But Margot wasn’t ready to see herself this way, wasn’t ready to give herself this label. She told Verdene that when she saw Verdene at the market after her years away, Margot began to understand something about herself. Margot described it in detail: How she gasped, because Verdene snatched her breath away. How she was transfixed by Verdene’s smooth, peanut-butter skin against the sea-green dress. How she was taken by the dark unruly mass of hair with the patch of white in front. How the vision of her perfect silhouette convinced Margot she was in need of something else at the market—more cyan pepper, pimento seeds, more soursop, lime, and cauliflower, more ginger, cocoa, and yam. But the more Margot added to her already full basket, following Verdene down an aisle of vendors, the more she realized what she was really in need of.
Verdene herself remembered only the market vendors. How they watched her, turning to give her their full unfriendly stares. One by one they scrunched their noses as though the smells from the nearby fish market had finally gotten to them after thirty years of selling. Verdene, pretending to be untroubled by this, filled her basket with fruits, handed crisp bills to hesitant hands, and left. But once outside the market, she suddenly turned her head sharply to the right, meeting Margot’s stare.
Months later Verdene was pulling a weeping Margot into her arms to comfort her. But Margot jumped up, got dressed, and fled as if Ella had stepped from the photo and chased her from the house. She ran all the way home in the pitch-blackness of the night.
Verdene leans in to kiss Margot on the base of her neck, then on her mouth.
“I’m ready,” Margot repeats, her eyes caressing Verdene’s face. They are a deeper brown than her skin, with the sun in their centers.
“No, Margot. Don’t confuse desire for love. Maybe for you this is a—”
“I’m not confusing anything. I know what I want.”
“Do you?”
Margot drops her gaze.
“Just as I thought,” Verdene says softly, swallowing the edge in her voice. She gently pushes Margot off and cuffs her wrists with her hands. “I have something on the stove. I don’t want it to burn. My mother left me that pot.”
Verdene looks out the window of her kitchen and watches people go by dressed in their Sunday best—men wearing their good button-up shirts and shiny black pants ironed too many times. Women in their church hats and bright pastel colors, Bibles clutched in their hands like purses, each pausing to make a sign of the cross as they pass by the house. Verdene rolls her fists, her nails digging deeply inside her palms until the violent tremor rumbling inside her subsides. Sunday is the only day of the week that these people take the liberty to parade in front of her property, dressed in their holier-than-thou costumes. Verdene pauses in the stillness of the kitchen, turning on the faucet full blast to take her mind off them. But then she sees Miss Gracie, the old woman who lives next door. Her bearded chin is thrust forward, jutting from beneath the broad white hat that covers the rest of her face; her wilted body that once towered over men and women in River Bank is draped in an off-white dress with lace trimmings. A very handsome young man, whose face Verdene doesn’t recognize, is walking next to her, supporting her weight as though the woman cannot walk herself. She too stops to make the sign of the cross as she passes by Verdene’s house, instructing the reluctant young man to do the same. Had she been holding something other than her Bible, she would’ve flung it. Like that tree limb she wrapped in a bloodied cloth and threw in Verdene’s yard last week.
“The blood of Jesus is upon you!” she had yelled with crazed eyes. It was as though she dared Verdene to say something. But Verdene remained on her veranda, stunned silent.
Before the tree limb it was a beheaded fowl that she left on Verdene’s front steps. Verdene didn’t see the woman do it, but she knew. Four Sundays ago Verdene found the body of a dead dog on her property. Since Verdene moved back from London there had been a total of four dead mongrel dogs found in her yard, their brown decaying bodies infested by flies. The incidents happened in spurts as though the perpetrator were operating on some kind of algorithm. The first time coincided with the first night Margot stayed over. A Saturday night. Verdene had woken up that Sunday morning to the slaughtered animal’s blood trailing her walkway to the veranda. The blood was smeared across the doorposts and columns. And on the veranda grill and the gate. The blood of Jesus be upon you! was scrawled on the wall on both sides of the house.