My grandmother Louisa passed peacefully that following winter, ninety-one years old, in the same house she’d left me, surrounded by great-grandchildren she’d gotten two full years with that she never would have had if I’d stayed in Harrow Point pretending a marriage built on quiet contempt was still worth saving.
“Hunger like that never fills up,” she told me once more, near the end, her hand thin and steady in mine. “But you, baby — you built something that does. I’m proud of you for finally letting yourself have it.”
At her funeral, held in the same small church on Saint Averil where she’d been baptized nine decades earlier, Maya stood up unprompted during the family remembrance portion and told the whole congregation, in her careful eight-year-old English mixed with island patois she’d picked up faster than I ever managed, that her great-grandmother had taught her “how to grow tomatoes and how to know when somebody’s lying to you, and both of those things matter the same amount.” The whole church laughed and cried at once, and I understood, watching my daughter stand there so certain of herself, that whatever else Marcus and I had gotten wrong together, we’d at least made two children capable of that kind of clear-eyed honesty.
