A House Divided Read online

  “Damnit,” Zoie muttered. She walked in and shut the door behind her.

  One would think that, after all this time that she’d been gone, the sisters would have turned her teenage bedroom into an adult guest room. But no. Everything was pretty much like she left it, right down to the outdated VCR and the twelve-inch television set.

  She rolled her suitcase over to the corner, then looked out of the window. Her view was right above her grandmother’s lush garden, which appeared even more spectacular than when she last saw it.

  Zoie opened the window and pushed up the screen. She stuck her head out and inhaled the intoxicating scents of recently turned earth, fresh grass, and rainbow rows of vegetables.

  She rested her arms on the sill. “You did good, Nana.” Her cell chirped in her pocket. She pulled it out, and Miranda’s name lit the screen.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “Hey, yourself. How was the flight?”

  “Fine. I got to the house about twenty minutes ago—feels like days already.”

  “Z . . . Talk to your mom?”

  “Briefly.”

  “Your aunts?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been instructed to hurry and ‘get cleaned up’ because they’re anxious to see me,” she added drolly.

  “Okay. Go. Call me later.”

  “I will. Bye.” She disconnected the call in concert with her name being called. She pulled down the screen but left the window open. Determined not to get sucked into the discourse of discontent, Zoie closed her bedroom door and returned downstairs.

  She reached the bottom landing and was guided to the gathering by the murmur of voices coming from the veranda. She crossed the foyer, passed the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room, which her aunt still called the parlor, and stepped out onto the back veranda. Two of the three women she’d known all her life were not the women she remembered.

  Aunt Hyacinth, the oldest of the sisters, was draped in a shawl that appeared large enough to swallow her whole. The chestnut-brown face, still unlined, seemed small, doll-like. Her entire body was small, more frail, but what struck Zoie the hardest was the vacant look in Aunt Hyacinth’s eyes. For some years, she had suffered from “forgetful spells,” as her mother called them. Those spells had clearly morphed into entire episodes.

  Zoe felt her heart twist in her chest. Her eyes stung. When was the last time she had called and spoken to her auntie? Her gaze drifted to her aunt Sage. Sage Bennett, the middle child, had determined, once she realized that she’d never be the youngest or the eldest, that she would find a way to stand out. She did. Sage was the caregiver, the mentor, and a master of the rapier tongue. She knew a little bit about a lot of things, and whenever anyone in the family had a dilemma, it was Sage who solved the problem. Now the once-robust, often domineering sister appeared to have succumbed to the ravages of time, and the hellfire that always beamed around her barely glowed.

  Zoe pasted on a smile and stepped fully onto the veranda, quietly shutting the enclosed screen door behind her. Two pairs of almost identical gray-green eyes settled on her. The third pair remained focused—on what, no one knew.

  Rose pushed up from her seat. “We were waiting for you before we had some tea. You hungry?”

  “Tea is fine.”

  “Don’t just stand there. Go and say hello to your aunts.”

  “Let me get a good look at your gal,” Aunt Sage commanded, and then took up her glasses from the white wrought-iron table and perched them on her plump nose. She looked Zoie up and down as if inspecting a piece of furniture. “Humph. Your grandmother asked for you,” she said, turning the benign words into an accusation with the skill that she had mastered.

  Zoie bit down on her bottom lip to keep it from trembling. “I came as soon as I could,” she offered.

  Aunt Sage waved a hand in dismissal. “Too late.”

  Zoie turned her head to blink away the tears before facing the trio. She tugged in a breath, walked over to her aunt Sage, and kissed her cheek. “Hello, Auntie.” She squeezed Sage’s shoulder, then inched over to her aunt Hyacinth. She knelt down in front of her and took her aunt’s smooth, warm hands into her own. “Auntie Hyacinth, it’s me, Zoie.”

  Hyacinth blinked and settled hazy eyes on Zoie. Her eyes, once identical to her sisters’, had lost their sharpness, the ability to penetrate. Instead, facing her was like looking into a window that needed cleaning. She frowned in concentration, and then a slow smile lifted the corners of her lips. “Zoie! Child, you done come home.”

  “Yes, Auntie, I’m here.”

  “And a good thing, too,” she said in a lowered voice. She leaned closer to her niece. “Them two is trying to kill me.” She nodded to reaffirm her words.

  “Auntie! That’s not true. They love you.”

  “Mama’s gone,” she said, shifting the topic. Her glassy eyes filled. “Don’t know what I’m gon’ do without my mama.”

  Zoie reach for a napkin on the table and wiped her aunt’s tears. “It will be alright, Auntie,” she soothed.

  “Never gon be alright again.” Her gaze shifted toward her sisters. She whispered, “Watch dem two.”

  Zoie patted her aunt’s smooth knuckles, then sat down in the one available seat between her mother and Aunt Sage. A wave of indescribable sadness crept inside her, then sucked her down in its undertow. A pall hung over the sisters and the house. That was expected, of course, because of the loss of Nana Claudia. But Zoie felt it was more than that, something deeper. It was as if Claudia had left this world and taken all the lifeblood that flowed through the house and her children with her.

  Nana was the thread that had held them all together. With her passing, the patchwork quilt of the Bennett family would slowly unravel.

  Zoie turned to her mother. “What are the plans for Nana’s service?”

  Rose flattened her palms on her lap. “Reverend Carl will officiate. The wake is scheduled for tomorrow at the Holloway Funeral Parlor. You remember Gena Holloway, don’t you?”

  Zoie tried to place her. “Um, I think so.” What did it matter?

  “Well, Gena took over the family business about two years ago, after her daddy passed.” She nodded her head while she spoke. “Doing a fine job, too. Her shiftless brother Rufus didn’t want anything to do with it ’cept for the profits. So Gena stepped in. Folks were kind of skeptical at first, her being a woman and so young.” She smiled. “But she put everybody’s doubts to rest. She renovated, purchased brand-new hearses, and hired a staff.”

  “Humph,” Aunt Sage chimed in. “Like Mama always said, there are two jobs that’s nevah gon’ lack customers: bringing folks into the world and taking them out.”

  Rose umm-hummed her agreement. “It’s just a nice thing when family business, family legacy gets passed down.”

  “It’s the right thing,” Sage added and slapped her hand on her thigh. “Too many young folk don’t care two tits about family. Just pack up and leave like all the people and all the things that made them up to be who dey is don’t matter worth a damn!”

  The flint of her temper scratched against Zoie’s chest and burst into flames. She clenched her hands into fists until her nails dug into her palms. Now she realized where her mother’s storyline lead—straight to lining her up, then shooting her down.

  “Maybe we could get back to the plans,” Zoie said, her chest tight with anger.

  “Yes, yes, we totally got off track,” her mother said in that passive-aggressive way that drove Zoie crazy. “Wake is from noon to six. Mama had a lot of friends in this town. We want to make sure that they all have a chance to pay their respects. Then the repast will be here at the house. That’s where we’re going to need your help.” She covered Zoie’s hand with her own.

  “The funeral service is Saturday morning . . .” Sage’s voice cracked. “Then the burial at Evergreen.”

  A shroud of silence wrapped around them.

  Sage’s lips tightened into an unmovable line. Rose’s gray-green eyes cloude
d with tears. Even Hyacinth was alert enough to understand that her sisters were hurting, too.

  Zoie wanted to comfort them in some way, say the right words, but it had been a long time since a modicum of authentic warmth had been shared among the Bennett women. In that moment, the full force of her grandmother’s passing truly settled inside her. She looked from one saddened face to the other. Nana had held them together by sheer force of will. She provided the nurturing, the love, the balance. What would they do now? How would they live under the same roof without Nana’s protective hand?

  “The reading of the will is Monday,” Sage said out of the blue.

  “You need to be here for that,” Rose said. “Pretty sure your Nana looked out for you. The least you can do is hear what she had to say,” she added, knowing from instinct that Zoie was contemplating her escape.

  “Monday? Mama, I need to get back to work.” She really didn’t, but she didn’t think she’d survive until Monday.

  “What’s more important than family?” Sage demanded. “Bad enough you couldn’t pick up a phone and git your New York tail down here ’fore Mama passed. And you ready to run off before she in the ground good.” She sniffed loudly, then dabbed her nose with a napkin.

  Zoie saw her mother’s expression freeze in a mask of shame. Her sister’s words, although hurled at Zoie, were meant to hit Rose, as they always did.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t stay, Aunt Sage. I’m only mentioning that I do have a job, and I’ve been assigned to a big story.”

  “More on the terrorists that bombed New York?” Sage asked.

  Rose leaned forward. “I told you when you ran off to New York it was a dangerous place. You wouldn’t listen. Do you have any idea how scared we all were for you when we heard the news?” She pressed a hand to her chest.

  Zoie wanted to believe they cared, actually cared. The truth, on the other hand, spoke for itself. She would never forget that horrific day for many reasons, her family being one of them.

  * * *

  She’d just gotten off the number 2 train at Chambers Street. As usual, the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan teemed with people rushing to their offices or the nearest Starbucks for a last shot of energy before tackling their day.

  The skies were bright, the air surprisingly clear. A typical September morning. She remembered checking the time on her Blackberry and picked up her pace. It was 8:40. The staff meeting convened in five minutes. The walk would take her ten.

  She turned onto Vesey Street and was stopped short by a bottleneck of people. Her gaze rose, as did those of the crush of suited and high-heeled pedestrians who stood, confused and transfixed, by the scene that unfolded above them.

  Pointing. Shouting. Screaming.

  Like a scene from a sci-fi movie, a modern-day war of the worlds, a plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  A collective gasp of disbelief was met with plumes of black dust above, which then scattered and tumbled in concert with the debris that rained down upon them.

  Panic. Terror. Running. Horns blaring. Sirens wailing. Then an explosion that rocked the earth beneath them. Flames burst from the windows of the North Tower, and the unbelievable magnified when the second plane rammed into the South Tower eighteen minutes later.

  Chaos.

  So she ran, blindly, covered in a film of white ash, propelled by the stampede of the terror-stricken, down the narrow streets, around the overturned trash cans and stalled cars.

  She remembered thinking the world had ended—the Apocalypse, the Four Horsemen, the shit that nightmares were made of. And the sky continued to fall.

  Nearly a week passed after that day before she got a call from her family. Even then it was more of a reprimand, more an “I told you so” than the concern they claimed to have. Only her Nana offered any words of love and comfort.

  Zoie blinked the past away. “I’ll stay,” she finally conceded. “What do you need me to do?”

  Self-satisfied harrumphs bounced from one to the other.

  * * *

  Claudia Bennett’s home-going service sent her off in style. It was standing room only in the Holloway Funeral Parlor, and the line of cars to the cemetery was celebrity long.

  The act of preparing for Nana Claudia’s final hurrah occupied so much time and thought that it left little opportunity to dwell on the loss itself. There was cooking and cleaning, and calls to be made and responded to. And, of course, there was the constant flow of mourners, who seemed to multiply by the hour.

  By noon, the two-story house was stretched to the seams with go-to-meeting hats, Jean Naté perfume, wide hips, and white handkerchiefs to dab at watering eyes.

  Zoie stopped counting how many times she heard “How much you’ve grown,” “Your nana was something special,” and “Did you see those buildings fall up there in New York? Just terrible.”

  Every countertop in the kitchen, the tabletops in the living room, and the six-foot-long dining table overflowed with trays of collard greens, deep-dish macaroni and cheese, black-eyed peas, white rice, chicken in all its incarnations, ribs, yams, whole hams, étouffée, and crab cakes, and tubs of sweet tea and lemonade that stood like sentinels in the remaining space.

  Zoie found refuge in her Nana’s garden, the one section of the property that remained off-limits to the guests. With a glass of sweet tea in hand, she sat on the bench that Nana had placed there for such an occasion. Whenever I have a lot on my mind I come right here, sit in my garden and turn it over to God.

  “I’m so sorry, Nana. Wherever you are now, please forgive me. I know I shouldn’t have let all the bad feelings between me and Mama and my aunties get in the way. I shouldn’t have let my pride rule over my mind. I should have been here for you. What am I going to do without you?” A choked sob lodged in her throat. The enormity of her loss overwhelmed her with a grief that wracked her body. She had a mother and two aunts, but without her grandmother, she may as well be an orphan. Even though they lived hundreds of miles apart and only spoke by phone, there was a comfort in knowing that her grandmother was always there.

  Alone. She was completely alone. Sure, she had her job and her one friend. That meant something, didn’t it?

  “I tried to say hello earlier, but you were surrounded.”

  Her body stiffened in response to the honey-sweet voice that she’d pushed into her past, where it belonged, where she needed it to be. She wiped her eyes and turned.

  “Jackson.” She drew in a slow, deep breath to steady herself. Seeing him again, even after all this time, raced her pulse and flooded her psyche with memories.

  Jackson Fuller. If there existed any other reason beyond her family as to why she’d fled New Orleans, it was Jackson.

  He slid his hands into the pockets of his navy-blue slacks. He lowered his head for an instant, then settled those soul-stealing eyes on her. “I’m very sorry about your Nana, Z.”

  Her heart lurched at the pet name. She folded her lips inward.

  “I know how much she meant to you and you to her.” He took his hand from his pocket and cupped his chin. “Look, I know things weren’t good between us when you left—”

  “Good between us?” she asked, incredulity elevating the pitch of her voice.

  The glass of sweet tea shook in her hand.

  “Z . . .”

  She took a step forward. “Don’t you dare call me that. You lost that right when you walked out on me.” Her eyes burned.

  The tip of his tongue moistened his bottom lip.

  “I’m sorry, Zoie, for all of it. I was young and stupid and full of myself, but that doesn’t mean that what I felt for you wasn’t real.”

  She turned her back to him. “You said what you needed to say, Jackson. Now please leave. I want to be alone.”

  “Your go-to, get-out-of-whatever one-liner.” He blew out a breath of frustration. “Cool. I’ll go.” He went to the door, then stopped. “It’s great to see you again. New York looks good on you.” He ope
ned the door. “Maybe you should think about what part you played in our breakup. Take care of yourself, Zoie.”

  She didn’t breathe until she heard the screen door pop close.

  CHAPTER 3

  “How did everything go today?” Miranda asked.

  Zoie stretched out on her childhood bed, crossed her legs at the ankles, and shut her eyes. She blew out a long breath. “It went. Hard at times. Exhausting. But the service was beautiful. I had no idea that so many people knew Nana.”

  “I’m sure she racked up a lot of acquaintances over the years. She’s lived in New Orleans all her adult life.”

  “I know, but it was still pretty amazing.”

  “And . . . how are things with you and the family?”

  “All the preparation for Nana’s service kept us too busy to get on anyone’s nerves. Two more days and I can head home. Monday is the reading of the will.”

  “Okay. I’ll take care of your return flight. Monday evening cool?”

  “No, I think I need to wait until after everything is settled on Monday.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Whaaat?”

  “It sounds like a one-eighty shift in attitude. Two days ago, you couldn’t get out of there fast enough. What changed?”

  “Nothing. I need to stay a little longer, that’s all.” She paused. “It’s what my grandmother would want.”

  “Sis, I’m not judging. Personally, I think this is what you need.”

  “Of course you do.” She sighed.

  “This is a chance for you to try to connect with your mom, Z. I would hate for you to look back when it’s too late and wish that you had tried.”

  Zoie squeezed her eyes shut. Like what happened with her Nana. “How’s everything on your end?” she asked to switch topics.

  “Great. Andre and I are talking about a short getaway, maybe the Bahamas for a long weekend.”

  “Getaway. Nice. You two are getting pretty serious.”

  “I like him a lot. Dre is a great guy. He makes me happy and treats me like the queen that I am,” she said, ending on laughter.

  “He betta!” Zoie teased.