The Fiance Who Wanted My Brothers Gone

That is the part that scares me still. Not that Garrett was cruel. The world is full of cruel. What scares me is how close I came, in my tiredness, to letting his cruelty wear the mask of my own doubt.

What pulled me back was Jesse himself, though he never knew it.

He came and found me on the back steps on the third of those terrible nights. He could not sleep. He sat down next to me and leaned on me the way he does and he said, “June, if we lived somewhere else, would you still be our sister?” And I said of course, forever, nothing could change that, where did he even get that. And he said, “Caleb says Garrett is going to send us to a school where you sleep there and we would not live with you no more. Is that true?”

Eight years old. He had heard us through the wall. They both had. My loud Caleb and my tender Jesse had been lying awake in their bunks knowing a man was trying to give them away, and keeping it between themselves because they did not want to make trouble for me. Making themselves small. So I would not feel bad.

I took my brother’s face in my two hands and I told him the truest thing I have ever said to anybody. I said, “Nobody is sending you anywhere. You are mine and I am yours and that is the whole entire end of it. You hear me? There is no school. There is no somewhere else. It is you and Caleb and me, till you are grown men with houses of your own, and even then.” And he cried, and I cried, and I put him back to bed, and I sat on those steps until the sun came up and I knew exactly what I was and exactly what I was not going to become.

I did not call it off right then. That is important, and you will see why. I should have. If I had any sense I would have driven to Garrett’s apartment that morning and left the ring in his mailbox. But I was twenty-five and I still half loved the idea of him, and I told myself I could change his mind, that if he just saw the boys the way I saw them he would come around, that nobody could really look at Jesse and want to send him away. I thought I could teach him who I was by showing him. I did not understand yet that Garrett already knew exactly who I was. He was just betting he could make me somebody else before the wedding.

The church supper was Glenda Ames’s idea. Glenda is our pastor’s wife, Brother Dean Ames being the preacher at Caney Ridge Baptist going on twenty years. Glenda had cut my mama’s hair for the casket, a thing I will owe her for till I die, and she had appointed herself a kind of grandmother to the boys and to me. When she heard I was engaged she clapped her hands and said the ladies’ circle simply had to do a little supper for us in the fellowship hall, nothing fancy, just the church family. I said yes because you do not tell Glenda Ames no. Garrett said yes because Garrett never turned down a room full of people who might one day need a loan.