Free Eddie Signwriter by Adam Schwartzman Page B

momentarily surprised, but not alarmed, though he might have been. Something told him she would not turn him in for sneaking out of the school.
    He said, “Good morning, Nana Oforiwaa,” and that he expected he was not.
    She didn’t say anything.
    He asked her what brought her there.
    “Me? I’m free to come and go as I please. No morning church unless I want, no ten a.m. homework, for instance.”
    “That is true,” he said. “I should go back,” turning and looking toward the town.
    “Not because of me,” she said.
    He said, “All the same.”
    “I can take you in my car,” she said. “My driver is parked at the Methodist church.”
    “All right. Thank you,” he told her.
    “It is my pleasure, Edward,” she said as they started to walk up the hill to the church. “Tell me where you want to go.”
    TO GET CELESTE took patience.
    Just like Nana Oforiwaa said it would.
    “Anyone can learn to wait,” she said. “The courage you must find yourself.” This was her idea. The story that protected him and Nana Oforiwaa—that she would teach him how to wait; everything else he’d do himself.
    “You have to be brave,” she said.
    He knew, he said, and that he’d try.
    She said, “Right now in your life you only have to want things badly enough to get them.”
    These were snatched conversations, exchanges that happened in between—between other conversations, between other people coming and leaving, in brief moments of privacy—at least at first.
    She told him, “The things you want are easy. Everyone gets them in the end, even if it doesn’t seem that way to you.
    “You’ll see,” she said, and that probably he needed to get some of the things in life that were easy before he learned to want the things he couldn’t have.
    “Maybe,” he said, “maybe that’s right,” because he felt she wanted him to agree with her, that she had a need for that. But really he wondered what she meant by this, because it seemed to him that Nana Oforiwaa generally did get what she wanted, and if she wanted that he’d have Celeste, then that is what he’d have.
    Which in the end is how it was.
    As well as for what Nana Oforiwaa wanted on her own account. The time she asked he spend with her. Keeping her informed, she said. That was how it started. As a condition for her help. Not the details at first. Although later, the details too. About where he went with her niece, and what he was doing, and what it was like, and where he might be at such and such a time.
    And later other things, for which he didn’t readily have proper words, and felt less easy sharing. But Nana Oforiwaa said she could always ask her niece. Which in fact was what she ought to do, she said, that she had a responsibility. Women spoke together of such things. And he knew that would mean telling—about what she already knew, and how; and about what he gave Nana Oforiwaa—and not unwillingly, Nana Oforiwaa reminded him, he was not unwilling in these things, and he had to agree.
    No, it wouldn’t be necessary to tell Celeste, he said to her, it wasn’t necessary that Celeste know anything. In addition to which Nana Oforiwaa had a way of putting him at ease. Through her approval of him, through her affection. She inspired trust, confidence. And he was grateful to her.
    As Nana Oforiwaa was grateful for him too. He was her consolation, she would say.
    For what?
    She wouldn’t elaborate, would just repeat herself and smile sadly.
    Some things Nana Oforiwaa hinted at, the least important things.
    “She is so much like her mother,” Nana Oforiwaa would say bitterly of her niece in unguarded moments.
    “How?” he tried to discover.
    But it was not a topic she would broach.
    “No, Edward,” she said, “we do not talk about that. We do not.”
    Celeste herself knew nothing of her mother that was not from Nana Oforiwaa. Her mother had died in childbirth.
    And Celeste’s father, Nana Oforiwaa once told him, confidingly, but in a way that