Ours by Phillip B. Williams

Author:Phillip B. Williams [Williams, Phillip B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

[6]

Like startled fawns, Saint, sitting in a chair under the veranda, and the twins, playing a handclap game on the stairs, looked up at once when Luther-Philip stepped through the small tribe of trees that led to the house. Their three unbroken stares clung to him like wolves in the apex of hunger, something in them having eaten the fawns they once were. He slowed his pace to a halt. Before he thought to run away, the cold assembly of woman and girls shattered as Joy, on her way to the garden, disregarded their tight silence and, too, Luther-Philip standing dumbstruck just feet away. It took her looking up a third time—the first to wipe her brow, the second to gander at the twins, whose beauty she had allowed to soften her stance against them—to see Luther-Philip frozen in place.

“Who’s that?” Joy asked, and Saint responded that their visitor was a man late in his boyhood. If Joy heard her, she gave no evidence and nodded in Luther-Philip’s direction. With that, he pressed onward.

“If you here to see your dead mama again, you might as well go home,” Naima said, starting up the clapping game again with her sister. Selah giggled and quickened the pace of the game.

“Mind yourself. He here to see me. Stay where you are. I’ll bring it to you,” Saint said.

While Saint was away, Luther-Philip stole glances of Joy. She caught him once and shook her head. He felt a pain in his chest and realized it was his heart learning a new language.

“They making love right in front of us, Selah. Like we not even here,” Naima said, much to Selah’s pleasure.

“Saint say love not a thing to put trust in,” Selah said.

“What’s her meaning?”

“I don’t know. I kind of know love and I kind of know trust. But they hard to know together.” Selah flicked a bug off Naima’s shoulder. “I don’t know how to carry two things at once yet,” she said.

Saint returned with a leather necklace that held a small glass vial from which herbs, soil, and various spices emanated a sweet balm. She lifted the necklace and instinctually Luther-Philip lowered his head to accept it. She instructed him to return to her every Monday for three months.

“Never take this off. Sleep in it. Bathe in it. End of August the last time you need to come back,” she said, “the beginning being the first Monday of June.” He asked what the necklace was for, and she made it clear that telling him would only make him behave stupidly so “just mind what I say with your whole mind. Return the first Monday of June, yes?” She swatted him away, returning to the garden.

Before leaving, he made sure to get one last look at Joy and promised himself he would learn everything he could about her each Monday he was to visit Saint or die from heartbreak.

The first Monday Luther-Philip returned, Saint had prepared for him a spot in the garden marked by a set of shears and gloves.

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