In the parking lot, almost to the door, a white woman and a small brown boy were about to enter the store. They were holding hands. The boy skipped, tugging on his mother’s arm, his happiness a contagion that made Ava smile along with his mother. She recognized the woman. A number of customers from the bank knew her even when she didn’t know them, but Ava knew the woman was not a customer.
The boy struggled to get a shopping cart from the corral at the store’s entrance. His father had to have been black or maybe one of the Mexican men that were now a significant part of the population. When Ava was the boy’s age, the children of one Hispanic family went to her school. One. The Hispanic kids now nearly outnumbered the black kids. That’s a lot of change for a generation. The boy was part of a growing number of interracial children in town. White mother, brown child equals a brown father somewhere in the picture. That was an easy equation. The boy turned to face his mother, the cart wrestled from the rest of the pack. Ava did not know the woman personally, the mother, but more than once Henry had mentioned her. He saw her at the store, he’d said, in passing. Did Ava remember her from school, he’d said. Even as he said the woman’s name, or even just mentioned her, Ava could see the mistake on his face. Ava had hoped he was just infatuated with her. Men get that. It passes. Maybe everybody felt some of that heat from a forbidden person, but Ava wasn’t sure. What she knew was she had no attraction for any man anymore. They were too much trouble, even for sex the trouble just wasn’t worth it. In fact the whole enterprise of romantic love was just too hard to be worth it. Her grandmother had told her more than once that the thing about men was once you learn them you won’t want them. Though there were minutes, never much longer, that Ava wanted to be wrapped up and consumed, the best part of sex hands down, it was only minutes of that longing, no more. These days when she got a glimpse of a beautiful man, she sized him up like a jeweler. Good cut, good sparkle, nice setting, but not something she herself could afford.
The boy’s face was all teeth as he pushed the cart toward his mother. What a beauty he was. Ava smiled at him the way people smile at beautiful children, her eyes puddled, her face soft. “Mama, I got it,” he yelled.
“Shh, you’re not in the woods, Z,” his mother said, but she wasn’t really bothered.
Maybe it was the slide of the automatic door, and the rush of the pretty woman suffering with the heavy load of her baby carrier on her way to the shopping carts. Or, maybe the boy sensed Ava’s eyes on him and in the way of small vulnerable things felt danger in her concentrated interest. Whatever it was the boy looked past his mother and directly at her, their eyes locked on each other.
“Come on, baby,” his mother said, motioning him forward. The two of them began their shopping. Ava turned to leave, but not before she dropped her bag and keys. She kneeled to pick them up. The sensation to lie down and stay on the floor at the dirty entrance, let one after another of the shoppers stomp her body into the ground, grind her until she was unconnected dust, was almost irresistible. The boy had Henry’s face. His complexion was lighter for sure. His hair was finer with less kink. But his face was unmistakably Henry’s. Ava stood up straight, turned to the place the boy and his mother had been. She watched the boy go to his mother with strawberries. Though she couldn’t hear them, the mother, what was her name? The mother instructed the son to get bananas. The blood rushed into her head. Is this how it felt to faint? The boy’s head had straight dark hair cut close, like Henry’s. She had known it. Of course she had. The days Henry had mentioned the woman, she saw his embarrassment, and if she’d allowed herself, she would have felt the secret. He had been trying to tell her, people do that. People need to tell the shames of their lives. Good God! He had wanted her to know. The third or fourth time he mentioned that woman’s name, her name is Carrie, that’s it, she had almost asked Henry, how long has it been? But she hadn’t wanted to hear it. She had realized it all, but what a difference between knowing and seeing with your own eyes.
The mother and child roamed through the produce. The boy pulled lines of plastic bags from the little stands for apples. The woman let him pick out his own pears. Ava turned to leave, the automatic door dutifully opened for her though she was leaving through the entrance. No, she shook her head like a toddler. No. She would stay. She would not be run off like she had done something wrong. Ava grabbed a shopping cart to steady herself and have something to do with her hands. She followed the woman and Henry’s child to the dairy section.
“Hello,” she said. The woman had her back to the organic milk and turned to the sound of Ava’s voice. Her face dropped, a cartoon face. But what a doll’s face the woman had, wide pink lips, thick longish hair she clearly didn’t appreciate. Hair that men would think looked bed tossed. She was a thick girl. She was beautiful.
“Hello,” the woman said, but she looked stricken. She held her son’s hand tighter. “Hello,” she said again.
“You don’t know me,” Ava began, not sure she could continue for her pounding heart. “I saw you when I came in. I just saw your boy. He’s beautiful.”
The woman gripped the boy’s hand tighter, positioned herself a little in front of him as slyly as she could without being insulting. The boy sensed a problem. Ava could see it on his face. He must spend a great deal of time with his mother, reading her reactions, sensing her moods. He looked at Ava and back to his mother.
“Thank you. He is a good boy too,” Carrie said, her mouth twitched. She was nervous but tried her best to look composed.
Ava was the one who looked like she might cry. The woman in front of her was not a trashy woman. Trash would look defiantly at her, look smug or smirk at her. Trash would goad her, hint at what she’d taken from her, at all she’d won. This woman was not trash.
Ava bent to get closer to the boy’s face. “You are a beauty. Do you know that?” Ava said to the boy. “How old are you?” She saw the woman flinch from the proximity. Ava raised herself to her full height. She would not scare him.
“He’s five.”
“What a face. Are you good to your mother?” Ava’s voice broke, but she would not cry.
The boy looked at his mother not sure what to say.
“He’s perfect. He’s my heart.”
“You’re lucky for that,” Ava said to the woman. “You are Carrie, aren’t you?” Ava tried not to sound cold, but she was sure she did.
The woman nodded, like she was not sure what she was admitting to.
“You be good to your mother, okay?” Ava said to the boy. She wanted to say more, and searched her thinking for a more lasting idea, one that might seem wise to a little boy. For a long second she considered saying something cruel that would ring for years, maybe forever in the boy’s ears, about his mother, about his status as a boy without a father’s name in the world. She would not do it. She was not trash either. Ava steered her cart away from the dairy section all the way to the other side of the store as far away from them as she could.