Still, she didn’t feel sad, just settled in her new understanding that this was life, and she had been foolish to expect much else. As she was about to head to the kitchen for any scraps Ruby had left behind, her sister walked in their room with a sneaky smirk on her face and two biscuits in her hand.
“So”—she plopped on her made-up bed and threw a pillow at Evelyn’s chest—“you didn’t tell me you had a visitor last night,” and as she said the word night, the pillow bounced off Evelyn and hit the floor. “You’re keeping secrets now, huh? Or trying to? You know Ruby always finds out in the end.” She sang the last part of the sentence. “This time it only took twelve hours.”
Evelyn smiled back, but she was afraid. She lowered her voice. “You had a bad time last night. I didn’t want to pour salt on the wound.”
Ruby didn’t answer for a little while. She just played with a thread hanging from the end of her apple-red skirt. Sometimes when she was in a bad mood, Evelyn would volunteer to sew any of her clothes that needed mending. Evelyn wondered if in an hour she’d be weaving a needle through that bright cloth.
Ruby looked up. “Evelyn, don’t be stupid, I’m your sister, your
joy is my joy.” She stared at her, her eyes wide and intense. “Anyway, I’m the one who introduced you to this man. What’s his name? Raymond? I should at least reap the rewards of my efforts through you.” She had inched her voice up a notch from its regular octave in an attempt to sound happy, but there was something in her face’s plain affect that made Evelyn certain her sister’s anger was near.
Evelyn sat down next to her to get it all over with. “How’d you find out?” she asked.
“How do you think? Miss Georgia’s loud mouth. Lord Jesus, I can’t change my girdle without her getting word. Let that be a note to you, girl. Don’t do anything in front of this house that you don’t want Daddy to know about because lucky for you Mama happened to be home this morning. If it had been Daddy who answered the door, we already know Ray would be a page in your memory book.” She paused. “And you’d be off at the Sisters of the Holy Family convent by now.” She cackled.
Evelyn shrugged. “Mother’s going to tell him anyway; that’s over now.”
Ruby gripped Evelyn’s wrist and locked eyes with her in a rare show of emotion. “She won’t,” she said. “She would never. That time I got caught holding hands with Langston at the St. Bernard Market, she yelled about my reputation and threatened to lock me in my room, but she never breathed a word.”
Evelyn sighed. “That’s because it was you; it’s different.” She caught Ruby grinning then, the first genuine smile the girl had had all morning.
Evelyn didn’t leave the house the rest of the day; she just waited for Daddy to get word, act on it, but it never happened. Even before dinner when it was just the two of them in the kitchen, and she gathered the silverware to set the table, and he prepared a whiskey straight, he just went on about the patient he’d seen. “Miss Sylvia still hasn’t dropped that baby. I told her husband to walk her up and down Napoleon. That little thing would be out by the morning, but these women don’t listen. You’d think they were the ones who spent the eight years in school. I should take off my stethoscope when I walk in their houses, pass it over, let them listen to my heart beat. I told her, if she goes any longer, she’s going to be delivering at Charity, and she’d have better luck giving birth in a manger than in the Negro ward of a hospital.”
Evelyn nodded and smiled, waiting for him to approach the real transgression. Halfway through dinner, when he and Mother had gone on and on about Mardi Gras preparations, the debutante receptions, soprano recitals, and whist parties; when Ruby pontificated over who would be riding with Zulu this year, how early she’d need to reach North Claiborne to catch the Indians, why the Skeleton Men frightened her; when Mother added that the Million-Dollar Baby dolls were scandalous and Daddy smirked and noted they were just costumes after all, Evelyn realized he didn’t know. And she stared at her mother as if just noticing a subtle feature in the older woman’s face that had transformed her into a different person altogether.
Without her daddy’s interference, Evelyn and Renard spent their free days together. They’d meet at the Sweet Tooth for ice cream and giggle at the owner of the store, who would scoop the ice cream up, toss it in the air, then catch it with a cone. After paying, they’d drift outside to walk, past the women haggling with the butchers over turkey necks and kids gaping at the posters outside the Circle Theater. They didn’t speak at first—the bustling environment seemed to grant permission to their silence—but finally after a few days of the same, Renard’s voice inched out in a cracked whisper.
“How was your treat?”
“Delicious,” Evelyn said, so eager to engage with him the word shot out. She actually hadn’t gone inside the Sweet Tooth before, though she’d stood on that street for years because it tempted Ruby to see someone eating something she wanted but couldn’t have. He nodded at her answer and put his head back down.
“How was yours?” Evelyn asked as sweet as her double chocolate malt ball shake.
“The best I ever had. Andrew’s mama makes shakes all the time. Don’t tell Andrew, but I think this one was better.”
The rest of their conversation seemed to pour out—first about their studies, then about what time they would head to the parades, and finally about the disparate versions of the stories Andrew and Ruby had relayed about their first date.
“I heard they didn’t have the best time. Don’t tell him I told you, but I guess they ran into another woman, and my sister felt like he talked to her too long.”
Renard chuckled. “Yeah, that’s my friend for you. He knows just about everybody in the city. Man or woman. And he doesn’t just leave it at a simple hello, he wants to know how their mama is, how their mama’s mama is, their brothers and sisters. He gets a full report on each one. That girl was probably from a big family, that’s all.”
“That’s what I told her, that he didn’t mean any disrespect.”
“No, he’s the kindest man I know. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. All his people are like that. When my mama passed, they didn’t have to take me in. They certainly didn’t have to pay my way. Andrew’s mama lost two of her sons; she has her own grief to tend to.”
“To the war?”
“No, tuberculosis; there aren’t too many Negroes fighting in the war.”
“But Miss Georgia’s son is there.”
“He may be there, but odds are he’s not holding a gun.”
Evelyn lowered her eyes. “Oh.” She wanted to change the subject; the war was tragic in the way slavery was; it hadn’t affected her, and she thought talking about it might invite it in. “Well, at least Andrew’s mama still has him,” she said.
He nodded, then went on. “My mama was just as sweet as Andrew’s, you know. I never met her, but they tell me that. They tell me she was beautiful. She was a twin.” He looked up in the sky, talking out of the side of his mouth. “Jet-black hair down her back, they say. Beautiful woman.” Then he jerked back into the conversation as if he were coming to. “What about yours?”