During the ride to the house, they stayed away from New Orleans talk, with the attention mostly on Junior’s college life: Daddy bragged on his record-breaking backstroke, Aunt Tish asked about girlfriends. Junior tried, very obviously, Reesie thought, to avoid the word grades. She would normally have been cracking up over making him squirm, but her mind was on other things. What would happen when her parents were finally in the same room?
They slammed out of the car, and Aunt Tish popped the trunk before she crunched across the snow to open the kitchen door. The spicy aroma of red beans and sausage wafted out on the warm air. Reesie relaxed, even as she dragged Junior’s heavy duffel bag. Mom was home, all right, and she’d been cooking Daddy’s favorites. That was a good sign.
While Junior muttered about his load, Reesie followed her father inside without taking her eyes off him. He strode past the pots steaming on the stove, moving straight through the open dining room door. Reesie stopped short.
Her father had spotted her mother in the next room. Aunt Tish, who’d been standing beside her sister, instantly vanished.
“Missed you at the station,” Daddy said, easing his arms around their mother’s waist and nuzzling his chin into her neck. He whispered something else to her.
“Lloyd.” She didn’t say it with a laugh, or even with much love, but her body seemed to go limp against him. Then she turned around and kissed him.
Junior crashed into Reesie’s back. They were both momentarily paralyzed by what they were watching.
“Yes!” Reesie pumped her fist and turned to high-five her brother. Junior didn’t look so cheerful.
Reesie’s smile faded, and she let the swinging door close. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked.
Junior shrugged. “I’m just saying…” He opened the fridge and stood there, eyeball-shopping like he was in the grocery store freezer aisle.
“What? And get out of Aunt Tish’s refrigerator!”
“I’m not so sure Mom and Dad are going to just make up and play nice. Dad probably won’t admit this, but he feels like Mom abandoned him, and I kinda think he’s right.”
“What?” Reesie wanted to call him wrong, but she couldn’t get the words out.
“Life is not a movie,” Junior said, his back to her. “In real life, stuff hits the fan, a man wants his lady to be there for him, and she ups and leaves. Now, in the movie version, some slow music would play and they’d meet up by accident and hook up again like nobody was hurting. Girl, everybody in New Orleans was hurting! I think Mom should’ve hung in.”
“Are you serious?” she said angrily. “You weren’t even there, you don’t know—” She caught herself before she added, “They were fighting over me!” Not the time, she told herself. Not the time.
“Listen, don’t jump all over me. You want me to say that I predict Dad and Mom will be like newlyweds by the time that ball drops on New Year’s Eve? Okay. Your fantasy.” He turned to see his sister’s unhappy expression, and he softened his tone. “I don’t mean that they’ve stopped loving, but there is some deep anger they gotta work out.”
Reesie said nothing. Was Junior right? Had her mother abandoned her father? Was the thing between them not about her, or his job, at all? She slipped back to inch open the dining room door, not knowing what to expect.
Their parents were sitting together on the sofa, their heads together as they spoke in low voices. That didn’t look like deep anger. They were talking, and it had to mean something. She didn’t care what Junior’s two cents were.
Before Reesie could ease away, Daddy looked directly up at her.
“Come on in, Reesie. We won’t bite you—or each other,” he said, waving her in with one arm and keeping the other around Mom’s shoulders.
Reesie’s heart began to beat fast. Then her mother patted a spot on the sofa and smiled, looking younger somehow.
“Really, it’s okay,” she said. They seemed so much the way they used to be, so close to their hugging, kissing displays of affection that embarrassed Reesie and Junior and entertained their friends. So close.
Reesie walked slowly past the brass reindeer marching through tinsel across Aunt Tish’s dining room mantel. She blinked as the sparkling ball decorations on the Christmas tree shook and shimmered, bouncing points of light into the huge mirror between the front windows. Everything was reflected there: her parents’ bodies so close that they formed one shape; Reesie’s own expression of anxious hope. She looked away.
“We want to talk,” her mother said. Reesie sat down beside her.
“Hey, Lloyd Edward Boone Jr.!” Daddy called loudly.
Junior appeared holding a double-decker sandwich with both hands.
“Mmmm?” He’d taken a bite out of it.
“Get in here. Your mother and I have something to say!”
Junior sauntered in, draped himself over an upholstered armchair, and then took one look at his father and slid to the floor.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “S’up?”
Reesie wanted to throw something at him. After the conversation they’d just had in the kitchen, he couldn’t imagine what was up?
“A couple of things,” Daddy said. He leaned forward. That was when Reesie noticed one of the bags he’d carried off the train, sitting between his feet. He reached into it and pulled out a pale blue envelope.
“Reesie first. This is for you.”
She took the envelope and turned it over, squinting at the spidery old-fashioned script that read, Miss Teresa Boone.
“You found her! You found Miss Martine!” Reesie shouted, ripping the letter open.
“Oh, read it to us!” Mama said, sounding as excited as Reesie felt.
“Okay.” The single sheet of paper trembled in Reesie’s hands.
Dear Teresa,
I hope this letter finds you safe with your family. Lloyd and Jeannie have done excellent work in raising a girl like you. I want to thank you for showing an old woman how to put up a stiff fight. Eritrea has told me that you stayed strong. I hope you grow up to find everything in life you are looking for.
Sincerely,
Martine Odette Simon
“Wow,” Junior said. “She’s talking about you?”
“You chill out, brother!” Daddy shot at him. Reesie paid Junior no attention for once. She reread the note in silence.
“I really had to do my policeman thing to locate her,” Daddy said. “She had heart surgery and she’s staying in a rehab place in Baton Rouge.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” Reesie smiled at her father.
“That André is a pretty surprising young man, seeing after her the way he did,” Daddy said. He dug into the bag again, this time pulling out a small box, which he placed on his wife’s lap.
“Lloyd! We weren’t going to exchange gifts—”
He quieted her with another kiss, and Junior made a face. Reesie smiled, and when her mother gave her a should-I-open-it? look, Reesie nodded eagerly.
Her mother opened the box. At first Reesie couldn’t see what it was that her mother grasped to her heart. She covered her face with her other hand and started to cry softly. Reesie leaned against her shoulder, and even Junior stopped chewing.
“What is it?” He crawled forward on his knees to see.
“It’s—it’s…” Mama couldn’t quite compose herself. Reesie peeled her fingers back to reveal a small, very plain gold heart, no bigger than a nickel. She’d never seen it before.
Daddy cleared his throat. “This is the first piece of jewelry—”
“First gift,” Mama corrected him gently.
“The first gift I ever gave your mom. I was working and still in school. Saved up three months to buy it at Maison Blanche so she’d have a fancy name on the box. I found it, crazy enough, wedged in a baseboard in our bedroom after I emptied it out.”
Reesie stared at her brother. What was it he’d said, about there still being love between them? Ma Maw would have said that the gold heart, stuck in the room they’d shared for twenty years, was a sign.
“Jeannie.” Daddy’s voice changed, at once reminding Reesie of that day outside the Lafayette motel. “Jeannie, you know Pete and I watched our mother work two and three jobs to buy that house so she could move us out of the projects. That house is her legacy!”
“I know, Lloyd. I know how much more than a house it is to you.”
“But it’s not family.” His voice was thick. “Jeannie, I’m asking … I’m begging you. Please come back. Nothing is home without you and Reesie.”
Reesie gulped down the lump in her throat. Her mother fingered the gold heart, but she didn’t answer right away. What did that mean? Surely, Mom wasn’t thinking of saying no, was she?
“You—we—worked so hard for everything, and now it’s all just gone!” her mother said. Daddy hung his head, and Reesie could see that he was trying to maintain control.
“But, Mom!” she interrupted. “Everything isn’t gone! We’re here—together—for Christmas. This is what I’ve been waiting for. We want to be together! That makes us kind of a home without a house, doesn’t it?”
“The kid is making sense, Mom,” Junior added. “Say yes. Just—please, say yes!”
Mom methodically began to take off the necklace she was wearing, and carefully slid the old heart onto the chain. When she lifted her arms to return the chain to her neck, Daddy fastened it.
“You Boones are ganging up on me!” she finally said with a sigh. She looked at Daddy. “I’ll try, Lloyd. Reesie and I will come for spring break. Then we’ll figure it out.”
Reesie and Junior cheered loudly.
“Merry Christmas to me!” Daddy said, kissing her again.
Reesie knew that one week of vacation wasn’t forever, but she didn’t care. She was happier than she’d dared to be in months. And a short time later they were in Aunt Tish’s kitchen just like always: together, laughing, home.