Lies With Man by Michael Nava

Author:Michael Nava [Nava, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612941981
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2021-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

Everything about the woman who opened the door was practical— her tan slacks and blue blouse, efficient short hair, solid, stocky body— but a deep, feminine grace drew together her strong features. Her light brown eyes, even as they assessed the stranger before her, were doubtful but not unfriendly.

She was lighter-skinned in the flesh than she’d appeared in the photographs, but her Blackness still shocked Jessica because it represented a side of Daniel that remained fundamentally ungraspable to her. Jessica was not an overt racist like her Georgia-born father, and racial mixing had never seemed to her the abomination it did to him but only because it wasn’t something she’d ever had to consider. Other than Caleb Cowell and his family, there were no Black people in her world, and she had no reason to think about them. Now, confronted with her husband’s Black lover, the mother of his only child, she felt disoriented, speechless.

“Hello,” the woman said. “May I help you?”

She managed to say, “I’m Jessica Herron. Daniel’s wife.”

Now it was Gwen who stared speechlessly at the woman on her doorstep. She cleared her throat and said, “Come in, Mrs. Herron.”

••••

Gwen offered tea, a diversion, Jess thought, to give them both time to absorb each other’s presence. While she pottered in the kitchen, Jessica paced the cluttered, comfortable living room. A bay window framed the backs of the adjoining Victorians with long, complicated staircases leading down from the upper flats to small gardens just visible from where she stood. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected but the quiet, pleasantly furnished room and shrill piping of a tea kettle in the kitchen— the ordinariness of her surroundings— calmed her apprehensions. Yet, as she ran her hand over the back of a wing chair, she thought, Daniel might have sat here, and a strange discomfort came over her, as if her presence violated, not Gwen’s, but Daniel’s privacy. This was his real life, she realized sadly, and I have no right to be here.

Her sense of having stumbled into a stranger’s life grew as she studied the framed photographs on the mantel of the gas fireplace. Many were of the boy— Wyatt— taken from the time he was a toddler to his teens. Gwen was in some while in others were what she assumed were members of Gwen’s family, solid, comfortable-looking Black men and women and children. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins. In a photograph half-hidden among the others Wyatt was wedged between a smiling Gwen and a beaming Daniel in a high school graduation cap and gown. She lifted it from the mantel. Here was the conclusive evidence of paternity in the color of the boy’s eyes, the curve of his nose, the shape of his face— all identical to his father’s. As if discovering Daniel’s secret life all over again, the photo left her nearly breathless with shock, then anger and then, to her surprise, a complicated sadness. Daniel’s death had ended not only his life with her, but his life with them, his family.

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