“You’re coming,” Ava said.
The house on Development Drive was full of sounds and movement and people, again. Devon’s room made the perfect space for toys and two small beds. How could she have ever wanted otherwise? What will she do when they want separate rooms? They will have to cross that bridge later. Ava had insisted that her father come around. Children need old people, even trifling run-down old people like Don Ross. We all enter the story too late, and old people can tell us what they know about the past, at least some of it, at least the important stuff. Thank God the old tell it slant so the jagged edges don’t kill the babies. That’s what family does, sanitize the filthy or at least dust it off, give it to us in bite-size morsels. Sylvia didn’t seem to mind him anymore. It occurred to Ava maybe for the first time that her mother loved her father. Not loved, loves. There had never been a past tense. Her good mama had loved wrong, but not for nothing. They say that life can give you another chance, but don’t believe it. You choose to find another chance. Either way, don’t strike out for the territory, there is no undiscovered country.
The children knew to walk, not run to collect their bags and shoes. Ava stood up to gather them, to say the warm things, to encourage and envelop.
“Was Simmy’s already closed when you left?”
“Oh yeah, I was here.”
“The time runs together, I can’t remember anything,” Ava said. She missed the sloppy king burger, but she was glad her children would not ever remember seeing it on the landscape of the town, would never even know the place existed. One day she would tell secondhand stories her mother had told her, and her children would listen to them with skepticism and wonder at the unbelievable bad old days. Or maybe if there was mercy, they would shrug off the terrible old news, shift their eyes to their own bright futures, the past as indecipherable and finally over.
“I thought Jay might be here,” Henry said.
“We see him a good bit, but he travels. His house still hasn’t sold. A house that big will sit for a while. Not many people are working around here.”
“The Google people will buy it. They must have some money,” Henry said.
“It’s a hike to there, but maybe,” Ava said, but she hoped not. She’d hoped a local person, a local black person, might live there after all.
“I know you love him,” Henry whispered. “I know you do. You deserve it, baby.”
The last time Ava went to Jay’s house was to see the completed deck. “Somebody will buy this house just for the view,” Ava had told Jay. And many would have if they could. Group after group came through the oversized doors, remarked on the fireplaces, the glorious view, the winding secluded road. Only one couple had been serious enough to put in an offer, but they’d been unable to get bank financing. Jay hadn’t seemed to be crushed by it the way she thought he would be. He worked in his garage when he was at home, and slept in his bed. Houses come and go, he’d said. But both Ava and Jay had understood that what had lived between them, years ago and then for a few days in that house on Brushy Mountain Road, would not be revived.
And, though Ava would see Jay often and talk to him on the phone even more frequently, Jay was not a live presence in her mind. He was not insinuated into her memories or her dreams, and he lived only in the spaces where he had actually moved and existed with her. If Ava were being entirely honest, even some of those honest memories of him were now leaving her, sloughing off in her brain and becoming unstable, their half-lives not even as long as her trek into middle age. The tragedy of that was almost too much to bear. A whole swath of feeling, entire departments of her brain had gone to knowing, loving, and missing JJ Ferguson. He was a past with a name. This is what it all amounts to, all that feeling a footnote, a relic of a bygone time and mind. But gone too was the shame, the hurt and embarrassment of acting without knowing enough, acting without being sure enough. But there is mercy. Jay was one of the few friends she’d ever made. He loved her. She would love him as long as she lived. There is mercy.
Ava paused and watched May help her brother put on his jacket. She had to remember to tell her what a kind girl she was to help. She would remember to tell May that someone would be there to help her too. She’d asked herself how she felt about Jay many times. She’d even considered going back to him, letting him transform from the person of her youth, her best friend and witness to her pain. But her feelings for him had fossilized and though she didn’t know if Jay could believe it now, his feelings for her were trapped in amber too. That didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. Love was too small a word for how she felt about him. But her feelings for Jay would not grow—not then and not now.
“I don’t love him in the way he wants, Henry. I never did,” Ava said. “But you know as well as I do.” Ava paused and put her arm around Henry’s back. She was close to him now, their faces almost touching. Kinky gray whiskers sprouted out from his chin that she didn’t have to touch to know were stiff and would be hurtful if scrubbed against her own face. But his laugh lines, like large parenthesis surrounding his mouth! Black might not crack, but given time would fold. She almost ran her finger in the shallow gullies of Henry’s face. She and Henry were the same age. What she felt next to him was exhilaration, a gratefulness that threatened to make her weepy. They had made it and despite everything she would always love Henry too. “You know, love isn’t a cold, Henry. You don’t just get over it.”
41
The day Frank Ferguson showed up at her house, Sylvia was expecting him. Not really him, but a nasty wind, some bad luck. They say bad omens, bad signs, bad luck comes in threes. Don’t believe that. But be sure if you are feeling okay, if the world is off your back, even for a minute, you have forgotten something. At least that was how it felt to Sylvia most days. Jay’s father, Frank, showing up was just the very bad penny she’d missed.
A thin man stepped out of a car, with a head full of hair combed up in a stiff Afro, like he’d stepped off the set of bad seventies TV, looking more out of place than if he’d had no hair at all. He was clean-looking at least, but ragged, like life had taken a distinct dislike to him. His clothes were too big, probably borrowed or thrift store. His mouth was sunken in from the loss of many if not all of his teeth. Even with all those differences, Sylvia knew without question that this man was Jay’s father.