Lousiana Hotshot

brittleness, even her stoicism, and all she could see was happiness. And hope. And real hair, she was pretty sure— Miz Clara had been buzz-cutting her hair and wearing wigs for dress-up ever since Talba could remember.
    She thought:
Why don’t I know about this? What little girl doesn’t know about her parents’ wedding?
    A memory came blasting back— Talba playing with her dolls, humming the “Wedding March,” Miz Clara yelling at her. “Girl, you stop that foolishness. You want to end up pregnant at fo‘teen? Ya want to finish school or not?”
    She had been nine at the most.
    Talk of marriage was as
verboten
in the Wallis household as talk of Daddy. Miz Clara had always said, “Don’t you ever depend on some man to take care of you. You got one person you can depend on, and her name’s Sandra Wallis. That’s all you got in this world.”
    Hurt, she had asked, “What about you, Mama? I thought I had you.”
    And her mother had laughed. “Baby, you got to take care of
me.”
    She looked at her father’s picture. He was handsome. So handsome she was instantly drawn to him, though perhaps that was because she knew she was looking at her father. He was a nice medium brown color, like she was, and he had an Afro (though her mother’s hair was straightened). He also wore a lush moustache, a masculine attribute for which she’d always had a weakness. He was dressed in black tie, proper as you please, standing politely behind his bride. You’d never have guessed he’d become a druggie and die of a gunshot wound.
    Talba felt herself tearing up again.
What a waste!
    She was disgusted with herself:
Get a grip, girl. The guy was worthless. Everybody says so.
    Still. You only get one father.
    There were other pictures in the drawer-like compartment, though this was the only framed one. The others were loose, as if carelessly tossed, though there was nothing careless about Miz Clara. They must be things she couldn’t bear to part with, no matter how much she professed to despise her husband’s memory. The first one Talba saw was a two-by-three-inch photo of herself, snaggletoothed and pigtailed; a school picture, probably from second grade. Again, she felt like an intruder. She didn’t want to know that her mother had saved a picture like this of her, and she knew her mother wouldn’t want her to know. It was far too sentimental a gesture for Miz Clara to acknowledge.
    There were more pictures of her, and some of Corey, and some of Aunt Carrie. One that really got to her was of all of them, six-year-old Corey all dressed up in a suit like his dad’s, their father wearing a tie, Carrie and Clara in dresses and hats, each holding a baby daughter, each daughter decked out in white lace. On the back, someone had written, “Easter, 1974.” Talba wondered who had taken it
    It was hard, looking at those pictures. She wanted to stare at each one forever, and yet the most cursory glance made her feel so guilty her stomach hurt. The phone rang, and she nearly threw herself under the bed.
    Darryl,
she thought, and let it go. Pausing now wasn’t going to make it any easier.
    She did stare at them for a while, even laid some on the floor and looked at them in the aggregate. There was so much so see… so much it took her nearly an hour to find the flat, green-leather album at the bottom of the pile. It was trimmed with gold and looked bought at a stationery store, an extravagant purchase for someone like Miz Clara. It was no one’s idea of a wedding album, yet that was what it was— and indeed it had a dignity that one of those white shiny ones wouldn’t have had.
    For the first time, she saw a picture of her grandmother. Her grandfather had died when Carrie and Clara were in high school, and her grandmother, when Talba was a baby. Talba thought it odd that there were no photos of her anywhere in the house— but then, there were no photos at all. They were all, it seemed, in the cedar chest.
    If her father had parents, they hadn’t come to the wedding— perhaps he had come from too far away for poor folks to travel. Aunt Carrie had been maid of honor, and there was a best man— someone named William Green whom Talba didn’t recognize. He’d be difficult to trace with a name like that, but she could try. There were no bridesmaids and no groomsmen.
    The photographer evidently hadn’t shot pictures of the guests as well as the wedding party, in the casual manner of the late nineties. But there was a face