Days were difficult to discern from one another in Heaven. Yesterday looked like tomorrow and today seemed to never end, but Patience always knew when it was Sunday. Sundays, the smell of corn bread, fresh baked rolls, and collard greens wafted onto the porch.

Tradition dictated that Sunday afternoons were spent in her grandma’s kitchen after the morning service, regardless of who had caused a scene in the middle of a sermon or who kept kicking the backside of the pew in front of them and, as a result, had a whooping with a self-selected stick pending. Her eyes would be squeezed shut against the sudden onslaught of sunlight as her father coaxed each of them into the car. He’d fumble with the dials on the radio until the static parted like the Red Sea, giving way to old school hip hop that made Patience’s heart bump right along to the rhythm. The route to University City was long, studded with shops and stores sporting boarded up or shattered windows, doors blocked by thick, rusting bars, and large, empty lots where the sunlight bounced off the cracked black asphalt, cooking it until it might as well have been lava.

At the halfway marker, a four-way intersection sat with at least one broken traffic signal at all times. More often than not, there was one group of children headed by one adult or another waiting for the moment that the lights turned crimson before they descended upon the waiting cars like flies on the coils of dog crap that littered the sidewalks; every open window was met with an elevator pitch on what summer camp they were trying to fund and why it was vital for the growth of ‘our youth today.’ Their matching shirts would often be drenched with sweat during the summer, the brightly colored fabric sticking to their bodies like a second skin.

Just as often as they showed up, her granny would kiss her teeth and shake her head, jostling the bob cut wig that she reserved specifically for church. “That’s a damn shame they got them kids out here like that.” She’d say, but from the backseat Patience would hear her rummaging around at the bottom of her purse, and when a child approached their car, she would always drop something in with a sweet as sugar smile and ask them to promise her that they would be safe out there.

The end of that strip marked the end of what her classmates referred to affectionately as the hood, transitioning into the slightly wealthier county of Saint Louis. The sidewalks gradually became cleaner and the sides of the buildings, although still old, were rarely defaced with graffiti. The stop signs were all still there, and people adhered to them rather than simply blowing past. This was where her grandmother lived along with most of the other older black folks who worked their entire lives to get out of the city but either couldn’t afford to go to another state, didn’t want to, or a mixture of the two. Their yards were wide, green, the streets safe for the grandkids to play double dutch in, but they still sat by the window to watch just in case. On hotter days, they could still be seen camped out on their porches, and if there was ever a lick of trouble, they dealt with it themselves until they couldn’t, at which point they had their kids deal with it rather than ever contact the police.

Right there on the lawn, her granny would fawn over whichever flowery dress Patience’s mother had shoved her into and the shoes that usually didn’t match, her dark eyes glimmering behind the thick lenses of her glasses. She’d tell her how well she behaved at church even if it wasn’t true, tapping the end of her nose with her finger.

“Can you give your granny a smile? I just love it when my babies smile.” And it didn’t matter what kind of mood she was in, though it was usually a bad one after church; her granny always got a wide smile and in return, Patience got a can of Pepsi when her mother wasn’t looking.

For hours, she’d move about the kitchen in a frenzy, chopping, frying, sifting, kneading. Her grandmother never had to consult a cookbook, and she didn’t trust the macaroni and cheese of any woman that did; the recipes were stored within each of her fingertips, her instincts the only units of measurement she needed. Patience was the only one allowed in the kitchen when she cooked.

“Don’t ever let no man watch you cook. They see what goes into a meal, all of a sudden they don’t like this seasoning or that kind of meat, whole time they don’t know they own mama fixed them the same thing, been eating it they whole life. Tuh.” She often said, brandishing a wooden spoon that she used to swat at her brother and father if either of them got too bold.

“Then how come mama ain’t allowed in either? Why she can’t help?” A younger, naive Patience would ask.

There seemed to always be so much work, too much for a set of hands with crooked fingertips and ones that were too small and clumsy to hold any cutlery; her grandmother would just hum at her and act as if she hadn’t spoken at all.

Gospel serenaded them from the speakers in the living room, accompanied often by the sound of sizzling chicken, broken only to shoo her father out if he tried to creep in early. No one dared to change the record even when the songs began to repeat; they were as integral to the process as the food itself, allowing her granny peace as she hummed along. By the time she was ten, Patience knew Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Gospel Train album better than she knew her multiplication tables.

“Turn that up,” She’d call to her father if she was in a good mood, her tone rising and falling with in unison with the song. “Ya’ll generation don’t know nothin ‘bout no good music no more, that’s fo’ damn sho’.” She didn’t know if the comment was directed towards her daddy or her, but when she delivered a slice of sweet potato pie straight out of the oven to her for her good behavior, it didn’t really matter. If she was in less than a adequate mood for one reason or the other, it wouldn’t take her long to become annoyed by Patience’s constant staring and she’d break the cycle to swat at her.

“Get out from underneath my feet, chile,” She’d snap, making for the white telephone cord that she kept wound up on the fridge if Patience moved a little too slow for her liking. As far as Patience knew, it’d never been connected to a phone, and it remained long after her grandmother’s landline was ripped out of the wall.

This was how she preferred to remember her; comforting, wise, and vaguely threatening. Before all of the small bad things snowballed into the worst thing.

“How come my granny ain’t here?” She asked Owl on one of those Sundays, breaking the silence they’d been cultivating for the entirety of the morning. “Didn’t you say this was Heaven?”

He rolled his head to the side and stared at her, bemused. “Well, if she died years ago, it’s possible that she, you know, passed on. I told you there are levels to this thing. You make peace with your death, you leave this level. It’s that simple.” He paused, leaning back until his weight rested on his arms. “Most people who die of natural causes don’t really stay here for that long. Ain’t much to make peace with.” He paused, leaning back until his weight rested on his arms.

God sighed, and a gentle, warm breeze swept through the street.

Pastor Rolland often spoke of the dead, promising his flock that their loved ones who passed on were not gone, but in fact watched over the living in His stead, guiding them through the hardships of life with a gentle hand. She needed nothing more than for him to be wrong and for Owl to be right; she hoped that wherever she was in Heaven that allowed her to shadow the living, that her grandmother had moved on, if only so that she wouldn’t have had to watch all the mistakes she’d made, how she’d spent her last moments on Earth.

Her grandmother’s name was Loretta.

It was one of those names that you couldn’t imagine a baby having, improbable that they just walked out of the womb as a grown woman with a family depending on them and reminding you to wash behind yo’ ears and between yo’ legs. It was a name that was synonymous with matriarchy and earthly wisdom; a Loretta could give you seven different uses for the old bacon grease that she kept on her stove in a small pot, and in the same breath she could settle a dispute between feuding sisters with twenty minutes on the clock and table with some firmness left in it.

Her mother had done all that she could to turn her kitchen into a place of distress, but the doorway of her granny’s kitchen was one that opened up into a whole new universe, one where the constrictions of age melted away and she was just Patience, a young woman that she could speak candidly to, and although she was never allowed to refer to her as such, her grandmother was just Loretta.

It was there that she got it into her head that she was invincible in the mornings after her father hastily dropped her off, the sleep still thick in her eyes as she prepared breakfast, laying strips of bacon onto a sizzling pan. Boiling oil sprang out of the pan and latched onto her loose skin, leaving a rose-colored spot behind that she barely acknowledged at all. This belief was only solidified when she decided it was time for Patience to learn to cook her own bacon. When the hot oil kissed her skin, there was no convincing Patience that she wasn’t going to perish right then and there. She’d slapped the spot lightly and sent her back to the stove, claiming, falsely, that Patience was sure of, that she wouldn’t die from it.

When it was decided that Patience would be going to Noorwood elementary rather than Eureka as her father before her had, she’d sat Patience down at that kitchen table in front of a stack of pancakes, slapping her hand away when she reached for a fork. Her warm hands rested on her shoulders, and she as pushed her face close to hers, Patience could pick up a faint hint of the perfume she wore over the smell of her kitchen. It was still somehow too much, the artificial lilac scent coating her tongue just enough to be unpleasant.

“Don’t let nobody ever call you no nigger. You are a young, beautiful, black girl and those are two different things. And if anybody do, you let me know and yo’ grandma gon’ take care of them, you hear me? God don’t like ugly, and that is a damn ugly word..”

As a child, Patience was more concerned with the fact that she had cursed more than anything else; that word held no meaning to her yet, but from the hard look in her eyes she could see that it meant nothing good. There were some questions that just tasted wrong in your mouth and so you knew not to ask them. What that word meant was clearly one of them, so rather than asking, she simply nodded and instead inquired about strawberry syrup.

Later, over sweet potatoes, she gave Patience her first lessons on men after her friendship with Qway began to flourish whilst scrubbing them in a pot of murky water. Her job was to peel away the skin, but the edge of the knife that seemed to be as long as her forearm frightened Patience enough that she hesitated to apply it to the potatoes at all as if it were her own flesh she was cutting into.

“Don’t act scared of it now, it ain’t gon’ bite.” Her hands enveloped Patience’s smaller ones, showing her where to place her thumb to maintain control of the knife. “You don’t wanna cut too deep now, but you ain’t gotta be cute about it. Just deep enough to take off a little meat, just like that, baby.”

She set about peeling her own potatoes across from her, creating a pile of discarded skins before Patience even finished a single one.

“So I see you got yo’self a little boyfriend,” She started, and if asked, Patience would’ve been unable to justify the immediate embarrassment she felt.

“No, I don’t,” She mumbled, sinking lower into her seat.

“Girl, I got eyes. I see how you be actin’ with that boy at church. And sit up when you speak to me.” Patience wondered what her rheumy eyes saw that hers didn’t as she hoisted herself up from the table, turning the heat on the stove lower as the water began to bubble. “Let me tell you something about men, baby; they ain’t worth the paper they printed on. I love yo’ daddy more than my own life, but he still a man. He his daddy’s son, and if that man wasn’t a test sent by God then I don’t know what is. He gon’ slip up and you just gon’ have to forgive him, okay? That go for any man you think is worth putting time into. But you also got to know when you done spent enough time.”

She might as well have been speaking another language.

Patience’s grandfather was a man of vapor. He’d disappeared before the smell of him could sink into her skin, before it could permeate the couch in the living room and stick to the walls, and so his memory slipped between her fists like water anytime she tried to grasp it. He had never been given a name, and the older that Patience got, the more she realized this was because her grandmother was positive that if she spoke his name, he would materialize out of thin air, given solid shape from the ice in her tone.

In the periods when she and Owl traveled their separate strands of Heavens, Patience filled the emptiness with her curiosity; what would her grandmother have thought of Darius? Which part of that advice would have applied to him? She’d fed her wealth of knowledge to her with the hope that she’d pass it on to her own daughter, and to her granddaughter after that. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn’t help feeling as though she had allowed that wealth to go to waste.

Next Chapter: 22