YESTERDAY MOURNING

A woman attempts to move beyond her anger at her dying father in Bryant’s novel.

Sixteen years ago, Yvette’s mother died. Then her father, a pastor, quickly dropped out of her life to be with his new wife and stepdaughter. Unlike her sister Zoe, Yvette has never fully gotten over either of those losses, even as she’s grown to be a successful woman, wife, and mother. Now Yvette is about to turn 42—the age her mother was when she died—and mortality has been creeping into her thoughts. So have her feelings about her father, which she claims to experience less as pain than as a sort of emptiness. “It somehow bypasses the emotions that accompany caring and instead migrates to not having any feeling at all,” she thinks. “It settles into a level of indifference unmatched by any spite or unwavering ill will.” On a routine trip to her Georgia hometown to visit Zoe, Yvette receives a surprise: Zoe has conspired to arrange a meeting with Vera, the stepdaughter from their father’s second marriage. Though Yvette and Vera are similar in many respects—Vera also has a husband and daughter—they have radically different understandings of their father. To Vera, the Pastor (as she calls him) is a loving, dependable, and loyal man, and she can’t understand why Yvette would shut him out of her life. Yvette feels betrayed by the setup; even after learning that the Pastor has been diagnosed with cancer, she does not want anything to do with him or his new family. When everyone in her life encourages her to make amends, Yvette attempts to let go of her long-held animosity—unsuccessfully, for the most part. But could Vera hold the key to understanding the distance between Yvette and her father, a secret from years ago that, if brought to light, might change Yvette’s understanding of their strained relationship?

Bryant alternates between Yvette’s and Vera’s points of view over the course of the novel, revealing how the Pastor’s decisions have shaped their respective lives. Even for Vera, who enjoyed the love of living and happily married parents, the irregularity of the Pastor’s two estranged daughters forms a painful wrinkle in her understanding of her otherwise-functional family. Here, Bryant allows Vera to share her side of the story, in typically confessional prose: “It was years before I was privy to the whole story, but in short, his wife had died and his daughters had abandoned him. Based on the whispered conversations I’d overheard, I was sure the decision was driven by his daughter Yvette’s selfishness. If only she’d known.” The novel is brief at under 150 pages, but the plot proceeds slowly, providing Yvette and Vera with little to do aside from stewing in their respective fears and resentments. (Both have highly supportive husbands, which mostly keeps their inner pain from manifesting as real-life drama.) Their emotions are certainly understandable, but the story’s attempt to resolve them feels slightly contrived and simplistic. Some readers will no doubt tear up at the final reveal, while others may wish for a bit more messiness.

A slim, earnest novel about the ways in which parents can hurt us for life.