The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,186
kind.
I lived alone until a couple of years ago. Then Lil discovered that Alphonso, her college sweetheart and husband for almost twenty years, was not what she thought him to be. After the divorce, she came home to Florida and decided to live with me. I’m old enough now that all the girls thought it was a good idea that one of them be around to keep an eye on me.
They are not so young themselves. Gracie will turn fifty within days. But, like their father, they all seem to be aging at their own special rates. The curve of their earlobes, how they lift their faces when their own children speak to them, how their hips and breasts have filled and shrunk with the changes of maturity and childbirth, continue to fascinate me—not as frequently, but no less intensely than their perfect bodies did when they were new and fresh. I still feel flashes of tenderness toward them, amazed that they are here in the world and are mine. They are profoundly, cellularly familiar to me, and they are, in the distances and privacies of their adult lives, a series of mysteries.
Adam may be responsible for the youthfulness of their faces, but I claim responsibility for the gene that sent them to the edge of their tribes for a mate. The same gene that sang in me as I dragged A. in out of the cold rain. Our daughters are now scattered across four continents. Mayan, Chinese, Dutch, and African blood runs through the veins of my grandchildren. In their careers and their choice of husbands, they’ve covered the globe. Gracie lives in the Netherlands. Still married to Hans, she now has a diplomatic appointment at The Hague. Their sons are mild, witty Dutchmen like their father. Vet school led Rosie to research in genetics and species-hopping viruses. She married Mussa, a fellow geneticist, and they commute between California and Africa on a seasonal basis. Her boys all have their daddy’s beautiful tropical skin and big hands. Sarah lives and paints in China with her husband, Jian, and their son. She has just been authorized to return to the United States. Lil lives down the hall. The mother of two grown sons, she left the Library of Congress last year and took a position at the UF library as a digital preservation specialist. Eventually, she ceased being the twin left behind, one half of a whole, and became her singular self. Seeing her become a mother separated her, at last, in my heart, from Jennie, who remains nine years old.
About a month ago, I woke from a deep sleep to a sound I had not heard in twenty years: the reverberations of Adam’s sexual climax. Instinctively, I reached across my empty bed for him. Still half-asleep, I got out of bed and followed the rising voice, then realized I was outside Lil’s bedroom door. Gently, I pressed my palm flat on the door as the cry peaked then vanished.
Only then did I realize who I’d been listening to. I stepped back into my bedroom and quietly shut the door. I wanted Adam. I wanted the beautiful harmonic of him, wanted to pour myself over him.
Down the hall, their voices continued, indistinct, muffled.
Eventually, the house became quiet again. Then I heard Lil’s footsteps in the hall. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, just outside the pool of light from the stove hood, her features relaxed and soft. She shook her head when I sat down at the table across from her. “Momma, just when I think I’m on an even keel and I understand how things are and what I’m capable of . . .” She sighed.
“I know. I heard.”
“Yes, I guess you would’ve.” The corner of her mouth lifted in an apologetic half-smile. “We always knew with you and Daddy. There would be the click of your bedroom door closing, then after a while . . .” She paused and glanced at me a little sheepishly.
“Yes?”
“Then you’d make that sound you always made. The walls hummed, then Daddy laughed.”
“The sound I made?”
Her face reflected my surprise.
I touched her hand. “Lil, that was your daddy you heard, not me. It was never me.”
“Daddy? Really?” Her mouth hung open and she stared at me.
I nodded.
She snapped her mouth shut. “Wow . . . I thought it was something only women did. Sarah does it when she’s with Jian.