Free The Vanishing Half: A Novel by Brit Bennett

halfway normal. As far as he was concerned, both were a little crazy, Desiree perhaps the nuttiest of all. Playing white to get ahead was just good sense. But marrying a dark man? Carrying his blueblack child? Desiree Vignes had courted the type of trouble that would never leave.
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    A T L OU ’ S E GG H OUSE , Desiree Vignes learned how to balance plates of scrambled eggs and bacon and toast. Grits swirled with butter, thick pancakes sopping with syrup. She learned how to navigate around tiny tables, turn a sharp corner without losing a coffee cup, memorize orders. She learned quickly because when she applied for the job, she told Lou that she’d waited tables for three years.
    “Three years, you say?” he asked on her first morning, when she struggled to take down an order.
    “A long while ago, but yes,” she said, smiling, “back in New Orleans.” Other times, she told him she’d waitressed in D.C. She lost track of her lies, and even though Lou noticed, he never confronted her about it. He didn’t believe in accusing ladies of lying, and besides, he knew that Desiree needed work, even if she was too proud to admit it herself. Imagine that—the founder’s great-great-great-granddaughter waiting tables, not for white folks either but right in Mallard. Whoever thought they’d live to see the day? The Decuirs had lived free for generations, then Adele married a Vignes boy; now her daughter was serving coffee to refinery men and bringing pecan pie to farm boys. Once you mixed with common blood, you were common forever.
    “She not much of a waitress,” Lou told the line cook. “But she don’t hurt much.”
    If he were honest, he’d admit that hiring Desiree had, in fact, boosted business. Old schoolmates, seized by curiosity, sat at the counter sipping coffee they ordinarily may have gone without. Even those too young to remember her, teenagers now, crowded in the back booths, whispering behind her back with the fervor of those witnessing the casual appearance of a minor celebrity. She noticed, of course she did. Still, each morning, she took a deep breath, tied her apron, fixed her face into a smile. She thought of her daughter and swallowed her humiliation. She bit her tongue even during her first week, when she’d stepped out of the kitchen to find Early Jones sitting at the counter. For a moment, she faltered, fingering her apron. She would draw more attention to herself by not serving him. Head down then, and get on with it.
    He was wearing that leather jacket again, scratching at his beard as she slid over a coffee cup. A worn bag sat on an empty stool beside him. She reached over with the pot of coffee but he covered the cup with his hand.
    “That fella that done that to you,” he said. “He know where your mama stay?”
    Her bruise had faded to a sick yellow by then, but still, she gingerly touched it.
    “No,” she said.
    “She ever sent you a letter or nothin?”
    “We wasn’t in touch.”
    “Good.” He slid his finger inside the smooth handle of his empty cup. “What about your sister?”
    “What about her?”
    “When’s the last time you heard from her?”
    She scoffed. “Thirteen years.”
    “Well, what happened to her?” he said.
    “She took a job,” she said. It all sounded so simple when she said it aloud, and of course, it had started that way. Stella needed to find a new job, so she’d responded to a listing in the newspaper for secretarial work in an office inside the Maison Blanche building. An office like that would never hire a colored girl, but they needed the money, living in the city and all, and why should the twins starve because Stella, perfectly capable of typing, became unfit as soon as anyone learned that she was colored? It wasn’t lying, she told Stella. How was it her fault if they thought she was white when they hired her? What sense did it make to correct them now?
    A good job for Stella, then a good job for her, that was the plan. So Stella would