As Good as True

by Cheryl Reid

When he cried and said he was sorry, he was not apologizing to me. He cried for himself, what he had become, what he had never wanted to be, an ogre like his father who had lorded over Nelly and Ivie and him.

their breathing and thankful to be close. I wished I could go back in time and hold Marina more, hold her until she understood my love for her, hold her until I understood better what I should have been for her, so that now, when it came time for her to make a choice, she might choose me.

I gripped the comb and thought if I squeezed it hard enough, she would stop bleeding and the baby would cry. Her hair would grow long, she would laugh again, and the baby would come back to life.

gazed at me as if she wanted me to understand that life could be cut short, that blessings were special and rare.

I wanted to grab his leg, lift my arms so that he would pick me up and hold me close. But I was afraid he would walk away from me, if only because of his own grief.

The thought of him denying me, the grief for my lost mother, the loneliness of it all, let loose in me, and I cried as I never had before, nor ever would again. My wails startled him from his prayers, and in a few long strides, he swept me up into his bearlike arms. “Binti, binti.” He held me for a long time until my crying stopped and the sobs and hiccups passed. He carried me to my dark room.

I would keep vigil over her. My chest felt hollow, like her empty birdcage in the corner of the room. I touched her things. The silver mirror, the bone-handled brush and tortoiseshell comb. I watched her still body as I neared her closet, wanting her to turn and invite me into bed. Her ten silver bangle bracelets were strewn carelessly over the dresser. One of them had been engraved with my name and birthday. I found it and ran my fingers over her name and mine—Vega. I placed the bracelet on my wrist.

pulled her dresses, one by one, from their hangers, and made a nest of them on the floor of her closet to sleep the next few hours wrapped in her scent.

She was his daughter, and I wanted to argue with her, knock Elias out of her, but I held back.

wanted to warn her that carrying a child was easier than labor, and labor easier than raising it. Loving a child was the most bittersweet joy, maybe the most difficult thing in the world. I wanted to tell her, she could do her best and her child might see it as all wrong. She would know soon enough, this terrible chain of love, from mother to child, how the love was not always returned in the same measure, how it can hurt as deeply as it could be sublime. But I did not want to sound discouraging, because I loved her and I did not want to disappoint her.

Growing up, she had asked questions—how I met her father, if I’d had other beaus, what was my wedding like? She wanted the romance and the love story, but there was only a one-sided story to tell. I gave her paltry details. The wedding was at the church, Gus gave us the silver, and her grandfather built the house on property he had purchased for my mother. Then I would remind her, in a harsh tone, how I grew up in Mounds over the store, working when I wasn’t in school, no mother to dote on me. She would frown, sad or appalled at the poverty of my girlhood, so different from hers. She never worked a day in the store and she had anything she wanted—friends, piano lessons, dresses, ribbons, bicycles.

neck. “That’s fine,” I said. I should have created more happy moments for her when she was a child, seeds of joy to grow on. Elias had given her so many. But I was stingy and too bitter to share what little hope I had stored away. If I had given her something more, she would have that now. She would see me differently.

Maybe she could handle only one crisis at a time, and my leaving was secondary to her father’s death. Maybe she did not know. She was a mystery to me, keeping her emotions locked safe away, buried deep below the surface.

On the porch, Papa sat like a penned bull, moaning and snorting as thoughts passed through his mind. I had never seen him so agitated, even worse than yesterday when he told me to leave town and gave me money. Was he thinking of the day that he gave in to my pleadings and told me I could marry Elias, or the day Mama died, or the day I returned home to Elias? As I told people good night, I watched Papa and looked past him at the windows blazing in candlelight, as if the house were on fire.

“I stayed because I loved you and Eli,” I said. “I could never have left you. I lost my mother and I knew how that hurt. I was never as good as her, but I loved you more than I loved my life.”

It had been easier to give her to Nelly than to risk losing her without warning.

His body was so close, and I wished his touch was true.

His touch was kind, and his voice was true, honest, loving when he spoke of Marina.

I feared her smile would disappear if I crossed the boundary between us.

“You draw your breath, do your work, and pray to God. Troubles will pass. That is what I thought. We were young. We were not afraid.”

It felt good for a stranger to see what he did and say it was wrong.

I feared that soon he would die. He seemed to be holding on, not wanting to leave because I was in trouble. I would be an orphan, no mother or father, no one to love me the way a parent loves a child.

I hoped she could understand, but every second I spent away from her, I imagined her love for me splintering and Nelly’s seeds of doubt sprouting and growing as fast as weeds.

“They don’t want me there.” My eyes fell below us on the statue of Mary, with her hands open and her gaze downcast, by my mother’s grave, down the path from Elias’s. Mama had talked about the icons of Mary from her home, and Papa must have chosen this large statue for that reason.

“My mother was so good,” I said. “So gentle.” I remembered her thick black hair, tied back in a white scarf, her flowing blue skirt, and the accent of her voice. Her bracelets sang as she moved. Eli stood by me, close and patient. “What will Marina remember me by?” I asked Eli. Nothing so sweet, I thought. “Mama was so young. I thought she knew so much, but she was not much older than Marina when she died.” My Marina was soon to be a mother, and I prayed she would do better than me. “I saw what happened to you, Mama.” Eli meant what his father had done to me. “I’m not going to let it happen again.” “It’s not your job to take care of me.”

“Don’t you change your plans, for me or for them.” I ran my fingers over her name. Vega. “You don’t know what people are capable of.” “I do.” He raised his voice and I heard the anger in it. “I know what my father did and I want to do better.” “You don’t have to pay for your father’s sins,” I said. Or mine, I thought.

“I should never have asked him inside.” I could not reconcile my motives or my actions. “You were being kind,” Eli said. “Why should either of you suffer over a kindness?”

“I’m afraid I helped him to spite your father.” All of it mixed in my mind. “You were not wrong,” he said. The gravediggers walked up the hill with their shovels and ropes in hand. “There is right and wrong,” Eli said. “Lives are at stake and I won’t stand by and do nothing.” He sounded like a man of conviction, but I saw the boy who looked at me with pity, who knew what his father had done to me. For what I had done to his father, there would be no redemption.

On the day of her baptism, we had sat around the table, Elias and our children with Gus and Lila, Papa, Nelly, and Louise. We had been so happy watching Sophie play and toddle in her white dress, and I had thought, Now is our chance. We held so much hope in Sophie, that one creature, and here was our chance again in Marina’s baby, who was sure to be loved and adored and smart and beautiful.

I had made it this far and now Marina’s baby was almost here. If I bided my time, if I had faith in my love for my children, maybe Eli would be right. The rain began to fall and the hot ground steamed. The water fell cool and clean on my face like a baptism washing away the past few days of misery.

I was scared for him to take such a stand. I wanted him safe and whole at the seminary, where the ones who went after Orlando Washington could not get him,

“You disappointed me again,” she said. The truth was spilling out like a flooded well. Maybe this was motherhood, longing for a person who would outgrow you, longing for a love outside your reach.

There was no proportion to the joy I felt, or what I had ever felt, good or bad. Holding my grandchild, I had a glimpse of what love could be, and I lost my breath, as if all the bad did not matter. That moment with Marina’s baby was all the good of the past and the future.

The truth was the bundle in my arms, and I could feel it, a fleeting glimpse, that love had come too late and all in a jumble. All love and loneliness, and I had only a short time to sort it out.

My mother’s Gypsy came to mind. Mama had tried to tell me how she had been lonely in her new world, an oddity to most people she met. She had been the Gypsy on the outskirts and now I was the same, never to be trusted or let in, scorned and cast out by my daughter and family. I watched Marina sleep, and I felt her love and her loneliness too. She would be as lonely as I had been without a mother or the father she loved. He had been a different man to her than the one I knew, and I realized one person could be many. My mother, brave and wise in my memory, was young and frail and worried to my father. I could not know them any better than I could know if Marina would change her mind about me.

How many babies did one get in a lifetime? I had had four, Marina, Eli, Sophie, and now Eliza. I had wasted time being angry and passed my anger on to Marina. All I could hope for was a chance to show her better now. I could not dare to hope for more.

wondered if the baby would change her, if she would soften in her dress or in her attitude or if she would see the world in a gentler way. I felt a thickness in my throat—a cold, hard lump that I could not swallow. The heaviness traveled through my whole being, and I worried I was too late in my understanding. I should have been more patient with her, more giving and loving, and I should not have begrudged her for being her father’s child.

tried to remember what I had wanted when I married Elias. I had wanted him. I had wanted love. I had wanted to be like my mother. All I knew for certain, I had wanted more than what I had or what I got. That was when regret washed over me like cold water. I had waited too long to stand up for myself, for others, for Marina and Eli, for this baby girl, and I had gone about it the wrong way.

prayed she would never know what it was to sacrifice love or feeling in order to survive, to finally have a chance, to have it so close, as close as I held baby Eliza, and to feel it slipping away. She would never trust me. Seeds of doubt had been planted in her mind, in Michael’s mind, and nothing I could do, no denial, no words, could change that.

The sheriff or a mob might still come for me, but I would face whatever I had to for Marina and Eli. I was not leaving. I would rather live on Marina’s fringes, like the Gypsy of my mother’s story, begging for scraps, an outcast, waiting for glimpses of them and their love, than run away to nothing.

Beneath the white mulberry trees, I waited for the fire to take hold and looked one last time at the garden Elias and I had planted together. The pole beans were his and the tomatoes mine. The eggplant hung heavy on the small bushes and the okra had grown taller than me. All of it gone to waste.

All of that sad life was gone, and I had been the one to do it, not Michael or Ivie or any of those who wanted to hurt me, the ones who had tormented Mr. Washington.

Maybe Marina could forgive me and I would see Eliza Anne again, whether it was tomorrow or next week or in a year or in ten years. One day, I would give her my bread that I made in her great-grandmother’s oven,

the expression in Mama’s eyes was complicated. Perhaps, that day when she called me to help her water the fig tree, she sensed a future sadness, as every mother does—but despite the worry, she held me with love and hope and smiled for my father taking the photograph. I recognized the same feeling in myself, for my daughter and son, my brother and Lila, for Sophie, and now Eliza Anne. Looking at my mother’s face, I saw the love I had always wanted. I had always had it, but I had been too distracted by sorrow to see it.

I’d give Marina the picture at my father’s funeral, and she would see the hope in my childhood face and recognize herself in my mother’s image. She might see Mama’s worry and her hope and her joy, and I would say, “What you feel for Eliza, I felt for you, but I had trouble showing it.” I would tell her that I had wanted to be good and loving like Mama, and if she gave me a chance, I would prove myself to her. If she turned away, I would keep trying. I’d bake bread in my mother’s oven and carry the loaves to her. If she would not see me, I’d leave them on her porch and wait for something in return. One day, I would put these bracelets on Marina’s arm and hope for an embrace that captured the feeling I had holding her child while she slept. That was the moment when love was clear to me, when I had a glimpse of truth, that pain and suffering were the right costs to have paid for my children. That was the moment when redemption was present, and I would wait for that to come again.