so old to Noelle and it worried her. Her father had died two years earlier at fifty-seven. She’d learned about it in a stilted letter from Doreen. The letter arrived nearly a month after his death with a check for four hundred dollars, made out to Noelle. “He didn’t have a will,” Doreen wrote, “but I thought Noelle should get something from his estate.” His estate. The word made Noelle and her mother laugh for hours, the sort of laughter that was borne of hurt and pain. But the four hundred dollars had helped her buy the car, which she named Pops, and she hoped it would treat her better than her father ever had.
Aside from Noelle’s trimmed-down belongings and the boxes she had to transport to Miss Wilson’s, the only other thing left in the house was an old recliner. James was borrowing a truck to take it to his house. After the night that Bea’s baby was born, James became a fixture around their house, mowing their lawn at first out of gratitude but later for the few dollars Noelle’s mother insisted on paying him. That family had been full of surprises. As it turned out, James wasn’t Bea’s brother, but her boyfriend and the father of the baby she had that night. That baby was now five years old and he already had two younger brothers, both “caught” by Noelle’s mother, as she would say, with Noelle as her assistant. Noelle’s mother had tried to persuade Bea and James to practice birth control, but her pleas had fallen on deaf ears. Bea, it turned out, liked being a mother and she doted on her kids.
Noelle was carting boxes to her car when James showed up with his truck.
“Hey, Miss Noelle,” he said as he hopped out of the cab, “did I miss your mama?”
“She took off an hour ago.” Noelle heaved a box into the cramped trunk of her car.
“What we gonna do without her?” he asked.
“You and Bea better stop having babies, that’s what.”
James grinned. He’d grown into a handsome man and he had the sort of grin that made you grin back. “Too late for that,” he said.
Noelle put her hands on her hips and stared at him. “Again? What are you going to do with all these kids?”
James shrugged. “Love ‘em up,” he said.
People have a right to make their own choices, Noelle, her mother had told her when Noelle complained the last time Bea announced she was pregnant.
“Well,” Noelle said now, “let me help you carry that recliner out to your truck.”
It took them nearly half an hour to carry the recliner through the tight doorway of the house, across the windy yard and into the truck. Then James helped her with the rest of her mother’s cartons.
She was walking from the car toward the house to pick up another box, when she saw James suddenly drop one of the cartons to the grass, his arms flung out in the air.
“Girl!” He nudged the box with the toe of his shoe.
“Where these boxes been? They got spider shit all over ‘em.”
Noelle hadn’t noticed, but he was right. Round egg sacs hung from the corners and cottony webs crisscrossed the untaped flaps.
“Leave it there, James,” she said. “Nothing’s alive, I don’t think, but I don’t want to drag these filthy things into that Miss Wilson’s house. Let me get a rag and I’ll clean them up.”
“You got some tape?” James squatted down next to the box. “I’ll check inside a couple to make sure they ain’t no infestation or nothin'.”
Finding a rag in the cleaned-out kitchen was easier said than done, and Noelle finally resorted to pulling one of her washcloths from her suitcase. She dampened it under the tap and headed back to the front yard.
By the time she reached James and the box, he was on his feet, a manila folder in his hands. He looked at her from behind a frown.
“Was you adopted?” he asked.
She froze. How would he know that? She’d only found out herself the night Bea’s first baby was born, when her mother finally told her the truth. They’d sat together on the hammock in the backyard while her mother apologized for not telling her sooner. “You had a right to know way before now,” she’d said, “but I didn’t want you to think that you being adopted had anything to do with Daddy leaving.”
Noelle had felt stunned, like a huge void opened up inside her. “My mother?” she’d asked. “Who were my real mother and father?”
“Your father and I are your real parents,” her mother said sharply. “But your biological mother was a fifteen-year-old girl like that one we just left. Like Bea. Your father …” She’d shrugged. “I don’t think anybody knew who your father was.”
“I’m not yours,” Noelle said, trying on the fit of the words.
“Oh, you’re mine, honey. Please don’t ever say that again.”
“I’m not part Lumbee?” She felt the magic drain out of her. The Spanish moss hanging above the hammock suddenly looked like nothing more than Spanish moss, not the hair of an Indian chief’s wife.
“I believe you’re a mishmash. A little of this and a little of that.” Her mother had taken her hand and held it on her lap. “What you are,” she said, “is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Now, Noelle looked at James. “Yes, I’m adopted,” she said, as though the fact meant nothing to her. “But how did you know?”
He handed the folder to her. “Some papers fell out of this thing in the wind,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’ to me,” he said. “But maybe mean somethin’ to you.”
His soft brown eyes told her he’d seen something he shouldn’t have seen. Something she’d never been meant to see, either. And when he gave it to her, he touched her hand. Not like a man would touch a woman. It was the touch of a friend who knew that the papers in that folder just might change her world forever.
8
Tara
Wilmington, North Carolina 2010
Oh, God, this felt strange.
I sat across the table from Ian at the Pilot House, wondering if I was on a date. It had seemed casual enough yesterday when he said he had two tickets for a film at Thalian Hall. Then he suggested we grab something to eat first, and when you put dinner on the waterfront together with a film at a place as nice as the renovated Thalian Hall, what else could it be but a date? I liked Ian. I’d known him for so long and in some ways I could honestly say I adored him, but I didn’t want to date him. I didn’t want to date anyone. The thought of kissing or even holding hands with someone other than Sam made me shudder—and not with desire. It was actually repellent. I felt a deep, deep loneliness in my bed at night, but it wasn’t for just any man. It was for my husband.
“This isn’t a date, is it?” I asked Ian after the waiter had poured my second glass of wine.
Ian laughed. “Not if you don’t want it to be,” he said.
“Were you thinking it was? Is?” I was smiling. I liked that I could talk easily to Ian. I needed
