'Let us bow our heads in prayer.' Hands outstretched, the minister shepherds the congregation. 'Lord, into your care, we commend your humble servant Charles Bandanny.'
It's been a while since I've heard my maiden name out loud. Said out loud, it comes across distantly familiar, like the slow recognition of waves gently lapping on a beach.
David, still looking ahead, gives my hand a squeeze. Sasha, on the right of him, does as her father does. On my left, Grace stares at me.
'As it is written in Genesis 3:19,' The minister continues, 'By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground for out of it you were taken; for you are dust...' A newly appointed aunt in the pew behind us, fake blubbers the way my father's old Nissan Datsun would when it didn't want to go. She's newly appointed because until just before the funeral, I'd not heard of her. I inhaled sharply at the newcome relative because where was she in my childhood years?
'Are you okay, mom?' Grace asks, her face sad even with those bunny eyes.
'Yes, baby.' I give her a loving look, brush her right cheek and give her a squeeze before closing my eyes.
The minister continues in his prayer but it's Aunty Shelly's running commentary on my father, I'm listening to. 'Yes, Lawd, you know,' Aunty Shelly preaches in that thick Jamaican accent of hers. 'Him waited all his life for that good for nuttin wife of his to come back. What a waste of a good man.'
That wife was my mother. A woman I don't in any way know. She'd upped sticks and left for the sights and the sounds of a big city in America. Well, that's how the story wound down to me. What really happened was my mother met an American here on the beach. Promises of brighter lights, something different, she left. For years, I'd assumed she was in Florida or New York; at least, that's where many of us go. I'd been navigating the turbulence of adolescence when I learned the bright lights and the big city my mother left for was in the state of Minnesota, a big chill.
I'd often asked myself why? Was I too much? Was I not enough? Was I not deserving of a mother too? Did she not care what happened to me? How I ate? How I slept? All those years and not a call. No card, no letter or even a peekabo. With time I stopped puzzling myself with those questions. With time, I forgot.
I vowed I'd never do that. Leave Jamaica, leave home. And for a foreign man? Absolutely not. Why would I trade the salt of these waves, the rustle of the palm leaves, the scent of ackee and salt fish frying on a Sunday morning for someplace that could never know my soul the way Jamaica did?
But then, I met David. He's not Jamaican. Yes I know, I know. But he's at least from the Caribbean. Anguilla, to be exact. Softens the blow. Neither of us lives on the islands we were born. So I suppose in a way I did the exact thing my mother did. Except, I at least have not forgotten where I came from. I at least didn't leave any kids behind and I at least looked back in regular checks and sparing visits to my father.
Of the little I know of my mother, Grace's free spirit and adventurousness bear the most similarities. When my father saw Grace for the very first time, he paused in his approach and stared. He didn't pick Grace up, not the way he picked Sasha up, and to this day, that bothered me.
A curious toddler abound with energy when my mother left, it was Aunty Shelly who helped raise me. She isn't my aunt either, well, not by blood because like me, my mother is an only child and my father has only brothers. Auntie Shelly has been our neighbour for all these years. The woman who helped look after me. Who I felt certain held a flame for my father at some point. Or maybe it was pity she felt for him. But she was the woman who taught me to comb my thick afro, the woman whose oldest daughter's hand-me-down clothes I wore, the woman...
'And though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death..' The minister continues.
Otherwise, I was a tomboy climbing coconut trees, playing cricket and rolling hooks with the boys down the dust road. I learned fast, I had to, putting me ahead of my years. I did all the things kids with mothers didn't do. Make breakfasts, pack school lunches, cook full-on Saturday soups and Sunday dinners of baked chicken, rice and peas, macaroni pie and coleslaw. Wash, iron, clean. I was nine when bare hands, I gutted my first fish for dinner. Awful at first but I got over the ghoul of it. My daughters on the other hand are yet to see the inside of any fish. Except maybe in a Biology class or that David Attenborough documentary which, let’s be honest, they only watched for the penguins. Peas came frozen in a bag or preserved in a tin. Peanuts came salted and roasted in a resealable four hundred-and-fifteen-gram KP bag. And mangoes? Oh, well those came in nice bite-sized chunks from a mixed recyclable pot off M&S's shelves because, that's the only mango my Sasha trusts.
A few days before, Aunty Shelly gave them roasted peanuts still in their shells; neither of my daughters knew what they were about. They looked at me, and in turn, so did Aunty Shelly, and I must admit I felt the shame of my parenting.
'Lawd Livie.'
'Aunty Shelly.'
'Why dem kids of yours don't know how to shell out peanuts?'
'Aunty Shelly...' I started but it wasn't a real question. Before I'd finished, she'd sat the girls at the kitchen table (still in the same position it was from over 20 years ago) and showed them how to. Sasha, she shelled two and was done. Grace, she sat with Aunt Shelly's granddaughter and between the two of them, shelled and ate the paper bag of roasted peanuts. The mess they made but something was satisfying, nostalgic watching them at it.
'Yes Lawd, you know he was a good man. You only have to look at his one and only daughter and dem two beautiful grandkids. But why you had to make my little Gracie in the spitting image of that good-for-nuttin' wife of his, I'd never know.'
My husband squeezed my hand again and I kept my eyes sealed and my chin to my chest.
'In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.' The minister finished.
'Amen.' The congregation chorussed.
'Let us all stand.'
But I, I couldn't lift my head out of that prayer.
