“You know we don’t lie to each other in this house.”
“Like I said, I didn’t need it, but I thought about what you always say. ‘To give is to get. The Lord sees people as interchangeable and so should we.’ So I didn’t need it, but I remembered how you felt on the matter, and I obliged them.”
He sighed. She hoped he could feel the punch she intended.
“Look, little girl, I know what you’re doing, and I can’t lock you up.” He lifted his palms then dropped them at his side.
“Your mother must have told you how I feel. I know you don’t agree now, but I promise one day you’ll have some perspective. If you even waited a few weeks, you might see your old man knows what he’s talking about. I’m not the smartest man, but I’m not new to this world, Evelyn. I’ve sheltered you and your sister, so you think life starts and ends on Miro Street. You don’t know it’s only easy for you because I made it easy. A different kind of man might not.”
“He’s going to be a doctor just like you, Daddy,” Evelyn said, but her voice was shaking.
“He’s going to try to be a doctor,” her father corrected, “and Lord knows I want to see him succeed, but the odds are some obstacle is going to come along and trip him up. And it doesn’t mean he’s not a good man, it’s the world we’re living in, baby; it’s the world I want to protect you from.”
He reached for her hand, and she yanked it from him, dropped it on her own lap.
“I hear he’s going off to war, huh? Real heroic. Going off to fight somebody else’s battle when the real work could have been done here. Imagine how many lives he could have saved in New Orleans. I don’t just mean that literally. It does something to a young Negro boy to see me walk in his house to deliver his mama’s babies. I see it every time in their eyes, and it’s an awesome wonder to watch their pride develop inside.”
“He didn’t have a choice. He was drafted.”
She could hear her daddy’s soft chuckle, then out of the corner of her eye she saw the smirk.
“Oh, okay,” he said in a soft tone. “You’re right.”
But in his resignation, Evelyn understood that she was wrong. She remembered the conversation earlier that day in the alley; he hadn’t actually said he was drafted. She had just assumed that he was. But why would he volunteer? Of course she had heard of men who did, men who thought aligning themselves with this country would benefit them in some regard when they returned. Renard and Andrew had debated that very issue their first night over for dinner, but it had been Andrew who was promoting that angle. Renard, she thought, hadn’t agreed. At the heart of her shock of course was the fact that if he had volunteered—and her father’s tone had convinced her he had—he hadn’t discussed it with her first, and what did that say about his feelings for her? What did that say about the likelihood they would make it through this?
She put the matter out of her mind; she had so little time left with Renard and she didn’t want to squander it, but she hated her father just then for the very trait that typically endeared her to him, that he was always right, and her anger stripped her of anything else she might have said. She fumed inside, but she quivered too. If she were to speak, she didn’t know if she would strike him or cry out.
“You could have any boy in this neighborhood, in this country, I might dare to say. You have your whole life ahead of you. Who knows whom you’ll meet out there? You’re so young. You don’t know what it means to have choices. Don’t throw your life away over a low imagination.”
Low imagination, it might as well have been her nickname, she’d heard those words so often growing up, but never out of her father’s mouth. No, that was her mother’s expression for her, applied about once a week, usually after Evelyn said there were no groceries in the kitchen when there was rice, green beans, and salt pork. Or when she bought the beef the butcher offered her instead of demanding the choice cut. But this time her daddy had adopted his wife’s tool, kneaded it into Evelyn’s chest with his fingers.
Miss Georgia snuck out on her porch just then, and Daddy waved. Then he reached for Evelyn’s arm one more time. She made a show of refusing him so Miss Georgia could see it, and he sighed, tapped his cigar out, and walked back into the house.
Evelyn began pumping her legs harder. The cool wind slapped her face as she swung, and with each lift, she quieted inside. There was no more pretense. She would go to see Renard and stay out as long as she pleased, and everyone would know where she was, including Miss Georgia, who peeked out from behind her zinnias.
“It’s a beautiful day, little girl, isn’t it?” Miss Georgia called out, but Evelyn didn’t respond.
She just stared back without flinching; there were tears leaving her eyes, but she could hardly feel them.
It was harder to maintain her guard with Renard. He’d found a patch of grass across the street from the Sweet Tooth where they could sit, and he’d bought a bag of crawfish from Dufon’s, picked meat out for her the way her father always had, the juice of the heads trickling from his mouth. But she barely touched them.
“What’s wrong?” he repeated.
She shook her head each time. If she told him about her talk with her father, she’d have to share her father’s real opinion with him, and she didn’t want to offend him. He was already going through so much. He hadn’t mentioned his fear since the day he’d told her he was going to war, but she could hear it in his voice, too high-pitched, as he listed each sibling he had to visit, that he’d already seen half, that they all served gumbo, and he was so sick of okra he thought if he smelled it again, he might vomit.
He looked up from one of his stories, expecting her to laugh, and she tried to twist her mouth and her voice into something that might resemble that sound, but a cry escaped. It was in that moment that she let it all come out, every detail since the dinner that he thought had gone so well. She kept looking up at him as she spoke, oddly seeking the betrayal in his eyes so she could share the feeling with someone, but he only stared ahead nodding, his face as cold as stone.
When she was done, he didn’t say a word.
“I knew it was too good to be true,” he said finally.
“What’s that?”
“Your daddy’s approval. I believed it because I wanted to, but now that I think about it with a solid mind, I can see that it was all too good to be true.” He paused. “And I understand it. I mean if I had a daughter, I would want better for her too, better than a janitor’s son. My mother was a schoolteacher.”
He seemed to look up then for a glimpse of her approval, but there was none. Evelyn was as impressed as she would be by him already; he himself had been enough.