Page 12 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Will you do it?”

“Kiss me.” She wants to. I can see it. “Come to Los Angeles.”

“I’m never doing that. Odette. Please. He’s so young. He’s so scared.”

“You’re giving me away?”

“I would keep you if I could, but that’s not how things work and you know it. And you’ll livehere. You’ll be out of your mother’s house. We’ll see each other every day until you need to go. He knows about California. He said he’ll follow you when he gets back from overseas.” She puts her hand on my face. Stops there.

“I’m not his yet,” I tell her.

“Yet?” Her mouth to my mouth. I expect the kiss to feel different knowing that she loves me, but it feels the same. She’s felt this way all along.

When she pulls away, it’s with finality. She widens the distance between us. “Can I send him tomorrow? That’s all I’m asking. Spend some time with him. Let him show you how special he is.”

I’m cold, the floor hard underfoot, the shadows long across the room.

“Okay,” I say. I don’t know why I’m saying it. I thought our kiss might change her mind.

“We should go back up now.” I follow, watching her ahead of me on the stairs. In the living room, someone’s singing at the piano. Someone’s handing me another Sazerac. I drink it down, find my sisters, tell them I’m not feeling well. A crushing headache, maybe too much to drink, and no I don’t need anyone to walk with me, but I do really need to go. Purse from the hall tree, waving my goodbyes, and I’m on the street now. Alone among the dark houses and the bright ones.

Delphine, where are you?

Cyril and I spend three days getting to know each other. I’m leaden with heartbreak. We’re at the pictures and all I hear is Hattie saying, “I love you.” We watch the boats and all I see is Hattie stepping away. But when he takes me to the live oaks and we’re strolling together, just looking, I discover that his mouth turns down at the corners when he’s contemplative, the same as Hattie’s. He holds my hand in a club and his handsare like hers, too. Beautiful hands, for a boy. When he drops to his knee, Hattie’s in my ear—“there’s no future in us”—and the wanting in his eyes matches the wanting in hers on so many Thursday afternoons.

He’s on his knee. He’s waiting.

Seven days until he leaves for Shreveport. And I’ll live in his parents’ house, with Hattie, until it’s time to go, and once we’re in Los Angeles, Hattie and I will be tied together by a marriage even if it isn’t ours. When Cyril and I visit home, it’s Hattie we’ll be going back to. And when Hattie visits California, she’ll sleep in a room next to mine. We’ll stay close, we’ll stay tethered. Maybe once every few years we’ll give in to each other. End up alone in a house, unable to resist. Not right, but not entirely wrong, either, to give Cyril everything he wants from me, and in exchange take only a little, every now and then, of what I want for myself.

I say yes.

Just hours later, Hattie comes to fit me for a dress. My sisters and Maman watch as she wraps the sewing tape around my waist, my breasts, unaware of how many times she’s touched me. They talk about silk and lace, necklines and veils, ask my opinions.

“Whatever Hattie thinks,” I manage to say, and I wait and I wait and I wait for her to change her mind.

She leaves down the front steps with her sewing bag. I imagine her rushing back to me. At night I listen for pebbles or taps against the living room window. Nothing comes and the next day I can’t complete my sentences. I burn the rice on the stove. A day later, the dress is finished. I’m married on the next. A Saturday morning at Saint Peter Claver, just like my sisters. Bernard meets me at the back of the church to walk me down the aisle, offers me his arm. “Wish he could be here to see you,” he says. “He’d be proud.” But if Papa were still alive, he would have spared me from all of this.

The ceremony is unbearable, so many eyes on me. Cyril slips his grandmother’s wedding band onto my finger and a cheer rises. I search for Hattie but she’s wearing a hat that obscures her face.

At the luncheon reception, on my way to the powder room, I trip overthe carpet and Felix appears from nowhere, catches me. “You all right, Odette? You look a little pale.”

“Too much attention,” I say. “I’m not used to it.”

“Go on, then. I’ll guard the door in case some of the aunties try to go in.”

Someone’s set a doily on the bathroom counter, a dish of wrapped peppermints atop it. Above hangs a frameless mirror. I lean against the wall, close my eyes.

Hours later, I’m in a borrowed car on the way to our Baton Rouge honeymoon, and every time I look at Cyril it shocks me. My husband. He drives carefully, both hands on the wheel. “Look,” he says, and tips his chin toward something out the window, but I miss it, startled by the straight line of his jaw. There’s an unreality to everything, the blur of road and trees, the mansions and the river bends, like I’m not really myself, like the real me is still down in Hattie’s sewing room, in the moment before she says she loves me.

Wait.

Let’s take a minute here. Let’s think a moment about what we’ve done.

But we keep moving.

Just inside city lines, Cyril turns down a long gravel path, past a simple cottage. There’s a flutter from a window. A little guesthouse waits in the back. Cyril carries our suitcases through the unlocked door. On the kitchenette counter: a vase of baby’s breath and a note that says,Welcome, lovebirds.

“Whose house is this again?” I ask, not sure he ever told me.