“Aw, just to Uncle Franklin’s.”
In all Evelyn’s folding and unfolding of her memories of Renard, she had forgotten it was February, and every first Friday of February, Uncle Franklin and his wife, Katherine, threw a pre–Mardi Gras soirée.
“Oh. Well, have fun,” Evelyn said just above a whisper.
“What’s that, baby?” Daddy walked over.
Her mother excused herself. “I’ll be in the parlor when you’re ready, Nelson.”
“All right, Josephine,” her daddy called back, then he eased over to the edge of Evelyn’s bed, sat down, and combed his fingers through her hair. The two couldn’t look any more different. Evelyn had a sharp, narrow nose, her eyes were light brown, not so brown they looked black like most other Negroes’; her lips were thin and pink, and like her mother and sister, she was the color of a Spanish woman more than a Negro one. Her daddy on the other hand was a black man. Born of freed Senegalese people who never mixed, his color was so notable in the Seventh Ward that it was the first thing people said about him when they wanted to reference him but not give him too much shine. “That big black doctor that think real high of himself,” they’d whisper. His lips were thin, but everything else about him screamed Africa: his broad nose and wide nostrils and his hair, which he slapped pomade in but which reclaimed itself by afternoon, shooting out in rough bunches.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Oh nothing, Daddy.”
“Don’t tell me ‘nothing.’ Daddy can tell when his Evie is paining inside.”
Evelyn just sighed and brought her arm over her face.
“Don’t tell me you’re still too scared to stay alone. I can run Ruby’s man off, and she can stay with you.”
“No, Daddy,” Evelyn said forcefully so she wouldn’t have to repeat it. Ruby would never let her hear the end of it if that happened. “I just wished I had something to do tonight is all.”
“Play with your brother, then. You’re not too old for that, are you?”
“Brother’s not even here. He’s out with the twins.”
“You want me to call him inside?” Evelyn’s daddy leaned toward the window, preparing to shout.
“No, Daddy. We don’t play together anymore anyway. I’m too old to play any games he’d be interested in.”
Her daddy sighed and propped on his elbow on the bed beside her. “Baby girl, you want me and your mama to stay in with you tonight?”
Evelyn wanted to say yes—there was something about the silence of that house tonight that seemed formidable—but she thought of her mother in the kitchen. She could hear her clanging pots and glasses that were already clean, fussing in Creole so the kids couldn’t understand her.
“Cofaire to pas laisse moin tranquille?”
Mother thought Daddy was too easy with their oldest daughter; she often said Evelyn’s head was in the sky, and instead of rooting her, Daddy propped it up there as if the clouds were a row of pillows. She thought Evelyn should be seeing boys, on the verge of courtship, but her daddy would raise his voice at any intimation of the sort.
“She’s got plenty of time for that,” Evelyn had heard him shout.
“Does she? Seems like the good men are already getting snatched.”
“Not the ones that have the sense to wait.” He’d pause. “She’s going to be more than somebody’s wife, Jo,” he’d say, and her mother would clam up, fry Evelyn’s eggs too long the next morning.
“No, Daddy,” Evelyn said. “I’ll be all right.” She paused. “I’ll read some. And then I could always study.”
He lit up at that. He had hoped for a sharp and disciplined mind from his son, but he’d soon learned that was like expecting corn from a pumpkin seed. He’d be lucky if Brother graduated from Valena C. Jones Elementary on time, he often joked. But Evelyn being a nurse, now that was something even his own grandfather, the first Negro doctor in the state of Louisiana, would be proud of.
“Go on now, Daddy,” she said. “And don’t get so drunk you get Mother upset.”
“What are you going to tell me about behaving? Like I’m the one was birthed by you.” He smiled.
Mother cleared her throat from the other room, and he tipped his hat at Evelyn and clicked the door behind him.
Evelyn turned over and stared at her ceiling. She returned to imagining Renard again, but as she settled on a memory of his hands, she began to wonder at the point. He was somewhere doing something interesting, and she was at home lying under sheets and blankets that might as well have been chains.
She dozed off. When she came back to, she didn’t know where she was for a while. She never slept outside the confines of her nightly slumber, and she didn’t understand why Ruby wasn’t in the bed next to hers, why the lights were on, and why the doorbell was ringing. After a few seconds she sat up. It was probably Miss Georgia. She came by sometimes for company. Her only son was away at the war, and her husband had died before he could give her more children. Evelyn could relate to her loneliness though she’d been surrounded by people her whole life. When she’d explained that to her mother once, the woman grabbed her by the wrist and looked her dead in the eye: “If you forget everything I tell you, remember this: You can’t ever be friends with somebody who wants what you have.”
Evelyn only nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am,” but she’d folded and unfolded the statement around in her mind several times since and still couldn’t find an angle in which it held meaning.
She walked through her bedroom, through the kitchen, then the parlor, and peeked through the small curtain guarding the window on the side of the front door. Lord Jesus, it was not Miss Georgia, it was the uneven man. She turned to the mirror on the wall nearest the entrance. The right side of her face was red from where she’d fallen asleep on her hand. Her hair was tousled on that same side, and though she licked the palm of her hand and dabbed it down best she could, some still stuck out in every direction. She tucked her blouse back into her skirt, which had ridden up, and cinched each of her breasts out of her bra, then plopped them back in, seated a tad higher this time. The doorbell rang again, and she almost shrieked. She wondered if she could pretend to be out, but he must have seen the curtain on the window move. Her heart was beating enough to sustain ten men, and it was too much for her, thoughts flooding her mind, her hands shaking when they should have been still, her whole body paralyzed by its doubled intentions.
The doorbell rang one more time. She heard Ruby’s voice in her ear. You didn’t even get him to ask you on a date? How tickled would she be when she came back to see Evelyn had found something to do all right. Evelyn settled her hand on the knob. A note slipped through the door, and she almost bent down to read it, but she stopped herself and inched the door open.