Bunny knows more about Pearl than most. Bunny understands that Covey’s mother wasn’t just her employer. Mathilda had become her friend and Pearl tried to take care of Covey after her mother left but it wasn’t enough. She watched Covey grow from a bighearted little rascal to a tough and driven young woman, knowing that underneath the girl’s bravado was a well of dejection as deep as the sea.
Bunny comes to visit whenever she passes through this part of Florida. Bunny is a grandmother now. Hard to believe it, even though Pearl herself is a great-grandmother. It’s just that the children will always be children, no matter how old they get. Bunny must be seventy-three years old, now, maybe seventy-four, and she’s still doing her crazy swimming. All those years ago, her coach told people Bunny would be a champion someday and, sure enough, look at her now.
Over the years, Pearl has seen Bunny on the television and even on her cellphone. She remembers watching on the television when they named a cove back home after Bunny. Seeing the pictures of Bunny’s seaside ceremony on the Internet left Pearl feeling proud of Bunny and sad at the same time. Covey should have been alive to see that, too.
There’s Bunny now, getting out of a car at the bottom of Pearl’s driveway. Three other people are getting out of the car with her, a man and two women. Pearl nearly has a heart attack when she gets a good look at them. She only needs ten more seconds to be certain of what she is seeing, to understand that something impossible has happened, something marvelous, praise God. Bunny told her she’d be bringing some people with her but Pearl would never have guessed. What a story Bunny is telling her now. What a story.
Pearl is standing in her backyard, flanked by Covey’s children, and trying to act normal-like. She stands at the edge of the canal, pointing out the mangrove and the birds and fish. Why is it, Pearl jokes, that the only fish you can ever see in there, the ones who jump all the way out of the brackish water and flip themselves back in, are the homely-looking ones, so quick to show themselves off?
Covey’s children all laugh, low, bubbly laughs, just like Mister Lin. Imagine that.
Covey’s son and one of the daughters look like Gibbs, though the girl has Mister Lin’s complexion. But it is the other child, the oldest, that Pearl can’t stop looking at. This white woman is Covey through and through, down to the way she shows all her teeth when she tips her head back and smiles. To think that all these years, Covey was alive and raising a family with Gibbs.
After Gibbs Grant went to England and never came back, people took to saying that maybe he’d become too big for his britches, couldn’t be bothered to stay in touch with his own uncle. Or maybe something had happened to him, Pearl thought. But, no, all this time, Gibbs was with Covey in California. The Lord works in strange ways, indeed.
If only, Pearl thinks. If only Mathilda could see this. Her daughter’s children. Which makes Pearl wonder for the millionth time, whatever happened to Mathilda? Another person who had simply disappeared. That, too, is part of Pearl’s untold story, how Mathilda managed to run away from home. She used part of the black cake money she’d saved up, and left the rest of her share to Pearl for Covey. Mister Lin had no idea how much a woman could make baking a proper cake for a wedding. He never did take women’s kitchen work too seriously. Which was a good thing. Otherwise, he might have found the money and gambled it all away.
Lin
By the time he reached retirement age, Johnny “Lin” Lyncook was a wealthy man. He had moved to a suburb of Miami where he knew folks from the island, earned a chunk of cash on the black market, invested his profits in stocks and bonds, and liquidated his gains before the 2008 crisis. He learned to stay away from everything else. No casinos, no poker, no cockfights, no sports. The betting had already cost him too much. Two wives and his only daughter, his one true regret.
Lin’s newfound wealth proved very useful. He acquired a third wife and her two young children, produced with other men but welcomed into his home. He sent the boys to pricey universities and watched with satisfaction as his investment paid off. The boys have their own homes and families now, and their children call him Papa Lin, to distinguish him from Papa Shaw, their mother’s dad.
Lin was also in the position to pay a private investigator to locate his daughter Covey, who was reported to have been killed in a train accident in England years before but who, Lin learned, was actually alive and living in California. There was a photograph. It showed Lin’s daughter with Gilbert Grant who, like Covey, had changed his name and left his past behind.