed it down with a cold bottle of Dr Pepper. She belched and Eleanor laughed, her hand cupped at her mouth.
“I know who you are,” Eleanor said, looking down at her hands and fiddling with a cuticle.
Kit held her breath. She fixed her attention on the oiled skin of the table, its scent of orange peel, its grain whorled and mysterious. She could sense Eleanor start and stop, as if unsure of how to tell the story she’d begun.
“They came to me, when you were still a baby,” Eleanor finally said. “And they asked me—well, if I could raise you. But I couldn’t, not then. I had lost my Emily that year. She was only nineteen but she got cancer in her bones, and it went everywhere, and fast. The doctors couldn’t do a thing, and I was angry. I was older and widowed, too tired to raise a child alone.” She bowed her head and shook it ever so slightly. “Or so it seemed at the time. Several months later I got to feeling better. I went to the county to see if you still needed someone. They said the nice family you’d been living with wanted to adopt you. At the time I thought you’d be better off with a young family than with an old woman living alone.” She began to cry, the tears leaving tracks in the powder on her sunken cheeks.
Kit felt heavy; her thoughts lumbered around drunkenly. She remembered Miss Rhonda, the smell of shampoo as she brushed and brushed her hair. To think that at one time there was a family who was interested in adopting her—and ultimately chose not to—was almost as rending as to learn now that Eleanor had passed her up, too. There was music, very faint, coming from an upstairs room. It sounded like three-piece suits and forced wartime gaiety.
“That nice family gave me up,” Kit said, a hollow around her middle filling with a flicker of something that burned. “I was all alone. I wasn’t safe at all.”
Eleanor wept into her fist now.
“I can’t believe you didn’t try to meet me,” Kit said. “It would have cost you nothing. But for me . . .” Kit trailed off and tried to swallow the pain that was wedged in her throat. “It would have changed everything. To know I had family, that I mattered to someone.”
Eleanor nodded her head as Kit spoke, and her eyes were wild, like she was sorting through every moment of the last two decades trying to find a sliver of meaning.
“At the time, I don’t know, it just seemed like more than I could bear.” She squinted hard, a new crop of tears. “I am so ashamed, but you deserve the truth. I didn’t want to think of what could have happened to you. It was easier not to think about it.”
Kit had come to expect rejection, but most of the people in her life had been shitty in general. What really stung was that Eleanor seemed decent and kind. How was she supposed to get over the fact that someone as nice as Eleanor had just turned her back on her?
Kit tugged at her earlobe.
“But I did wonder, time to time, how you were doing. I imagined your family had found a nice school for you in Houston, that you were awful smart and maybe a little impetuous like the women in our family.” She dabbed her face and reached out her hand, but Kit drew hers back. It was insulting, the thought of Eleanor telling herself lies so she didn’t feel guilty, lies that kept her from trying harder to find Kit.
“I beg your mercy, dear.”
Kit swayed in her chair, woozy with it all. It was too much for one day. If she didn’t keep moving, she feared she would sink into the mire of it, the black sludge of anger at everyone for letting her down, the shame of being unwanted, regret she didn’t leave Manny sooner, regret she left him at all. If she didn’t keep moving, she thought, she might never get up again. Kit did not know what to do with Eleanor’s tears and hospitality and the sickening news that she had known about Kit but declined to take her in, that there had been a family who had wanted to adopt her. What had happened to that family? Had they, too, given her back when they realized how defective she was? How could Kit stay here and not hate Eleanor for what she’d failed to do? The questions, and the feelings that came with them, swelled in a panic, then slipped away, like passengers swarming to the high point of a sinking ship that finally, quietly submerges.