Up North

The Vails’ youngest got into a school up in Chicago.

I heard it from his mama, Brenda, who was in Yvette’s chair getting a fill-in and could not sit still about it. Full ride. Some engineering program. Brenda said the word engineering about four times, turning it over like a stone she found in her yard that turned out to be worth something.

“Chicago,” she kept saying. “My baby. Chicago.”

The other women in the shop made all the right sounds. That’s wonderful. You must be so proud. Engineering, now. And Brenda was lit up the whole time, showing somebody a picture on her phone.

I didn’t say nothing. I was getting my cuticles done and looking at the wall.

Yvette caught it. She always does. She kept working Brenda’s nails but she gave me that little look in the mirror.

After a while Brenda turned to me. “Miss Magda, you quiet over there.”

I said, “I’m happy for him, baby. Chicago’s a good school town.”

“But,” she said. Because she heard the but I didn’t say.

I let it sit a second. Then I said, “When you driving him up there in August. Take the long way back.”

She looked at me.

I said, “You gon’ drop him off, and you gon’ help him put his little room together, and you gon’ meet his roommate and decide what you think about him. And then you gon’ get in that car to drive home, and somewhere around Memphis it’s gon’ hit you that the next time you see him, he’s gon’ be somebody you have to get to know again. They come back different. That’s the whole point of sending them. But it don’t make it easy, and don’t let nobody tell you it should.”

The shop got quiet.

“So take the long way back,” I said. “Cry where he can’t see you. Stop at one of them gas stations and get you something sweet. By the time you pull in your driveway you’ll have your face back on. And then you call your sister and you tell her your baby’s at engineering school in Chicago, and you let yourself be proud all the way through, because you earned that part too.”

Brenda’s eyes did a thing. She blinked it back.

“You sound like you done it,” she said.

I said, “Once, baby.”

Yvette didn’t look up from Brenda’s nails. But I saw my daughter swallow.

She was little, and one summer I left her with my sister for two weeks while I drove my mother up to see family. Knee-high, and I cried at a gas station outside Jackson over a two-week trip. So I know. You don’t get harder at it. You just learn where the gas stations are.

Brenda reached over with her wet nails held up funny and put her wrist against my arm. That’s the most you can do with fresh polish. We sat like that a second.

Then she went back to her phone, and showed somebody else the picture, and said “Chicago” again, lit up.

Both things are true.