enough.
“Miss?” Rue didn’t know how to calm her. “Is he died in the war?”
“Better he was dead,” Varina moaned. “Better we all were dead.”
Rue tried to approach her, but she cussed and swung away. Varina rampaged to her vanity table and swiped at the contents on top; her perfumes and hair things and jewelry all clattered to the ground. She raised her gloved hand and slapped at the mirror, and Rue braced herself for a shattering that didn’t come. The mirror held and, enraged even further by that futile gesture, Varina stumbled back into the center of the room, headed, it seemed, for her doll collection. They were looking on her calmly with their rictus smiles.
Rue didn’t know why she moved to defend them. They were only dolls. But it flashed in her mind that she had always loathed the stupid things and if anyone was going to destroy them it ought to be her. She stepped in front of Varina’s path and tried to soothe her.
“I don’t understand what’s happened.”
“He ain’t comin’. Ain’t never comin’. Only sent the letter as a courtesy.” Varina cracked out a sharp laugh. “A courtesy to tell me the engagement’s broken. He’s found himself a better girl. One who ain’t touched. Ain’t ruined.”
At that one word, ruined, Varina ripped the parasol from Rue’s hands and swung it once and hard across Rue’s face.
Rue felt the angry welt already rising in a perfect line across her face and she tasted blood boiling up in her mouth.
“I don’t understand,” Rue said.
“Oh, don’t you see?” Varina kept saying. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”
Varina backed away. She was throwing down her clothes, all her pretty things. The net she’d put her hair up in snapped in its stretch and her curls came raining down on her bare freckled shoulders. She was tugging at her gloves, angry at each individual finger as she pulled. Varina was all come undone as the world around her was, and Rue, always behind, it seemed, always foolish, didn’t put it all together until Varina was all but naked in front of her save a thin white slip, see-through and gossamer. Still bent, cowering, Rue looked up and saw Varina’s belt, the one she’d made for the courses that had never come—just as the husband had never come—and in that instant of seeing it and remembering it, Rue watched it snap, all the little beads of nutmeg scattered across the floor like marbles, and some broke in half and spread their dust, and Varina began, again, to cry.
Oh, Rue understood what she was seeing then and how right Miss May Belle had been, as she always was, for the belt had served its purpose and sent its message as good as any letter: Varina’s little belly was protruding, the skin already rounded out in a stretch of six months.
PROMISE
Miss Rue had been, all her life, a liar. Over the years, in slaverytime, wartime, in freedomtime, she’d lied and said, I know.
When the mamas told her something was going wrong below, something they could not explain, I know, she’d say, to shush them. But she had never got to understand wrong from inside herself. She realized she had spent her life in kneeling, in peering in, in parting legs, touching skin, squeezing hands. In wiping brows and blood and bits of birth. In interpreting moans and sighs and vague descriptions of other folks’ pain.
Ooh, Miss Rue, it’s like a fire, like a stabbing, like a burning, like a gunshot, like a tearing, feels like I’m dying.
She always wanted to ask them, how you know what dying feel like if you never done it?
I ain’t know nothin’.
The thought rang through her as she woke in the middle of the night to the feeling from the inside that she didn’t have a name for other than wrong. The feeling persisted, grew, in the place at the bottom of her stomach, the warm round place she had been sending love feelings to for months now.
Bruh Abel was asleep beside her and she hesitated one lonely second before waking him because waking him meant that the wrong