In West Mills

by De'Shawn Charles Winslow

  But what about Essie’s secret? If she were going to tell Pep what she knew, so that Pep could tell Otis Lee, now was the time.

  “Penelope,” Knot said. “Shut that TV off. I got somethin’ to say to ya.”

  With her cane, Pep pressed the button, and the TV screen went black. The only sounds Knot heard were those that came from the hallway. Pep used her cane again to close the door. It closed only halfway.

  “What’s wrong, Knot?” she asked.

  Knot stared at Pep and sang eeny meeny miney mo in her head. Miney mo wanted Knot to break her promise to Valley so that Otis Lee could know his own truth. Otis Lee’s sudden trip to Brooklyn had something to do with Essie; Knot had no doubt in her mind about that. To hope that Otis Lee might return from New York with some kind of new peace would be silly. Lately, Otis Lee was becoming bossier and grumpier by the day. Whether he was in New York receiving good news, bad news, or any news at all, Knot believed he’d come home ornery either way, and that would be all right with her. Her faithful Otis Lee.

  Knot sang eeny meeny miney mo one last time and it gave her the same answer as before: No more secrets, it said. The longer they’re kept, the more hurt they cause when they’re set free. Fran and Eunice know their truths. Otis Lee should know his, too, and you’re the one holding it.

  Usually, Knot didn’t care much for being told what to do, not by miney, mo, or anyone else. But today wasn’t a usual day, and Knot wasn’t her usual self.

  “Knot?” Pep said.

  “I’m gon’ tell you somethin’, Pep,” Knot began. “But first, get that book with them naked white people on it and read to me.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Grateful to have made it to the attorney’s office alive—the taxicab driver hadn’t seemed to have much regard for speed limits—Otis Lee sighed and offered up a silent Thank you, Lord. He asked his granddaughters why cabdrivers drove as though they had only two or three minutes to get to everywhere.

  “Time is money up here, Pop,” Coy explained.

  “I don’t understand why folk say that,” Otis Lee shot back. He was exhausted and his neck and shoulders ached. “Time is time. That’s what time is.”

  Cedar dug into her pocketbook and pulled out the small piece of paper with the attorney’s suite number written on it. They were thirty minutes early for the ten o’clock appointment.

  “Mr. Roth will be with you shortly,” the secretary said. She offered them water, coffee, and tea. Coy had all three, causing Otis Lee great frustration.

  “Well,” Otis Lee whispered once he was seated between Coy and Cedar, “he must be a nice man.”

  “Why?” Coy asked. “Because they got free coffee and tea?”

  “Don’t you see that colored girl sittin’ ’bout ten feet in front of us?” Otis Lee said.

  “People don’t say colored anymore, Pop,” Coy told him. “Maybe the lawyer’s black, too.”

  “Not with a last name like that, he ain’t,” Cedar remarked. “I’ve never met a black person with the last name of Roth.”

  “Girl, you sound just as stupid,” Coy retorted. “What does a name have to do with it?”

  “Shut up, Coy,” Cedar said.

  Otis Lee looked from side to side at his two grown granddaughters. Cedar, married with two children. Coy, married to herself.

  “I ’magine y’all might grow up one of these days.”

  Coy and Cedar talked about the Manhattan shops they wanted to visit. Otis Lee looked forward to finishing the business right there in Roth’s office. He had neither the interest nor energy for shops and boutiques. He did, however, want them out of the hotel room so he could enjoy the television and a long nap.

  As it turned out, Roth was black. With that shock out of the way, Otis Lee could now concentrate on the business at hand.

  “I got a question, sir,” Otis Lee said. “Is the money she left in the bank enough to pay me and my grandgirls back for our plane tickets?”

  “Indeed,” Roth affirmed, and he scratched his goatee. Roth was not tall, exactly. Nor was he short. And though Coy had said Afros had gone out of style, Otis Lee imagined Roth would disagree. He wore tinted spectacles, making it hard for Otis Lee to see his eyes. And his pin-striped navy-blue suit looked as though it had been made just for him. “I’ve got the most recent statements right here.”

  Roth spun around in his brown leather chair and flipped through papers on his other desk, the desk with two lamps. When he spun back around, he lay out three pieces of paper in front of Otis Lee.

  “Let me go get my grandgirls,” Otis Lee said. He used his cane to stand. Roth told him that he would ask Deb to escort them in. He picked up his phone, pressed one button, and less than a minute later Coy and Cedar were there.

  “Mr. Loving would like the two of you to see these statements for the certificates Mrs. O’Heeney bequeathed to him.”

  Cedar picked up two statements, and Coy picked up the third.

  “Well, goddamn!” Coy exclaimed. Cedar cursed, too. They were both staring at the statements, flipping them over and over again.

  They so much like Knot.

  “One of y’all gon’ say somethin’?” Otis Lee asked.

  “All of this is his?” Cedar said to Roth. The answer was yes. Cedar looked at Otis Lee and told him, “These two statements add up to almost two hundred.”

  Otis Lee sighed and asked, “Y’all doin’ all that cussin’ ’bout two hundred damn dollars?”

  “Two hundred thousand, Pop,” Cedar corrected.

  “Nooooo,” Otis Lee said.

  “How much yours say, Coy?” Cedar asked, reaching for the paper in her sister’s hand. Coy moved it out of Cedar’s reach.

  “Twenty-seven thousand and some odd dollars.”

  Otis Lee looked at Roth, waiting for some sort of correction—anything. He took a deep breath and said, “Great day in the mornin’.” And when Roth told Otis Lee that the two houses had steady-paying tenants in five of the six units—no mortgages owed—Otis Lee echoed, “Great day!”

  In Roth’s car, on the way to see the two side-by-side brownstones on Gates Avenue, Otis Lee thought about the paperwork he had just signed, leaving the two houses to Cedar’s twins—and to any children Coy and La’Roy might have. Most of the cash, which would be put away, would be divided between Breezy, Cedar, La’Roy, and Coy; he and Pep would try to enjoy some of it. We might even spend it!

  “I want mine now,” Coy declared.

  “Shut up,” Cedar said.

  When they arrived in front of the houses, Roth gave them a pouch that contained nine or ten keys and copies of papers he needed to hold on to.

  “And, Mr. Loving,” Roth said, putting his hand on Otis Lee’s shoulder, “there’s an envelope in there for you. Letters from Mrs. O’Heeney. She wanted me to put them directly in your hand, if I could.”

  Otis Lee figured the letters were full of “I’m sorrys.” He was grateful to her for leaving him something to pass on to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But he was in no hurry to open the large envelope and have anyone read to him things he had heard before. No rush at all.

  Back at the hotel, Otis Lee sat in the high-back chair in the corner of their room and told Cedar and Coy how different houses looked from the way they had in the early 1920s. The house on the right had not belonged to Essie and O’Heeney when he lived there.

  Cedar went through the pouch of legal papers, reading everything a second time. Coy was ironing. She’ll lose her mind if she don’t get to go shoppin’.

  “You want to open this now or later on?” Cedar asked, holding the large, thick manila envelope that held Essie’s letters.

  “Later on,” he said, and Cedar set it on the desk, next to the Bible.

  “Y’all wait ’til I get back to open it,” Coy told them. And Cedar told her they would open and read them whenever Otis Lee was ready, whether Coy was there or not. Coy was spoiled rotten, Cedar complained. The two of them exchanged sisterly insults, to which Oti
s Lee had become accustomed. But today he wasn’t in the mood for it.

  “Open the damn thing up and read one of ’em,” he said.

  “Don’t pay us no mind, Pop,” Cedar said. “We—”

  “Open the damn thing up and read it,” he broke in. “It’s just as well to hear it and get that over with. Then y’all can go where y’all want to and I can get a nap.” He rested his head on the back of the chair and looked out the window at Brooklyn’s pretty skyline.

  Cedar told them that she would read the most recent letter first.

  March 19, 1987

  Dear Otis Lee,

  If you are reading this letter, it means that I have died. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn that I’ve hung around this long. I know I am. But I hope that you will not be surprised that I have left you everything. You may not even want any of it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  As I’ve mentioned in the previous letters, I’m sorry not to have told you sooner that I was your mother.

  “Say what!” Coy yelled.

  Otis Lee shushed her, and he stood to his feet.

  “Read that again, Cedar,” he instructed. “Slow.”

  Closing his eyes would ensure hearing it correctly, he thought. The words Cedar had just read had to be a mistake.

  Cedar read it again from the top. Essie was his mother, the letter said.

  Otis Lee heard very little after that. His memory had taken him back to when he was a young boy, catching bits and pieces of Ma Noni fussing at Rose for having gone along with a lie. Then he was once again a young man standing just a couple of feet from Essie’s back stoop. Essie was there, too, with that sweet look on her face.

  Otis Lee opened his eyes to find his granddaughters sitting next to him. Cedar had finished the short farewell letter, she said. The letter next in line was dated 1927.

  “You want me to keep going, Pop?” Cedar asked. He nodded once, and she read on.

  Essie had met Otis Lee’s real father—Otis Meachum, a short Negro handyman who worked at the boardinghouse where she lived—soon after arriving in New York City. She had loved Meachum, but their affair was cut short. Essie’s looking white had caused more trouble than Meachum was able to handle, the letter said. And not long after their split, Essie discovered she was to be a mother.

  Rose had come to New York just before Otis Lee was born in a tenement house in Brooklyn. When Essie found herself struggling to shake off the blues of new motherhood, she begged Rose to take her baby—Otis Lee—back to West Mills, and until she felt able.

  Essie had met a group of Negro women who looked like her. And before she knew it, she had fallen into the life she had once been sent to Maine to inhabit: the life of a white woman.

  Cedar finished reading the letter and put it back into the envelope.

  Maybe Knot was right when she say people don’t always need to know everything ’bout everybody.

  Cedar rubbed Otis Lee’s shoulder. And he knew that if Pep had been sitting there with him, she would have done the same thing. Essie was my mama. Rose my grandma. Ma Noni my great-grandma.

  “Well, I’ll be …” Otis Lee mused. Cedar and Coy were looking at him. Waiting. “Life’s somethin’. Ain’t it, y’all?”

  He didn’t need Cedar and Coy to reply to know that life was something to marvel at. Life, as Rose and Ma Noni had always told him, was full of surprises—surprises of the good kind, the bad kind, and the kind that had a little of both. Rose had loved and cared for him better than he imagined any mother could. So there was nothing left to do but smile when he thought of how things would have been had she been his real mother.

  He looked up at his granddaughters and asked that one of them call Pep. When Cedar handed Otis Lee the phone, he could hear the voices of his neighbors talking in the background.

  “Penelope,” Otis Lee began. “Essie was my m—”

  “I know,” Pep said. “I know.”

  He did not get a chance to ask her how she knew before she was telling him something else, something that made him forget about Essie altogether.

  “Knot slipped into a coma today,” Pep told him. “Get on back here, Otis Lee. We need ya.”

  Otis Lee had known many people to go into comas. And none of them had come out. That’s what he would have said to Pep if he’d been able to speak. He handed the phone to Cedar, who told Pep they’d be back in West Mills the following evening.

  On the road from the Norfolk airport to West Mills, Otis Lee sat in Coy’s back seat trying to nap. An hour would be just the right amount of time, he had said when they first got into the car. He closed his eyes but all he saw was Essie. I’m sorry not to have told you sooner that I was your mother, she had written. It might have been Cedar’s voice that had spoken the words, but when Otis Lee played it over and over in his head, he heard Essie.

  Rose. Essie was not the only one who had left Rose. Otis Lee believed that if he had known what Rose had done for him, he would have never gone looking for Essie.

  But what about Ma Noni? How was he supposed to feel about her? Was she not the one who had caused it all? Otis Lee wanted so badly to sit with Knot at her kitchen—maybe even with a short drink—and tell her everything he’d learned over the past couple of days, and to hear her say something like, “Well, that’s that, I guess.” But the shakiness of Pep’s voice over the phone had already told him that it would never happen. And for the fourth time since they’d been on the road, Otis Lee pulled his handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped away his tears.

  The silence was loud on the ride back to West Mills. At one point Otis Lee glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Coy, who was so much like Knot, wiping tears. So he knew that if he were to ask if she was all right, she would probably say yes. Then she would cop an attitude because he had asked.

  Cedar had pulled a notepad and a pencil from her pocketbook and was writing.

  Antioch Lane was lined with parked cars. And Fran’s driveway was full. When Coy was about to turn into Otis Lee’s driveway, he said, “You might as well take me to Fran’s.”

  “Pop, don’t you want to go home for a minute and—”

  “Do like I tell ya, Coy,” he ordered. “That’s what I want right now.”

  She and Cedar glanced at each other.

  “Y’all go on in,” he said after they had parked. “Fran probably wants to see ya faces. Go on.”

  He sat in the car a few minutes longer, refusing to look to his right because that was where Knot’s house stood. Because surely there would be a bereavement wreath hanging on her door. The sight of it would shatter him into pieces.

  Otis Lee leaned his back against the seat. And much like he had on the day he’d ordered Essie to leave his house, Otis Lee cried. But this time, he wailed.

  A few weeks after Knot had given birth to Fran, he let himself into her house and pulled her out of the bed and out onto the porch. He laid her down in front of the front door.

  “Leave me be, goddamnit,” Knot said when he rubbed the piece of ice on her face. She had not drunk any water in at least a day, maybe two. He could tell by the smell of her breath and by her chapped lips.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “I ain’t gon’ leave you be, Knot Centre. Not like this here. You too special for that. I loves ya.”

  Knot tried to sit upright and Otis Lee helped her. Finally she had focused her eyes enough to make contact with his.

  “You love me?” she asked.

  “Course,” he replied.

  “You ain’t gon’ stop, are ya?”

  “Nooooo,” he reassured her.

  Knot scooted next to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder. He knew that was the closest thing to a hug he would ever get from her.

  It was a warm, pretty day in West Mills.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am incredibly grateful to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for their generous support of my work, and fo
r giving me a chance.

  To my agent, P. J. Mark, who guides me every step of the way. A champion. And to Ian Bonaparte, who jumps in wherever needed.

  To my editor, Liese Mayer, thank you for loving this project, for asking all the right questions, for your keen eye, and for your patience. And to Grace McNamee, Barbara Darko, and everyone at Bloomsbury Publishing, you are magnificent. Thank you for all you do.

  While at Iowa, I learned so much from Ethan Canin, Lan Samantha Chang, Margot Livesey, Rebecca Makkai, and Ayana Mathis. Thank you for sharing your gifts with me. Ayana and Margot were especially giving of their time, feedback, wisdom, and friendship. And how could any of us do anything without the constant care of Connie Brothers, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek? Thank you.

  To Elaine Brooks, Geoffrey Minter, Helen Phillips, and Helen Rubinstein, thank you for believing in me.

  Many thanks to Mia Bailey, Jamel Brinkley, Marcus Burke, Drew Calvert, Noel Carver, Joseph Cassara, Charles N. Collier, Tameka Cage Conley, Christina Cooke, Amanda Dennis, Scott Ditzler, Iracema Drew, Jason England, Sarah Frye, Nathaniel Go, Garth Greenwell, Maya Hlavacek, J. M. Holmes, Eskor Johnson, Jade Jones, Sasha Khmelnik, Claire Lombardo, Alex Madison, Magogodi Makhene, Grayson Morley, Melody Murray, Derek Nnuro, Natalie Nuzzo, Regina M. Porter, Ed Roth, William Pei Shih, C. Kevin Smith, Berend ter Borg, Dawnie Walton, Monica L. West, Connor White, Davina White-Elliott, ZZ Packer and her 2017 Napa Valley workshop group, Helena Maria Viramontes and her 2017 Bread Loaf workshop group, and Kim and Robin Christiansen at the Historic Phillips House of Iowa City.

  I am so grateful to black writers such as the late Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, who have cleared a path for us.

  To Daniel and Alyssa Crouch, Davina and Steve Elliott, and Kevin J. Harrell, thank you for the steadfast friendship over the years.