tone. “What?” she said.
“I’ve been trying to tell you, wanting to. But I just—”
Aviva sat down heavily and lowered her bag to the floor. It was an authentic replica of the kit bags carried by the crew of the
“Let’s hear it,” Aviva said.
“This whole thing with Archy,” Gwen continued. “It’s just, seriously, it’s not the main thing. I mean, it
“Well, that’s what I’m—”
“My real work.”
“Your real work. What’s your real work?”
“The other night, somebody told me how Archy is lucky to have found something that he can really put his heart into. However wrong or crazy it might look to some people.”
“Yes?” Aviva said, sounding wary. “Well, that’s true, isn’t it?”
“I’m sure it is,” Gwen said. “You have that, Aviva. Nat, too. But I…” She hesitated and seemed to change her mind about what she was going to say. “And then at the review board, with those doctors. Those smug, cocky, self-satisfied—”
“Gwen, it’s fine. You stood up to them, and they caved. Now you’re good. I— Nat? What are you looking at?”
There was a patch of sky fringed with Indian paintbrush, visible through the kitchen window, devoid of anything but blue. Nat could not keep his eyes off it. “Hummingbird,” he said.
“Gwen,” Aviva said, “you don’t need to worry about those assholes anymore.”
“I’m not worried,” Gwen said. “It’s just… I’m sick of having no power in this game, Aviva, and them having it all. Of always fighting against feeling useless. Of how sad it makes me feel that sisters won’t go to a midwife. Also, frankly, I’m sick of overprivileged, neurotic, crazy-ass…” She stopped talking. She tucked her crossed arms between her breasts and belly like a pencil behind an ear.
“You were going to say white ladies.”
“Yes!” Gwen said. “With their white-lady latex allergies, and their white-lady OCD birth plans, and that bullshit white-lady machismo competition thing they all get into,” putting on a whiny white-girl voice, “‘I went twenty-seven hours without an epidural! Oh, I know just how you feel, I went forty-four!’ I’ll take out loans. I talked to my mom and dad, they’re willing to help me. My mother’s overjoyed, in fact.”
“Overjoyed, help you
“I figure I start studying now. As soon as I have this baby, I mean. For the MCATs. By next September, I get my application together, this guy’s going to be a year old.”
“You’re going to
“I told you. I don’t want to be fighting them anymore. So I’m just going to, I figure, I’m just going to go ahead and
“Okay,” Aviva said. “Great. Thanks for sharing.” She got up from the table and picked up her
Nat started toward her, but she was out the door before he could reach her. Down the stairs of the deck to the backyard. A few seconds later, they heard Hecate’s agitated rattle, the inveterate scrape as she backed down the curb.
“Whoa,” Nat said.
“I know.” Gwen looked dazed. “Crazy, right?”
“So you aren’t going to the birth.”
“No. No, I’m not.”
“Can I ask you a question, then?”
“Sure.”
“Can I get a ride?”
“Huh? I mean, yes, yeah, but where’s your car?”
Nat returned to the kitchen window and found again only a trackless, shadowless, and above all, zeppelin- free patch of sky. This benign expanse of blue offered, alas, little in the way of reassurance.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.”
Flowers had stashed them in a visitation room, under a gable of the sweeping bungalow roof. It was a minor room, cramped and out of the way, with latticed wallpaper that invited tedium. Window curtains the color of scorched ironing, a disturbance of pigeons outside. A room reserved for dead folks who were forgotten or unmourned, with the strange angles of a theater carved from the balcony of a chopped-up movie palace. In his spaghetti-western black suit, Flowers straddled a backward chair facing Luther and Valletta, who sat installed on an armless sofa side by side, like mourning parents. A closed coffin on a velvet bier held someone unknown.
“Look here,” said Flowers as Bank showed Archy into the room. “We got Thurston Howell III.”
“Luther,” Valletta said, and gave his knee a shove.
In Archy’s dream, it had felt like such a revelation to encounter again, to recall with such force, as if he had forgotten them completely, the crook of his mother’s fine Cherokee nose, the down on her forearms, the lingering hint of her childhood lisp. The dream had returned all that, the way a day at Stinson—the sourdough bite of a Negro Modelo, the rattle of a kite on the wind—could be restored to you by an old calendar page in a bottom drawer. At Motor City the other day, Archy had come in so pissed off at Titus and Julie, so unwilling to be there, wedged so deep in the pocket of his fury, that he hadn’t been able to see the real Luther, only the Luther required by his anger. Only whatever you saw when you pictured a dead mother and a father you had long since cut out of your life, for your own protection. Photographs and phantoms on the retina.
Now he remembered: The man sat low and scatter-limbed, but he could bounce up out of a chair, on his feet and ready to go, faster than anybody Archy knew, as if someone had dropped a coffee in his lap. That was still true. The cleft in his chin, how it seemed to have been incised by a pottery tool, deft and deliberate. The way he would scowl at you just long enough for it to make you uncomfortable, long enough for you to wonder whether he was kidding around or if you’d actually committed some sin, some forgotten transgression, before he finally pulled the rip cord on the Cleon Strutter smile.
But he was so wintry now, snow in his hair, frost on his eyebrows! Though the height and the breadth of him remained impressive, he had lost mass, gravity. He scowled at Archy from under the icy ledge of his eyebrows. Clear-eyed, possibly sober, but Archy had seen Luther sober before. That was no big thing. With Luther, a period of sobriety was a kind of Groundhog Day, a shadow needing sunshine to foretell interminable gray. Archy hung back by the door and waited. At last, like a fading custom, the Stallings smile revived.
“I hope you don’t mind, Chan,” Luther said, still looking at Archy, “if I asked my mediator to join us.”
Here it came: Time for Luther to put on a show. Archy’s heart sank, and he was about to say
“I parked my zeppelin in the clergy spot,” Archy said. He settled the yacht cap more firmly on his head, thinking it best to own the hat, to live up to it. “Hope that’s all right.”
He let his father take hold of him for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. Laundromat, motel air freshener, no shower, Valletta’s perfume. The bones of his shoulders. Luther making a sound, deep down, sounding like Cochise Jones at the foot pedals of his B-3.
“Hey, Valletta,” Archy said, getting free of Luther.
“Hello, Archy. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this.”
“You okay?”
“I’m just fine, thank you, honey.”
She looked like she had been fighting. No doubt, she had directed some energy toward putting herself
