Together they lay in amid the dawn, a fresh day but no light of promise because Duchess knew promise was a falsity.
“I love you. I’m sorry.”
There was much Duchess could say, but for the moment she could find nothing more than, “I love you. I know.”
2
AT THE CREST OF THE hill the land fell away.
Sun climbed cerulean sky as Duchess, riding in the back with her brother beside, took his small hand in hers.
Walk eased the cruiser down their street and pulled up out front of the old house, then followed them in. He tried to fix breakfast but found the cupboards so bare he left them and ran to Rosie’s Diner, then returned with pancakes and smiled as Robin ate three.
After she’d washed Robin’s face and laid out his clothes, Duchess went out front and found Walk sitting on the step. She watched the Cape begin its modest wake, the mailman passed, Brandon Rock from the house beside came out and hosed down his lawn. That they did not give a second look to the cruiser parked outside the Radley home made Duchess sad and glad.
“Can I give you a ride in?”
“No.” She settled beside him and tied her lace.
“I can collect your mom.”
“She said she’d call Darke.”
Duchess did not know the true nature of her mother’s friendship with Chief Walker, though she guessed he wanted to fuck her, like the other men in town.
She looked out at their tired yard. The last summer she’d set about planting with her mother. Robin had bought a small watering can and softened the dirt, his cheeks colored as he made trip after trip. Blue-eyes, Indian mallow and mountain lilac.
They died of neglect.
“Did she say what it was?” Walk said it gently. “Last night, you know why?”
It was the kind of cruel question she was not used to from him, because, mostly, there wasn’t any kind of reason. But this time she knew why he asked, she knew about Vincent King, about her aunt Sissy who was buried in the cemetery by the edge of the bluff. Everyone knew her grave, behind the sun-bleached picket, with the babies that hadn’t made it, the children cut down by the same God their parents prayed to.
“She didn’t say nothing.”
Behind they heard Robin. Duchess stood and fixed his hair, wiped toothpaste from his cheek with her spit and then checked his schoolbag, that he had his reading book and journal, his water bottle.
She slid the straps over his shoulders and he smiled and she smiled back.
They stood side by side and watched the cruiser pare the long street, and then Duchess slipped an arm around her brother and they began to walk.
The neighbor cut the hose and walked over to the edge of his yard, slight limp he tried hard to correct. Brandon Rock. Broad, tan. A stud in one ear, feathered hair, silk robe. Sometimes he benched with the garage door up and metal blaring out.
“Your mother again? Someone should call social services.” Voice like his nose had been broken but never fixed. He carried a dumbbell in one hand and curled it now and then. His right arm noticeably bigger than the left.
Duchess turned to him.
Breeze blew. His robe parted.
She wrinkled her nose. “Flashing a kid. I should call the cops.”
Brandon stared as Robin led her away.
“Did you see Walk’s hands shaking?’ Robin said.
“Always worse in the morning.”
“Why?”
She shrugged but knew. Walk and her mother, their shared troubles and the way they dealt with them.
“Did Mom say anything, last night, when I was in my room?” She’d been doing her homework, her project on her family tree, when Robin hammered at the door and said Mom was sick again.
“She had her photos out. The old ones, with Sissy and Grandpa.” Robin had taken to the idea of having a grandpa the first time he’d seen the tall man in their mother’s photographs. That he’d never met him, that Star said next to nothing about him, did not seem to matter. Robin needed people, the cushion of barren names that would keep him from feeling so vulnerable. He longed for cousins and uncles and Sunday football and barbeque, like the other kids in his class.
“Do you know about Vincent King?”
Duchess took his hand as they crossed onto Fisher. “Why, what do you know about him?”
“That he killed Aunt Sissy. Thirty years ago. In the seventies, when men had mustaches and Mom wore her hair funny.”
“Sissy wasn’t our aunt, not really.”
“She was,” he said simply. “She looked like you and Mom. The same.”
Duchess had got the bones of the story over the years, from Star when she slurred it, from the archives at the library in Salinas. The same library where she’d spent the past spring working on their family tree. She’d traced Radley roots back far, then dropped the book to the floor when she’d made the link to a wanted outlaw named Billy Blue Radley. It was the kind of find she’d been proud of, something more when she stood up front and presented to the class. There was still a whole load of nothing on her father’s side, just the kind of question mark that drew an angry exchange with her mother. Not once but twice Star had been with a stranger, got herself pregnant, left two children with a lifetime of wondering just whose blood pumped their veins. Slut, she’d whispered beneath her breath. It saw her grounded for a month.
“You know he’s coming out of prison today?” Robin kept his tone hushed like it was a grave secret.
“Who told you that?”
“Ricky Tallow.”
Ricky Tallow’s mother worked dispatch at Cape Haven PD.
“What else did Ricky say?”
Robin looked away.
“Robin?”
He folded quick. “That he should’ve fried for it. But then Miss Dolores yelled at him.”
“Should’ve fried. You know what that means?”
“No.”
Duchess took his hand across onto Virginia Avenue, the lots a little
