“Dr. Beekman says neither blacks nor whites used to celebrate the Fourth of July in some parts of the South,” my daughter instructs me from behind the wheel of the Blazer.
“Whites were reminded of the fall of Vicksburg, and it obviously meant nothing to African-Americans.”
Life according to Beekman. Anxious to get to Bear Creek, we have taken 1-40 east to Forrest City and then south on Highway 1, arriving on the outskirts of Bear Creek at noon.
“Proportionately, the South sent more men to Vietnam than any other region of the country,” I say, recalling something I think I read on the subject. A patriotic act or one confirming our stupidity, depending on your point of view. Thanks to a heart murmur, which has never affected me (other than probably to save my life), I was classified 4-R We turn off to the right onto Highway 79 and go for a mile before I announce, “Here’s where your grandparents are buried.”
There is nothing picturesque about Pinewood cemetery. Off the highway a good fifty yards, it is little more than a flat field, and it takes us ten minutes this cool Saturday in November to find my parents’ graves.
“I haven’t been back here since your grandmother died seventeen years ago,” I explain to Sarah as we finally come upon their markers. I bend down to pull up some weeds around the stone.
“You were too little to remember, but you came, too.”
Sarah, dressed in jeans and a bulky tan sweater, studies the simple tombstones.
“Were they racists?” she asks, squinting against the sun that has suddenly appeared from the low flying clouds.
“We all were,” I say, wondering how I can explain the South without sounding too defensive.
“Back then, I don’t think we believed that blacks were really human the same way we were. We thought they were so inferior genetically, that it was okay to treat them like we did.”
Sarah bends down to snap off a weed growing at a forty-five-degree angle from my father’s grave marker.
“You make it sound as if you weren’t responsible for your own racism.”
Surely she has learned in her history classes that a later generation can’t judge an earlier one by its standards.
“Of course we were, but back when we were in the middle of that era, it wasn’t so easy to accept we were wrong.
We had a lot invested in it.” To my own daughter I can’t admit that even today my mind contains an informal hierarchy of ethnic mental superiority: Japanese, Jews, followed by whites of northern European ancestry, and blacks on the bottom. The evidence seems all too apparent. Yet, I dare not voice it, for fear Sarah will again tar and feather me with her own labels.
“But it was worse than that,” she insists.
“It wasn’t just stigma and forced separation in schools and in public.
They were exploited, cheated, even still being lynched in your parents’ generation.”
“True,” I concede, not wanting to argue over the details.
As I stand erect, my knees snap, and I feel dizzy. At my age, seeing my parents’ names so permanently etched in stone has made me aware of how much of my life I’ve already lived.
“But individual relationships weren’t all like that. You can care about somebody even if the relationship is based on paternalism. As soon as my mother got to know your mother, she forgot about her skin and loved her as much as I did. We weren’t as bad as it seems today.”
Leading me to the car left on the side of the road that runs through the cemetery, Sarah says over her shoulder, “Is that how you justify what your grandfather did?”
I sigh, knowing the situation is impossible.
“I don’t know what he did,” I say, catching up to her.
“That’s why we’re here.”
We drive into town, and as usual I am struck by the sad shabbiness of the buildings on Main Street. When I was a child, the town didn’t seem so poor. In a rectangular park that centers the town the most prominent structures are a statue of Robert E. Lee and a concrete platform used by politicians and musical groups. Underneath it are four separate bathrooms, an architectural reminder of segregation.
Here, almost in this exact spot, I recall seeing Governor Orval Faubus as he waited to be introduced at a campaign rally. It was after he had become famous the world over for stopping nine black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 and term porarily defying the federal government. Squatting on his heels with his coat slung over his shoulder, he seemed totally at ease with himself. He maintained he had acted to prevent violence. We are all politically correct, even our rascals.
“Do you want to stop and see anybody else while we’re here?” Sarah asks, inspecting my hometown carefully as if she were considering buying some property here.
“No,” I say, more abruptly than I intend.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Sarah, stopping at the first of Bear Creek’s two lights in the downtown area, says scornfully, “Would that embarrass you?”
She knows it would if I were truthful about the purpose of our visit, but not for the first time I am forced to confront my own cowardice.
“I didn’t come back to Bear Creek to be gossiped about. And that’s what would happen if I told people why we’re here, and you know it.”
“Why didn’t you say so when we were driving over?”
she asks.
She is being deliberately disingenuous.
“I thought it was understood.”
She says archly, “Being partly African myself, I’m not ashamed of what I’ll find.”
She sounds so superior and sanctimonious I want to gag.
“I wish I were worthy to be in your company,” I hiss, retreating to my usual weapons of guilt and sarcasm.
“But I haven’t quite achieved your status as a moral saint.”
My scathing comments surprise me and hush her into a shocked silence. I didn’t know I felt so edgy’ about this visit. I apologize, but my offering is understandably met with a hostile glare. Typically having left at the office the address Lucy gave me, I find a Fina station and a tele phone booth and direct Sarah to stop. Sure enough, the name of Mayola Washington is in the tiny Bear Creek phone book at #7 Terrace. I should telephone and warn her we are coming over, but if I’d had that kind of basic courage and decency, I’d have called her from home over four hours ago.
From behind her opaque sunglasses in the Blazer, Sarah protests, “You’re going to upset her just dropping in out of the blue this way.”
Why am I doing this? I can live without this family re union.
“Her granddaughter called her to say we were coming. If the story is true, our showing up at her door won’t surprise her at all.”
Accustomed to my intransigence, Sarah shrugs. Others have tried to civilize me and have failed. Why should she be successful? I turn down Utah and notice that at least the streets have been paved in the black neighborhoods.
When I was growing up, gravel was the main surface.
Separate has never meant equal in much of anything over here.
The Bear Creek housing development for the elderly is actually pleasant. Unlike Needle Park, there is no spilled trash in anyone’s yard or junked cars on the streets; I don’t see half the apartments boarded up or burned out.
Trees and flowers flourish in front of the redbrick apartments and it is possible to imagine living here. Since these are units for the elderly, there are no children about;
in Needle Park, the children play inside because of the drug dealers and violence outside.
With Sarah at my side nervously tugging at her hair (my anxiety is catching), I knock at the door, and soon a light-skinned elderly black woman opens it.
“Ma’am, I’m Gideon Page and this is my daughter, Sarah,” I introduce myself, my voice scratchy with anxiety.
“Your granddaughter, Lucy Cunningham, gave me some information I’d like to discuss with you.”
At the mention of Lucy’s name, the old lady’s face softens and she invites us in.
“Lucy said you might be callin’.” Her voice is high and fragile but not as reedy as some old folks’ get. She is wearing a flowery ironed dress, as if she might be expecting company; perhaps her great-grandchildren are coming over later to eat leftover turkey. Sarah and I are invited to sit on a green sofa while our hostess sits down on an uncomfortable-looking rocker across from us. The living room is modestly furnished but has a homey touch supplied by obvious family portraits (I recognize my client and his family in one snapshot) and needlework on the walls, and a weathered Bible on the coffee table in front of us. On a nineteen inch Sears model TV in a corner grim-faced actors battle through inane dialogue on a videotape of The Guiding Light. She offers us something to drink but I wouldn’t dream of putting this old lady to trouble and decline for both of us. Sure I wouldn’t.
“You’re the lawyer for Dade,” the old lady says softly.
“You think he done what they say?”
“He says he didn’t,” I hedge.
“He seems like a very fine young man to me.”
“That’s the truth,” she replies, chuckling mechanically.
She squints at Sarah.
“Why, this child looks like one of my nieces!”
Sarah smiles selfconsciously while I explain, “Her mother was from South America. They had slaves from Africa brought there, too.”
“South America!” she marvels as if I had announced something profound.
“Can you imagine?”
Mrs. Washington and I are barely connecting. This old lady is as nervous as I am, I realize. She is an oldfashioned Negro, one to whom the civil rights movement never was very convincing. Never mind all the speeches and legislation; white folks still have the say-so, and it is no use to pretend otherwise. What must she have been like fifty years ago? Though she is too old and wrinkled now to be called pretty, I have little doubt that she was at tractive as a girl. Even now, she has a firm chin and healthy skin. She has a Caucasian nose, no work of art it self, but preferable, at least in white eyes, to the broad nostrils characteristic of most African-Americans. Underneath the cotton dress is a bosom that seems to have defied time and logic. She has something of a stomach to go with it, but nothing that explains the mountains above it. Is this what attracted my grandfather?
“Did you know my parents?” I ask awkwardly.
“My father owned Page Drugs.”
Mrs. Washington clears her throat.
“Mr. Calvin was a good man, ‘fore he took so sick. He sure was.”
“Sarah, here, unfortunately never knew either of them,” I say. Our mission here is a monumental invasion of her privacy. What happened half a century ago between her and a man whose memory I have little knowledge of or connection with is none of our business. Yet, my curiosity is growing. But if she clams up, I won’t pry.
“That’s too bad,” Mrs. Washington clucks automatically.
“It sure is.”
I do not think I will get a direct answer from her and ask, “Did you know my grandfather Frank Page? At one time he owned a bunch of property on Cleveland Street.”
Mrs. Washington begins to pick at a thread on her couch.
“Lucy sent you over here to as’t these questions, didn’t she?”
“She told me a story or two,” I admit. If I had a decent bone in my body, I’d get up and make us leave. This old woman is afraid of us. If this had occurred in the last twenty years, surely her attitude would be different. She could have gotten child support out of him, at least. In fact, today, the state of Arkansas would have demanded she divulge his identity and then brought suit to recoup welfare payments to her.
“You want your child to hear?” she asks, her voice low and trembling.
I glance at Sarah, who, as if I had cued her, says, “It’s all right, Mrs. Washington. If you don’t want to talk, I understand But I would like to hear if it won’t upset you. I want to know my history. I don’t know very much about my mother’s family in South America and probably never will. Daddy’s family is all I have, and all I know is that my grandfather was mentally ill and hung himself in the state hospital. I don’t know what his parents were like.
All Daddy tells me is that his grandfather owned several businesses in Bear Creek and didn’t get along with his son. I want to know more than that, and I think Daddy does, too.”
I nod, but find that I am thinking that Sarah is not quite telling her the truth. Until now, I thought her motive was to try to document a fifty-year-old case of rape in the cause of feminism. Yet, by her questions at the cemetery, she wants to know more than I gave her credit for.
The old lady smooths her dress, avoiding our eyes.
“It was such a long time ago.”
Sarah slides off the couch and places herself at Mrs.
Washington’s feet. Her voice almost a whisper, Sarah asks, “Did my great-granddaddy hurt you?”
Mrs. Washington stares over Sarah’s head at me and replies in a firm voice, “Why, Mr. Frank, he never jump on me or nothin’ like that. He’d come by and say he was checkin’ on his property or to get the rent, but I know he was comin’ by to see me. Momma be off cleanin’ white folks’ houses, and I’d be takin’ care of my little sister. We didn’t have no daddy. Least not one who lived with us.”
Sarah asks, “How old were you, ma’am?”
Mrs. Washington looks down at Sarah to gauge her answer. ““Bout sixteen when Mr. Frank started comin’ round. I was a pretty girl. Least that what folks said. Mr.
Frank, he said so, too.”
“Do you know about how old he was?” Sarah prompts.
Mrs. Washington squints at me and answers, “Mr. Frank was a full-grown man. Thirty, maybe.”
I nod but do not speak, afraid if I do, she will stop talking. Each time she uses the words, “Mr. Frank,” I feel sick. Even as a child, I was called by the man who swept the store for my father “Mr. Gideon.” Damn, underneath all that passive behavior, how they must have hated us! I wish this old woman were angry, but either she is masking it well, or time has erased the bitterness it seems she ought to have toward my grandfather.
“What was my great-grandfather like?” Sarah asks.
“He was all right. When he started visitin’ reg’lar, he’d forget to collect all the rent. Say he’d git it next time. After Calcutta was born, he never as’t for nothin’.”
“Calcutta was his daughter?” Sarah says. I realize how skillful a questioner she is. She should be the lawyer in the family, not her old man.
“Couldn’ta been another daddy,” Mrs. Washington says, a melancholy expression on her weathered face.
“My mama be real strict, but white folks kinda do what they want. I liked Mr. Frank. He never meant no harm.
Jus’ a reg’lar man.”
Sarah cuts her eyes at me to make sure I heard that last remark. For good reason my choice of women hasn’t always pleased her. I got high marks for Rainey; she will like Amy, too, if she gives her a chance.
“Did he ever acknowledge that Calcutta was his daughter?”
Mrs. Washington is silent for a long moment.
“After he seen how light Cal was,” she says, “he quit comin’ ‘round to the house. Not even to git the rent money. Mama said he got a li’l shy after that.”
Sarah begins to pull at her hair. She asks, “Where was your daughter born?”
“In the house,” Mrs. Washington says, her tone matter of-fact.
“Wudn’t no hospital in Bear Creek then.”
Sarah knows Marty and I were born in the Baptist Hospital in Memphis.
“Did you see a doctor before or after your daughter was born?”
“Never did,” Mrs. Washington says ruefully.
“Mama didn’t have no money for that. When I had a bad toothache once that wouldn’t quit. Mama took me on the train to a colored dentist over in Memphis. White dentists didn’t like the colored even if you had money.”
Her cheeks now blazing, Sarah asks, “Do you remember if the house your mother rented from him was in good condition?”
Mrs. Washington has come to terms with her life in a way Sarah will never understand. The philosophy of stoicism is not in my daughter’s bones. Patting at the back of her white head, Mrs. Washington says, “It was all right, but it didn’t have no toilet. Still had to go out back.
It was hot, too.”
I wince at the thought of the house. When I was fourteen and received my restricted driver’s license, each week I was allowed to drive a basket of laundry to a house in one of the black sections of Bear Creek. Lula Mae (I never knew her last name) did her ironing in the front room of her house, but all I really remember is the stifling heat in the room, the ironing board, and her asthmatic wheezing. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house each time the feeling was so oppressive. How could people live in such poverty? At that age I never made any connection between our lives and theirs.
Sarah has fallen silent, a sign that she has begun to brood. I will hear a sermon on the way home. Mrs. Washington volunteers that when Cal was about three, my grandfather sold their house to someone else, and she rarely saw him again. He didn’t send her money, see the child, or acknowledge them in any way. Again, she doesn’t seem perturbed about the lack of support. After some urging from me, she adds a few details about her own life. She was married when she was eighteen to a mechanic who ran off after she had four children by him.
Until five years ago when her arthritis got too bad, she cleaned houses for a living.
Mrs. Washington confirms that Calcutta is Lucy’s mother, and I calculate Frank Page became a father more than sixty years ago. Unlike many blacks who left the county to go North to find work, the family has stayed in eastern Arkansas.
“They started coming back these last few years. It ain’t no better up there now, and it be a little worse.” Though it is not warm in the house, she picks up a fan from the table by her chair and stirs the air in front of her face. She seems a little breathless now, and I suspect we have tired her out. She does not object when I announce we have to be going. As we stand to leave, Mrs.
Washington, nodding at Sarah, tells me, “She’s a pretty girl.” It sounds more like a warning than a compliment.
We thank her for talking with us, and Sarah adds, “I hope this wasn’t too hard on you.”
Mrs. Washington smiles for the first time. Talking, her expression says, hasn’t been the difficult part.
In the Blazer, Sarah complains bitterly.
“He was a terrible person! First, he rents her family probably a pigsty;
then he knocks some off the rent if she’ll have sex with him; then after she gets pregnant and has a child, he sells the property and pretends it never happened. That’s just simply evil! How could he have done such a thing?”
I direct Sarah to drive back on Highway 79 through Clarendon and Stuttgart to keep us off the interstate. As we drive past the cemetery again, I try to put the matter in some perspective.
“You need to remember that they were in the Depression then, so the housing isn’t a surprise.
And, we still don’t know if she felt coerced to have sex with him. He may have genuinely cared for her. If she hated him, I couldn’t tell it.”
Sarah passes an ancient pickup with two dogs and three black children in the back.
“How can you defend him?” she says shrilly.
“She was practically a child. He might as well have raped her for all she could do to stop him! It’s all true. Whatever white people over here can get away with, they will. I’m so glad we don’t live over here!”
“I’m not defending him, but it’s not that simple, Sarah,” I lecture her.
“Geography doesn’t have a lot to do with how much we humans rationalize our behavior.
Give any of us too much power, and we’ll abuse it.
There’s some wonderful people, black and white, living in Bear Creek. Granted, my grandfather may not have been one of them, but the older you get, the more you realize we’re pretty much all the same. You just haven’t lived long enough yet to find that out.”
Predictably, I have infuriated her.
“I don’t want power,” she snaps at me.
“That’s all I hear about!
Whether it’s here or up at Fayetteville. Politics, sports, sororities, fraternities, grades, money it’s all about winning Somebody being better than somebody else, having more than somebody else. Why can’t Americans learn how to cooperate with each other and quit trying to beat each other’s brains out?”
My stubborn, idealistic daughter. I look over at her and hope that, as angry as she is, she doesn’t drive us off into a ditch. I am a poor choice to answer this question. Almost twenty-five years ago, when I came back from the Peace Corps with my mixed-blood bride and moved into an integrated neighborhood, I, like my daughter, thought that if the country just tried hard enough, social and economic equality would be achievable. Black and white, rich and poor would vanish. Or, in the words of John Lennon, heaven and hell would disappear and we would all be one. Well, I was wrong.
“You’re wanting something to happen that’s totally foreign to the average person in the United States. Competition to the death is bred into us from the moment we learn that walking is better than crawling. The national bird ought to be a gamecock.
The stereotypical American hero is a type A personality who succeeds whatever the cost, and sacrifices everyone else in the process. While we might give lip service to altruism, it’s no accident this is a capitalist country.”
“And meanwhile most of an entire race of people have been trampled over to get what we want.” As Sarah talks, we go slower and slower, settling in behind Ma and Pa Kettle in a twenty-year-old Ford pickup.
“I don’t know what the hell has happened to them,” I say honestly.
“Do you really think that everything bad that transpires in this country is due to racism? Why can’t they compete any better? Get them off the playground, and they lose their drive. Look at all the other minorities who have come to this country and succeeded. Why can’t they?”
Sarah swerves to avoid hitting a dead skunk.
“That’s really great. You’re back in Bear Creek an hour, and you sound just like the whites. The short answer is that de spite all the discrimination there is a growing African American middle class. Maybe there’s not much of one in Bear Creek, which is in one of the poorest counties in the country, but there is in Blackwell County, and you know it because you can see the evidence right on our street. You just don’t read about it in the papers.”
“That’s for sure,” I concede, glad to have an area where we can agree.
“All I read about is drive-by shootings, the drug deals in Needle Park, gangs controlling the streets, and teenagers having babies. It just seems like things have really gotten out of control.”
Sarah begins to respond but merely shakes her head. In her eyes I’m simply one more racist, an obstacle to progress and enlightenment. As we pass over the White River in Clarendon, I look down into the water and realize how little I believe in the possibility of the advancement of humanity, whatever the race. The best evidence available suggests that we are a violent, greedy, and appallingly wasteful species, intent on pulling the plug on ourselves as fast as we can. Capitalism, stripped of its pretensions, is merely the big rats eating the little ones.
The Soviet Union, of course, demonstrated the utter ineptness of socialism. The only redeeming fact is that I love my daughter even more now than when the day started. I love her for her capacity to be outraged; her willingness to care. Right now, she doesn’t love me, but she will. She always has.
Outside of England, my bladder can’t take another mile, and I tell Sarah to stop at a nondenominational gas station to let me pee. Made of sterner stuff, she waits in the Blazer while I relieve myself in an ancient commode so black with bacteria that out of it could emerge a pre historic monster. Sarah was right to wait. Feeling guilty that we aren’t buying gas, I buy some suckers (a trip wouldn’t be complete without hard candy) and two Diet Cokes. The clerk, a grizzled white male whose foreign travel may have taken place in the jungles in Vietnam, judging from his Army jacket and insignia, takes my money complacently. His status notwithstanding, he could stand a little competition, too.
Back in the Blazer I divide my goodies and say, “I wonder what your aunt Marty will say when I tell her that our family tree has a few more branches than we thought.”
“What can she say?” Sarah says, pulling back onto the highway. She’s a worse racist than you are, her expression says.
“What do you feel about it?”
“I haven’t had time to assimilate it,” I say, glad my parents aren’t alive to have Sarah rub their noses in this unfortunate chapter of our family history. She would, too.
“It was rape, pure and simple,” Sarah pronounces.
“She had no choice.”
Pure and simple? What is ever pure and simple? I try to keep from clenching my fists and stare out at the bare fields, the rice and bean harvests already completed in this dry and mild fall. Now that we have proof (I can’t imagine the old woman was lying, having heard her) of our kinship with Dade and his family, I wonder if Sarah’s attitude will eventually soften about his case. Is Dade now a victim in her eyes, too? Or does his maleness transcend race? What a battle for her ideological soul!
On the outskirts of Blackwell County, I ask, “Isn’t it odd that neither Dade nor his father have mentioned the fact that we are related?”
The sun disappears entirely, and Sarah takes off her dark glasses.
“It’s probably their male pride that prevents them. Their women were raped, and they were helpless to stop it. They probably don’t like it any better than you do. Women are different. Once the baby was born, all Ms. Washington could do was love it. The baby was innocent.”
We drive in silence the rest of the way home. I hope she remembers that someday. Dade didn’t ask to be born either. As we turn in our driveway, she asks me, not for the first time, “Do you still think Dade is innocent?”
Though he is still refusing to take the polygraph test (for reasons I don’t understand), I say stubbornly, “Yeah, I do. If he’s convicted and goes to prison, and you find out later that he was telling the truth, how will you feel?
After all, he’s sort of a half cousin.”
Sarah picks up her purse from the floor and opens the door, refusing my invitation to feel guilty.
“What I found out today is that women don’t usually lie about what men do to them. All those years you didn’t believe that poor woman had been raped by your grandfather. If we hadn’t gone over there today, you never would have known the truth.”
Sarah has a way of learning her own lessons from events, but I let this pass. Anything I say will be seen as denial. I grunt and pick up candy wrappers strewn on the floor before following her into the house.
“What time will you be home?” I ask from the couch in the den as I watch Sarah study herself in a compact mirror. She is going out to meet some friends from high school. I look at my watch. It is almost eight. Amy was supposed to be here by now to meet her. I pet Woogie, who has jumped up on the couch beside me now that he sees Sarah is deserting us.
“I have no idea,” she says vaguely.
“Do you think you’ll be back by noon tomorrow?” I ask sarcastically. I didn’t think it was such a difficult question.
“Oh, Dad!” Sarah says, picking up her purse.
There is a knock at the door, and it is Amy who breezes in past me.
“Did I miss Sarah?”
“Almost,” I say, irritated with both of them.
Sarah, dressed in jeans and an old bomber jacket she has found in her closet, is just barely civil. Rainey, her expression says, was an appropriate companion, but this woman is too young.
Indeed, with her hair in a ponytail and wearing white sweats, Amy looks more like a college student than a woman who surely has to be close to thirty.
“Have fun!”
Amy calls to her as Sarah bounds down the front stoop, keys in hand. My daughter, who has barely said hello to her, nods but doesn’t speak.
I had wanted Sarah to sit down and visit, but Amy was delayed by a phone call. I shut the door and complain, “That was successful, wasn’t it?”
Amy reaches down to pet Woogie, saying mischievously, “Well, you should have had me over to dinner. I would have been on time.”
I lead her into the den.
“Sarah could have waited a few more minutes. It wasn’t as if she had to go put out a fire somewhere.”
Amy comes up behind me and bumps me with her shoulder.
“She’s darling. And mad as hell at her old man for blowing it with Rainey, and taking up with a young bimbo, and probably for a million other sins you’ve committed that I don’t know about.”
“You’re not a bimbo!” I yelp.
Amy sits on the couch, and I plop down beside her.
“I’ve got my work cut out if I want to hang around the Page gang, don’t I?” she says merrily, but I can’t tell whether she’s kidding or not.
“The old guy’s a lush and still mooning over his former girlfriend who’s getting married on him; his daughter is furious because she’s nearly the same age as his girlfriend. This is a tough crowd, huh, Woogie?” she says to my dog, who has jumped up beside her.
“I’m not a lush!” I say plaintively.
“It’s a bit dog that barks,” Amy says cryptically, then reaches up and kisses me.
I don’t get this woman and tell her so.
“Why do you like me?”
“I can’t explain it either,” Amy says, a big grin on her face.
“I know this will end in disaster for me. But what else is new? How was your day?”
Before I tell her, I get the Arkansas-LSU game on the radio from Baton Rouge. As I expected, the rest of the Hogs’ season has been terrible. Without Dade, the offense has shut down completely, and we haven’t won another game. While we listen, I explain to Amy for the first time about my grandfather.
“Goodness gracious!” she exclaims when I am finished.
“A little Southern gothic soap opera. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
I turn off the game. We’re hopelessly behind (21 to 0 in the fourth quarter). “Hell, I don’t know. I was embarrassed, I guess,” I admit. I get up to get a beer. Amy has already refused one.
“You didn’t do it,” she says.
“Besides there’re a million stories like that all over the South. Some worse, some better.”
I come sit back down by her. Things heat up on the couch, and I am all for going back into the bedroom, but am deterred by the possibility that Sarah may return for something.
“She’s practically heard us,” I say, as I put my hand under the top part of her sweats, “she might as well see us” “I can’t imagine a more delightful scene,” Amy says, only halfheartedly pushing my hand away.
“This is your new mother, Sarah. She’s even cuter without any clothes on, isn’t she? Stop it!”
The next morning during breakfast I manage only two sips of coffee before asking Sarah, “Well, what did you think of Amy?”
Sarah chews on a piece of buttered toast, swallows, and then lectures me: “Dad, don’t do anything foolish like getting married right now. You’d just be doing it to spite Rainey. You’re on the rebound. Don’t forget it.”
I put down the sports pages, unable to continue reading about the massacre last night. My daughter is a piece of work.
“I wasn’t sending you a wedding invitation. I just asked, what did you think about Amy?”
“She’s all right,” Sarah says grudgingly.
More than satisfied, I do not risk a followup question.
An hour later after she drives off to return to school, I pick up the house and realize that Sarah did not make me try to agree again that I would ask the court to let me withdraw as Dade’s attorney. Maybe she thinks we should be all one big happy family. The court wouldn’t let me withdraw at this late date anyway.