Home Tears

  “Okay.”

  Dani glanced around. The humming lady had been sitting in the corner when she got off the elevator, but once Phyliss left, she stood and shuffled her way over. Dani held still, stiff, as she poked her arm. She shook her head, hummed, and poked Dani again.

  Dani didn’t say a word.

  After a third poke, the lady turned and shuffled back to her sitting spot. She shook her head and went back to humming.

  “What’s your name?” Dani asked.

  The humming stopped, and she gazed over. “Henrietta.”

  “What are you humming?”

  “I’m not humming,” Henrietta clarified. “I sing in my head.”

  “Why don’t you sing out loud?”

  “Because they wouldn’t understand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The voices. The angels. They wouldn’t understand.”

  “What wouldn’t they understand?”

  “The angels are dead, but I’m singing about live folk. I can only sing in my head so that the angels don’t get mad.”

  Henrietta glanced down the hallway and went back to humming. The volume rose a notch as Phyliss rounded the corner.

  “She said you could come in for five minutes, but that’s all she has in her.” Phyliss nodded, and they both turned down the hallway. Outside of Sandra’s door, Phyliss knocked once and poked her head in. “We’re coming in, Sandra.”

  Dani heard a creak and a rustling of bedsheets before she stepped around Phyliss and saw her grandmother. The white hair hung limply off her scalp, and the bedsheets seemed to overcome her grandmother’s pale form. She had a hospital nightgown on, and her eyes were numb.

  Dani swallowed.

  Phyliss had been watching her, gauging her reaction, so Dani smiled. “Thank you.”

  Phyliss nodded and left the room quietly. She gently pulled the door shut behind her.

  “You can sit.”

  The order came out in a monotone voice. Her personality seemed washed out of her grandmother. Dani missed her already.

  She sat, and the chair’s plastic creaked slightly underneath her. The back unyielded, and Dani’s skin molded around the seat’s back. She folded her arms, unfolded them, and finally just laid them on her lap as she tucked her legs underneath.

  Sandra chuckled. “They’re damn uncomfortable, ain’t they?”

  Dani smiled abruptly. There was the Sandra she remembered from her last visit.

  “Something like that.”

  “You come for your second visit today. I suppose you want what I promised you.”

  “If you’re up for it.”

  “What do you care?” Her question came out like a bark.

  “I care.” And Dani realized that she did care. Very much.

  “I don’t even care. How am I supposed to believe that you care?”

  “I’ve learned recently that there are people out there who do care. And I think I’m a little like you, but I’ve learned not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  Her grandmother studied her intently for a moment before she sighed and lay back down on her bed.

  “Have you always been like this?”

  No answer.

  “Is this why my aunts don’t talk to you?”

  There wasn’t an answer. Dani waited, suddenly filled with an uncanny calmness. Strength filled her. She didn’t know where it came from, but it was there. She felt similar strength as she held one of the children in her arms. It came from nowhere, at a time when she should’ve broken. She learned that day she could feel strength and weakness at the same time. She could feel surety and terror at the same time, too.

  She waited, like she had during the storm.

  Finally, Sandra O’Hara broke the silence. “My daughters don’t talk to me because they don’t know I’m here. I only told one person I was here.”

  Dani bit back the inevitable question.

  Sandra answered it anyway, “Their father. No one else knew I was here. With him gone, I’m in the system. The government pays my bills.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.” Dani shook her head. “How’d my mother know you were here?”

  “Because she was told by someone else. I got a guess who that was, but it ain’t for you to know.”

  Dani leaned forward. “I think it is my business. I don’t think it’s right to have secrets in families.”

  Her grandmother snorted, sounding so much like Mae that Dani felt a pang in her chest. “Yeah, well, we got so many generational secrets, I don’t feel it pertains to us. We don’t pretend to be a family anymore. We got broke long ago.”

  “Who’s my grandfather?” Dani had asked a different question on her last visit. She had asked for her father, but now she wanted to know who lay at the start of the roots. She wanted to understand how the branches had grown as they did.

  “Your grandfather ain’t around anymore. He’s long gone.”

  “Did you love him?”

  Sandra’s movements stilled in the bed. As quiet as she grew, Dani would’ve easily believed death just took her grandmother’s breath. And so her answer was even more eerie when she replied, “That was the problem. I did love him.”

  Dani frowned.

  Her grandmother mused further, “The two of us together broke a lot of folks. We weren’t supposed to love each other, but we did. I loved him and he loved me, and it wasn’t right. We were supposed to stop, but we never did. I got pregnant three times from him. That’s another secret.” Sandra laughed a bitter laugh. “Everyone thinks my babies were born of different daddies, but they weren’t. Whole-blooded sisters, they were. Same thing with your mother. She had the same sickness as me. All of you had the same daddy. I’ll tell you that bit.”

  “You’re not going to tell me who my father is, are you?”

  Her grandmother didn’t respond, and Dani knew she wouldn’t.

  She saw the emptiness in her grandmother’s eyes. She knew some of it was inside her, too. “What happened to you?” Dani asked, but she didn’t expect a response. Hell, Dani wasn’t sure to whom the question was directed. Herself or her grandmother. “What happened to us? All of us? What happened to my mother?”

  “We fall in love with the wrong men.”

  “What if we don’t fall in love?”

  “Then we don’t live.”

  “Are you alive?” The question was an afterthought.

  The answer was whispered in return. “No.” Sandra continued, speaking to the air, “Sometimes I don’t know where I am. Sometimes I don’t know what time it is. I don’t know what’s real or what’s from my head. When I met him, he made me feel alive. I got an anchor to the world, like I belonged somewhere when he held me, even though we both knew it wasn’t right. I could’ve stopped it, but he could’ve too. Neither of us stopped because I needed that feeling. It’s why I’m in here. He left me and my sadness came back. I stopped living the day he went away.”

  Dani heard a hallowed wistfulness in her grandmother’s voice. She didn’t dare move. She didn’t dare interrupt whatever else she was going to hear.

  “You don’t got the same sickness as me, Daniella.” Dani knew her grandmother wasn’t whispering to her. “You ain’t sick in the head. You just sick in the heart. But you got a wall inside of you. I made sure to install that. I made damn sure. You need a wall or people gonna take you for a ride. They tried with me. Hell, most think your daddy did take me for a ride, but I went with him. I’d go again if the chance arose.”

  Dani bit her lip and held still. Her grandmother forgot who sat in her visitor’s chair. She thought she was Dani’s mother. It was the same voice that Mrs. Bendsfield had used as she spoke to a ghost.

  Her grandmother whispered, “I’d love to go again.”

  Dani’s fingers bit into the plastic seating of her chair.

  “You raised those girls right. I hear how you talk about them. Julia sounds real proper, like she’s going to be a queen or something. Erica—she’ll be the sweeth
eart. You believe me, right now. Erica’s gonna wrap everyone in that hand of hers. She’s gonna make hearts thump.”

  Her grandmother fell silent for a moment.

  “And Dani.” She sighed, stricken. “She’s the one who’s gonna walk her own path. Julia’ll wear the crown, but Erica’s going to rule the lands. Dani’s just going to walk right through them. She’s got it inside of her to make it. I know it.”

  Sandra laughed.

  She was laughing with a ghost.

  “You gotta make Mae clean up her act. And you can do that. I know you can. You might not think it, but you just get her at the heart. You promise her one of your girls, and she’ll turn about. Mae can’t have kids, and that’s where most of her partying comes from. She’s mourning all those unborn babies of hers, but you promise her one of yours. She has to earn it, though. She’s gotta walk the straight and narrow.”

  Dani jerked in the chair.

  “You promise her one of yours…”

  Dani tasted salt at the corner of her mouth. She’d started to cry. It couldn’t be… She shook her head. That couldn’t mean what she was starting to think it meant.

  “You give Julia to Kathryn. Kathryn can speak Julia’s language. They the same, but Dani—she’s different. You give her to Mae. Mae will teach her how to stand. I guarantee that. Mae will raise her right. Erica, you best give her to Kathryn, too. Erica’s a mix of both her aunts. She’s like you, Daniella. She got your spirit. I know. A mother knows. A grandmother knows even more. You do what I say.”

  Dani pressed a hand to her mouth. She was shaking. Her hand was trembling.

  “No, no.” Sandra O’Hara soothed her daughter. “You be fine. That sickness will work its way through you, and you’ll find peace at the end. You loved him true. I know you did. And, even though he’s not around, I know Emmy. He’ll be back. He’ll check in on your girls, but he’ll know that they ain’t his girls. Your girls will be fine, Daniella.”

  Dani took another breath. Then another.

  “Okay,” Sandra whispered in a short breath. She sounded drowsy. “You best be going. I’m getting right tired now. I gotta get my strength for tomorrow. You call and tell me how your doctor appointments go. I want to know.”

  She reached over the bed, grinned distantly at a ghost, and grabbed Dani’s hand. “I’ll see you when I pass away, too.”

  She drove to one place.

  She parked.

  She walked in.

  She ignored everyone sitting there.

  The one person she came to see straightened. “What’s wrong?”

  She asked Mae, “Did you adopt me?”

  Dani saw the answer before Mae responded. It hit her smack in the chest, and it was like a bomb that imploded. It was true. Everything her grandmother said was true. Dani never knew. Lies. Had everything been lies? Had everyone been lying to her?

  “I can’t.” She turned away. Her heart was splitting open.

  “Dani!” Mae rounded the counter and approached her, slowing at the end as if she were an injured animal. “Maybe we should talk about this somewhere quiet.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Dani removed her arm from her aunt’s touch. “I already know.”

  “There’s a lot that went on that you don’t understand.”

  “No, there’s not. There’s the simple fact that you kept something from me. You lied to me.”

  “It’s not that simple. It wasn’t about lying or holding back the truth or…”

  “Yes, it was. I was a child who wasn’t loved by her caretaker. And the person who did love me, who could’ve taken me in, chose not to. That’s how simple it was.”

  “Dani—there’s—there were stipulations. There were things that your mother wanted done before I could even think of making your adoption legal.”

  “But you did. Somewhere down the line, you and Aunt Kathryn signed me over, and both of you never told me.” Dani felt it in her gut. It made sense why one aunt wanted her, and the other hated her. “That was wrong.”

  “Dani.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Dani started to move away, but Mae caught her elbow and kept her in place. “You will not run from me, not from this. There are a lot of things that you aren’t aware of. Before you pass your judgment on me and run, you best be hearing all the facts before you judge me.”

  Dani stared at her. The two stared at the other. Neither looked away, but it was too much for her. Dani pulled away again. “This isn’t a trial. This was a lie you kept from me.”

  “You don’t run.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.” But that wasn’t true. It’d been there in the back of her mind, but it wasn’t strong. There were more reasons to stay than run.

  Pain flashed in Mae’s eyes. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”

  “Everything.”

  “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Dani saw who else was in the Grill then. Jake. Kate. Aiden. She ignored all of them, and walked away. Just outside, she stopped short because Boone and another man were studying her Mustang.

  She said, “It’s mine.”

  She guessed this was Boone’s brother. They looked similar. Both were tall and lean with the elder Quandry outweighing the Boone by twenty pounds. Those pounds had been lost in mourning, and Dani stood there, plain as day, as the catalyst for that weight loss. An emotion flickered in Boone before he masked it and straightened stiffly. He slid his hands into his custom-made suit pants. His brother arched an eyebrow, raking Dani up and down.

  He held out his hand. “Drew Quandry.” He gestured to her car. “You got a nice vehicle. A classic.”

  “I’m aware.” She was tense, ready for another fight, for another onslaught of emotion that never seemed to stay away for very long.

  “Drew,” Boone spoke up.

  Dani tensed again at his wary voice.

  Drew turned and frowned in surprise at his little brother. “What?”

  Boone sighed. “This is Dani.”

  Drew jerked back to her, new comprehension in his eyes.

  “This is my ex-fiancé.”

  “Oh.” Drew reared back. He raked his brother with worried eyes, then turned to Dani. Sudden suspicion, and anger sparked there.

  “I haven’t told anyone else.” Boone spoke to his brother, but he watched Dani. “I don’t know what you’ve said…” He trailed off, letting her answer.

  She did. “Two people.”

  Drew Quandry was silent. He watched the two exes a moment before saying, “You broke my little brother’s heart.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sleeping with our enemy.”

  A lump formed in her throat. She heard his condescension. “I don’t know how that’s any of your business.” Dani made sure she was looking right at Drew when she spoke. It was Boone’s business, but not his brother’s. “And with all due respect, your brother’s relationship is with me and him. Not you. And you don’t know a thing about me except that I left your brother.”

  “You walked out on him when he was celebrating your engagement.” Drew narrowed his eyes. “I know that, too. And I know that you’re the reason my brother’s half the man he used to be.”