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Mama chose our names because she’d always wanted to travel to Savannah, Georgia. She said it was a storybook city with real character. We were meant to grow together as a pair, one never to be without the other. But our story had played a mean trick on us, and here I remained—a lone city without a state. Now that Mama had left us, too, it felt like I’d lost a country. It might as well have been the whole world.
It scared her a little to know she was capable of loving a person so much, that all that love had been waiting there her whole life, like a dormant seed just aching to get out and grow up into something bigger than the cypress trees in the bayou and the pines that shot up all around her yard. She would never be able to put it all back inside her if anything happened to this child, this perfect little creature who had stolen her breath and her heart along with all her good sense. She would never be the same. She had a daughter now.
“Look back for too long and you’ll end up with a mess of broken dreams and a crick in your neck.”
No point in trying to shovel water out of a sinking boat with a slotted spoon,”
She hadn’t known that a person could die inside while the rest of her body kept right on living.
Men were always there for the fun parts, she thought. Women were always left to pick up the pieces.
In a world that was determined to forget, someone had to do the remembering.
Then again, maybe it was because they’d spent all those months inside her own body, nestled against her heart, that they knew exactly how to break it.
Maybe she was like the swamp canaries that flittered about in our bayous, traveling the world for a season but always returning to build their nests in the hollows of the trees.
We could never keep every bad thing from happening. All we could do was cherish the good when we had it for however long it was ours.
