The Truth Has Teeth

Desmond Baptiste died in a bar bathroom in Baton Rouge on a Tuesday night in January, alone, his heart finally making good on the warning he'd never once taken seriously enough to keep a cardiologist appointment for, and it took the bar owner, who knew him only as a regular who played trumpet on request and always tipped better than he could afford, most of a day to work out who to call.

The funeral was at Mama Ruth's church in Algiers, the same one he'd been dragged to as a boy, the fig tree in her side yard bare that January the way it was bare every January, and it was the first time in fourteen years that Odessa and Camille stood in the same room.

Neither of them had planned what to say. Both of them had, in the days leading up to it, rehearsed several versions in the shower, in the car, lying awake, and all of it evaporated the moment they actually saw each other, across a funeral home parlor smelling of lilies and floor polish, both of them twenty-nine and thirty years old now, both of them recognizable and entirely changed, the way people who knew each other as children always are to each other as adults, a face laid over a face laid over a face.

"Hey," Camille said, first, crossing the room.

"Hey." Odessa's voice came out more careful than she meant it to. "Been a long time."

"Yeah." Camille looked at her, really looked, the way you look at someone you've spent years picturing from an old photograph and are now recalibrating against an actual, present, unfamiliar-familiar face. "You look good, Dess."

"You too." This was, in both directions, true, and also entirely insufficient, two sentences trying to do the work of fourteen years and visibly failing at it. They stood together at the back of the parlor for most of the service, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, neither of them quite finding the next sentence, both of them watching Mama Ruth, eighty-nine that year, moving slower than either of them remembered, leaning hard on a cane at the front pew, receive condolence after condolence with a dignity that neither girl, watching her, felt entirely capable of matching in themselves.

"I should've called you," Camille said, finally, low, near the end, while the choir was doing the last hymn. "Years ago. I thought about it so many times."

"Me too." Odessa did not elaborate, and Camille did not push, both of them understanding, without saying so, that a funeral parlor was not the room this particular conversation was going to happen in, that whatever needed saying between them had been building for fourteen years and was not going to fit itself into the twenty minutes available between the eulogy and the repast. "I'm at my mama's number still, if you ever—"

"I know your mama's number," Odessa said, which was true, and which was also, in its way, an admission: that she'd had it this whole time, could have called at any point in fourteen years, and hadn't, for reasons as tangled and half-examined as whatever had kept Camille from calling hers.

They did not, that day, make a plan to see each other again. They hugged at the end, careful, brief, both of them aware of how much was still unspoken and how little either of them had it in her, that particular afternoon, grieving the same complicated man, to actually say it, and they went back to their separate cities that same evening, Camille to New Orleans proper, forty-five minutes and a whole world away, Odessa to Tennessee Street, both of them carrying the exact same unfinished conversation back into two entirely different lives, where it would sit, mostly undisturbed, for another five years.

Mama Ruth watched them leave from her chair by the door, and said nothing to either of them that day, but she filed the whole brief, careful, unfinished reunion the way she filed everything under her roof, and she thought about it, off and on, for the following five years, with the specific slow patience of a very old woman who has decided a thing needs doing and is simply waiting for her own body to run its clock down far enough to force the issue.

She got the diagnosis in the spring Odessa turned thirty-three and Camille thirty-four, nothing sudden, nothing anyone was calling an emergency yet, but a decline the doctors described in the careful, rounded language doctors use when they mean months, not years, and Mama Ruth received this news with the same flat, unsurprised dignity she'd brought to every hard thing in her ninety-four years, and made, within a week of hearing it, exactly one demand of her family that surprised every single person she made it to.

"Call Camille," she told her daughter-in-law, one afternoon that June, apropos of nothing, the fig tree outside her window heavy with fruit for what everyone privately understood might be the last summer she'd see it bear any. "Tell her I want to see her. Tell her to bring herself down here before I'm too far gone to know the difference, and tell her—" she paused here, gathering something she'd clearly been gathering for a while, "—tell her her sister's not doing as good as she lets on, and neither is she, probably, and that an old woman doesn't have the years left to wait on two grown women to work out on their own what she's known needed working out since before either one of them could walk." The message got relayed, imperfectly, the way messages relayed through three people always are, but the essential shape of it reached Camille within the week: Mama Ruth's failing. She wants to see you. Come soon.

Camille sat with her phone in her hand for a long time after that call, in her kitchen, in the good light, and thought about a letter she'd written in 2007 and never sent, still, as far as she knew, sitting in a drawer in her old bedroom at her mother's house, and thought about fourteen, no, nineteen, years of next year, once I know what to say, and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once and did not recede this time, that there was not going to be a version of knowing what to say that arrived before she simply had to go and find out.

She did not, yet, have Odessa's address, after all these years living forty-five minutes from wherever her sister actually was. But she had her mother's number, and she had, at last, run out of reasons not to use it.