My Baby Girl
On the day that Bert Bennett was laid to rest, Benny’s left arm was in a sling against her bruised ribs and one of her eyes was swollen shut. A bandage covered half of her face. Bicycle accident, she’d told the driver who picked her up at the airport the day before. Ah, he said in that way that service professionals do.
The same driver picked her up at the hotel before the funeral. He took the seatbelt and helped Benny pull it into position. It was already heating up outside but Benny rolled down the window, breathing in the smell of sun-baked sidewalks and jasmine flowers and tilled soil and a whiff of salt on the breeze coming in from the west. The smell of home.
The cemetery went back to the time when Los Angeles had fewer than thirty thousand people and the county was more farmland than not. It had been SoCal’s first such facility, with broad, grassy lawns that called to mind the kind of place where you might have laid out a picnic blanket. It made Benny think of those barbecues her parents used to organize in the park near the house. She would help her dad attach balloons to the trees with pieces of paper that read Bennett Bash and they’d be out there with a bunch of other families until the sun went down.
Benny could imagine slipping off her shoes now and strolling barefoot across the grass until she found her father’s burial site. But she would not be getting out of the car today. She touched her hand to the wound on her cheek.
She asked the driver to follow the road through the grounds until she saw the crowd of bowed heads, all shades of skin, all sizes of black and navy suits and dresses. Her father had been a popular man, a successful man, a pillar of the black community. He’d been known as a bridge builder, a man of tolerance, but the last time Benny saw him, two years earlier, her father had refused to listen.
Her parents had always taught her that the greater your capacity to love, the better you could be as a person. But when Benny tried to remind them of this principle, her father put up a wall, stood up, and walked out on her. That quickly, her daddy had turned his back on her. And Benny never did see her father again.
Benny caught sight of her brother as the crowd began to break up. He was walking toward a line of parked cars, his arm around their mother, his head lowered toward hers. Ma was wearing a sunny, fluttery dress, her father’s favorite. The color made Benny smile, even as the tears slid down her face.
Benny watched her brother open a car door for their mother, watched him keep his hand on her arm until she had settled onto the seat. Byron used to be that protective of Benny, too.
“That’s fine,” Benny told the driver. “We can leave now.” As the car skirted the cemetery plot, Benny consoled herself with the thought that her father never would have wanted to see her in this state. They hadn’t spoken for two years, and yet she was certain that if she’d told her dad what had happened to her just a few days before, he would have folded his arms around Benny the way he used to when she was little, he would have rested his chin against her hair and murmured, My baby girl.
Etta Pringle
Etta Pringle looked down at the program in her hand. Meet Etta Pringle, Endurance Swimmer and Motivational Speaker. She was traveling so much right now, she made sure to double-check the date and location before speaking into a microphone. February 27, 2018, Anaheim, California.
Etta smiled as the emcee introduced her as a small-island girl who had grown up to conquer the world. He spoke of how she had swum Catalina and the English Channel and circled the island of Manhattan. Of how she had braved some of the colder swims on the planet.
Etta always spoke openly to her audiences about the challenges she had faced, but there was one thing that she could never tell them, that wherever she went, Etta “Bunny” Pringle still thought of her dear friend Covey Lyncook. And sometimes she thought she saw her.
Losing someone could have that kind of power over you.
After Covey’s death, Bunny had been lucky to fall in love again, this time with someone who felt the same way. She and Patsy had raised her son and Patsy’s baby brother in the UK and watched them grow up to become scholars and parents. Patsy had become one of the first black women to join Scotland Yard. And through it all, the seas that had tested Bunny’s resolve each year had, ultimately, been good to her. Now, at seventy, Bunny had spent more years of her life swimming without Covey than with her, but she still couldn’t face the waves, or her fears, without imagining her friend a few strokes ahead of her.
And now, Bunny saw someone who made her think of Covey. When Bunny was done speaking and the lights had come up for audience questions, she took a good look at a woman sitting on the aisle, gazing up at her as Covey might have done. Bunny looked away, then back in that direction and narrowed her eyes. Bunny, who had put her body through punishing routines for six decades, who was stronger than most people half her age, didn’t think her legs could support the shock of what she thought she was seeing, but they did.