I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “If you mean him latching on to another woman, that’s the least of my worries,” I shot back. “Yvonne, can I use your toilet and if you don’t mind, could you pour me a stronger drink?” I stood up and started walking toward the back of the room as fast as I could.
Chapter 30
Odell
“DADDY, HOW COME YOU DON’T LIVE WITH US ALL THE TIME?” my son Daniel wanted to know. I loved all my children, but he was the most special. He’d been born in the month of May in ’35 at home in the same bed where me and Betty Jean had created him during one of the worst tornadoes we’d had since I was a little boy. In nearby Midland City, the wind had picked up and hurled a family of three a hundred and fifty yards from their farmhouse, killing the five-year-old son and seriously injuring the husband and wife. Some of the people who lived on the same block as Betty Jean had lost everything. Because of that storm, I’d had to spend a few extra hours in Hartville and so I’d been in the house for Daniel’s birth. I’d also been present for the births of our other two, but things had gone a lot smoother. As big a fool as I was for women, I’d choose my children over them in a heartbeat. There was something about having another person in my life that I had helped create. Love was the strongest connection between a man and a woman. But with his children, it was love and blood. I would rather die than not be able to spend time with my precious sons. I had to blink hard to hold back the tear that threatened to roll out of my eye.
“Boy, you know your daddy got to travel for his work,” Betty Jean answered before I could. We sat on the front porch steps of the house that I paid the rent for every month. My two younger boys was visiting with their aunt Alline.
Daniel gave me a curious look and hunched his shoulders. “How come you can’t work around here, Daddy?”
“I wish I could. But we still going through the Depression and finding jobs is hard, so I need to hold on to the one I got.”
The country was still in a slump. Millions of people was still out of work and scrambling like crazy just to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. I don’t know what I would have done if Aunt Mattie hadn’t let me work for her for almost five years and then for Mac and Millie to hire me. Without the job I had now, I couldn’t take care of my family, and I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like if I lost them. With things being so easy for me, at least for now, I didn’t spend much time worrying about losing either one. Instead of wasting time dwelling on situations that sent shock waves throughout my body, I spent my time counting my blessings every day.
“Did that answer your question?” I asked, tapping the side of my son’s head. The older he got, the more he resembled me.
He nodded. “I got another one.”
“Oh? And what is it?”
“Do we have a grandmother and a grandfather? And what about aunts and uncles and cousins and stuff?”
A lump got stuck in my throat. I was relieved when Betty Jean jumped and answered that question for me, too.
“You know my mama and daddy both dead. But you got plenty of other kinfolks on my side. Your auntie Alline and her husband, and our cousin Roy and his wife and your three cousins come see us all the time.” Betty Jean paused and gave me a sympathetic look. “Your poor daddy. He lost his whole family years ago. He ain’t got nobody except us.”
“Oh. Well, can we have a puppy, too?” Daniel asked.
Betty Jean and I laughed at the same time, but I felt really sad. Daddy loved children and he missed not having relationships with my siblings and their families. That made me feel worse than I already felt. I hadn’t communicated with my sister and brother since before I got with Joyce, so they’d never met her. I had toyed around with the notion that one day I would load up Betty Jean and the kids and drive to Birmingham so they could get acquainted with my siblings and their families. But if I ever did, I could never let my siblings know about Joyce. It would be just my luck that one of them might decide to visit Daddy someday and he’d tell them about her. And if he didn’t, Ellamae sure enough would. That was one pickle barrel I didn’t want to be in, so I had to leave things just the way they were.
Everything else was going fine. I had nothing to complain about. My finances were still in pretty good shape. Other than our rent and the household expenses, me and Joyce didn’t have a lot of money going out. We was generous with our friends who needed loans now and then, but we had recently started cutting back on that. And it wasn’t because we had suddenly turned stingy, or had lost our compassion for people that had less than us. The problem was, every time we approached people about paying us back, half of them had a sad story about how the country’s ongoing depression had set them back, and the other half didn’t give no excuse or even attempt to repay the loans. It was Joyce’s idea
