PART 4: FINDING EACH OTHER - The Reunion

Odessa opened her own front door on a Saturday in June to find her sister standing on the porch in a linen dress that had clearly been chosen, and then reconsidered, and then worn anyway, holding a bakery box like it was a passport she wasn't sure would be accepted at the border.

"Hey," Camille said.

"Hey." Odessa did not step back to let her in, not right away, both of them standing in the doorway for a second that stretched longer than either of them meant it to, taking each other in the way you take in a photograph you've seen so many times in memory that the real thing requires a moment of recalibration. Camille had gotten thinner in the face since the funeral, five years back, a little grey coming in early at her temples that she hadn't bothered to color, and there was something in her posture, still careful, still upright, but tired underneath the carefulness in a way Odessa clocked immediately, the specific tired of a woman holding something heavy and pretending her arms weren't shaking.

Odessa, for her part, looked to Camille like a woman who had built something with her own hands and knew it, solid in a way that had nothing to do with size, a directness in her eyes that had sharpened rather than softened with the years, a kitchen apron still tied at her waist from whatever she'd been cooking when the knock came.

"Mama Ruth said to bring myself down here," Camille said. "I would've called first, I just didn't have your number, and I didn't want to lose my nerve waiting on your mama to text it to me." "How is she."

"Not good. Not — she's not scared, she says. She's just tired." Camille looked down at the bakery box, as if only just remembering she was holding it. "I brought king cake. It's June, I know, I couldn't think what else to bring that wasn't weird."

Something in Odessa's face moved, almost a smile, not quite arrived at yet. "King cake in June is weird, Camille."

"I know. I panicked at the bakery."

"Come in before the flies do." Odessa stepped back, finally, and Camille crossed the threshold into a house she had never once, in thirty-four years, actually stood inside of. The old one, the one before the storm, she'd visited exactly twice as a child; this one, rebuilt from a foundation neither of them had chosen so much as inherited, she had never seen at all. She stood in the front room for a moment taking it in: the porch swing visible through the front window, a child's drawings taped to the refrigerator visible from where she stood, a smell of something with onions and thyme in it still working on the stove, a house that felt, immediately and unmistakably, lived in.

"This is nice, Dess."

"It's small."

"It's nice." Camille meant it, and something in how plainly she meant it, no comparison implied, no nice for what it is, just nice, flatly, the way you'd say it about any house you liked being in, landed somewhere in Odessa that eased, fractionally, fourteen-going-on-nineteen years of a specific defended posture she hadn't fully realized she was still holding.

They sat at the kitchen table, the good light coming through the back window the way good light always seemed to find its way into this family's kitchens no matter which side of the river they belonged to, and there was a long stretch of careful, surface conversation: Mama Ruth's decline, the logistics of hospice, a cousin's new baby, safe subjects, subjects that let both of them stay in the room together without yet having to open the door on fourteen years, before Marquis came thundering in from the back yard, twelve years old, sweaty, delighted to find a stranger at the table.

"Who's this?"

"This is your Aunt Camille," Odessa said, and the word aunt sat in the room for a second, unfamiliar in her own mouth, true in a way she hadn't let herself say out loud in years.

"I didn't know I had an aunt."

"You do. She's just been hard to find." Odessa said this lightly, a joke with a blade folded inside it, and Camille felt the blade and did not flinch from it, which Odessa noted, and filed, as a point in her sister's favor.

"Nice to meet you, Marquis," Camille said, and meant it with a warmth that surprised her, a whole unmet person, her own blood, twelve years into existing without her ever once knowing his middle name, and something in her chest did something complicated and large that she did not have a ready word for. Marquis, having assessed the stranger and found her acceptable, asked if there was more king cake for later, was told yes, and thundered back out to the yard, leaving the two women alone again with the actual weight of the afternoon settling back over the table.

"He's got Daddy's laugh," Camille said, quietly.

"I know it." Odessa turned her coffee cup a half turn on the table, not drinking from it. "You want to tell me why it took Mama Ruth dying for you to find your way to my door, or you want me to guess?"

It was not asked cruelly. It was asked the way Odessa asked most true things: flat, direct, already halfway prepared to hear an answer she wasn't going to love. And Camille, looking at her sister across a kitchen table in a house neither of their childhoods had prepared either of them to picture, understood that the easy part of this reunion, the bakery box and the safe subjects, had just come to its natural end, and that whatever came next was going to cost both of them considerably more than a king cake bought in the wrong season. "I don't have a good answer," Camille said. "I have about six bad ones. You want to hear all six, or you want me to just start with the truest one?" "Start with the truest one." Odessa finally drank from the cup. "We got time. Mama Ruth's not going nowhere today, and Marquis won't be hungry again for a couple hours."

Camille took a breath, the specific kind of breath a person takes before stepping into water she can't see the bottom of and began.