The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [62]
I looked to Unc, then to her again. I said, “He’s not my dad. He’s my uncle.” I shrugged. “My dad is—”
“Very well,” she said, and nodded, hands still in her lap. Unc sat facing forward, and I could hear the tick of a clock from somewhere.
I looked down, said, “Yes ma’am,” and glanced at the paperweight again.
“Mrs. Dupree,” Unc said. “With all due respect, we must be going now in order—”
“It seems you have an inordinate interest in this latest keepsake of mine,” she said, still looking at me. She picked up the paperweight, held it up to her face.
I said nothing, and Unc turned to me, said, “What’s this?”
I whispered, “She has a paperweight.”
“A paperweight, is it,” she said, and now she was looking at me. “This is a symbol, I was told by my Constance on the day before her passing, of my daughter’s transgressions.” She turned the paperweight one way and the other, her eyebrows up, inspecting it as though it were an apple she might or might not buy.
She said, “It is a cryptic symbol, I believe, one I cannot yet decipher. But my daughter was given to cryptic behavior, most assuredly when it came to matters of the heart.” She looked at Unc, then to the paperweight again.
Unc cleared his throat.
“You call it a paperweight,” she said, “when it seems she meant it to carry more sentiment than that. And now my daughter is dead.”
We sat there, the ticking between us filling the room.
Cherish your momma, Constance Simons’d said.
I looked at this woman, her momma. Her only child dead.
I stood, crossed the room. She was looking at me, her eyebrows still up, her mouth a small O of confusion: Who was this upstart daring to come to her?
I knelt to her and felt at my waist the gun, heavy and sharp. Still with me. Then I pulled from my pocket my own symbol, the one she’d given to Unc through me. It was warm.
“Huger?” Unc said from behind me.
She looked down at mine, and I could see better now the one she held: a small coil of sweetgrass inside, as tiny and delicate as my own. She looked at me, and I saw the watery look in her eyes wasn’t the old age I’d figured it was, but grief. Plain and simple.
Her only daughter, giving her her sins.
She said, “How—”
“She came to me Saturday night,” I said, my voice low, almost a whisper. “I was in the hospital. At the medical university. She gave me this to give to Unc.”
She took in a breath, whispered, “You talked to her.”
“Yes ma’am.” I nodded.
“And what did she say?”
“She said to tell my uncle she loved him. And she said, ‘Cherish your momma.’ ”
She quick looked at me, and I could see on her face a kind of startled shine. Slowly she brought down her hand, let her paperweight rest in her lap.
She said, “Do you?”
“Yes ma’am,” I whispered. “I cherish her.”
She looked from one paperweight to the other.
“I can’t tell them apart,” she said.
That was when I turned to Unc, and as though he knew precisely what I was thinking, knew and could see me looking to him for something I couldn’t yet name myself, he nodded. I looked at him a moment longer, then turned to her.
I took her gloved hand, and placed it there. I said, “You can keep it, if you like.”
She looked at me, and it seemed she tried to smile, though her chin quivering wouldn’t let it happen. She said, “One is sin, and the other is love. And I can’t tell the difference.” She tried the smile again, looked up at me. “Can you?”
Unc cleared his throat again, him standing now behind me. He said, “We must go now.”
“She told you to cherish your mother,” she said, that thin fact that was her voice going even thinner now, “because I did not cherish her. And as I did not cherish my child, so she did not cherish me.”
Then Mrs. Dupree cried, shivered in on herself, grew smaller in only the seconds I looked at her. It was a pitiful sound in this room, cluttered with flowers and the thick smell of them all,