Half an Inch of Water: Stories

by Percival Everett

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “I knew you would find my Davy. Davy, my Davy.” Roberta Cloud reached out her hand. She was so weak that I thought I could feel her life slipping away.

  I stepped close and took the old woman’s hand. It felt like a baby bird. Her bones felt like nothing. I said nothing.

  “Davy, my Davy,” she whispered. “I’ve missed you so much. I love you.”

  I didn’t make a sound. I rubbed the back of her little hand with my thumb.

  “It’s been too long,” Roberta Cloud said. She said that several times until her voice just trailed off.

  I watched her face. I felt her leave. I didn’t even hear her last breath. She was just gone.

  One of the women came in and I looked up at her. She left and I heard her tell the others that Roberta Cloud was no more. There was no crying. I let go of her hand and stood up. She looked peaceful. I toyed with the idea that I was partly responsible for that. I also felt terrible that I had lied to her. I told myself it was not exactly a lie. I had simply let her assume something. But of course I had lied.

  I left the room and joined the others in the kitchen.

  “So, who are you?” one of the women asked.

  “Ms. Cloud asked me to come here and then asked me to find her son, her eighty-two-year-old son. I couldn’t find him.”

  “That’s because he died when he was a boy,” the man said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He would have been my great-uncle, I think,” one of the women said. “Granduncle?”

  I looked back at the bedroom.

  “What did she say to you?” the woman from the door asked.

  “She thought I was Davy,” I said.

  “And so you were,” the man said. “So you were.”

  PERCIVAL EVERETT is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of more than twenty books, including Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Assumption, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, The Water Cure, Wounded, Erasure, and Glyph.

  The text of Half an Inch of Water is set in Adobe Caslon Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.