The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [10]
“I don’t usually have people come into my house like this,” she says, “I promise you.”
“I appreciate it,” I say. “I’m grateful for your trust and I didn’t mean to violate it.”
“I guess if you don’t have it, then you don’t have it,” she says. “But I’m very disappointed. I really wanted to give that piece to my father.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I should have known something was off,” she says, looking around the room, as if for something more interesting to concentrate on. “Usually when people come here to sell us art, first of all they’re always carrying it with them and they always show it to us right away. But since you know Céline, I overlooked that.”
“There was a sculpture,” I say, aware of how stupid my excuse was going to sound. “My father didn’t like it, and he threw it away.”
She raises her perfectly arched eyebrows, as if out of concern for my father’s sanity, or for my own. Or maybe it’s another indirect signal that she now wants us out of her sight.
“We’re done, then,” she says, looking directly at my face. “I have to make a call. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
Gabrielle Fonteneau excuses herself, disappearing behind a closed door. Through the terrace overlooking the garden, I see her parents guiding my father along rows of lemongrass. I want to call Gabrielle Fonteneau back and promise her that I will make her another sculpture, but I can’t. I don’t know that I will be able to work on anything for some time. I have lost my subject, the prisoner father I loved as well as pitied.
In the garden Mr. Fonteneau snaps a few sprigs of lemongrass from one of the plants, puts them in a plastic bag that Mrs. Fonteneau is holding. Mrs. Fonteneau hands the bag of lemongrass to my father.
Watching my father accept with a nod of thanks, I remember the chapter “Driving Back Slaughters” from The Book of the Dead, which my father sometimes read to me to drive away my fear of imagined monsters. It was a chapter full of terrible lines like “My mouth is the keeper of both speech and silence. I am the child who travels the roads of yesterday, the one who has been wrought from his eye.”
I wave to my father in the garden to signal that we should leave now, and he slowly comes toward me, the Fonteneaus trailing behind him.
With each step forward, he rubs the scar on the side of his face, and out of a strange reflex I scratch my face in the same spot.
Maybe the last person my father harmed had dreamed moments like this into my father’s future, strangers seeing that scar furrowed into his face and taking turns staring at it and avoiding it, forcing him to conceal it with his hands, pretend it’s not there, or make up some lie about it, to explain.
Out on the sidewalk in front of the Fonteneaus’ house, before we both take our places in the car, my father and I wave good-bye to Gabrielle Fonteneau’s parents, who are standing in their doorway. Even though I’m not sure they understood the purpose of our visit, they were more than kind, treating us as though we were old friends of their daughter’s, which maybe they had mistaken us for.
As the Fonteneaus turn their backs to us and close their front door, I look over at my father, who’s still smiling and waving. When he smiles the scar shrinks and nearly disappears into the folds of his cheek, which used to make me make wish he would never stop smiling.
Once the Fonteneaus are out of sight, my father reaches down on his lap and strokes the plastic bag with the lemongrass the Fonteneaus had given him. The car is already beginning to smell too much like lemongrass, like air freshener overkill.
“What will you use that for?” I ask.
“To make tea,” he says, “for Manman and me.”
I pull the car away from the Fonteneaus’ curb, dreading the rest stops, the gas station, the midway hotels ahead for us. I wish my mother were here now,