Read Online Solemn by Kalisha Buckhanon - Free Book Online Page A

said.
    â€œYou’ve said enough,” the man told him. “Glad to hear everything’s okay with you.” And the two men braced in a silence Bev’s pots and pans broke.
    â€œTake good care.” The man waved at them. Redvine watched the Jeep drive away. Hall Carter pulled up right behind it, with Hinckley water coolers in back of his car.
    *   *   *
    At the weekend, one week after her daddy got sick and mumbled out of leaving home (even to do the right thing, be good), at this type of event Solemn had never attended and would never again, she noticed her mother did not speak at all to the woman from Singer’s, stuck to a front pew with her hair tied up. The women near her looked like witches, dressed in all black with wide hats. Just no brooms and cats roaming the yard.
    â€œCan I go see?”
    Bev thought about it and then nodded yes. For her, as a mother, it was too much.
    In Solemn’s walk up close after the singing and the humming and long talking, the baby’s lips looked as if it had just sucked on blueberries or grape freeze pops. It had no rise or fall under a white gown, just a line of buttons in a stretch of fabric as still as the well’s surface now. Its eyes were two crusted slits in a head. A line of people stood behind Solemn, connected like one—all leaned on someone, touched somebody’s back, held someone’s hand, linked another’s arm. Solemn knew in her own way what this was. And more important, no one could change it back to what it had been.
    A woman with perfume powder spilling out of her dress nudged Solemn forward. The woman had never seen the baby before, but she wanted to keep the line going—maintain the sense of decorum, stave off the breakdowns that would inevitably flow if the show went on for too long. The relatives had driven or bussed in that morning. The fried chicken and pork chop and sweet potato pie smell crept from the basement into the pews. Bev had already said they would not eat there. Just pay respects. Hand fans flicked faster in the attendees’ hands. Solemn looked up to see her mama wave her back.
    Then the baby said, What you say?
    I gotta hurry up … My mama want me. And this lady behind making it hard for me.
    Oh. I don’t even know her. They don’t know me.
    I know you.
    I know you, too.
    And I saw your daddy, too. I saw him.
    You see your own?
    What you say?
    Solemn rubbed velvet inside the strong bed the baby rested in. The impatient lady behind her was so outwardly so, rude even, eager to see what she had never known the child looked like anyway. So Solemn tapped the baby’s claylike hand and moved along.
    I said, meet me at the well, okay?
    *   *   *
    Before, during, and immediately after the baby’s funeral, Pearletta exhausted the attention and strength of her family and friends. They couldn’t get through to her. Nor could they convince her to leave those six-hundred square feet behind, not even after she paid a few empathizing boys to accordion the baby’s side out back into the whole of the trailer—like a second-degree burn healed flat in no time. It was over now. Nothing worked. Not music, church, prayer, money, flowers, baptism offers, covered dishes left at the step, and, most of all, not vacations. Not even to Louisiana, her brother offered her. Oakland, her sister said. Pearletta turned down these offers to come “stay awhile.” Even from her parents—her same childhood bedroom cleaned, cooled, crisped down to lint off the floor. She felt she couldn’t be away from where her child spit and played and breathed and learned to walk. She was unsure how to visualize her baby and herself outside the trailer.
    So she stayed clenched to their old nest like a leech, her ruminations dug in like tentacles. Least she wasn’t the only one being talked about in all of it. There was a God. A courthouse janitor told his nephew