Chapter 12

“A Sunday Kind of Love”

Violet

Greenville, 1947

Violet was thirty-eight years old when she met Rollins, but she looked and felt like a much older woman. She was brutally honest when she looked at herself in the mirror. Years of cleaning houses had given her rough hands and bad knees that cracked when she bent them. After Gray died, she’d stopped caring about what she ate and how she looked, and although there was still evidence of beauty in her face, her body was plump and the shapeless, dark-colored shifts she wore all day did nothing to flatter. She wore no jewelry and didn’t bother to style her hair, even when she wasn’t wearing her work kerchief.

The strain of working and being the only parent to two daughters showed in the permanent frown line on her forehead, the dark circles under her eyes, the drawn expression on her face. She had done the best she could for the girls. Merline was her favorite because she reminded her of Gray. He would have been happy to see her grow into a lovely young woman, but her mother just worried that beauty would make her daughter vulnerable. Beauty hadn’t saved her from a broken heart, so she tried to keep the headstrong Merline under control, forbidding her to wear lipstick, telling her to stay away from charming young men who would someday, one way or another, leave her.

Violet could not bring herself to love her younger daughter, because she reminded her of her own weakness, of the man she’d met in Sonny’s. She didn’t know his name and she didn’t care. He had left her with a baby she didn’t want, a reminder that she could never let down her guard. She hardly remembered what the man looked like, but Violet saw neither her grandmother nor her mother in the girl, so she assumed that the baby looked like the man from Sonny’s. Dark skin, wide nose, skinny body. It was easy to withhold her love from an ugly baby, and that is what she did until her lack of affection for Duck became a habit.

At seventeen, Merline became secretive. Violet knew something was going on, but she was afraid to know what was making her daughter’s cheeks flushed and her eyes secretive. And then the whispers began, and Violet learned that Merline had done what had been forbidden, and with a white man at that. White men had killed Merline’s own father, had robbed her mother of the life that was rightfully hers. She simply couldn’t understand how Merline could let a white man touch her. Hadn’t she been listening to her mother? Didn’t she understand that white men were poison?

A black fury had come over her, and she had banished Merline from her life. Violet could not stand to lose anyone else, and now, her eldest daughter was pregnant with a baby that she might grow to cherish. No.

Later, she thought she might have been wrong to send Merline away. After she was gone, Violet and Duck were left alone, and somehow, sharing space with her younger daughter made Violet feel lonelier than she would have on her own. She didn’t understand the girl, who spent hours on her own reading and singing when she thought Violet couldn’t hear her. Duck seemed to live in a world inside herself, self-contained and independent. She cooked her own meals, kept her room tidier than any teenager should, and she believed in the future in a way that Violet knew was dangerous.

In her own way, she tried to make the girl understand that hopes and dreams were dangerous, but Duck just gave her a blank look and went back into her room. When she lay in her bed alone and unable to sleep, listening to the unnatural silence of the house, Violet sometimes wondered if she had been wrong. Maybe if she had let herself love Merline and Duck, they would have been different. Maybe she would have been different, a better self. She tried to imagine herself as one of those mothers who hugged her children when they felt sad, who read them stories before bedtime. She tried to imagine herself as the kind of mother Phoebe was, the kind of person who opened herself up to the world and took the good and the bad in stride. But she couldn’t even remember exactly how Phoebe looked, couldn’t put herself inside Phoebe’s head to understand how she could love with abandon when love caused the worst pain imaginable.

She had done the best she could, Violet told herself on those long sleepless nights. She repeated this to herself, silently, until sleep finally came.

* * *

Rollins had made her laugh.

There was a group of men and women who had all taken a well-paying temporary job preparing a newly renovated house for occupancy. The women worked inside, sweeping up sawdust, shining cloudy windows, scouring the insides or porcelain tubs and sinks. The men worked outside, raking leaves, painting, clearing weeds. They all sat together at lunch, flirting and joking while eating the food they’d brought in brown paper bags.

Violet always sat a little bit apart from the group, and early on, they’d all realized that any attempts to get more than brief, non-informative answers to their questions were futile. The women thought she was standoffish, putting on airs. The men thought she was a cold fish, pretty but difficult, not worth the effort. Eventually, they all ignored her and talked amongst themselves. A lot of their talk centered around popular radio shows or local gossip. Once, a man played an old guitar while the others sang silly songs. On the last day of the job, the mood at lunchtime was celebratory, and the women started dancing. The men joined them, and soon the backyard was filled with the sounds of singing, dancing, and laughing.

She watched for a while, taking small bites of her sandwich and thinking of the chores she had to complete before the end of the day. Most of the women were younger than Violet and their enthusiasm for life meant nothing to her. She had found peace with her life, preferred its dullness to the raw pain of her younger years. She was gazing off into nearby trees when Rollins approached.

“Excuse me, madam. May I have this dance?”

He was a round-bodied man about her age, with gray flecks in his close-cropped hair and a sly smile. She glanced over at the others, who had stopped a small distance away to watch. The guitar player was the only one not staring. His eyes closed, he picked out notes to a slow ballad.

“I don’t dance.” Violet gave him one of her looks, a frown warning him that she was not one to be charmed.

“But please, Miss Violet. You always sit over here by yourself, and I’d just like to have one dance before we part ways and never see each other again.”

He had a formal way of speaking that showed he’d had some education in the past.

“I. Don’t. Dance.” Most people usually left her alone when she used this tone, but Rollins stepped closer and sat next to her on the grass.

“They bet me ten dollars I couldn’t get you to dance,” he whispered in her ear. “They called it a sucker’s bet, said you’d never dance, no matter what. Come dance with me, Miss Violet, and I’ll split the money with you.”

He leaned back and winked at her. And Violet, in spite of herself, laughed. She laughed longer and harder than she had laughed in many years. It felt good to laugh, as if it released something caught inside her for too long.

She saw the surprise on the others’ faces when she took Rollins’s outstretched hand, stood up straight and proper, and proceeded to follow his lead in a waltz. She still felt old and tired, but as she danced, her spirit felt a little lighter.

Rollins gave her the five dollars right there in front of everyone, and at the end of the day, he offered to walk her all the way home. She agreed, and for the first time since Gray, she found a man that she liked talking to. When he was around, the house seemed bigger, less lonely. Rollins understood that she would never love him, and it was nice to fall asleep in a man’s arms again. He distracted her from regrets, from disappointment, from guilt. They had fun together, and it was enough for him. It was enough for Violet.

Certainly, Rollins had his faults, but he was generally a good man. And that is why she didn’t believe Duck when she said he was up to no good in her room at night. No, Violet was a survivor, and her instincts would have told her if Rollins was some kind of pervert. Duck was just mistaken. She didn’t know much about men, Violet reasoned. She had misunderstood Rollins’s attempts at fatherly affection.

When Duck left, Violet told herself it was for the best. She had been on her own since she was Duck’s age, and she had managed. Duck would find her way, too.