Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 23

Daunted by the hunger in her sister's voice and the rough hand that encircled her wrist, Delta looked away.

As Sunday watched her, she relived her recent impa.s.se with paint. She wanted to be able to tell how she had gone each morning to her kitchen studio to stare at the blank and half-done canvases that filled the room, reminded of tombstones, and then turned their faces to the wall. Riding the El to the end of the line and back, she had walked the city streets, searching for something, a face, a storefront, a window that would move her from silence. She had even found herself standing at church doorways, attracted, yet hesitant to enter for the first time since she had left home, except in requiem. She had walked the lakesh.o.r.e, trying to think of the water that stretched before her as ocean, but unable to lose the feeling that she was landlocked.

She had tried charcoal and pencil drawing, collage and modeling clay, never getting past concept to give her beginnings life. She had collected paper sc.r.a.ps and photographs and fabrics, but had been unable to turn them into anything. Her relentless, vague anxiety seeded and took root as she stretched canvases and mixed colors, and then flourished into panic when she tried to begin. She couldn't even focus on the rote drafting projects that were her steady source of income.

And then, after retrieving Delta's note from the box, she had drawn and painted furiously for close to a week. What came to her were shadowy figures bent into fetal question marks and disembodied limbs and hands, floating, buried, rising, layered. Again and again she painted the world from above, patchworks of city and field joined by branching rivers that fractured into overlapping pieces, like shattered trees. But she would come to a stop while painting, as if full sight just closed up, and then her palette began to narrow down.

Reed had walked in one day to find her stuck, trying to make a mark, a stroke, in any kind of blue, but lost. She couldn't seem to choose it, just as she couldn't seem to fully choose him. She knew she was trying his patience, but how could she explain something she didn't even understand?

She wanted to tell Delta how it had been. Fingers still around her wrist, she could only say, "I need it. I need all of what I am."

Except for the moth wings that homed in and trembled on the lightbulb's yellow curve, the room was still. And then Delta pulled away and tightened her pocketed hands into fists. "You see," she answered, "there isn't much I know." Tears filled her eyes and she felt as if she had failed her sister, once again. "We weren't a family that talked about what was gone." She looked at Sunday, apologizing silently for every time she had come up short.

"You know a h.e.l.l of a lot more than I do," Sunday answered. "You had him for five years, so you've got your memory, for one thing. And by the time I came along, everyone had decided to just keep quiet about his leaving and everything else that had to do with him. I don't even know the smallest things about him, like whether he wore cologne . . . what he liked to eat . . . how he moved his hands. You and I scarcely even talked about him. Maybe everyone was protecting me, but in the end, I was left with my imagination, and a gaping hole."

She leaned into the circle of light. "Delta, this didn't only happen to you; it's both of ours. I know you can't give me what you haven't got, but let's remember together. Tell me, anyway, what little bit you know."

Delta paused. At least she was sure what the beginning was, for it came to her all the time, despite her resistance, as if occupying its own tier of the recessed past. She placed her palms flat on the table.

"Shoes," she said. "What I remember most is that pair of shoes."

Delta could see them. From the witnessing or the telling, or both, they were there, worn through brown to gray and dirty at the squared-off tips from work and daily travel. Laces tucked inside. Heels run-down and placed neatly side by side.

"Yes," Sunday responded. "I heard about the shoes. It's practically the only concrete thing about his disappearance that I do remember hearing. Describe them for me, so that I can see them, too."

She did describe their run-down heels, one eroded to a sharper slant than the other, and they both savored that clue to his walk, imagining him moving along, favoring one leg. She told about the places where the dark brown, dusty leather was strained and bunion-cracked on the sides. The twisted laces and elongated tongues. The mud-encrusted toes. And then they wondered what had happened to them, and Delta said, "Maybe Mama threw them out."

As Delta stared out the back window, seeming to fade farther and farther away, it occurred to Sunday that they might not be able to begin with Mercury's disappearance, which had never, in all their years of growing up, been discussed. Would they have to start to remember him as a person, to make him real, first? "You know," she said, "I wonder what Mama did with the rest of his stuff. There must be something, up in the attic, maybe. Something of him she kept."

"Well, I never heard anyone talk about his belongings, and I can't even recollect what all he had."

"But . . . but you must have kept something of him, then, if not a possession then a memory, some little thing he liked or used to do?"

Delta thought for a while, her hands in motion, turning and tipping the edge of her coffee cup and lighter. What came to her suddenly, despite attempts at forgetting, were his restless and uneven footsteps as he paced the upstairs hallway late at night, reaching one loose and groaning floorboard again and again. She willed away the sound and recounted other things.

"I know. He had a beautiful gray fedora that he always wore when he left the house. Sometimes he would take it off and let me feel the soft, pressed felt and the raised lines in its wide, grosgrain ribbon band, where a couple of feathers were tucked before the hat broke out in a cold-blooded brim. I think he felt really fly in that hat, even if he was just going to the plant. I'm sure Grandpa thought that was ridiculous, but he loved that hat, was proud of it, and when he came home he brushed it and placed it just so on the closet shelf . . . I can see him come through the door and do just that . . . but the clearest thing is me looking up at it, from my little-girl height, as it rested, tilted on his head, surrounding his frowning face with a dark oval that blocked out everything else."

After a pause, she went on. "I remember him playing cards at the dining room table, by himself. He liked to listen to the news while he played, and I can see those cards being turned over, building and shrinking and building in overlapping columns, and then his sudden curse and a hand scooping the ma.s.s of them together and cracking the edge on the table, evening them up, before starting again. I was entranced by the ceremony of it, and the mirrored, n.o.ble pictures on the cards, the bright red and black and the faces turned, secretively, to the side, as if they knew things they would never tell. But I was afraid of the curse and the sound of them hitting the table, and even more afraid to ask if I could play."

She spoke faster and faster. "And you know what else, Sunday? He used to bring a whole bagful of Mary Jane candies when he got home late. We both loved the thick, chewy mola.s.ses taste, and he would take one out and hide it in one hand, and ask me to guess which one. Whichever one I chose, he gave it to me, and we both laughed as we ate them together.

"I hadn't thought of that in a long time. It's small, but it's a good thing, isn't it?

"Mostly . . . he seemed ill at ease with me, like he didn't quite know how to relate to a child or a girl child, anyway. Those Mary Janes were something we shared."

Sunday looked at her expectantly, pus.h.i.+ng for more. "So what else?"

Delta continued, "He liked fine things. Champagne taste and beer money, Grandpa used to say. And Nana told me how he bought that belt buckle, which he had engraved, along with a pair of inlaid silver cuff links, and a s.h.i.+rt to go with it, and Grandpa chided him with the uselessness of that. 'French cuffs,' he would say, and suck his teeth. It had turned into a big fight, because Nana had defended him, unable to bear the way he got on Mercury at the slightest provocation, telling Grandpa 'a body's got to have a little something nice, just for himself.'

"Grandpa didn't budge, I guess, even though he had his own weaknesses. He sure loved getting all decked out for Mason meetings, and his ring was so important to him that he made Nana promise to bury him in it. Being a Thirty-second-Degree Mason, the secret rites, the ring, all of that was major, along with the gold pocket watch that he cherished so. But in Mercury, he just couldn't tolerate it. Nana said Grandpa thought a person had to work their way up, to pay their dues before they got nice possessions and respect, and that att.i.tude seemed to make Mercury even more withdrawn. Nana said he had one pair of really good shoes that he changed into after he got home and showered, and they were impractical for the life he led. Thin soles and fine leather . . . and she thought he would change into them to try and mark off the separate parts of his life. It was as if he was saying: This isn't all I am. I am also a man who appreciates the distinctions between things."

Sunday wondered at Delta keeping such details to herself for all those years, and at the slight smile in her eyes as she told them, as if they made her proud. She knew plenty of people like that, who found certain indulgences necessary, whatever their means. As she had studied the belt buckle over the past weeks, she had been struck by its extravagance, and she knew she had that taste for special things in her, too. Reed was forever reminding her of the time she had decided to have a pair of antique fountain pens repaired, when they'd scarcely been able to put together rent money.

Delta went on, "He would shower as soon as he got home and put on that s.h.i.+rt and those shoes and take a walk around town before dinner. The ones he left by the river weren't those; they were his other pair."

"You mean that when he left, he went wherever it was he went barefoot?"

"Well . . . I guess he did."

"I wonder what he did about that?" Sunday pressed. "I mean, how long could he have crossed fields and roads without shoes? I wonder if he stole some or what. Are you sure he didn't take those good shoes, too?"

"Nana said he left the good ones home, of that I'm sure. But the hat, the hat went with him. It was never found."

"The fedora?"

"That's right." She frowned in concentration and then went on, "You know, Nana would sometimes talk to me about him, as if she was trying to give me something of him to hold, and I often wondered if it was her own imagination talking, like she was forming an outlook that she could pa.s.s on to me. I remember those times by her gentle voice and her clove smell.

"She told me he had worked delivering papers and groceries and whatever else he could manage, from the time he was nine or ten, and then he had landed that job at the paper mill his junior year, most likely with Grandpa's help. At first he worked part-time, and then, after graduating, he had a regular s.h.i.+ft. They still had segregated bathrooms, by unstated policy, though, and the black men used to have to warm their lunches on the radiators outside the makes.h.i.+ft 'colored' washroom, which wasn't much more than a closet with one toilet for the dozens of men, and that had filled Mercury with rage. She said he was a prideful man, who liked words. He read the dictionary sometimes and he liked to work crosswords during his breaks at the plant . . . and, what else . . . I know, he used to say all the time that his white supervisor didn't even know the word 'quandary.' It used to burn him, Nana said, and he would repeat it over and over again, 'Quandary,' and shake his head, as if it summed up everything about the unfairness of the world.

"Nana said he used to walk the river early in the morning, a big branch of oak like a staff in his hand. Looked like he was pretending to be someone in an adventure story, striking out for new ground."

Sunday asked, "But what was he thinking about while he walked? And on his last day here, did he pa.s.s the corner store and the little triangular park? Did he nod h.e.l.lo, and good-bye, as it turned out, to those he knew, and stop to chat at the barbershop, with its rippled iron grate and Mr. Odell out front, closing up?"

"I wonder. Maybe he saw that lilac tree downtown as you round that corner near the river, and scent floated up over the curb to greet him."

Sunday thought about that. "Somehow I don't think so. Even if he pa.s.sed it, he likely didn't really see it. At least for me, that tree, with its tender perfume and cones of star-shaped blooms, might just make me able to deal with things. Really seeing that tree might just make me want to live."

"Well, everyone's different, Sunday," Delta said with irritation as she lit a cigarette. "Seeing . . . seeing a tree might not make some folks want to live. Some folks who might feel unlovely could have a harder time going on, with lovely things like lilacs around. People . . . individuals, I mean, see different things in things. Some people might even look up and see a tree as a potential place to hang."

Sunday stared at Delta and then picked up her gla.s.ses and began to clean them again. She was taken aback by the despair and resistance in her sister's words, and at the fury with which they had rushed out. d.a.m.n, Sunday thought, focusing on getting one lens completely free of lint, you can count on family to be there for you, in the same awful way they always were. And all you have to do to inspire their antipathy is be yourself. I wonder how soon I can get a train.

"I'm sorry," Delta said to the table.

"No," Sunday responded, putting the gla.s.ses on, "I wouldn't want to deny you a chance to express a grievance. It's quite okay."

Delta sighed. "Anyhow, I overheard someone say that he left for the paper bag plant that morning, showing no more than his usual dislike for his job. He had been talking in the weeks before, though, about his new a.s.signment of pulling the bags out of the folding machines, where they had been turned from flat sheets into rectangular sleeves, one after another, on, on, and on."

They were silent for a long time, both pondering the embalming force of mechanical routine, from which Sunday had always been escaping and about which Delta knew so much.

Sunday pointed at the locket and finally asked, "How did it get here? When did it come?"

Delta went to the hallway and returned with the shoe box Sunday recognized as the family photo archive. Placing it on the table, she explained how she had been at the post office on sorting detail when it arrived in a small padded envelope, made out to "The Owens Girls" at Nana and Grandpa's obsolete address. She had turned it over and shaken it as she tried to think of whom she knew in Clare County, all the way across the state, and after prying open the stapled end, she had reached in and pulled the contents out: the locket, a long piece of lined, yellow paper folded into a tiny square, and a store-bought sympathy card. As she read the card she heard herself shout, "He was alive," and then she looked around and realized, from the uninterrupted flow of events around her, that no sound had emerged from her mouth.

Delta lifted the gray cardboard top of the shoe box, its edges worn soft, its corners split, and removed the brown padded envelope that held the note and card.

"Well," she said, and then cursed herself silently: There you go again, with that pathetic floundering. Unable to find the words to go on, she placed her fingertips on the envelope and slid it across the table.

Sunday began to sweat as she opened the card from the stranger. The words seemed to wave across the page until she placed it on the table and anch.o.r.ed it with both of her hands, recalling the sight of her thumbprints on Delta's note. She finished reading, put it back in the envelope, and got up for more coffee, her cup rattling against the saucer in her unsteady hold. She would have to do this in two stages, she realized, and she was not yet ready to confront her one and only message from a man who had been dead her entire life. Reaching out to touch the kettle without a pot holder, she felt nothing at first, and then a sharp white heat pierced her numbness and she jerked her hand away. Instead of running cold water on her fingers, she took solace in waking to the throbbing burn.

The card, whose printed message read "With the Deepest Sympathy" in embossed silver script, had a handwritten message inside. It said, Your father he asked me to send this along. He was brother to me these last years. And he was sorry.

Sincerely, Clement Woods She came back to the table and picked up the folded yellow paper, smelling the chemicals in it and detecting the minuscule fibers within its smooth surface. Aware, suddenly, of the fingers that held the paper, she noticed the dryness of their skin, the paint deep in the cuticles, and the scars the fingers bore. She could hear her heart beating, the air moving through her lungs, and the thunder of the paper unfolding as it grew from a two-inch square to full size.

When she got the creased paper open she found the same leaning, elongated scrawl she had studied on the back of the snapshot she had found. Five words: "I remembered and I paid."

Questions erupted in Sunday's chest, and with them a lightning flash of outrage.

Remembered, remembered and paid? she said to herself. And that's your offering to me who never even knew you never even saw you and I hope you did pay in fact I'm counting on it and what does that mean anyway that you paid and what does it mean that you were brother and never forgot and were sorry yes sorry you surely were and does it mean you married again and had another family you did not feel the need to leave?

It was too little, and far too much.

She wanted to know if he had recalled the 704 of Nana's address, and whether he had ever phoned their number and hung up when someone answered, or let his imagination run wild as he let it ring. Whether he had taken anything besides the locket that he had kept all those years, and wondered, wondered, what his fatherless children had grown up into, how they had turned out, if she looked anything like him? Delta, he had a chance at remembering, but what about her? The baby who was not yet born? What about her?

She heard tearing paper and before she understood what she had done, she had ripped the note in half and Delta was crying, "No!" and s.n.a.t.c.hing it from her, running to the hall closet for Scotch tape. There she was again, Delta thought in panic and rage: Sunday, taking everything for her own.

"I'm . . . I'm sorry . . . I didn't realize . . ." Sunday stammered as she stood holding the envelope, aware that once again, she had just made Delta the victim, and had given her something else to hold against her.

Delta leaned over the table, carefully matching up and rejoining the halves of paper, while Sunday tried to find different, more meaningful words than "sorry" to express her regret.

"Do you want me to fix it?" she ventured, reaching out to touch her sister's hand.

"I think I'm capable of doing it," Delta replied as she pulled away.

"I didn't mean . . ."

"Oh d.a.m.n, I almost had it lined up. Why don't you make some coffee or do something useful?"

Okay, I feel really s.h.i.+tty, Sunday thought as she looked at the paper, bisected with a s.h.i.+ny, Scotch-tape scar, and while I'm at it I'd like to apologize for every wrong I've ever done to you. She knew she had acted impulsively, "before thinking," as Dolora had always told her was her biggest flaw. And selfishly.

Delta smoothed the paper and added tape to the back to reinforce the mend, while Sunday, returning to the padded envelope's postmark in the heavy silence, considered whether she might be able to cope with finding Clement Woods.

They both jumped at the teakettle's shriek. "I figure," Sunday said, after rus.h.i.+ng to turn it off, "Mama must have been puzzled by him taking that one thing. Lord knows she had a whole story about that locket that was very important to her."

What had his selection of that one possession meant? they pondered. Had it crushed her and comforted her both, that he had left behind the ring, which had stood for a promise that bound, keeping instead the smooth, gold disk that held a timeless memory of the girl she had been, before the demands of life began. Was it a talisman he had selected for his afterlife, rejecting commitment and choosing love?

While they considered Dolora's feelings about the locket, Sunday reached into the shoe box and started spreading the contents out on the kitchen table. When she came to a photo of her own art school graduation, she stopped. There they all were: she in her cap and gown, waving her diploma in the air; Delta, matronly at twenty-seven, hands folded and pageboy intact; Nana dressed in a navy suit and hat and gloves, head held high; and five of the bread-making ladies from church surrounding them, dignified and proud. The Bread Ladies had arrived on commencement morning by train and returned that same night, trusting neither the cleanliness nor the hospitality of white, city hotels.

There was a picture of Dolora's younger brother, Wilborn, who had gone to the East Coast after college and married Anna, from a prominent black family, who loved to say their people were never slaves. At each family death, she and Wilborn had flown in the morning of the funeral and left that night, only visiting once that Sunday could remember for longer than that. "I know he's embarra.s.sed by me," Delta had overheard Dolora declare tearfully to Nana one night.

Sunday and Delta remembered enduring holiday phone calls placed by Wilborn and his family to Nana and Grandpa, following the arrival of extravagant checks. Everyone was forced to take a turn on the line, composing pleasant summaries of school and health and prosperity. "We're having a really good quarter," Wilborn would always begin, and then he would tell about the earnings of his latest sales line and the gifts he had given that year. Dolora was always reduced to icy withdrawal by what she called Wilborn's "all-out bragging" and Anna's "digs." "Isn't family great?" Sunday and Delta used to say, after hanging up.

Wilborn and Anna sent a yearly form letter detailing family accomplishments, and an annual Christmas photo taken in front of their hearth, in which they wore matching holiday outfits, and even the dog had on a red and green sweater. Sunday found many of these in the box and arranged them chronologically on the counter to observe the changes the years had wrought. She found that although the children grew taller and their parents' faces and bodies aged, the photos were amazingly uniform. They showed the same poses and expressions, the same dark hair, and only slight variations on the outfit theme. And then for three years in a row, they presented forced smiles and hints of discord. Wilborn and Anna had moved apart, to the sides of the fireplace instead of its middle. Her arms were folded tightly in a posture of defense, and she looked tired, unamused with her part. Aha, Sunday thought, there was trouble in paradise. What was it, Wilborn, an affair, unbearably average children, declining revenue? Yet after those three pictures, they resumed their presentation of triumphant harmony. The pictures stopped the year before Nana's death.

Beneath those holiday photos, in the shoe box, was a collection of picture postcards that Nana's cousin, Boykin, had sent from all over the country. They remembered how he had come through town as a traveling salesman, bringing the jokes and tall tales he had picked up on the road, jigsaw puzzles and hand mirrors and folding fans with silky red ta.s.sels. They had loved it when he showed up, unannounced, spreading mischief and laughter.

They put Boykin's cards aside and took a brown and white photograph of their grandfather from the box. He had died of a heart attack when she was only four, so that most of what Sunday knew was what she had heard. Delta picked up the photo and noticed right away how it had captured his unyielding, unforgiving gaze, and the resolution and pride in the set of his jaw.

"He was a reserved kind of man," Delta said, "and he took everything he did seriously, never missing a Masons' event and revealing nothing, even to Nana, about those sacrosanct meetings or the lodge. He wore a stiff collar and a coat and tie to work at the store, and kept it on even at home while he sat in his easy chair and read the paper as Nana cooked their evening meal. I always wanted to be in the kitchen with her, and I think he scared me. He seemed to need adulthood from me, when I was just a little girl."

She went on to say that his most unforgettable habit was directing an inventory of questions to Nana or Dolora, about the way some ch.o.r.e had been performed. And after the inquisition, during which his respondent had grown more and more vexed, he would demand with quiet force, "Since we now understand each other, tell me. Tell me that you love me now."

That feeling behind "Tell me that you love me" was what Sunday remembered about him. She felt uncomfortable just thinking about it, and she still responded to compelled affection with flight.

"He wanted things to be done in a certain manner," Delta said, "the way he had seen those he called 'important white folks' do them at various points in his life." She told how Grandpa had also been religious about "upholding the race." Although he was a man of few words, one topic he went on at great length about was "the betterment of the Negro." He had worked since he was seven, first farming soybeans and wheat with his family and then, anywhere he could earn something extra. For many years he had had two or three jobs, and he had always taken on something extra, like picking up people's clothes for the white cleaners downtown or delivering groceries. His experience working for a fancy country club, during the one year of college for which he had managed to pay, left him bitter at white folks and determined to emulate them, too.

He took pride in knowing that he was one of the most hardworking and prosperous men in Salt County, and he had a corner drugstore and several pieces of property to show for it. He always wore a suit to work behind the counter at his store, and he felt his people had to show both white folks, and themselves, that Negroes knew how to do right, that they were capable and responsible. And what disturbed him about Mercury Owens were his inklings that he had neither tenacity nor rect.i.tude.

Delta remembered him checking with her to see that she had done her homework. "Always follow through, child," he had told her, stabbing at the air with his forefinger. "Always follow through."

Delta remembered being perplexed by the difference between Nana and him. In contrast to his distant formality, she was warm and fluid, but one piece of common ground Delta had been able to discern was the church, where he was an alderman and Nana was forever organizing some activity, baking for benefits, and singing in the choir. The other quality they shared was a kind of dignity, expressed in different ways.

"Did you ever hear anything about how he and Nana got together?" Delta asked. "Because I don't believe I did. I don't even know what year they married, or exactly how old they were at the time. Well, I have to think about who else would know, about their getting together, I mean. Opus Green knows, if anyone does."

There were no pictures of Mercury's family in the shoe box, but Delta knew that according to Nana, after his father had been killed in a sawmill accident, when he was three, his mother had tried for a year to feed and clothe them. She told Sunday what she knew about how they had often gone hungry, and how his mother was sick with consumption. She had been forced to leave him with her sister, Edna, who thought it best to try to raise him as her own and to speak of his mother as little as possible. He had been a handful growing up, restless and inattentive in school, a loner who had trouble making friends, and his mother died soon after his aunt Edna took him in.

Delta had seen Edna regularly at church. She had brought them birthday and Christmas gifts, but had never stayed long at the house and had never been there for a holiday meal. Delta recalled Nana commenting that Edna and Mercury seemed to make each other so defensive and ill at ease that her visits were dreaded by everyone, and then, after his disappearance, she rarely came. She had brought food for Dolora and sat with the children several times right afterward, and then she had faded from their lives, moving, a year or so later, to another town.

Sunday made a mental note to see what she could do about contacting Edna, or any of her family who might still be alive.

They put aside the photo of Grandpa and uncovered the last things in the box: two pictures of Mercury, one a yearbook photo and one a riverside snapshot with Dolora, that they had both memorized. They had retrieved the meager bequest from Dolora's closet often when they were growing up, determined to read his expression and posture, to know him through his dimpled chin and folded hands. "Who are you?" they had both puzzled, inspecting the figure in the yearbook pose and the youth at the riverside. "Who are you and how are you mine?" Sunday remembered looking at the second snapshot and imagining what everyday essentials and treasured possessions he had carried in his bulging pockets.

Studying the snapshot with a magnifying gla.s.s, Delta had speculated on what things had been withheld and professed. She noticed how their shoulders barely touched and the attention her mother's t.i.tled head revealed, and imagined the charged aftermath or prospect of touch on their impatient, adolescent skin. Surely they were dreaming, she thought, of the life they would make together, of the home and family they would one day have. Or had he just told her about some aspect of her beauty, "You have the longest lashes I have ever seen," or "Your waist is perfect for my hand"? Maybe they had laughed a private laugh.

They both imagined the people their parents had, at that moment, been. And then, as there was nothing else for the shoe box to yield up to them, Sunday went to her coat and took out the mosaic coaster, its tiles set within a bra.s.s frame. "Oh, that one I remember," Delta said. "In fact, I can picture her making it, for the church sale, and then deciding she didn't want to part with it, because she had gotten the colors just right, and almost hidden in the pattern was a scarab she just couldn't bear to let go."

As she handed Mercury's monogrammed belt buckle to her sister, Sunday thought she saw Delta's face stiffen with resentment while she smoothed her eyebrows, right then left. "So you had the buckle," she whispered. "He wore it only on special occasions, not to work, and he always placed it in a dish on his dresser, where I was told never to go. It was off-limits, you see, to my touch. He used to polish it with a piece of flannel, I remember that."

Sunday explained hurriedly that she had forgotten packing the coaster and the buckle when she left for college, only to find them before she came home.

She didn't tell how, halfway through that night when she hadn't been able to sleep or work, she had opened her taped-up box, cutting the packing tape with her matte knife to retrieve the note. Before she got to it, she read every other piece of correspondence she had saved, arranging Nana's letters and Delta's greeting cards by date, combing through her other boxes for the things she had brought with her from Salt County. Unsure of what she was seeking, but driven, she had unearthed her high school yearbook; her drawing contest awards from elementary school; her first set of markers, now shrunken and dried; and the ticket stub from the first train she had taken to Chicago. Amid the other contents of the box, she had found the coaster and the buckle, which as a child, she had liked to use for bouncing moonlight at the window, pretending it was a signal to contact airplanes and helicopters as they pa.s.sed high above Salt County.

"Well," Delta said, before she could stop herself, "I'm surprised you found anything from here worth keeping." She placed the photo on the table and stood up to clear the plates. It was quieter than ever, and Sunday's bitterness at her sister's long-standing martyrdom flared. Two small mementos seemed little enough to take, when Delta had every other possession that had been left them right there with her. But nothing between them was free of the past, and Sunday guessed that the paucity of things selected, as well as the taking, itself, had provoked her sister.

She looked at the things on the table, stung silent by Delta's comment, and disappointed, too, that she hadn't been more excited about the items she had found. It made her even more reticent to reveal the bigger yearnings she had in mind, for Delta would surely think her maniacal for deciding to track down the man Mercury Owens had become.

For her part, Delta couldn't believe how sharp her own tongue sometimes got. This was no way to begin a reunion, she thought, and yet Sunday just seemed to get under her skin like no one else. She didn't understand where it came from, when she hadn't even been aware that all that ugly history was still so alive. She suggested that they put the pictures and the shoe box aside and they made lunch, relieved to have a concrete task.

To the background of the clock's steady meter, they made and ate their sandwiches, saying little except to comment on the train ride and the condition of the neighborhood. And then, settling back at the table and taking out a cigarette, Delta told the detail, overheard and never shared, which had caused her untold pain: In the laces of one shoe, Mercury Owens had tied his wedding band.

Once she had added that piece of information, the surviving image of his departure became, for both of them, those side-by-side work shoes. Run-down unevenly at the heels and holding a slim ring of gold.

FROM October Suite.

BY MAXINE CLAIR.