Aftermath Read online

  Had Dad swindled people in town? Gotten a married woman pregnant? Maybe killed someone? Horrible possibilities swirled like the shaved ice in my glass.

  “Tha’s good, tha’s good. I’d mish you.” He tried to lift his drink but it—or something inside him—seemed too heavy and he merely rotated the glass inside a ring of condensation. “I ain’t had a friend in a long time,” he said. I stayed quiet, but I guess he saw the question in my expression and plowed on. “Ain’t seen the Mercer girl in months. She won’t answer my tests…texts-s-s…my calls, nuthin’. Even before that, she wasn’t never really a friend. Somebody to go out with, yeah. Somebody to stay in with—” he appeared to blush, his gaze lowering to his glass again “—but not somebody I could really, like, talk to, y’know?”

  I placed my hand over his and said, “I know. You just described my love life since I was fifteen.”

  CHAPTER 7

  I parked Tim’s car in front of his grandmother’s home, killed the engine, and released my seat belt. Moonlight made the lumber of the new porch gleam like white gold.

  During the short drive, I’d made the mistake of turning up the heater for his comfort, and it finished the job the margaritas had started: he was dead to the world. “Tim? Timothy?” I shook his shoulder and spoke louder. “We’re at your grandmother’s. Come on, you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of her, right?”

  He didn’t respond other than to turn his back to me. I had visions of having to drag all six feet, two inches of him out of the car, up the stairs, and into the house. Even as skinny as he was, I didn’t think I could manage it. I hoped I wouldn’t have to. One positive about being in a lot of relationships was that I had accumulated all sorts of experiences, including dealing with drunks.

  I’d taken mixed martial arts classes for years at a YMCA in Manhattan and could think of about twenty-five ways to get Tim’s attention. Too bad a number of them would’ve made him vomit. On the plus side, he had taken a bathroom break before we left the restaurant, so some options were wide open to me.

  I said, “Sorry about this,” and jabbed four stiff fingers into his left kidney.

  Tim jerked upright while he sucked in a deep breath. His left arm slid back to cover his wounded side. He gaped at me as if I were something from a nightmare.

  “You’re thinking, ‘Who’s this crazy bitch and what the hell did she do to me?’” I spread my hands. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I also don’t want you to shame yourself in front of Grandma.”

  He whined, “Why’d you have to poke me so damn hard?”

  Matching his tone, I replied, “Why’d you have to drink so damn much?”

  “Lemme sleep it off in here.” He smiled and nodded at that irrefutable logic, as if he’d just scored a key point with a judge, and closed his eyes again. His left arm continued to guard his side from further assault. Of course, that exposed his entire front and gave me lots of choices.

  I settled for a sharp elbow to his ribs.

  Tim grunted and covered the spot with his right hand. He looked fearful now: he had no way to protect himself from a third blow. I curled my left fist into what my instructor had called a “cobra strike” and slowly drew back my arm.

  He blurted, “Shit, all right, okay. I’m awake for fuck’s sake.”

  “I never heard you swear before.” I lowered my fist. “I’m getting all kinds of good stuff on you. Need help getting out?”

  “You mean like a kick in the ass? It’s about the only thing you ain’t done.”

  Actually, he’d gotten off easy, but now I felt sorry for him. I’d had my share of bleary nights. My friends claimed I was a nasty drunk: the cussing, kicking, hair-pulling kind. Lots of pent-up anger, apparently. Tim was of the sleepy variety—bless his heart, as Mom would’ve said. Before I exited the car, I jabbed the seat belt release near his hip, causing him to flinch away in panic.

  Although the dashboard thermometer had shown thirty-five degrees, and I only had my business suit for warmth, the air didn’t feel that cold. Of course, I was conditioned to far worse winters, and I’d drunk my share of alcoholic insulation as well.

  I took deep breaths of the piney fresh air to clear my head a bit. After opening Tim’s door, I offered my hands. Mercifully, he allowed me to help him to his feet.

  He steadied himself on the door frame and then took a few short, tottering steps. I stayed close by, ready to grab him if he stumbled. Maybe I should’ve put my arm around his waist and helped him more, but I knew how that would look to his neighbors and his grandmother. She probably watched us from behind one of the lace-curtained windows.

  Tim gripped a handrail and pulled himself up one porch step at a time. It worked for two stairs, but then I needed to steady him with both hands so he didn’t topple backward. Together, we made it up to the planks that led to the maple-stained front door, which also looked newer than the rest of the house.

  It opened as we approached, and a short, squat woman with fluffy white hair and huge glasses shuffled into the moonlight, bundled beneath two sweaters and a hand-stitched quilt draped across her shoulders. Her face crumpled in grief. She said, “My Lord, was there some kind of accident?” Then air hissed through her nose, and fear settled into her elderly features. “What’s that smell?”

  I said, “Tequila, ma’am.” Patting Tim’s back, I asked him, “You good, big guy?”

  “I’m going to bed,” he mumbled. His right hand rubbed his chest and side. “Gotta nurse my wounds.”

  His grandmother looked even sadder after his last remark and glanced down at her hands. They were curled into rigid claws, as if she wanted to punch someone.

  Hoping Tim wouldn’t get a further beating, I asked, “Would you mind if I go in and make sure he gets settled?”

  “Of course. Where are my manners? Please do come.” She led the way into the dark house and snapped up a wall switch with the side of her fist.

  A couple of table lamps lit the small living room. On the yellow walls and on every horizontal surface, faces peered back at me from countless photographs in simple frames. Maybe five generations of an African American family, from an unsmiling, formally dressed couple in sepia to five-by-seven color shots of grinning toddlers and babies.

  Dozens of other pictures showed a short woman in white—a nurse’s uniform—posing with people of various races and ages in medical settings, from modern hospitals to Third World clinics. The woman in the photos seemed to age as I turned clockwise around the room, scanning them, until I looked again at Tim’s grandmother in person. I now realized arthritis had crippled her hands: a nurse who literally couldn’t lift a finger to help her grandson.

  “My name is Janet Wright,” I said. Automatically, I started to put out my hand to shake but then pulled it back, cursing myself.

  “Abby Bladensburg,” she replied with a curt nod. The oversized glasses pressed in her small, wide nose, which twitched again. I wondered if she’d caught a whiff of strawberry-scented tequila from me.

  Tim scuffed toward the back of the house. He bumped an end table, knocking over some frames. I said, “I better help him.”

  Abby only looked at her hands again. I caught up to Tim and held his right arm above the elbow to give him some stability. We walked past a cramped kitchen and the aromas of gingerbread and fried pork chops. That she could overcome her arthritis enough to cook was a minor miracle and probably scary as hell to watch.

  Tim’s bedroom was one of two at the end of the hall. “I’m okay,” he mumbled. “Don’t need you to tuck me in. Or sing me a song. Or beat on me no more.” He snorted, then sat hard on a single bed in the dark and groaned.

  Before he could protest, I untied his shoes and pulled them off his feet. Then I gripped his ankles, lifted his long legs, and swung them onto the mattress. He was a slumped-shouldered silhouette. I asked, “Need help taking off your suit jacket or tie?”
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  “Unh-uh.”

  “I have to borrow your car to get home. I’ll bring it back in the morning. When do you go to work?”

  “Before nine. Lest I’m going to the diner.”

  “I’ll be here at 8:30 and take you to breakfast. Get you some hardboiled eggs, bacon, and sriracha.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned to go, but he added, “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Y’know…not grilling me tonight. The whole pariah thing.”

  I reached out carefully to find his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. Then I left him, closing his bedroom door behind me, and walked back down the hall. I found Abby in the kitchen drinking water from a straw, her fists pressing two sides of a plastic cup to get it close to her mouth.

  “He’s a great guy,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought him home to you that way. It was a long day for him, driving me around, suffering my questions, and I just wanted to take him out to show my thanks.”

  She set down the cup. “Praise Jesus, Timothy’s been good to me. I don’t know why he stays here—it takes a toll, for sure. Can I get you coffee or something else?”

  “No thanks. I better go.”

  “Sit with me a spell.”

  Although I was beat, I thought it might be a rare opportunity to learn some things about my new friend. I had to come at it indirectly, though. My Yankee style of going right to the point would make her clam up. Stifling a yawn, I perched on a rickety wooden chair and said, “In those photos, it looks like you’ve been all over the world. Have you lived here long?”

  “This was the old home place. My mama and daddy lived here, grandma and granddaddy, and the ones that came before them. I moved around a lot, yes, but Graylee always meant coming home.”

  “Was your husband in medicine, too?”

  “A doctor. Graduated from Shaw University, up in Raleigh. It was a calling for us both. Traveling the world, tending to those that God led us to care for.”

  “Was your husband in any of the shots?”

  “He was always taking them. Handsome man but real camera shy.” She pushed out of her chair, knuckles on the tabletop, and led me back to the living room. Her thumbs had enough mobility to clamp two sides of a large, framed wedding photo against her curled fingers and slowly heft the black and white image for me to examine. “This is the only one I have of him.”

  Her husband posed in a tuxedo, a slim mustache curling up above a gentle smile, with Abby beside him, slender and lovely in white lace. I said, “You two made a beautiful couple.”

  She thanked me, replaced the frame with care, and gestured at nearby monochrome photographs of young boys and girls. “Hard life for our children, traveling, so my folks ended up doing the raising, and this became the kids’ home, too. Every time we’d come back, the house would rock with laughter and stories and carrying on until we had to go again. Then, my folks said, it was tears and sniffling for weeks after. The going-away was always hard on everybody.”

  As her gaze roved over the images, I asked, “Why didn’t you go away with your family when they left?”

  Abby kept looking at the pictures, as if searching for something. Finally, she said, “I spent forty years wanting to get back here. Buried my husband at the old AME church up the road, and God told me I done enough healing and could rest at last.” She gestured at the room with a fist. “This is home.”

  Before I could chicken out, I held her gaze and said, “I got the impression from Tim that something happened, something to make your family sort of like outcasts.”

  I held my breath, thinking the question would take us in one of two directions—the big reveal or a polite ejection from her house—but Abby chose a third path. She said, “Something’s always happening in families. Whatever became of your mama?”

  Her question was the perfect way to get me sidetracked. I said, “Cancer got her when she was in her forties. I was nineteen.”

  “Mm-mm-mm, I’m sorry to hear it and sorry for your loss.” Abby lowered herself onto a floral loveseat, so I sat in the matching armchair facing her. “You got Mary Grace’s eyes and nose and cheekbones. She even had the same cowlick at the back of her head. I remember she wore one of those hippie headbands but that hank of hair always managed to poke out in a little flip. Like a smile.”

  I touched the back of my head and felt that rebellious curl. “How’d you know her?”

  “Saw her a few times here in the neighborhood, between our trips. Late sixties, before she married your daddy. I reckon she was in her teens. Used to run a sort of bookmobile out of the trunk and backseat of the fancy car her folks bought her.”

  “She never told me about that.”

  Abby smiled. “She was a pistol. Decked out in those peasant blouses and bell-bottoms, the headband on or a scarf tied up like one.” She swiveled her gaze, searching the photos again. “I wish we took a picture. You should’ve seen her, handing out the paperbacks she and her friends had read, children’s books she’d grown up with, putting in handmade due-date cards as bookmarks. She could talk to anybody: old men, young mothers, little kids. Black, brown, yellow, or red. Always knew the perfect book for everybody.” Abby laughed and tapped her knee with a fist. “I’ll bet her people had no idea what she was up to, hanging out in the ‘colored’ neighborhood.”

  Though I managed to smile at the image, I felt sad—I only could remember the woman who had struggled just to stay afloat, not someone determined to change the world. Wanting to hear more about that side of her, I said, “I think she married my dad just out of high school. You see her much after that?”

  Abby shook her head. “If she still came around, it was when we were away, but I remember folks talking about her, about them. Nowadays, your parents would’ve been what the TV people call a ‘power couple.’ They were from the two richest families in the county. Your daddy started learning their businesses, and I reckon your mama began keeping house.”

  “You’re right—she never went to college. My brother was born the first year they were married.” Before we went too far down the rabbit hole, I needed to get back to my original focus. “I appreciate you telling me all this,” I said, “but what does my mother have to do with your family leaving?”

  “Only that she made a difference back then. It was a small thing, of course, handing out books, but it’s not about the size of the gesture—it’s all about how you make people feel. We mattered to her.”

  I thought about the neighborhood she and Tim lived in and my determination to change things. Following in my mother’s footsteps—who knew? “After Mom got married, something went wrong with them,” I said. I spoke to myself as much as to Abby, as I reasoned through what must’ve happened. “My father probably exerted more control over her than her parents had done. I came along in ’76, and she packed us up and left town in ’81. By then he pretty much owned Graylee and did whatever he wanted. From the little Mom would say, it was clear her parents sided with my dad, most likely because he was running their businesses better than they ever did. They disowned her.”

  Abby stayed quiet, looking at me as I continued to think out loud. I said, “Finally, with my father not hiring people from this street, and backing local politicians who couldn’t care less about your community, it took its toll. Just like with my mom, my brother, and me, your family needed to find opportunities elsewhere, right?”

  She glanced toward a frame on the mantel displaying a family portrait: a black couple in their forties—the man taking after Abby’s husband—together with a lovely late-teen girl and her older brother, Tim. They grinned at us, but my hostess was not smiling. She said, “‘Took its toll’ is mighty right anyway.”

  Obviously, I’d missed something, but I could always revisit that. I returned my focus to my original goal, saying, “It still doesn’t explain why some people treat Tim like a pariah.”

 
“Is that what he told you?” She snorted. “That boy is so melodramatic.”

  I shook my head. “No, I’ve seen it. At the diner some people got up and left as soon as we sat down. It wasn’t about me and who my father was—they were looking at Tim.” Even if he hadn’t passed out already, there was no way he could’ve heard me from the back bedroom, but I still lowered my voice and chose my words carefully. “He’s a great guy, and I want to be his friend, even mentor him if he’ll give me the chance. But I need to know if he’s done anything that, you know, he now regrets.”

  In an instant, her expression changed from amused to stricken, as if I’d slapped her. I added quickly, “So I can help him through it…whatever it was.”

  “Raped a white girl, you mean?” She practically yelled it, eyes flashing behind the huge glasses. I cringed as her volume rose even higher. “Sold drugs? Shot somebody?”

  Her voice reverberated with accusation, and I was guilty as charged. I had considered every stereotype I’d seen on TV and applied each one to Tim, deciding the shoe could fit. Ready to forgive him, of course, but not rejecting any of those scenarios as patently ridiculous and totally offensive. Somewhere along the line, somehow, I’d become a bigot. Abby had cut through all the crap and showed me what I was, though I’d never thought of myself that way. So, it was really my dad I took after, not Mom.

  Abby hissed, “You best be going.”

  Hanging my head, I apologized and left her fuming on the loveseat. Outside, I pulled my suit jacket tight around my shoulders and chest. Even with the heat cranked up in the Hyundai, though, I couldn’t get warm.

  Instead of having answers about Tim’s life, I only had more questions, plus the new feeling that I didn’t deserve to call myself his friend. I drove back through the sad little neighborhood, across the railroad tracks, and past the white-owned homes that were increasingly grand and draped in more and more opulent displays of Christmastime as I approached town. I turned onto Main Street. No one was outdoors, not even driving around. The phrase “I own the road” slipped into my mind before I realized it was pretty much true. A bitter taste at the back of my throat accompanied the knowledge.