Perish by LaToya Watkins

Author:LaToya Watkins [Watkins, LaToya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

10

LYDIA

JAN ISN’T HAPPY TO see me when she arrives and finds me in the hospital room.

When she walks in, I say her name with so much excitement that I surprise myself. When I wrap my arms around her to embrace her as family should, she doesn’t raise her arms to hold me back. She lets them hang limp at her sides.

Her eyes are dark beads surrounded by dark circles. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, but I can tell it’s thinning. When I embrace her, she feels so frail, so thin, that I think I’ll break her. She can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. She looks like an old woman and she’s not even forty yet.

When I let her go, I return to my seat in the chair closest to Grandmoan’s bed and she sits in the chair across the room, right beneath the television. We don’t say anything for a while, but I can tell she’s having a hard time keeping quiet because she keeps taking deep breaths and smacking her lips.

“You still walking around not believing in God or nothing?” she finally asks with her face all screwed up.

I shake my head and say, “It’s not that I don’t believe, Jan. I’m just not sure.” I make sure my voice is calm and try changing the subject. “You think she’ll come back from this?” I ask, nodding in our grandmother’s direction.

The last time I was here, Jan was huge with child. She was beautiful, but she judged me about what I was doing with my mother. I’d come as a courtesy to the family. I wanted to let them know where Mother would be. Thought maybe they’d finally want to see her. That they’d finally care.

But Jan sucked her teeth and rolled her eyes when I told them that I was putting Mother away. When she spoke, her words were short and snippy. God don’t want you driving your momma away. Black folk don’t do that. We take care of our own.

When she said that, I looked at my hands and told her I didn’t know what God wanted. That I’d never heard his voice. That I wasn’t sure I believed in him.

My aunt, her mother, didn’t say a word. Just sat there in silence. Grandmoan cleared her throat and told Jan to hush her mouth. You don’t know nothing about nothing you saying, she said. And for a minute, I thought she cared for me.

“If God want her to be all right, she be all right,” she says. “That old woman got a whole lot to pay for, though,” Jan says now.

“We all have things to pay for, though, right?” I say.

She smacks her lips. “Grandmoan was mean and ain’t no cause to be how she was,” she say. “This all she got right here.” She sighs. “This all she got left right here,” she says again, and her voice cracks a bit and I think she might cry.

Jan clears her throat and says,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.