The big skinhead said, “That how you want to play, motherfucker? You gonna fuck with me?” He swung the chain at me. I jerked back, waving the bottle in as unpredictable a pattern as I could, trying to force the guy back. But his friends were circling around behind us. As they did, I knew we were screwed. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the fucker with the chain. He swung it in a wide arc, fast, and I had to jerk back, almost bumping into Jeremiah.
Then I had my chance. Asshole swung too hard and lost control of the chain. As he wound up to swing again, I jumped forward, slashing at his face. He screamed and fell back, dropping the chain and grabbing at his face. I spun, just as the other two guys started to grab Jeremiah. I ran at the bigger one, swinging the bottle, just as Jeremiah punched the young one in the face. Both of them stumbled back, the younger kid falling on his ass on the sidewalk.
I caught Jeremiah’s eye. Neither of us had to say a word—we took off at a dead run for the train station. The skinheads didn’t pursue, and finally we reached the relative safety of the MARTA station.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, staggering as I tried to control the rushing breaths. I was shaking.
“Man, that would never have happened if we went to Blind Willie’s,” Jeremiah said, laughing. He was shaking too.
“That was crazy.”
He shook his head. “Thanks for bailing us out there, Cole. That was savage. But don’t ever ask me to a concert again.”
I laughed, loud, making light of it. But the incident tied us together. Since then, it’d been Jeremiah who bailed me out of trouble, way too many times. Jeremiah had argued persuasively that I should stay in college and not accept the job at RalCom. I had tried to convince him to come with me. While he worked slow and steady—graduating early, then working his way up in the restaurant business, I’d been busy doing mergers and acquisitions.
A few days before I dropped out of college, I’d taken up the job offer with him. “Dude, they’re starting me at sixty-five thousand. I’m twenty years old! It’s like a gold rush up there. Stock options, fast promotions. You gotta come with me.”
He shook his head. “Nah. My mom’s sick, Cole, you know that. I can’t leave her. If I dropped out of school, she’d check herself right out of the hospital and come kick my butt. And seriously—you might be able to drop out of college and just start your career, but it’s not so easy for me.”
“What, because you’re black? Come on, it’s the nineties.”
He scoffed, shaking his head. “Yeah, that don’t mean shit. If I want a leg up, I’ve got to work twice as hard. And that means I have to finish college. You go on, and let me know how it goes.”
Later, when I screwed it all up? It was Jeremiah who showed up. He made sure Sam and Erin had a Christmas when I was in prison. He found me a job when no one else would hire me.
I owed Jeremiah everything. That’s not something I could ever forget.
He answered on the second ring. “Cole, what’s going on?”
“I’m going to be driving past your place in about twenty-five minutes, I’m just coming back from the airport. You busy?”
“Come on by. Ayanna will be happy to see you. Is Erin with you?”
“No, I just dropped her at the airport, actually.”
“I got beers in the fridge,” he replied.
Twenty minutes later I pulled up in front of Jeremiah’s house in Douglasville. I remember how astonished I was that he’d taken the job with Waffle House after graduating from Georgia Tech. I’d been baffled by his decision to work at the restaurant, but he had made his way up higher and higher in the company in the intervening years. I didn’t know exactly what regional vice presidents made, but I was pretty sure that by now he was doing very well indeed. He and Ayanna maintained a modest lifestyle, buying a three-bedroom ranch house when he first became a district manager. I’d bought a gigantic house and a flashy car and gone way too deep in debt. Jeremiah had been careful, hadn’t taken out any debt other than his home loan, and that was long since paid off.
I’d once thought his progress was plodding, overly careful. Now I only wished I’d emulated him, because he and Ayanna had security that I could only dream of.
I parked in the front of the house and walked up the driveway to the front door. Three years ago, Jeremiah had added a wraparound porch to the house, giving the place a stately look. The boards creaked under my feet as I walked to the front door and pressed the doorbell.
The door opened, revealing Ayanna. She was a tall, elegantly dressed woman with tightly curled shoulder-length hair, skin a rich brown. Her dress and the string of white pearls she wore made her look as if she were getting ready to go to a party.
“Cole!” She smiled and reached her arms out. We embraced. Then she stepped back and said, “You’ll have to forgive us … Jeremiah will be free soon, but right now we’re having a talk with the twins. You’re welcome to join us.” At the last words, she had a twinkle in her eyes.
I could do that. “I’m game.”
I followed her into Jeremiah’s office, a dining room he had converted years before. Jeremiah sat in his office chair. Across from him, side by side on the loveseat, were Kelly and Antoinette, their fifteen-year-old twins.
Jeremiah stood as I entered the room and grabbed me in a bear hug. “Hey, roomie. Give me just a minute.”
He turned back to his daughters and said, “This discussion is over, ladies. You leave this house, you wear appropriate clothing. Are we clear?”
Kelly rolled her eyes, and Antionette opened her mouth to talk.
They didn’t get a chance. Ayanna interrupted, saying, “That will be quite enough. Let’s leave your father alone with Mr. Cole. Say hello, girls.”
Both of the girls approximated well-mannered greetings to me, despite their age. I complimented the latest news about their grades and they went on their way with their mother.
“You want a beer, or something stronger?”
I thought about it for a fraction of a second. “I think maybe something stronger.”
“Well, come over here to the bar.” Jeremiah maintained a well-stocked bar in one corner of his office. Within a couple of moments he had mixed both of us scotch and sodas. Then he led me outside, where we took seats in the rockers on the front porch.
For a few moments we just sat in silence taking in the smells and sounds of the neighborhood; cicadas hummed in the woods and the frogs and other animals cried out in the darkness. It was the first time in weeks I had done anything resembling leisure. Sitting and listening immediately unlocked a flood of memories of growing up. My childhood had sounded and smelled like this.
I sipped the scotch and closed my eyes. “This is good.”
“What brings you by, Cole?”
I looked over at my oldest friend. “Brenna’s alive.”
He set his scotch down on the small wicker table between our chairs and said, “And you’re just telling me now? I can’t believe you didn’t say that the second you came in the door. Or called me earlier. Tell me what’s happened?”
In short, clipped sentences I told Jeremiah about the phone call to Erin and what little we knew about Brenna’s situation.
Jeremiah instantly zeroed in on what was making me uncomfortable. “How come you aren’t going out there?”
“Sam. It’s been three weeks since they saw Brenna. She could be anywhere. We can’t leave Sam alone and I can’t lose my job … not again. Not to mention, I can’t travel without permission. Technically, I shouldn’t even have brought Erin to Atlanta—I don’t have a travel pass.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s a problem. Jesus. I’d love to get my hands on the son of a bitch that let her slip through the cracks.”
I nodded. I’d been struggling with rage ever since I learned she could have been safe in police custody, and instead, they’d treated her like a criminal.
“So now we wait?”
I nodded. “Erin’s going to the Portland police in the morning, and hopefully we�
�ll know more then. In the meantime, Sam has school and I have work, and I’ll try to keep life as normal as possible for him.”
Jeremiah frowned and shook his head. “Life ain’t been normal for that boy since the day his sister disappeared.” He took a deep breath then a slow sip of his scotch. “How are you hanging in there?”
“I’m all right.” I shrugged.
He frowned. “Don’t bullshit me, Cole. I’ve got eyes, you know.”
I sighed. “I’m doing the best I can, Jeremiah. This job will kill you.”
“I know it. Hang in there, and before too long you’ll be set to flipping papers instead of burgers and take home real money. Just gotta be patient.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Well, you know how it is. Busy as hell. Ayanna’s going to run for city council, and we’re working on figuring out how that’s going to go. I kinda wish she would wait until the girls graduate from high school, but you know how useful wishing is.”
“I bet Erin might want to help. She’s always loved political stuff.” As I said the words, I knew they weren’t really true. Once it might have been, but with her drinking and depression—I couldn’t imagine her bothering to get involved in something political now.
He eyed me carefully. “How are things with her? With the two of you?”
I took a sip of the scotch. Then another. It had a faintly earthy smell. It felt good going down. I didn’t know how to answer his question.
“That bad, huh?”
I felt my eyebrows pulling together as I struggled to find words. “I fucked things up bad. After Teagan, she can’t trust me. When Brenna disappeared, she didn’t have anybody to turn to.”
Jeremiah snorted. “Except her sister.”
“Right. Lori’s advice is consistent if nothing else. I’m pretty sure she still tells Erin that she should just leave me.”
Jeremiah let out a deep sigh. It sounded like one he’d been waiting to release for years. He cleared his throat then took a sip of his whiskey. “Maybe she should.”
I was stunned by his words. Stunned and betrayed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Jeremiah?”
He frowns even deeper, deep lines appearing on both of sides of his mouth. “Chill, chill. How long have we been friends?”
“Twenty years. A little more.”
“Do you trust me?”
I nodded, a little dazed by the direction the conversation had taken. “Yeah, I trust you. You’re damn near the only person in the world I trust.”
“Then listen to me. You can’t fix your marriage by sitting around whining about how she doesn’t trust you. I saw how it was then … you were all dazzled by the money and the power and the pretty salesgirls. And I know you try in your own way. You’ve taken a job you hate to keep your family supported. I get that. But she’s not gonna trust you until you trust her. In there.” He pointed at my chest.
“I don’t know what you mean—”
He interrupted. “How often do you talk to her about your fears? About things that go wrong? About how you feel about Brenna?”
“That’s not really who I am, you know that.”
“I do know that. And I pay attention. Erin didn’t marry someone to provide a paycheck … she married someone to be partners with. You used to understand that. And it seems to me that as time went by, more and more you were focused on providing things instead of love.”
I shook my head. Christ, that was harsh.
But was he right?
When I looked back to those heady days when Erin and I first met, things were so different. And one of the biggest differences was that we’d always talked about our dreams. It’s funny how our dreams had reflected our lives. With her hippie parents, Erin dreamed of saving the world, of making a difference, of leaving the world a better place than she’d found it. It’s one of the things I admired the most about her—most people couldn’t see past their own comfort and security long enough to consider anyone else. But even in college, Erin was fully engaged in the world around her.
My dreams had been shaped by my childhood moving from one base to another before my dad’s retirement from the Marine Corps. I’d wanted to give my family stability, a home, a place they could remember for their entire lives. I’d wanted to give them one thing I’d never had as a kid or as an adult … roots.
Like everything else, I’d failed at that too.
My voice was rough when I spoke again. “I don’t even know when we stopped talking.”
Jeremiah stretched, a long luxurious stretch. Then he punched a hole through the silence. “Do you really want to stay with her?”
I almost answered with a simple knee-jerk, Of course I do. But this was Jeremiah, my best friend who had always been able to see through me. So I considered. I thought about what things were like now … Erin drinking herself to sleep on the couch almost every night. The smell of death in our house. The despair.
Then I thought about how she’d looked the other night, asleep on the couch, much like the girl I’d fallen in love with. About her beautiful smile, her outrage when she talked about injustice in our world. I thought about the four of us laughing and giggling together in our living room before we bought that stupidly large house.
I missed her terribly. I missed my family.
“Yes. I want her back.” Unexpectedly, I felt my eyes begin to water. My voice choked up as I said, “I want her to be happy again. I hate seeing her so miserable.”
Shit! I quickly wiped my face with the palm of my hand to erase the tear that had run down my cheek.
Jeremiah put a hand on my shoulder. “You gotta tell her that, man.”
I spoke in a near whisper. “We had everything … and I fucked it up. I fucked it all up. It’s my fault Brenna disappeared. She wouldn’t have been hanging around with older guys if I hadn’t gotten mixed up in the affair. And then when Erin needed me the most I got myself locked up in prison.”
Jeremiah nodded. “Yeah, you screwed up. I don’t think you can blame yourself for Brenna, at least not all of it. Screwing things up is nothing special … that just makes you part of the human race. But here’s the thing, Cole, you’ve got hope. She’s alive. And I don’t think it’s too late to save your marriage, either. But you’ve got to be the one to make it happen. You’ve got to want it bad enough to make some changes.”
Both of us went silent, sitting and listening to the night sounds. Night sounds that took me to an earlier, simpler time, a younger time, a time when I hadn’t lost my daughter and my marriage.
Cole: January 1994
“So what are your parents like?”
When Erin asked the question, she had no idea what kind of can of worms she was opening. But we’d reached that point. After our pre-Christmas visit to her parents, visiting mine in January made sense. I had accumulated way too much vacation, so taking a few days off wasn’t a problem, and she didn’t go back to school until almost the end of January. Atlanta was a considerably further drive from Washington than Raleigh-Durham, and we’d been switching off the driving for some hours, listening to music and talking before Erin broached this particular question.
I smiled. “Nervous?”
She snorted. “Of course.”
I shook my head, my eyes on the road and scanning the countryside as we drove, now through South Carolina. It was greener here than it had been in Washington. “Don’t be. They’ll love you.”
“I don’t have that kind of confidence.”
I grunted. “Seriously, Erin, my bigger worry is that you’ll realize what throwbacks my parents are and you’ll have second thoughts about me.”
“Not possible,” came her quick reply.
“You haven’t met them yet,” I responded. “My parents—Daddy especially—aren’t exactly … um … politically correct.”
That was an understatement.
Daddy had always been a throwback to an earlier era, and not necessarily a good one. Mom was all Southern charm and gentility, nos
e in the air, her whole family too good to see most of the white trash that surrounded them. Which was the main reason her family always hated Daddy. Brash, bold, and loud, Daddy grew up as a scrappy kid in the mountains of North Georgia in a time when literacy rates were still low and high school graduation rates lower still. The Great Depression came early to the mountains of North Georgia, and its effects lingered long after World War II ended—especially for poor families. And while the mountains of North Georgia had never been big slaveholding country, there were plenty of old racists who were mean as snakes.
Daddy never talked about growing up that much—what I knew, I knew from Mama, or from stories he sometimes told when he’d had too much to drink. James Roberts—everyone called him Jimmy—left home for Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville at the beginning of the seventh grade. Mama said it was to get away from his father, a drunken and bitter man who had seen his entire World War II service inside the gates of Camp Oglethorpe, Georgia, where he trained recruits to go overseas and fight. The hour or so drive between Canton and Gainesville was just enough distance to keep his father from visiting very often, and the academy’s endowment provided enough financial aid that he was able to continue attending even when his father refused to pay.
In those days, Riverside maintained a winter campus in South Florida. For the two coldest months of the year, the entire campus decamped and relocated, occupying an old school on land that had been purchased by the Academy a number of years before. During the rare times when I was growing up that my daddy talked about his own childhood, it was invariably stories from the winters he spent in Florida. They were sometimes humorous stories, stories of practical jokes and friendly harassment among the cadets. But there was often a darker edge to those stories. In the fifties and early sixties, Riverside was, of course, all-white. Jim Crow was still fully in effect, and the general poverty of rural mountain Georgia was even worse for the black population. More than once he told me of the Riverside cadets going as a group into black neighborhoods “to teach the niggers a lesson.”
Winter Flower Page 15
