Grace didn’t grow up in Portland.
She grew up in Southbury, Florida, on family land turned into orange groves. There were always people out in the early morning with sticky citrus fingers, dropping fruits into basket after basket until the picked oranges were trucked away.
Grace remembers playing hide-and-seek in the groves. Giggling behind big, wide trees as Mom called her name. She remembers the smell, oh, the smell of oranges in the evening. When the sky turned pink, then purple, then midnight blue.
Mom called out for her, and Grace hid for hours in those grove trees.
She was thirteen when she and Colonel jumped in the rumbling pickup truck and left. Mom stood on the veranda with a trembling smile on her face.
“You be good for your father,” she said, as Grace held back angry tears. “Listen to what he says.” She pulled lightly on one of Grace’s curls, and it sprang back into place. “Call me as soon as you land.”
Grace remembers worrying about the trees. Would they still grow big and strong without her there to watch them? Would they still grow plump fruit? Would it still taste as sweet?
She asked Colonel about that once, about the trees.
“Your mother will watch over the trees,” he said carefully, as gentle as he knew how to be. “They’ll be fine.” He said, “They’ll still grow as long as she’s there.”
Grace looked at him. “And who will watch over her?” she asked, and Colonel went silent.
Eventually, she stopped asking Colonel about the trees. She listened when Mom talked about the grove on the phone. She waited at the mailbox for letters with pictures of the harvest. Those didn’t come as often. Mom was busy, after all, taking care of all the oranges and trees and the earth beneath her feet. Then, she was busy during the off-season, traveling around the world in search of meaning and spirituality and holistic retreats that made Colonel scoff when the postcards came.
Soon enough Grace was busy, too.
So, she didn’t grow up in Portland. But Colonel’s house, with its winding driveway and pebbled walk and Victorian porch, eventually made itself home.
Sharone answers the door with fresh box braids, her dark brown skin gleaming in the setting sun. She smells like shea butter and vanilla when she leans in for a hug.
“Porter,” she says, smile in her voice, and Grace relaxes into her embrace. From her mouth, her name has a different harmony. Porter doesn’t sound like a rebuke, a resignation, a demand, like it does from Colonel. From her stepmom, it just sounds like a name of a person you love. “We miss you. I wish you’d spend some time here now. You graduated in January, and we still barely see you. I know Colonel would enjoy it.”
Grace rolls her eyes, following Sharone into the house. “Right,” she says. “He enjoyed my graduation, too. Must have been ecstatic when they called me Dr. Porter, and he stormed out.”
Sharone sighs. There’s a process to dealing with Colonel: excuses, rationalization, defeat, attempting to change the behavior, sighing and finally acceptance. Grace is still trying to reach acceptance. She thinks she might always be trying to reach acceptance when it comes to her father.
“Is he home yet?” she asks. He was the one who invited her for dinner. A formal email, signed off with all his military honors and titles, as if Grace needed reminding.
In the kitchen, Sharone has her famous butter rum corn bread laid out on the counter. A pan of mac and cheese sits heavy on the stovetop.
“You know damn well he gets home at five thirty on the dot,” Sharone says, pouring an oversize glass of sangria. “He’s in his study, but he can wait. I need wine first.”
“Cheers,” Grace says, cutting into the corn bread. “You know, you could always come live with me. I am Dr. Porter now. I’m a catch.” Sharone rolls her eyes. “Is that a no?”
“It’s also a hell no,” she says, humor twisting her lips, “unless you start making the same money he makes.”
Grace shrieks, the laugh carrying through the echoes of the big home. She and Sharone fall into each other, laughs eking out into little cackles. “After almost ten years,” Grace says, “you’ve finally outed yourself as a gold digger.”
“Oh, honey.” She lifts her glass. “That was never a secret.”
A cleared throat announces the arrival of another person, and instinctively Grace straightens up, brushes the crumbs from her mouth and her lap. Colonel stands tall in the doorway, leaning against the frame as he rubs at the titanium that makes up most of his right leg.
“I heard laughter,” he says. It still takes Grace aback after all these years, the deep bass of his voice. He can still command her attention. “Thought we agreed that wasn’t allowed in this house.”
“That’s just you,” Sharone says, but she moves gracefully toward him, reaching up on her toes to give him a quick, chaste kiss. She offers her arm, but Colonel brushes it off, limping stiffly inside. “Porter and I know it’s laughter keeping us young.”
“Is that right?” he asks. “What do you think? Is it laughter keeping you young, Dr. Porter?”
“Don’t start,” Sharone says, hovering as Colonel lugs himself onto a stool at the kitchen island. “Ain’t nobody tell you to come out of your study to nag.”
Grace picks at the remains of her corn bread.
“All right, sweetheart,” he says. He’s like a pod person sometimes, with how normal he is with Sharone. “No nagging. We’ll have a nice dinner.” He winks at Grace, and she squints back. “What are we talking about, then?” he asks while Sharone starts bringing over pans of food.
She’s been gearing up to tell Colonel about her big interview. Professor MacMillan set it up with a private company in Seattle. They’d discussed for weeks ahead of time. Grace wore her best suit. She slicked her hair back and practiced answering questions in the mirror. She showed up twenty minutes early.
She doesn’t quite know the Porter way to say, I put on my best voice. I sat up with my back straight. I made eye contact, but not enough to seem threatening. I said ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘yes, ma’am,’ and I hated every second of it. She doesn’t know the Porter way to say, They picked me apart, questioned me until my eyes stung and I stormed out. I saw one person of color on the way to the door.
Maybe instead she could say she got drunk-married in Vegas. How she drank away the memory of her interview. And at the bottom of a cocktail she discovered the world did not end, it just felt like it did. There was so much more work, more climbing to be done. And then the rose-petal girl took her alcohol away, and they danced, and they got married.
Colonel breaks the silence. “Okay,” he says, looking at her over the rim of his glass. “I’ve been wanting to talk about what’s next for you.”
“Well, we’re watching Waiting to Exhale when I get home,” she says. “It’s movie night.”
Sharone lays a hand over Colonel’s, straightening out his clenched fingers. “What he means, baby, is what’s next for Dr. Porter? You worked so many summers doing research for Dr. MacMillan’s lab. Are you going to stay with her for a while? What were you working on last year?”
Colonel would have her head if she slumped at the table, but she wants to. “Using Gaia’s data for high-speed observation of white dwarf binaries,” she mumbles.
Sharone squints. “Will you keep doing—that?”
Grace exhales deeply. In her head, she thinks of the most efficient way to get through this. Colonel taught her how to turn a stressful situation to her advantage. Sometimes you do that with deflection, with questions, with subtle manipulation. Sometimes you just lie.
“I had an interview before I left for Vegas,” she admits. “With a company in Washington. Kunakin.”
Colonel narrows his eyes. “How did it go?”
Grace almost shrugs before she catches herself. “They said I wasn’t the right fit for the company culture.” She looks down at her plate. They didn’t say that, but they thought it. They probably said it aloud when they checked back in with Professor MacMillan. “But, it’s fine,” she says quickly. “They were good, but not the best. A Porter always goes for the best.”
“We do,” Colonel agrees. “Perhaps you and I should sit down with your mentor. She advised me—”
“You talked to Professor MacMillan? Why would you do that?”
Colonel blinks. “Admittedly, I know less about the trajectory of employment in—” he pauses here, mouth twisting “—astronomy than in medicine. I wanted to know your degree isn’t being wasted. It’s not as stable a field as medicine would have been.”
“No,” Grace says, voice rising, “but it’s mine.” She hides her clenched fists. The way she pinches the thin skin on her wrists. Sharone watches the two of them carefully. “It’s mine, Dad.” Dad, not Colonel. Not some distant military figure that sends her a formal email for dinner at the house she grew up in. No, it’s Dad, who taught her how to ride a bike, who dropped her off on her first day of high school. Dad, who let Grace cry into his uniform when no one else looked like her, sunshine hair and brown freckles on brown skin. “Dad,” she says, and he jerks back, surprised.
“Porter, I just want to know—”
“It’s mine,” she says. “All of it. My degree and whatever fucking—”
“Your language—”
“—mistakes I make, they’re all mine. Whatever I decide to do, it’s mine.”
“Okay,” Sharone cuts in. “Colonel, don’t you remember being young? You didn’t have everything figured out all at once, did you?”
“I did,” he says firmly. “The army recruited me out of high school. It’s not like I could afford college. I had no choice but to figure out what success looked like with the hand I was dealt, so I did the work to get it. Then I had a family to take care of, and I did that, too. I just want to know Porter is doing the work to get what she wants.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Grace says, and she watches his face with a repressed sort of satisfaction. “I worked for eleven years to become a doctor because I wanted you to be proud of me.”
“We agreed you would do medicine—”
“You agreed I would do medicine,” she corrects, voice trembling. “And I didn’t. I did something that disappointed you. I didn’t get the job Professor MacMillan set up for me, and I know that disappoints you, too. But my career is mine to figure out.”
Colonel sits stone-faced and unmoving. Finally, he pushes back from the table and refuses help getting up. “Then that’s what you need to do,” he says. “Next time, you will figure out what the best is, and you will get it. That is what Porters do.”
The kitchen is quiet when he leaves. Perhaps this is where Grace figures it out. In the silent gravity of her father’s home.
“That went well,” she says, finally slumping down and sipping her wine. “He didn’t disown me, at least.”
“He would never,” Sharone says. “Your father has his own shit to deal with, but never doubt he wants the best for you.”
Grace nods. “I know,” she says quietly. “But I don’t even know what’s best for me, so how the hell does he?”
“You know how he is,” Sharone chides. “He thinks he knows everything.”
Grace sighs and checks her phone, filled up with messages from Agnes and Ximena in their group chat. “I should go. Want me to help with the dishes?”
“Girl, this is not my mama’s house. You know I use the dishwasher.” She shoos Grace away. “Want me to drive you home?”
Grace shakes her head. She feels hollowed out, her insecurities laid bare for Colonel to poke and prod. But they are hers to examine, hers to shove back into the pit of her stomach, hers to hide. “No,” she decides. “I’ll take a Lyft. It’s fine.”
“Be careful,” Sharone tells her, kissing the top of Grace’s head. She’s tall in her heels. Grace doesn’t know how she wears them all day. “Call when you get home.”
“I will,” Grace promises. “Love you. Thanks for not letting Colonel eat me alive.”
Sharone laughs. “I love you, too,” she says. “You’re a good kid, Porter.”
The words feel like a balm, a cold compress to the raw feeling of exposure.
Spring nights in Portland are breezy, and as Grace sits on the porch swing and waits for her car, she lets her mind wander. She is not here in a home she needs an invitation to visit. She is in the stars, bold and bright and beautiful. She is strong and unwavering, and not filled with the sour taste of failure and the weight of unknowns.
She thinks, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, like a mantra. She has to be okay, because there is no other option. She is okay because she must be, to muster the strength to set up more job interviews. She must be as formidable as the black, swirling universe. It keeps going, and so shall she. She has to.
The door swings open, and Sharone steps out holding a bulky envelope.
“From your mom. I didn’t tell Colonel,” she says. “Looks like it’s been to hell and back, but it got here.”
Grace opens it with careful fingers. She and Mom spoke on FaceTime two weeks ago, and she hadn’t mentioned she was putting anything in the mail. She’d been in Thailand this time, and the connection was spotty.
The paper is wrinkled, the ink smeared in places like it got caught in the rain. Mom is always traveling on some spiritual retreat or holistic voyage, and Grace has become used to receiving letters and packages from all over the world.
“She’ll be home soon to start doing prep for harvest season,” Grace reads. “Should be ready to start up in a few months. She expects it to be a big one.”
“Oh wow,” Sharone says. “Running those groves sounds like so much work.”
In the envelope, tucked in the bottom, are a few crumpled bills.
“For my Porter,” is scrawled at the bottom. “For my wandering star girl. Hopefully this helps you find your footing on this green earth, too. Don’t get too lost in the big, vast universe.”
Mom sends a little money along every few months. Grace never touches it, so the amount grows in her savings, and so does the pit in her stomach. She doesn’t make a lot at the tea room. She already feels enough guilt that Colonel helps her out so much. It doesn’t help that Mom does, too, from running the orange grove Grace barely finds the time to visit.
Her failed job interview leaves a sour taste on her tongue. People would kill to have the cushion of their parents’ money, but it makes her anxious. They won’t support her forever. They definitely won’t if they find out she’s been storming out of sterile, white interview rooms and leaving sterile, white interviewers gaping behind. When they find out she got drunk and happy and hitched to a girl whose name she does not know.
Sharone rubs her back. “Car’s here,” she says. “Go home, Porter. Everything else can wait.”
Grace says, “You don’t have to worry about me. Promise.” Her stepmom becomes a distant shadow as the car pulls off. Grace texts the license plate and picture of the driver to her group chat and stares out the backseat window.
She picks a star and wonders if her rosebud girl can see it from her radio station in Brooklyn. Are you listening? There are so many things I don’t know how to say. Can you hear them? Is it just me out here, sending messages into the void?
The drive is silent, but Grace listens the whole way home.