Come Sunday: A Novel (29 page)

I am going to take the church appointment in Fresno in June, but in the meantime, I will be in Ohio spending some time with my family. I leave next Tuesday. What you want to do about the house is your call (one that doesn’t need to be made anytime soon), but I really don’t see how we can hold on to it, given my additional living expenses and reduced salary. Of course, I will do everything I can to help.

I apologize for writing this letter instead of talking to you. Somehow whatever I say ends up being the thing I least intended. What I hope you will understand from this, Abbe, is that I cannot live and die at the same time; I must choose. Know that you were always my first choice.

Greg

I leave Greg’s letter on the table and go upstairs to our bedroom. From the back of the closet I retrieve the two suitcases, still with Nevada tags on the handles. Among his socks and underwear, his favorite shirts and half a dozen ties Greg will need on the mainland, I pack a few of Cleo’s things: the framed photo of her as a baby, the pink pocket Bible Jenny gave her on the day of her baptism, the rattle he bought her, and a couple of baby blankets. In a tiny box, the blue velvet one that has spent all these years in the corner of my underwear drawer, I place my wedding band. While the birds come to the feeder for their morning feast, I sit down on his side of the bed and stare at the circle around my finger, envelope-white where a promise once lay.

MY MOTHER WAS DIFFERENT when she came back to the farm, after I had called and begged for her to come. Perhaps I expected her to look as though her head were still on a chopping block, still half dead or wrinkled from wishing it so hard. I was quite unprepared for her purposeful step and a face that didn’t quite crease into a smile but looked satisfied nonetheless. It was not something I could put my finger on, this alteration, but there was one difference I identified immediately: the absence of her wedding band.

“It keeps falling off,” she explained, and it was true that her hands looked like a connect-the-dots drawing. But she could not fool me: she was going to leave him.

That my mother was going to leave my father I was certain—the first time she came to visit me. By the second visit, two weeks later, I gnawed my fingernails to the quick and had my doubts. When she
showed up a third time, I knew for sure that the only person my mother intended to leave was me. Better a liar than a fool, I resolved the Sunday of my mother’s fourth visit.

The lie meant to punish my mother was formed as she got up at dawn, while she quietly dressed, folded something into an envelope, and then tiptoed out of the room. Before following her, I rehearsed the lie, confident that if it did not prevent her from leaving, it might very well make her feel bad enough for doing so. I peeked in the envelope she had tucked in her purse. Addressed to Beauty, it contained five tenrand notes and nothing else. Where she had come up with the money was as perplexing as why she would give it to Beauty.

“Go back to bed,” my mother suggested when I sat down on the porch swing next to her. “It’s too early to be getting up.”

“You’re up!” I snapped back.

My grandmother, in her gown and slippers, gray hair in a single braid down the length of her back, joined us and there was no going back to bed for anyone. Not even for Beauty, who straggled out of her
kaia
fully dressed when my grandmother called to her window where the paraffin lamp stood burning. It might have made a grand picture if someone had been there to take it—the four of us collected on the red
stoep
, waiting for the day. Had I known I was not the only one to face it with dread, I might have said something else. Or perhaps I might not have said anything at all. But I was seventeen then, on an odd-numbered year, and it seemed to be a year strung with one ending after another, only for me.

“Why don’t you leave him?” I asked just as the sun peeked out from between the
fynbos
.

“It’s not that simple, Abbe,” my mother answered, glancing at Beauty.

“Grannie left Oupa,” I prodded. Even though a scandalous thing whispered in backhanded conversations—an old woman divorcing her husband after so many years—it had not been hard. Oupa, already feeble both in spirit and mind, surrendered without much of a fight and shuffled off even eagerly to Downey Homes in Constantia. “Neutered
the ol’ bugger,” my father described it, who stopped coming to the farm when my grandmother had Beauty eat her meals with her in the dining room instead of alone at the kitchen table.

“This is different,” she said.

“How?”

“In my day,” my grandmother interjected, “a woman never left her husband, no matter how bad things got. You put up with all sorts of shenanigans for the sake of the children. Even when they left home and had children of their own, you put up with it because you were afraid of being lonely.”

“You weren’t afraid of being lonely,” I insisted.

“Yes, well, one day I realized it can be quite a lonesome thing to live with someone who is no longer there.” It was apparent, suddenly, that I was not alone in wishing my mother would give up my father, or whatever it was that drew her back to his whereabouts. It also seemed that my grandmother had said the one thing that would convince my mother to stay, for good this time.

Instead of agreeing, my mother turned to me and said, “We’ll be together one of these days, you’ll see.” As though I were a child, as though I could live off “you’ll see’s” and “I promise’s.” Had my mother forgotten I had watched her, pressed between my father’s moods like a flower in the pages of a thick book, go brittle? The only thing left to see, surely, was the moment she went from a dried flower to a handful of crumbs. My lie, steady as a boot, came crunching. “I don’t want us to be together! So why don’t you go, and don’t bother coming back!”

When my mother drew a sharp intake of breath and rose slowly from her seat, her back to the glowering sun, it seemed the first draft could just blow her away.

Later, after receiving from Beauty her tin of tea or whatever it was my mother said calmed her nerves, she headed for her car. Shading her eyes from the sun with her free hand, she squinted in my direction. She would not have been able to see me, in the shade of the fruit trees, watching her from around one of the massive trunks, but she knew I was there. I both dreaded and hoped she would come to me, and kiss me and make it all better. Instead, she got in her car and drove back to
the house I had once thought of as home, to a man I once thought of as father.

It was only after my grandmother had driven off to church that I went back to the house. Entering my room with the timidity of a stray dog, I searched for something she might have left behind. Would it be a book this time, or a photograph, or perhaps her perfume? I glanced around the room: clothes strewn hastily on the floor, the disheveled bed by the window, hers neatly made, a drawer of the bureau open like the mouth of a panting dog. And then there it was, on my school case. Not something of hers at all, but a new thing that was to be mine alone. A sealed envelope with my name centered tidily on the front of it.

My grandmother returned from church to find me with my head in Beauty’s lap, my mother’s letter still in my hand. So long had I lain there that I no longer noticed Beauty’s odor—the spiky scent of wood fires and Vicks and unnamed things—or her fingers unknotting the tangles in my hair. The soft song of Africa accompanied my guilty tears.
“Tula tu tula baba tula sana, tul’umam’ uzobuya ekuseni.”

“It’s all my fault,” I cried when my grandmother sat down on the bed next to us.

“Now, now,” she said.

“It is—it’s my fault she stays with him, and now she’s never coming back.”

Beauty lifted me off her lap and ushered me into the crook of my grandmother’s arm before leaving the room.

“If anyone is to blame for her staying with your father, dear child, it’s me.” When I looked up at her, she explained. “Your mother came to me long ago, on a day when she had gotten between your father’s hand and your brother’s face. She wanted to know what to do, and I said something I have regretted all these years, something I have tried to reverse a hundred different ways.”

“What did you say?”

“I never did think she should have married him, your father. He was a bad apple right from the beginning, but your mother could be a stubborn girl in those days.”

“Grannie?”

“I told her she had made her bed so she had to lie in it.”

I hate going away
, my mother had written,
because it means we have to be separated again. And though it must feel to you as though I leave you again and again, I never do . . . I just go away. But please believe me, Abbe—I will never leave you
. The truth of it was that
we
had all left her, deserted her in some way by what we had said, by our expectations of her. The only one not to have left her was her amber-haired boy who had grown up and gone away.

“I’M PICKING YOU UP AT SIX,” announces Jenny in an early-morning call. “Petal is coming too; the grandparents are going to watch Blossom.” Hearing my groan, she goes on, “Hey, she could do with an evening out too.”

“Okay,” I relent.

“It will be fun,” she insists, perhaps too keenly, because she asks, “Are you going to be okay today?”

“We’ll see,” I answer.

In the three weeks since Greg left, not a day has gone by without a call from Jenny. If it is not before school starts to make sure I intend to get up, it is in the evening after she has fed Mr. Finnegan his saimin, changed his diaper, and put him to bed. It seems I am also part of her flock, as is Petal, for whom she babysits every other Friday. Just as she once did, and then stopped doing, for us.

I do get up. The first few mornings, it was just to double-check that Greg had not just gone away but left. For good. I looked for bits of Greg, but the house, covered with Cleo like a coat of dust, offered barely any signs of him, as though he had never quite lived here. Besides his clocks and his gray easy chair, which Ronnie has agreed to haul to the curb, there is nothing much to remind me of him that isn’t attached to my memories of Cleo.

His absence does mean I have to remember more things. Besides remembering
to eat breakfast before going to work, I must remember to fill the pets’ food bowls. When I come home in the afternoon, I must remember to attend to the litter box and fill the bird feeder. It was a week before I remembered to clear the backyard of Solly’s business, which is when I noticed Greg’s orchids, withered in their pots. When I tipped out their remains behind the torch ginger whose stalks had taken custody of Greg’s pitiful tomato patch, I said out loud to those things still stubborn enough to grow, “You will all just have to fend for yourselves now.”

The church, according to Jenny, is fending for itself quite nicely. The interim pastor, a middle-aged woman recently graduated from seminary, has a portable electronic keyboard and the zest of the newly ordained. Some people say she is going off in too many directions—if you can call replacing hymnals with praise song sheets a direction. “She means well” is the general consensus, but there are still those who miss Greg. They did not have time to host a farewell luncheon for him, so Cleo’s memorial service turned out to be their last social gathering. Jenny said many more than the anticipated thirty showed up, filling Sylvia Horton’s house, her yard, and half of her neighbor’s.

And today, on the anniversary of Cleo’s death, I wonder who minds the date. A handful of us, is my guess—Greg and his mother, Cicely and Rhiaan, Jenny, yes; Theresa—bad with dates—no. Mr. Nguyen, if Greg still corresponds with him, yes; the clergy who officiated at her service, no. Perhaps I should have put something in the paper, for people to say, “Gosh, has it been a year already?” No, I’m glad I didn’t.

No sooner have I called Buella to tell her I won’t be coming in than I realize my mistake. There is a day to fill. The walk to the mailbox and back takes two minutes, even with a pause to hear Mrs. Chung’s updated tally on her oranges. If I am diligent about reading the entire stack of mail, including the credit card offers, I might kill an hour. I have never been so eager. Sandwiched between the weekly coupons and the mortgage loan preapprovals is a postcard. On the front is a field of flowers; on the back an Ohio postmark and Greg’s handwriting.
We’ll never forget. She lives on
. The note brings with it images of Greg on a ladder, scraping off old paint from shutters, his mother coming
around the corner with a soda, licking her lips in that nervous fashion of hers, saying, “Be careful now, Gregory.” Of him standing up there, with a view of the fields and their spring flowers and the old highway that no one uses anymore; up there with God and the big blue sky and thoughts about Cleo living on.