“They’re more than slaps you give me, Momma.” Dresden began pulling the roses off herself. “You don’t remember because you drink more than you should.”
As Alvernine stared at the bruises, she dropped the one rose she held. It landed on the ground like a wadded-up tissue. She blinked over and over again. A robot malfunctioning and desperately trying to get her system back to its perfect way.
“You’ve hurt me, Momma. You’ve hurt me and—”
“No.” Alvernine spun around, her hands up to her neck and its choker, like a pearl noose. “I would never hurt you.”
“But you did.” Sal was loud and bold. Unafraid, as she slowly turned to him and his accusation.
When she slapped his cheek, he neither frowned nor retaliated. He merely turned his face up toward hers as if silent hurt was the loudest scream in the world.
She raised her hand again, but Dresden quickly stepped in and took the slap for him.
“You still believe you’ve never hurt me, Momma?”
Alvernine lowered her hand to her stomach like she was sick. She was a woman coming undone, one perfection at a time.
“Come on, Sal.” Dresden grabbed his hand, and together they turned toward the hill behind the house.
“Where are you going?” There was a tinge in Alvernine’s voice. Helpless, frightened even. A hard dose of reality she’d been given. A real bang, and I almost felt sorry for her. “Baby, come back.”
They were running away from her, though Dresden had difficulty with the leg, they were still running faster than Alvernine as she chased, all the while screaming for her baby to come back. Her arms stretched toward them. Her heels something she went down by. Landing on the side of her face. Her lipstick, an awful smear out to her cheek. Her knees two pink things as she rolled onto her back and held herself at the ears, maybe only to check the jewels dangling there.
Her crying had made her mascara look like a whole herd running from her eyes. Rhinoceros wires stretching down her face. Over the blush and freckles, which were small unlit things. Not like the freckles of her daughter. Her daughter who had stopped running when she heard her mother’s falling cry.
Dresden would have returned to her mother, had Sal not gently squeezed her hand and whispered something in her ear. Whatever he said made Dresden turn from her mother.
Alvernine sat up, but did not stand. She merely continued to reach from her fallen spot, crying out to Dresden, to her baby to just come back to her. Dresden buried her face in Sal’s shoulder.
Having been left behind at the pool, I slowly walked past Alvernine.
“You.” She pointed that perfect nail at me. “I know you. You’re the lawyer’s boy. Your father will hear of this.”
She shook her finger before dropping it back to her trembling lap as I stood over her.
“What?” She sniffled. “What do you want?”
“I just wanna give you a rose, ma’am.”
My hand stung after, but I knew her cheek did even more. I wiped the smears of her mascara and tears from my palm onto my shorts. It felt strange to hit a woman like that, but how can you regret bruising the bully?
I left her there, sobbing into her hands as I ran to catch up to Sal and Dresden, who had stood there watching me slap Alvernine. Sal patted me on the back and said I did a good thing, but as I looked at Dresden, I knew she didn’t think so.
“That was my mother, Fielding.”
“I did it for you. Don’t you know that, Dresden?”
“Yes, I know. But I still wish you hadn’t.”
I think she was about to go to Alvernine, maybe hold her cheek, but she just looked at me and one last time back at her mother, before the three of us ran up the hill.
Together we helped Dresden manage the climb with her leg, and all kept pace until the high land flattened out into a long meadow that we crossed to the dense woods of another hill, which came out on the other side to a fenced pasture belonging to three horses.
There in the pasture, Sal and Dresden removed the last of the roses from each other.
“I like you better without the roses. You know that, don’t you, Sal? That I want you just the way you are.”
He held her cheek, his thumb lightly brushing over her lips as he whispered in her ear, “I’ll be the black boy. You’ll be the white girl. And the world will say no. But we’ll just say yes, and be the only eternity that matters.”
20
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man?
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 10:743–744
WE STAYED IN that pasture with the horses long after sundown, doing what three people in a horse pasture do, think about what brought them there.
Funny enough, I thought of Elohim. I suppose because of the night sky above me, so like the one I had lain with him under the previous summer. We were there on his roof ending the day of work, which had been removing the nests of chimney swifts in his stacks.