You Look Different

They did not, in the end, get to the truest truth that first day. Camille started an answer, got two sentences into it, and Marquis came back in wanting a plate, and by the time the plate was made and eaten and the afternoon had shifted into early evening, both women found themselves, without quite deciding to, walking instead of talking, down Tennessee Street, past lots still empty after all these years and lots with new houses on them, raised up on pilings the old ones never had, past a corner store that had reopened under a different name with the same bell over the door. And the walking turned out to do something the sitting-across-a-table hadn't: it let them talk sideways instead of head-on, which was, it turned out, exactly the register both of them needed to ease back into being sisters at all.

"You remember Pete-Pete?" Odessa said, apropos of a boy she'd just glimpsed, grown now, loading a truck three houses down.

"Pete-Pete from the boat races?"

"That's him. Got four kids now, drives a FedEx truck, still owes me eleven dollars from a bet in the third grade he's never once mentioned paying." "You're not still counting that."

"I absolutely am still counting that." Odessa said it with a straight face that lasted exactly two seconds before it broke, and Camille laughed, really laughed, the specific unguarded laugh Odessa remembered from a card table twenty-two years back, the one Odessa had once told her she was allowed to have. And something in the sound of it, arriving so easily after so many careful years, made both of them stop walking for a second, struck by the same recognition at once: that whatever else this reunion was going to cost them, this part, at least, still worked exactly the way it always had.

"You look different," Camille said, once they'd started walking again. "Older. I don't mean that bad. I mean, I had you frozen at nineteen this whole time, I think. In my head. It's strange seeing you all the way grown."

"You too. You got Mama Whitfield's mouth now, when you're thinking something you're not saying."

"I do not."

"You do. Same exact mouth. Little pull at the corner." Odessa demonstrated, unkindly, well. "She used to do that at me over cake."

They walked another block before Camille said, carefully, testing the ground, "Do you remember the summer I visited and we raced the boats with Pete-Pete? I've thought about that day a lot, over the years."

"Which time. We raced boats every summer you came."

"The rainy one. The good one. Where Daddy left for two hours in the middle of it and came back smelling like somebody's cigarette."

Odessa stopped walking. "He didn't leave for two hours. He went and got more racing forms, he was gone ten minutes, tops. We raced Pete-Pete's boat and mine almost won and Mama called us in for red beans."

"Dess, he was gone over two hours. I sat on that step with a book I didn't read a single page of, watching for him the whole time."

They stood on the sidewalk looking at each other, both of them absolutely certain, both of them having carried, without ever comparing notes, two entirely different afternoons for over twenty years, and something about the sheer, specific impossibility of it, the same rain, the same porch, the same father, the same four inches of gutter water, made Odessa start laughing first, a short disbelieving bark of a laugh, and then Camille caught it too, both of them standing on a rebuilt sidewalk laughing at something that was not, underneath the laughing, actually funny at all.

"I had the best day of my whole summer that day," Camille said, once she could talk again. "And I was miserable for two hours of it and never told a single person."

"I didn't even clock him leaving. I was having too good a time with Pete-Pete and Marquita to notice he was gone." Odessa shook her head slowly. "We were sitting right next to each other and we had two completely different daddies that whole afternoon."

"I think we had two completely different daddies our whole lives."

"Yeah." Odessa said this quietly, no longer laughing. "I'm starting to understand that."

They kept walking, past the school Odessa had once walked to with one bag on a Sunday in 2005, past the spot where the storm drain still sat at the low corner of the block, the same grate, replaced twice since the flood but sitting in the exact same low point of the street where water had always, since before either of them was born, found its way to first.

"Camille." Odessa said it carefully, the levity of the last twenty minutes draining back out of her voice. "I need you to actually tell me the true thing. Not the six bad answers. Why now. Why did it take Mama Ruth dying." Camille was quiet for a long moment, watching the grate at the corner, the water long gone from that street but the shape of where it had gone still legible in every raised foundation and every empty lot around them.

"Because I've been scared for nineteen years that if I called you, you'd tell me the truth about how much I hurt you that night in the parking lot," she said, finally. "And some part of me decided it was safer to just carry the guilt of not calling than to actually find out how bad the thing I said really was. And I think I've been telling myself a version where it wasn't that bad, where you probably don't even remember it the way I do, and I think Mama Ruth dying is just the first thing that's scared me more than that phone call has, this whole time."

Odessa looked at her sister for a long moment on that street corner, the evening going gold the way it did in June, and she thought about the fifteen-year-old girl she'd been that night, and the seventeen-year-old girl Camille had been, and the sheer distance both of them had traveled, in their very separate directions, to arrive at this specific unremarkable corner together.

"I remember it," she said. "I remember every word of it. We're gonna have to actually talk about it, Camille, not walk around it. Not tonight, maybe. But soon."

"Okay." Camille nodded, something in her easing slightly at finally hearing the thing named out loud instead of managed around. "Soon."

They turned back toward the house as the streetlights came on, and for the length of that walk back, neither of them said anything else at all, and the silence, for the first time in nineteen years, did not feel like distance. It felt, instead, like two people standing at the edge of the same cold water, working up the nerve to actually go in.