Page 77 of Harvest of Sighs (Thornchapel 3)
Instead, she feels bitter.
Why does he get to be in love? After all these years of treating love like an invasive species. A tulip tree with branches covered in beautiful lies?
Her phone buzzes in the pocket of her black jumpsuit, and she pulls it out and sighs at the screen.
“Your mother again?” Saint asks. Her mother has been calling since last night.
Rebecca lets it go to voicemail, as she has been for the last twelve hours, and nods. Then grabs Saint’s beer from him and takes a drink. “They’re still married, you know,” Rebecca says and passes the beer back. “They’ve lived apart since I was eight, and yet . . . I don’t know.”
Saint isn’t like Poe—he doesn’t push for answers, not really. He just dips his chin in acknowledgement. And for some reason, it makes Rebecca open up more.
“It’s not common back home. Divorce. It can happen, it can be done, and if Daddy ever hit Ma, Ma’s family would be the first to help her pack up her things—but divorce for the reason of not loving each other anymore? For not being compatible? Even for infidelity on the husband’s part? It’s rare. There’d be fallout. She’d have to deal with the whispers, and the faces—”
“The faces?” Saint asks.
“The faces,” Rebecca emphasizes. “The faces they’ll make when she goes to visit his family, and she will have to keep visiting his family. The faces her own family might make—the aunties especially, they will have all the faces whenever she walks into a room. And it will be like that for years.”
“Why doesn’t she just move, then? Move away? To London, to be near you?” Saint asks.
“She could,” Rebecca says. Rebecca actually would, in her mother’s shoes, because nothing is worth sacrificing emotional independence for, not even family. “But she’d be leaving behind her entire family. All her friends. Her church. Everything that gives her meaning, except for me, is in Accra. And my father doesn’t just take care of her—he takes care of her mother and her mother’s sisters and one of my aunties—they all depend on him, and always will. If they got a divorce, life would look a lot harder for more people than just her.”
Saint nods again.
“So they’re still married. And I thought—well, my dad has never made a fool of her, you see, even when it would have been easy to, with him in London and her at home. So I thought that was the status quo. I thought the Quartey family would always look the way it did when I was growing up, with the three of us politely pretending everything was okay.”
“And now your father isn’t pretending anymore,” Saint says.
Her throat goes tight—a sudden, abrupt cinch that feels dangerously like she might start crying if she says something. And so she doesn’t say anything.
“Come on,” Saint says, standing up and offering his hand. “Let’s beat the rush and go back to the Markhams’ house now. They’ve got better booze there, at least.”
She looks up and sees Emily Genovese toying with one of Delphine’s big, blond curls. Delphine is letting her. And then her phone rings again.
She silences it with an irate squeeze. She takes Saint’s hand. “Let’s go.”
If Rebecca sat down and imagined a professor’s house, it would look like David Markham’s. The rooms are lined with built-in shelves, so overcrowded with books that they sag, and—with no regard for safety—even the old, green-tiled fireplace is surrounded by books. Stacks on the mantel, stacks around the hearth.
The dusty remnants of Adelina’s life as an archaeologist are scattered at intervals throughout—pottery sherds, arrowheads, coins—the kind of stuff one can keep because it’s too unremarkable for proper study. And on the coffee table and kitchen counter and kitchen table—stacks of papers to grade, like David had taken a clump of papers to work through and then abandoned them halfway through the project.
There’re windows edged with geometric stained glass, a set of wide, creaky stairs, and antique light fixtures that predate the world wars. And of course, there’re the dogs. Three big ones haunting the kitchen like fuzzy, overheated ghosts, sleeping on their sides and panting on the kitchen tile, even with the air conditioner roaring full blast. They follow one breathlessly for caresses and pats, they insist on sharing the sofas with humans, they shed everywhere. An automatic vacuum occasionally ventures out to suck up the fur, but there’s too much and the floors are too crowded with stacks of books and reams of photocopies for anything to be cleaned with any degree of efficiency.
Almost nothing about the place appeals to Rebecca, except the back garden—yard, as Saint corrects her, stretching out the ARRRR like a pirate—which is filled with soft summer grass and two big oaks, old and shady and perfect for climbing. It’s the kind of outdoor space she’s seen in movies or on telly, perfect for an all-American barbecue, ready and waiting for the quintessential all-American family. It was the kind of back garden she used to dream of as a girl. Like if only they had a place like that, they would be the perfect family there. They would smile at each other and grill burgers and sleep in the same house after they ate.
She would have traded their expensive city lofts in the U.K. and Ghana both for those two trees and that hail-battered barbecue grill.
Since Saint and Rebecca arrived at the house, more people have followed, and now she’s sitting alone on the back deck, watching the warm wind blow through the leaves while guests talk and eat around her. The mood has eased a bit since the church—there’s more talking and drinking now, at least—but Rebecca’s mood hasn’t eased in the least. She’s very aware of her father sitting next to David, their heads bent together.
Rebecca is also very aware of Emily Genovese flirting with Rebecca’s own submissive in front of her own eyes, fetching her drinks and hovering near her elbow while they talk to Poe and Auden and Saint. She’s not sure what to do about this, because her impulse is to haul Delphine off and do something depraved, but she feels vaguely certain it’s not good funeral etiquette to do such a thing.
“Rebecca,” her father says. He’s come up to her without her noticing.
Rebecca has a thousand things she’d like to say to him. She’s aware that nine hundred and ninety nine of them are unfair, and so she takes a drink instead of speaking at all.
He sighs, sitting on the patio chair next to her, and says in Ga, “You are angry with me.”
“I’m not. You have every right to come to your friend’s funeral.”
“That’s right, I do,” he says, a touch coolly. “But we both know that’s not what you’re angry about.”
