one of the tables. He would stare out the window kind of mum bling to himself. And sometimes he would cry for no reason. He wasn’t all right in his head. Shell-shocked, the old folks called it. The man used to grab hold of Jay sometimes, used to grab him by the shoulders real hard and look the boy in the eye. He spoke in short, broken-off sentences, barking, kind of, like he had something caught in his throat.
Jay looks up at his wife.
“I don’t want to be that man, B. An old soldier, a man who can’t hardly talk. I can’t walk through this life like that.” He says this last part as an apology, for revealing to his wife, this late in the game, the man he truly is. “I just can’t.”
Bernie studies his face for a long time, the shadows beneath his eyes.
Finally, she gets up and walks to the sink. With a wooden spoon from the drain board, she pokes the chicken breasts encased in plastic wrap in the sink.
“I need you to be safe, Jay. I need that, understand?”
“I know.”
“I mean, they came after you once, Jay, what makes you think they won’t do it again?”
“I’m taking it right to the courts, B,” he says. “I’m taking it right to court.”
That night, sometime between
“You still looking for a lawyer?” he asks, after introductions are remade.
The old man is silent for a long stretch on the phone. Jay can hear his phlegmy breathing, a rattle and a rasp. There’s a television playing somewhere in the background. Jay thinks it’s tuned to the same station. He hears the same beer commercial that’s playing in his living room coming through the phone line as well. He pictures Mr. Ainsley’s wife sitting in the blue light of their television screen, a pile of knitting yarn in her lap. He thinks of their white A-frame house. The yellow curtains in the windows, the American flag hanging limply out front.
“I understand you got some encroachment onto your prop erty,” Jay says, using the same tone of voice he uses with all his prospective clients, one that’s gentle and encouraging. “Seems to me somebody ought not get away with it. Somebody ought to be made to answer for that, Mr. Ainsley.”
The old man is quiet still.
The laughter on their televisions raises to a high pitch.
Ainsley clears his throat. “You that black fellow that come by the house?”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man makes a humming sound, like he’s pausing to catch his breath . . . or think. “I don’t have a lot of money to pay you,” he says.
“You let me worry about that,” Jay says, already counting, in his mind, the $23,200 he’s got stuffed in the lockbox in his office. He thinks it may be enough for at least one expert witness . . . and enough to pay Eddie Mae overtime.
Chapter 30
The day he files the papers, Bernie goes into labor, some two weeks early.
Jay races home to find his wife bent over the kitchen table, her face screwed up in pain, the packed suitcase at her feet. They make it to Ben Taub Hospital in a record eleven minutes. He holds her hand for the first hour in the waiting room. Once they’ve been assured the doctor is on his way, Jay does every thing he can to make his wife comfortable, fluffing up the pil low she brought from home and offering her a can of soda from one of the machines. Then he has a smoke outside and starts making the calls on her list: her mother and father, her sister, some of the ladies from the church. Jay doesn’t have a list, not a soul he can call.
It kind of eats at him a little, not for the first time, and not the last.
Back at his wife’s side in the waiting room, he chews his nails to the bone, picks up one magazine after another, even starts flipping through one of Bernie’s romance novels, one with a field of corn and a nearly naked lady on the cover. By the time Bernie’s family starts to trickle in, the doctor has already come and gone. False labor, he called it. Not at all uncommon, but a sign they’re getting close. The doctor said he couldn’t check them into the hospital this early, nor did he believe they’d want the extra expense. His best advice was to send them home and tell them to be alert for the real signs: contractions that grow longer and stronger, any mucus or discharge, and certainly if Bernie’s water breaks, they should come back in. It could be anytime now.
Jay and Bernie wait around to make sure her whole family gets the news. Then they all make a caravan back to Jay and Bernie’s apartment. Evelyn and Mrs. Boykins get into the kitchen right away, doctoring up a couple of cans of chicken soup, throwing in fresh onion, garlic, and salt, and toasting up half a loaf of white bread. Reverend Boykins sits on the couch with his baby girl. Jay brings his wife a cool glass of water. He tells her he’s got to run by the office for a bit, that he won’t be gone more than an hour. “I’ll be all right here,” she says, patting a hand on her daddy’s knee.
Reverend Boykins looks up at his son-in-law. They haven’t spoken about the court case, but Lonnie’s article about Jay’s civil suit against Cole Oil Industries made the front page of the
Reverend Boykins gives Jay a nod of approval. “Go on, son.”
It’s not until he’s out of the house that Jay realizes how hard it was for him to breathe in there, how much being around Bernie’s family makes him pine for something he thought he’d long ago given up on, the someone he thought he’d lost.
When he arrives at the office, Eddie Mae has a stack of pink message slips for him, more than triple the amount of calls he usu ally gets in a single week. There are calls from newspaper report ers and at least one magazine, and three calls from the same law firm claiming to represent Cole Oil and Thomas Cole personally. Jay takes the message slips into his office and shuts the door.
He picks up the phone and calls, of all people, Rolly Snow.
He pictures Rolly behind the counter at Lula’s, bare-chested beneath his black vest, as, even in the first week
