“I surely did.”
Swinging my left leg over the horse’s flanks, I drop to the gravel beside Louise Butler. She’s about forty and very pretty, with the same milk-chocolate skin Pearlie has. She’s watching me with what looks like suspicion in her large eyes.
“If you stay here and jaw,” says Jesse, “you gonna have to get back to your car on your own. I gots to go.”
“I know where my car is. I can get back to it.”
Jesse kicks his horse and leaves us in a small cloud of dust.
I look at Louise and wait, expecting some explanation of her sudden appearance. But she only stares at the sky.
“Gonna rain soon,” she comments. “I got a place by the lake. We’d better start back that way.”
Without waiting for an answer, she turns her bike around and starts pushing it down the road. I watch her for a few seconds, noting her one-piece shift and Keds sneakers. Then I trot forward and fall in beside her, my feet scrunching the gravel as I walk.
“How did you know I was here?” I ask.
“Henry told me,” she says, not looking over at me.
“So you knew my father.”
Now she turns to me. “You might not like what I’m gonna say, Miss Catherine.”
“Please call me Cat.”
She laughs softly. “Kitty Cat.”
A chill goes through me. My father called me Kitty Cat when I was very small. He was the only one who did. “You did know him. Please tell me anything you can.”
“I don’t want to make you feel bad, honey.”
“You can’t make me feel any worse than I already do today.”
“Don’t be so sure. Did Jesse tell you anything bad about Luke?”
“Not really. He might have, but you came along.”
Louise wrinkles her nose. “You can’t trust Jesse. Not about Luke.”
“I thought they were friends.”
“They was for a while.”
“What happened?”
“Me.”
“You?”
She looks at me out of the corner of her eye. “Darling, Luke was my man for seven years. From 1974 right up to the night he died. And a lot of people didn’t like that.”
I stop in my tracks. This woman can’t be more than ten years older than I. And she’s telling me she was my father’s lover?
Louise walks on, then realizes I’m no longer beside her. She stops and turns back. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I just wanted to talk to you about him, see if I could see him in you.”
“Can you?”
She smiles sadly. “He’s looking out of your eyes at me right now. Every line of your face got a shadow of him in it.”
“Louise, what-”
Before I can finish my sentence, the clouds open up. Fat raindrops slap the cream-colored dust on the shoulder of the road, making dark circles of mud. The circles multiply too fast to follow, and then Louise and I are running down the road like little girls, she pushing her bike at first, then jumping onto it and riding beside me.
“You’re in good shape!” she cries as the shacks of the little village come into sight. “My house ain’t far, but it’s past this bunch here.”
We race past the gray shacks, their porches empty now, and turn down a muddy path that parallels the lake.
“There it is!” Louise shouts.
I hold my hand over my eyes to shield them from the rain. In the distance I see a shack that’s not gray like the others, but bright blue, like a shack in the Caribbean. Now that I know where I’m going, I sprint ahead of the bike. My feet have better purchase in the mud than her bicycle, and I beat Louise to her porch.
Watching her ride the last few yards, I realize that I’m about to hear things about my father that he never meant for me to know. Does this beautiful stranger know things that might explain what Grandpapa told me today? Or at least confirm it?
“Go on in,” she says, lifting her bike onto the narrow porch of the little house. “I’m right behind you.”
I walk through the flimsy front door into a room that serves as a combination kitchen, den, and dining area. The moment I enter, two things strike me with startling intensity. First is the sound of the rain hitting the tin roof above me. It’s my recurring dream made real, and the rattling almost takes my breath away. The second is the certainty that my father once lived here. On the mantel over a gas space heater is a sculpture of a woman. Though it’s of African rather than Asian derivation-a blank oval face over a long neck and a trunk with graceful limbs-one glance tells me it’s my father’s work. The woman is lying on her side, with one knee raised and one hand on her hip, the way a woman might lie in bed watching her lover across the room. This sculpture is easily worth more than Louise’s whole house.
The dining table, too, is my father’s work. Brushed steel with inset glass plates, and flecks of mica fused to the steel. There’s no bed in this room, but I’d bet anything that he built that, too.
“Luke wanted me to have my own place,” Louise says from behind me.
Suddenly I’m wavering on my feet. The heat in the house is stifling, as though the place has been shut up for days, and the rattle of the rain seems to grow louder by the second. But that’s only part of it. Today my father’s life has turned from a patchwork of happy memories to a house of mirrors.
“What is it?” cries Louise.
“I don’t know.”
She rushes to an air conditioner mounted in a window and flips a switch. The rumbling roar of the old window unit does much to drown the sound of the rain, but it’s too little too late.
“You’re going to faint!”
As my knees go out from under me, Louise catches me under the arms and steers my falling body toward a sofa.
Chapter 28
“Drink this,” says Louise, holding a glass of iced tea under my chin. “The heat got you, that’s all. This place been shut up a couple of days, and it gets like an oven without the AC going.”
“It’s not the heat,” I tell her, taking the glass and drinking a sip of syrupy sweet tea.
“Was it seeing Luke’s things? I should have known that would upset you.”
“That’s not why I passed out.”
She studies me with her deep brown eyes. “You look scared, more than anything.”
I nod slowly. “It’s the rain.”
“The rain?”
“The sound of it. Rain hitting a tin roof.”
Louise looks confused. “You don’t like that?”
“It’s not a matter of liking it or not. I just can’t take it.”
“Really? I love that sound. It makes me lonely, but I still love it. I used to lie in bed with Luke on rainy afternoons and listen for hours. It’s like music.”
I try to smile, but my lips won’t do it.
“I’m sorry. You’re upset, and I’m just thinking back on good times. Did something bad happen to you in the rain?”
