Beside, Leon. Not into. I want you to know that, because I know you have wondered for twenty-eight years, in the part of you that doesn’t sleep. You never touched me. Not that day or any other day. But I felt the plaster in my hair. I felt the wind of your arm. And I knew that the next time, or the time after that, beside might not be where you put it.
You went down on the kitchen floor about twenty minutes later, the way you did. I put a dish towel under your head. I went next door and got our baby and my bag. I had packed it in January, the night you drove home from Darnell’s with Tasha asleep in the back seat and ran the red at North and Fulton and laughed about it. I kept it under the basement stairs behind the paint cans. I took Tasha and the bag and I took the Number 13 bus downtown to the Greyhound station on Fayette Street, and I bought two tickets to Durham, where Bernice had been begging me to come for a year.
The 11:40 was the last bus. We got there at a quarter to six.
I sat in that station for six hours. Do you remember what it was like down there? Orange plastic chairs bolted to the floor, and the man with the mop who never mopped, and the television up in the corner showing the news with no sound. I bought our girl a hot chocolate from the machine and she spilled half of it on her overalls. She fell asleep around nine with her head in my lap and that raggedy rabbit under her chin. I sat there with my hand on her back and the tickets in my other hand and I watched the board. Richmond. Raleigh. Durham. Every half hour they called a bus and every half hour I didn’t get up.
I want to tell you I was thinking about you that whole time. I wasn’t. Mostly I was thinking about my mama, who stayed with my daddy in Rocky Mount until the day he died, and who told me on her own deathbed that she had never forgiven herself for it and had never forgiven him either. I was thinking, I will not be my mama. And then I was thinking, but this man is not my daddy. My daddy never once in his life cried over what he did. You cried every time. You cried on the bathroom floor. You cried in the car outside the shop at eight in the morning before you went in. You cried and promised and broke it and cried again, and Lord knows I had stopped believing the promises, but I never stopped believing the crying. The crying meant there was still somebody in there who knew.
At eleven-thirty they called the Durham bus. I stood up. I had Tasha on my shoulder, dead asleep, heavy as a sack of flour. I walked to the door. I stood in that doorway and I could see the bus, and the driver, a heavy man with a gray mustache, looked right at me and waited. He waited a whole minute, Leon. I don’t know why. Maybe he’d seen a hundred women standing in that doorway with a baby on one shoulder and a bag on the other. Then he nodded at me, like he understood, and he closed the door and pulled out.
I want to be honest with you, because I am too close to the end now for anything else. I did not stay because I was sure. I stayed because I was tired, and I was scared of Durham, and I was scared of being a woman alone with a child in a city I didn’t know, and because somewhere in me there was still a girl who had married a laughing barber on the steps of Bethel Hope in 1987 and wanted him back so bad it was like hunger. All of that. Not one reason. All of them.