Page 38 of It's Me They Follow
“Apologies, your honor.” Her sister played along. “But I’m asking if you don’t expect to see ME again a TEENSY-WEENSY bit, even though it’s completely illogical and he told you he left to become a monk.”
“Absolutely not.” The Shopkeeper shifted around in her seat. Shook her head no. “I want him to listen to that call on his life.” It wasn’t just his warm West Philly–born-and-raised attitude; it was the sense that he listened. He listened to the words in her book more closely than she did. He made herConversations with Harriettmake sense. He took the instructions and immediately followed directions without the back-and-forth of fear and wavering.
“You want HIM to listen to that call in his life because, what...?”
“Because things are so much better when we do. And so much worse when we don’t.”
“You mean so much better when YOU do, and so much worse when YOU don’t. No need to put that on him. What is it about him specifically that YOU want?”
“I want time.” The Shopkeeper didn’t hesitate.
“Time?”
“Yeah, time. I told you, when we looked in each other’s eyes, time stopped. I want that feeling of time stopping.”
“How do you know his calling is not to be the love of YOUR life, your time stopper?”
The Shopkeeper paused. “If so, we’d be together, and right now, we are not. So it can’t be. At least not yet. But this isn’t the end of the story.”Good answer, she thought.
Elle paused. She was processing. They both were. Then she asked, “And you’d be okay with being together but never ever touching ever, never ever, for the rest of your lives? Y’all would just talk and read books and eat and take walks and look in each other’s eyes?” She laughed.
“I’d be open to it.” The Shopkeeper searched in her bag for nothing at all. She found an apple. She wanted to see herself as the kind of person who could sacrifice the superficial for the truth, but she knew she wanted to know what the muscles in his forearms felt like. If not his, then someone’s.
“Stars?!” her sister asked. “Stars” was the term they’d used when they were little to promise they were telling the truth.
“Stars,” The Shopkeeper agreed.
“Well, that’s good. And you know, you don’t have to try to be the bigger person.”
She understood that in theory, but it got lost in practice.
“Like, I am not your morality police. Okay, I have another question. What if you do all this work to get over your issue—will you still want him in the end? A lover who can’t touch you or kiss you or hold you at night? Would you distract him from his purpose just to look him in the eyes?”
The Shopkeeper didn’t know if she would like his touch or kiss, but she was willing to find out. But what if he wasn’t? She’d spent a lifetime wondering about being held in someone’s arms. She wasn’t comfortable with the question, but her sister was right for asking. “I guess not.”
“You guess not?”
“Was that a question?” The Shopkeeper retorted. She was getting defensive. It was one of the questions running around in The Shopkeeper’s head as well. “I want everything,” she said softly, “but I will settle for something.”
Jazmine Sullivan sang about lions and tigers and bears. “I love this song,” Elle sang. “You can tell me the truth, you know,” she pushed gently between her favorite lines. “Don’t you always say that a writer’s job is to tell the truth? Tell it. It’s only me and you and the baby listening. Do you want EVERYTHING or SOMETHING or NOTHING?”
Sometimes the question game got testy. It required silence and space.
“I want everything,” The Shopkeeper whispered. “But I don’t wanna want everything.”
“ ’Cause you can’t handle the truth,” her sister mocked.
They both laughed. “Maybe, just maybe, you deserve someone for who you’re becoming, not who you’ve been,” Elle said.
That wasn’t a question, The Shopkeeper thought.But it wasa damn good sentence.“I can admit that I deserve sweetness.” The Shopkeeper bit into her apple. “I deserve sweetness,” she repeated.
“You truly do,” her sister agreed. Her sister turned up Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude” on the radio.
“Okay.”
If she was this open with Elle already, she couldn’t imagine how deep they’d be in conversation five hours from now. The Shopkeeper pulled out her journal. She wrote so hard and so fast, she thought she might break her pen.
“That’s smart to write it down,” Elle said. “Even when you can’t tell others the truth, at least you can tell it to yourself.”
