As Good as True Read online

  I said, “You might excuse me, this once.”

  Louise studied us and tried to determine the trouble.

  “That’s all Lila’s good for.” Marina’s voice was indignant, small and tight. “I guess y’all drank one to Daddy’s grave.” She raised her eyebrows and her temple throbbed.

  She must have known I was relieved he was gone.

  “You should have been the one to talk to the undertaker.” Marina crossed her arms above her bulging torso.

  “I don’t mean to upset you,” I said. “It was a drink.”

  “You should have been the one to choose the casket and his suit.” Her voice at a low boil, controlled. “You just disappeared yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I felt guilty I had burdened her.

  Louise’s head tilted toward us. She was listening to every word.

  “You should be at the paper now. He was your husband.” She closed her eyes to shut me out. Her face flushed. “But you’re too busy drinking with Lila.”

  “No,” I said. She did not want me to be the one to do any of those things, but I bit my tongue. Anger swelled in me like the heat ticking up in the kitchen. “Your father drank a lot, but you never said anything to him.”

  “I am burying my father,” she said.

  “I never had the choices you’ve had. By the time I understood what marriage meant for me, it was too late.” I had said the wrong thing. I should not have fueled her frustration.

  Marina’s voice wavered. “I am about to give birth, Mother. I don’t want to bury him, but it has to be done.” She seemed near tears. “You should be helping me with the details.”

  I could not stop myself. “I was nothing but his servant.”

  “I won’t discuss this now.” Marina stared at Louise. “This conversation is private.” Her dark brows knit together and made a long line across her forehead.

  “You know what he did,” I said. My face was hot. “You know where he went.” The cut seeped warm blood. I wanted to detail his wrongdoings, but she would hear only bitterness in my voice. I looked at my cut hand. “You make excuses for him.”

  She averted her eyes. “We’ve all done things we regret.” She spoke low and controlled. She wanted to protect him. I supposed she wanted to protect me—and herself too.

  My head throbbed and my stomach pinched. I had the urge to slide my arm out of the housecoat to show her the green and purple bruises he’d left. But she would defend him. She would say, “You let that colored man come to the house.” It was like riding a wave whenever we argued, up and down, storing away new injuries and bringing up old ones.

  Louise peeked in the oven and opened the door to pull out the sheet cake. The room filled with the warm smell of butter and eggs and flour. Louise’s eyes met mine, and she shook her head as if to say, Stop arguing.

  Marina stood slowly and patted her Aunt Louise’s arm. “I need to call my gardener to clean that mess out front.” Like that, she was back to business, her tone as smooth as a glass surface. It seemed Marina did not want me to see her real emotions, nor did she want to feel them. She passed me to get to the phone. “That storm was bad here.” She held the receiver in her hand and dialed the rotary.

  She spoke to her man in a singsong voice and my blood boiled. She had learned this from her father—swift, manipulative movements from anger to kindness to get what she wanted. She had his eyes, his ways. She was his daughter, and I wanted to argue with her, knock Elias out of her, but I held back. That was the wrong way. She was my daughter and too much was at stake. She hung the receiver in the cradle and turned her attention back to me.

  Marina tugged at my housecoat. “Let’s don’t fuss. Give me a hug, Mama.” Her touch felt false. She was readying herself to be the hostess and be seen. She wanted me on my best behavior, but I did not want to be judged with Elias in mind.

  I hugged her, and like the morning before, she pulled away almost as soon as my arms were around her.

  “I want pictures of him,” she announced. “To put out.”

  “Isn’t the portrait on the mantel enough?”

  Her face puffed like rising dough. She braced herself to stand. “Isn’t there a box of pictures in the china cabinet?”

  “I’ll get them. You sit still.” In the dining room, I opened the bottom door of the china cabinet and pulled out an old hatbox, one from my mother’s store. Flies buzzed around the room. All the windows were opened and more would fly in. I did not have the energy to shut them, nor would Marina or Louise have allowed me. I imagined I would be ridding the house of flies for days.

  Marina followed me into the dining room and left Louise alone in the kitchen, rattling at the sink.

  I opened the lid, and the fusty smell of chemicals and old paper escaped. Three olive-skinned girls looked back at me. Mama and her sisters. They wore coarse linen and leather sandals. A train of camels far behind them walked across the sand near the water. Seashell necklaces hung around their necks and crowned their long, black hair. They looked like they belonged in a fairy tale.

  “Elsa gave me this picture. Mama is the youngest, Mayme, then Elsa, the oldest.”

  She looked at the photograph with wonder. “Look at them.”

  “They are in Beirut, visiting their aunt and uncle. Elsa said those necklaces were their souvenirs.” Elsa, Papa, and Mama said everything in Lebanon was more beautiful—the greenest sea, the bluest sky, the sweetest air. And everything tasted better—the fruit, the vegetables, the roasted meat, the olives, the spices, everything. “Elsa thought Elias and I should go for a honeymoon, but he had no interest in going back or a honeymoon.”

  “You can travel now.” Marina sounded as if she wanted to be rid of me. She placed the photograph on the table. Any interest she had shown in it was fleeting. I put the photo aside. I would take it with me if I left.

  “We could go to Lebanon together,” I said.

  She looked up from the pile of photographs and grimaced. “Mother, I am in no position to travel across the world. Look at me.” She was exasperated. “No one tells you how bad the end is.”

  “People try to forget.” I wanted to warn her that carrying a child was easier than labor, and labor easier than raising it. Loving a child was the most bittersweet joy, maybe the most difficult thing in the world. I wanted to tell her, she could do her best and her child might see it as all wrong. She would know soon enough, this terrible chain of love, from mother to child, how the love was not always returned in the same measure, how it can hurt as deeply as it could be sublime. But I did not want to sound discouraging, because I loved her and I did not want to disappoint her.

  “Maybe we could go to the old country one day, I meant,” I said. “When you’ve had your children and—”

  “I don’t care about going there. My life is here.” She was matter-of-fact. She held up a picture of her father on a steep dirt road on a mule’s back. “Just look at this landscape. It’s rocky and dusty, all mountains and ravines. People must work for the smallest comfort.”

  She returned to the careful study of the photographs, one by one. “Who is this?” she asked.

  “That’s me and you.” The crown of my head is in the upper corner of the photograph. There is a glimpse of my forehead, the tip of my nose. I am looking down at her. She is one or two years old, and pushing against my arms, trying to free herself from me. I am studying the baby in my arms, the baby whose eyes burrow into the camera. Her expression is serious, neither happy nor sad, the same as she looked now sitting at my table. “We are at the store. You wanted to be put down to get into something. You were a terror.”

  “So you’ve said.” She fanned herself with a handful of photos.

  “I chased you up and down the aisles. You loved to spill over boxes or fruit or whatever mischief you could find.” I remembered the feeling of dread, chasing her around, and wished I could go back and enjoy her antics. “When you were three, your father made you a crown of cardboard and tinfoil. You would sit sti
ll for a few minutes if we pretended you were the princess ruling us from your throne. Do you remember?”

  She nodded and a smile crossed her lips.

  “You would be satisfied for a short time, and then I’d have to take you to Nelly because I couldn’t get any work done.”

  She frowned and her eyes accused me. “Work was important to you,” she said. “You always had work, until you had Eli, then you had work and Eli.”

  She thought I loved Eli more than her, but she had been an independent child, seeming not to need me, and he had been like a helpless bird. For some reason when he was born, I knew how to care for him. “I’d do it differently with you if I could,” I said. “You’ll do better than me.”

  She rolled her eyes at my words and then stared at the pictures.

  I was making her uncomfortable so I changed the subject. “Have you thought of a girl’s name?” They would name a boy after Michael.

  She placed a photograph of her and her father on the table. “A few.”

  “My mother’s name was Vega,” I said.

  “That’s your name too.” I was surprised she remembered. “You want me to name the baby after you?” She arched a dark eyebrow but did not raise her eyes from the photographs. She sorted another picture of Elias and Ivie in store aprons under the Nassad Grocery sign.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” I said. “There’s Elsa’s name and Mayme.”

  She grimaced. “Those sound like colored names.”

  I shook my head. “Not true.” But I knew those names sounded low and foreign to her friends, to her husband and her husband’s family.

  “We were thinking Katherine or Marilyn,” she said.

  Louise stuck her head out the swinging door to check on us. She gave a nod, signaling that she was glad we were not arguing. Louise was right. I knew I must appease Marina so that when her father was buried and the baby was born, I could tell her of Nelly’s accusations and calmly deny them, and she would choose me.

  “There’s a picture of my mother and me somewhere in Grandpapa’s house. It was taken when I was close to Sophie’s age.” I wanted to find it and show her who she came from. “You look like her. My mother. I want you to see that picture.”

  “You remember what she looked like?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember her.”

  “You can show me later.” Her hands shuffled through the photographs. She frowned at me and gave me an impatient look. “Right now, I want some of Daddy when he was young.”

  I watched her expression as she searched for a photo of him. She wanted something tangible to show her love. I was jealous, and I wanted her to feel close to me. I wanted her to see that I loved her more than I begrudged him.

  “Let me look upstairs.” I went to his room to the drawer where he kept the things he loved, the things he looked at when he was alone. In a shoebox in the drawer, he kept the old letters from Zada. I had read them when I wanted to know what was between them, what spark she had that I did not. I held the picture of the two of them in Mobile Bay. The wedding ring on his hand gleamed in the sunlight. I was tempted to take the box to Marina and prove what I had endured, but I dug beneath Zada’s letters and found the pictures she would want—one of him as a boy with his father, one with her as a baby, another of him and his lion.

  At the bottom of the pile was the newspaper article with the picture of him and me, the cedar trees and the hydrangeas behind us. He’d kept it because of the award, not because of me. His arm around my shoulder was for show. As soon as the shot was taken, he let go of me, and that smile on his face, the one so similar to the smile he wore next to Zada, receded.

  I left behind the pictures of Zada and the article and took the other pictures to her.

  Marina sat where I had left her, still looking through pictures.

  I handed her the photos and immediately she latched onto one. “The lion,” she said. She held up the black-and-white photograph. “It was real.”

  In the picture, a young Elias fed a cow bone to the lion through the bars of its cage. The lion stood on its hind paws. Its front paws wrapped around the black iron bars. Its face was a blur, but the muscle, the paws, the teeth spoke to its power. “Why have I never seen this?” She looked amazed. “I thought the signs were a gimmick.” She meant the porcelain sign with the image of a lion that hung over the counter and another one over the sidewalk.

  “What did you think that cage was behind the store?” I asked.

  Astonishment fell across her face.

  “Why did you think we called the store the Lion Grocery?”

  “I thought he was teasing me.” Tears welled in the corners of her eyes. “He used to call me his little lioness.”

  “It died a few summers before you were born,” I said.

  “I thought it was make believe.” She took a cloth napkin from the table and blotted her damp face.

  I told her, “When it was alive, the lion would grunt and cry in the middle of the night and it could be heard for miles. And then, when you were a baby and you howled at night, so loud, he’d hold you and whisper, ‘You’re the little lion come back to keep us awake.’”

  “You should have told me.” She shifted her weight and drew a painful breath.

  “I didn’t think you’d care.” I never told her a lot of things. Like the bruises on my arms, or the way he made me feel for so many years, but as much as I hated her father, I did not want to shame her. “I thought it would embarrass you.”

  She tensed in pain and gripped her belly.

  It seemed her time was near, and a twinge of excitement flashed through me. I went to the kitchen to wet a cloth. Louise patted my shoulder. I returned and Marina held the rag to her temples. Her body stiffened.

  I felt sorry for the physical pain that she was about to endure. I wanted to warn her, but I did not want to scare her. “There’s a lot you don’t know.” I crossed my arms and touched the bruises. She must have known something. How could someone so bright not know what happened under the same roof?

  She tried to compose herself. She groaned, and under her breath she said, “You never talk.”

  Memories were hard and I didn’t like to look at pictures. “What do you want to know?” I could see the baby moving—an elbow or knee raking across her stomach. “Ask me.”

  “How’d he get a lion?” She moved her feet to brace herself. Her belly constricted.

  “The circus had come to town. Ivie traded groceries for her, and then he dumped her on your father. Elias didn’t want her, but he couldn’t get rid of her. He couldn’t kill her.”

  She held the rag to cover her face. When she took it away, no trace of makeup remained.

  “After I married, I was the one to take care of it.” When the lion went into season, I hosed down the cage. If it rained, I pulled a tarpaulin over the cage. When she was hungry, I fed her. “I liked her. I did not mind the work, because when I had seen her after my mother died, I felt she held my mother’s spirit.”

  “He had it that long?” Marina brought the photograph close to her face. “He looks so young. He looks like Eli.”

  “Yes.” I had taken the picture with the camera Ivie gave us for the wedding. “In that picture, your father’s twenty-nine, not much older than you.” Elias grins in the photo. The lion is moving, excited, a blur of muscle, fur, claw, and teeth. “The lion’s about eleven there, but the first time I saw it, it was a cub. Seeing that lion was the first thing that made me happy after Mama died.”

  “How old were you when you first saw it?” She was greedy for the story.

  “I was eight when he got the cub. My mother had died, and I had taken to bed. Papa thought I was stricken with grief, but he learned I had the Spanish flu. Papa begged me, ‘Vega, wake up and we’ll go see the lion.’ I thought it was a dream.”

  Her eyes did not leave the photograph in her hand. We never discussed this sort of thing.

  “Thea dipped me in ice baths to break the fever. Then, a different wom
an came. I thought she was Mama. She and Thea coaxed me to rise. ‘Get up, Vega. We’ll go see the lion.’ In my haze I dreamed my mother had risen from the dead and brought a lion with her. Then one day, the fever broke. I sat up and the woman said, ‘So you have decided to join the living?’ Her voice sounded like Mama’s, and her face was similar, but different, and I thought dying had changed Mama. It made perfect sense. I started to say Mama. Then she ran her cool fingertips over my forehead. She said, ‘You are just like Vega.’ She was my Aunt Elsa, Mama’s sister. She had come to help with the babies, but they were dead, and so was Mama. I snapped my mouth shut like an iron gate and I never dreamed of saying Mama again.”

  Marina breathed heavily. Her green eyes were intent on me. She placed the photograph on the table and gripped her belly.

  “Do you want me to call Michael?” I asked.

  “No.” She took a deep breath. Her face was white.

  I touched her back.

  “No. I’m too hot.” She pulled away from my touch. “Just tell me about the lion.”

  “Mama told me about a people in her homeland, the Druze. They believed, she said, that when a person died, his soul, if it had been good, would transform and be born a baby in China, because their prophets believed China to be the promised land. So coming out of my daze, I decided that Mama, because she was so good and so kind, had earned the right to will her soul into this lion cub to make her way back to me.”

  Marina’s lips were drawn tight. The oven door creaked as Louise worked. Soon there would be people here. They’d bring his body back. If Marina’s water broke, I could rush her away and call the funeral home and tell them to keep him.

  Marina took my hand. “Tell me more,” she said. My story seemed to help her pain.

  I went on. “Papa drove us to your father’s store. It was Sunday and the store was closed. Elias knew we were coming,” I said. “He was eighteen, just a boy, but grown to me. He was building the cage. We got out of Papa’s truck and Elias turned off his welding gun. He went in the store and brought out two quarts of milk and a nipple to feed the lion.

  “Elias said, ‘Glad to see you’re well.’ They had all worried that I would die, and that if I did, my father would crumble.”