“When I came home, Jake had changed. He no longer spent time with the white boys, but he didn’t say why. I always thought they hurt him somehow—treated him like a human one minute and an animal the next. Those things happened quite often back then.”
She lapsed into another memory. I tried not to look at her for fear of intruding on her privacy. “We never talked about it and in a few months Jake was back to normal.”
A squirrel hopped toward us through the fallen leaves. He stopped about five feet away, cocked his head at an angle, and watched us through his left eye. The last of the cars pulled away from the church. The only car left in the parking lot was a gray-and-green Chevrolet that must have belonged to Atalanta.
Her eyes shifted from the past to her hands holding the Bible in her lap. “I think I could accept it if he’d only had sex with her.” Her right hand started to shake. “But I cannot bring myself to forgive him for rape.”
Atalanta’s hands were small, like Maurey’s. The left hand clutched at the right to stop it from shaking; I couldn’t conceive of her making a fist.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Williams.”
“It changes everything.”
“I’m sure Jake was a fine man. He just made a mistake. Maybe the white boys called him chicken if he didn’t do what they were doing.”
Atalanta raised a hand to brush against her eyes, then lowered it onto the Bible again. “There is no excuse.”
“When you want to be accepted, you’ll do almost anything.”
“No.” She turned to look at me and I had to meet her eyes. “If you are Jake’s son, I want to know. You would be part of him and I cherish any part he may have left behind.”
“Do you think I am his son?”
She studied me a long time. “I don’t know.”
“I’d hoped someone would recognize something in me.”
She shook her head slowly. “I’ve held on as hard as I could, but after thirty years I mostly see him as he is in the photographs.”
She leaned forward a little bit and stared intently into my eyes. I didn’t look away or blink. After messing up so many lives, hers more than anyone’s, it seemed important to come to some conclusion, to discover who was my father so I could set the other four families free.
But Atalanta gave it up. She looked back across the street at the church and her eyes almost, but not quite, relaxed. “You could do worse than having Jake Williams for a father.”
“Of the five, he’s the one I’m hoping for.”
“If you find out, yes or no, will you tell me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I miss Jake every day.”
Gilia was the worst driver I’ve ever ridden with as a passenger, not that I’ve been a passenger too often. Her idea of merging lanes was to roll down the window, stick her hand out, and wave fingers at whoever she was cutting off, as if people don’t mind you barging in so long as you’re friendly about it.
“D.C. drivers are mythologically terrible,” she said. “Politicians and bureaucrats refuse to recognize the authority of the red light. I think that says something about our government.”
“The middle lane is for turning left.” She’d just pulled an illegal maneuver that caused a moving van to lock its brakes and honk and my testicles to leap skyward.
“I don’t make decisions that far in advance.”
We were driving to High Point in her Ford EXP in hopes of finding and stealing my Datsun 240Z.
“Why did you let Wanda take your car in the first place?” Gilia asked.
“She wanted it.”
“You always give women what they want?”
The answer seemed too obvious to say out loud. Besides, I thought one of us should concentrate on the upcoming intersection.
“Women must take constant advantage of you,” Gilia said. “I like that.”
We parked across the street from the address Wanda had given me several times as the place to send money.
“Kind of run-down, isn’t it,” Gilia said.
“I should save her from this dump.”
“She must have wanted to leave you real bad to move here.”
No 240Z or any other car was in front and the house looked dark and empty. Beyond empty, it looked uninhabited. There were no curtains or shades, no clutter on the porch that sagged vaguely southeast. Several windows were cracked or broken.
“Maybe she doesn’t live here but uses the address as a mail drop,” I said. “She was accustomed to a privileged way of life.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“You stay here while I check things out.”
“Don’t be silly, I’m with you.”
“If she comes home while I’m inside, things could get ugly.”
“I like other people’s ugly scenes. All that intense emotion, words spoken without thought, domestic violence—it’s neat if I’m not taking part.”
“But what if she expects you to take part?”
“I’ll slap her upside the head.”
I looked at Gilia in the late afternoon light. Her eyes sparkled, but I couldn’t tell if it was from resolve or amusement. She was either being supportive in my time of tension or making sport of my personal problems. Either way, it would be nice not to face Wanda alone.
As we walked toward the house, I said, “Sometimes I wish I believed in firearm ownership.”
She buddy-punched my shoulder. “Yeah, right, Wyatt Earp. In a showdown you’re more likely to pull out a credit card than a gun.”
The front door was locked and I was ready to give it up and head back to Greensboro, but Gilia reached through a broken window pane and flipped the bolt.
“You’ve got spine to spare dealing with my father and Skip, why turn into a whuss when it’s your wife?”
“Wanda’s meaner than your father and Skip.”
The living room wasn’t as bad as I’d expected—bare floor, single mattress up against the wall, overflowing ashtrays, pizza boxes with the one-two Domino’s logo. I’d expected rotting trash and human feces; this was no worse than the average freshman dorm. On one wall someone had painted a Harley-Davidson that was fairly good.
Gilia wrinkled her nose at the smell. “So what’s Grandma’s jewelry stored in?”
“A box covered with green felt; at least that’s what the stuff was in when Wanda took it. Desperate as she’s been for cash, I doubt we’ll find much.”
Gilia bent down and turned over a couch pillow next to the mattress. “This it?” She held up Me Maw’s jewelry box.
I nodded. “I don’t suppose—”
“Nope.”
I wandered down the hall and into the kitchen, where my baseball cards lay stacked on a linoleum-topped table. They were a mess. She’d mixed American League with National League and relief pitchers with starters. A sticky bottle of Log Cabin syrup was balanced on 1968. I guess she hadn’t had time to figure out how much the collection was worth or where to sell it. She’d only stolen it to hurt me anyway; I told her a long time ago it wasn’t
