the archway, I could have been sitting in my childhood home in Beverly, on the south side of Chicago. Beverly was shade trees, and PTA bake sales, and morning papers lying on the porch. Our tiny brick bungalow was my Green Gables, my Ponderosa, my starship
I loved that house, felt loved and protected in it. I sensed those same feelings clinging to this place.
Slidell pulled out his hanky and mopped his face.
“Hope the old man scores the air-conditioned bedroom.” Spoken through one side of his mouth. “With six kids, I suppose he’d be lucky just to score a bedroom.”
I ignored him.
Heat magnified the smells inside the tiny house. Onions. Cooking oil. Wood polish. Whatever was used to scrub the linoleum.
Who scrubbed it? I wondered. Tamela? Geneva? Banks himself?
I studied the black Jesus. Same robe, same thorny crown, same open palms. Only the Afro and skin tones differed from the one that had hung over my mother’s bed.
Slidell sighed audibly, hooked his collar with a finger, and pulled it from his neck.
I looked at the linoleum. A pebble pattern, gray and white.
Like the bones and ash from the woodstove.
At that moment a door opened. A gospel group singing “Going On in the Name of the Lord.” The swish of padded soles on linoleum.
Gideon Banks looked smaller than I remembered, all bone and sinew. That was wrong, somehow. Backward. He should have seemed larger in his own space. King of the realm. Paterfamilias. Was my recall incorrect? Had age shriveled him? Or worry?
Banks hesitated in the archway, and his lids crimped behind their heavy lenses. Then he straightened, crossed to the recliner, and lowered himself, gnarled hands gripping the armrests.
Slidell leaned forward. I cut him off.
“Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Banks.”
Banks nodded. He was wearing Hush Puppies slippers, gray work pants, and an orange bowling shirt. His arms looked like twigs sprouting from the sleeves.
“Your home is lovely.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Forty-seven years come November.”
“I couldn’t help noticing your pictures.” I indicated the photo collection. “You have a beautiful family.”
“It’s jus’ Geneva and me here now. Geneva my second oldest. She hep me out. Tamela my youngest. She lef’ a couple months ago.”
In the corner of my eye I noticed Geneva move into the archway.
“I think you know why we’re here, Mr. Banks.” I was flailing about for a way to begin.
“Yes’m, I do. You lookin’ for Tamela.”
Slidell did some “get on with it” throat clearing.
“I’m very sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Banks, but material recovered from Tamela’s living room stove—”
“Weren’t Tamela’s place,” Banks broke in.
“The property was rented to one Darryl Tyree,” Slidell said. “According to witnesses, your daughter’d been living with Mr. Tyree for approximately four months.”
Banks’s eyes never left my face. Eyes filled with pain.
“Weren’t Tamela’s place,” Banks repeated. His tone wasn’t angry or argumentative, more that of a man wanting the record correct.
My shirt felt sticky against my back, the cheap upholstery scratchy under my forearms. I took a deep breath, started again.
“Material recovered from the stove in that house included fragments of bone from a newborn baby.”
My words seemed to catch him off guard. I heard a sharp intake of breath, and noticed his chin cock up a fraction.
“Tamela only seventeen. She a good girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“She weren’t with child.”
“Yes, sir, she was.”
“Who say that?”
