Her chin lifted. “Well, it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”
Gilia finally spoke. “May we come in?”
Inside, the house was dark furniture and soft lighting behind lamp shades. The couch and chairs had lace doilies over the arms. A glass bowl of candy corn sat on the coffee table. The woman crossed to an RCA radio and cut off the classical music that had been so low you could hardly hear it anyway.
Sure enough, she was a schoolteacher. Students’ papers lay stacked in graded and ungraded piles on the stained pine dining room table, the graded pile veined by red pencil marks. Jake looked at me from framed photographs atop the piano. Like a campfire in the dark, he drew Gilia and me across the room.
The woman said, “He was killed in Korea.” I picked up a picture of Jake in his army uniform. He was grinning and firing an imaginary tommy gun at someone off to the side of the picture. He looked about fourteen years old with big ears and a short haircut. He wasn’t any blacker than Maurey after a summer in the sun.
“Is this the one your mother had?” Gilia touched the frame around Jake’s yearbook photo. Number twenty, gray jersey, leather helmet.
“Yeah.”
There was also a wedding picture of both of them dressed up, looking shy and happy and wholesome. The girl held a corsage in her hands. Jake smiled at her, protectively. Knowing Jake would soon die and the girl would be alone made it the saddest picture I’d ever seen.
I turned to look at her. “Would it be personal if I asked your name?”
Her eyes were on Jake. “Atalanta Williams.”
I pronounced it like the city the first time and she had to correct me. Then I got it right.
“Atalanta,” I said. “That’s pretty.”
Gilia glanced from the photographs to me. Jake’s eyes were different from mine. And the nose. Heck, I don’t know if we looked alike. I’ve always made it a point to avoid mirrors.
“So talk,” Atalanta said.
“I’d rather not.”
“I didn’t ask what you’d rather do.”
“You owe it to her,” Gilia said.
This wasn’t what I wanted. When Shannon had said wreak vengeance by destroying their wives, it had sounded good in theory, but the reality sucked.
“Jake may have been my father,” I said.
Atalanta took it well. She didn’t speak or anything. Just stared at the pictures on the piano. I followed her line of sight to see which one she was staring at. I think it was a five-by-seven head-and-shoulders shot of Jake wearing a coat and tie.
“Five boys had sex with Mom and she got pregnant,” I said.
“Was she white?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you mean, ‘had sex’?”
I looked at Gilia but she gave no answers. “They raped her.”
“It’s a lie,” Atalanta said.
“I don’t think so.”
All the years I’d lived in North Carolina, I’d never seen a black woman cry. She made no sound. Nothing but tears and sharp intakes of breath. I looked down between my hands at Jake, wishing he hadn’t been there that night. Wishing he wasn’t dead and I wasn’t born.
“Get out of my home.”
“That’s fair.”
“And put down my picture. You can’t touch him.”
I put down the picture.
“You are a lying little white boy. How dare you come into my home desecrating the memory of my husband.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“You are trash.”
“Yes.”
“That house was nothing but one big shrine,” Gilia said. “I’ll bet you anything Jake left for the army about a month after he married her, when life was still perfect and she hadn’t had time to stop worshiping him. It’s love cut off at the peak that cripples people, not the long, ugly divorces.”
I had been highly confused when we left Atalanta Williams’s house, so I drove south a while, then east, then back north, not really aware of where I was going. Having pain is nothing—you live through it and go on—but causing someone else pain is totally unacceptable. I can’t stand hurting people. Won’t stand hurting people. And, yet—guess what?—I’d just trashed a perfectly nice woman.
Gilia was cool. She seemed to know that movement eases turmoil. After an hour or so of silently circling Greensboro, she suddenly got talkative. Mostly she talked about college days and the busted marriage with Jeremy. She had a story about a roommate sleeping with her boyfriend that was pretty good. Usually when a woman tells the roommate/best friend/sister-slept-with-my-man thing, they’re pissed off at the whole female gender. They never seem to blame the guy, but Gilia completely left out the self-pity part of the story.
“Those two sluts deserve each other,” she said. “Their biggest problem was who got to face the mirror when they did it.”
My fathers didn’t come up until Bojangles chicken, where we stopped for a bucket of wings. We sat in the car, chewing bones and sucking grease off our fingers while she gave me the love-cut-off-at-the-peak theory.
“Jesus,” I said.
“What?” Gilia had a dribble of barbecue sauce off the left corner of her lips.
“Or Elvis Presley. Or Marilyn Monroe. If any of that bunch had lived past fifty, they’d have been forgotten. Die young if you want worship.”
Gilia stuck a wing in her mouth and stripped meat as she pulled out the bone. She ate like a little kid who wants everything at once. I like a woman with an appetite. “So this teacher sat in a dark room for thirty years, mourning her perfect husband, having no life outside his memory, and you come along and smash everything to hell.”
“You’re the one said I owed her the truth.”
“By then it was too late.” She took a slug of Mr. Pibb. “You’d said too much to leave her alone with her imagination.”
“But the truth was worse than anything she could have imagined.”
Gilia sucked her thumb, then examined the nail. “Don’t you see, knowing for certain is better than imagining, even when what you know is awful. Imagining makes you doubt your sanity. At least when you know the person you love is a pig, you can get on with the grief process.”
“You’re talking about Jeremy.”
“He had me believing I was clinically paranoid. I’m at the school counselor whining ‘I know he’s a good man and it’s all in my mind’ when the jerk is screwing every bimbo on campus, including the school counselor.”
I thought about Wanda. Would it have been better to suspect she was a slut but not know, or to know? To tell the truth, I hadn’t even suspected. The first I heard about her migratory snatch was when she said I didn’t meet her needs and I’d driven her into the arms of another.
“One thing I do know,” I said, “is I’m done with fathers. I don’t plan on seeing another male relative again. Ever.”
“What if they aren’t done with you?”
I dipped a corner of my napkin into my 7Up and reached across to blot the barbecue off Gilia’s chin. “I am no
