by Gwen Florio
Grace’s father was as angry as she’d ever seen him, so angry he cursed in the presence of her mother, who herself was so upset she let it go by.
‘Bobby, what are you thinking?’
They were in the kitchen, her father and brother on their feet facing one another, radiating intensity, Grace and her mother at the tiny table that barely fit within the rowhouse kitchen’s confines. Three years after leaving Chateau, Grace’s mother still mourned the house that at the time had seemed so cramped, wistfully recalling its deep porch, the narrow back yard where she grew squash and pole beans. But the house, she always hastened to add, was the only thing she missed.
Kwame toddled about in the living room, blissfully oblivious to the seething conflict just a couple of yards away. Grace and Bobby had bought him a set of blocks, and he delighted in stacking them high and then knocking them down, interrupting their conversation every few minutes with a crash.
‘Did you even’ – his mother inclined her head toward the living room – ‘think about him?’
‘He’s why I’m doing this!’
Grace fully shared their parents’ concern, but still she thrilled to the conviction in Bobby’s voice, the purposeful set to his shoulders, the shine in his eyes.
‘Things have got to change. Not just here, but in places like that. We were lucky. We got out. But think of everybody back there, the plant the only place to work, unless you want to be a yard boy like me or do day work like Grace.’ He put some extra spin on the word boy. Grace’s father winced.
‘And now look at us. Daddy at the shipyard, Mama working in Hutzler’s. Look at her hands.’ He grabbed Davita’s hands and held them up like trophies. Faint white scars crisscrossed them like threads, the legacy of years in the canning plant, nicked daily with her knife or broken bits of crab shell. But they were no longer red and swollen, the cuts inevitably festering, as they had been every day she’d worked there. Now she sat before a sewing machine in a back room at Hutzler’s department store, altering pretty dresses for rich white women, and when the other seamstresses complained about the occasional finger-prick from the needles, she laughed and laughed and laughed.
‘Me in college,’ he continued. ‘And Grace a regular career woman, working for the Afro. The Afro! Can you imagine such a thing as a black people’s newspaper in Chateau?’
Grace straightened despite herself. Her job was very nearly the Afro’s lowliest, one step up from the copy boys, answering phones, opening mail, running various errands for the reporters and editors – but still, she was part of the Afro. No matter what her bosses had in mind, she’d promised herself she would not be a clerk forever.
Bobby reached for his mother’s hand. She snatched it away and folded her arms across her chest as he spoke.
‘Chateau, the whole Eastern Shore, it’s like it never came out of the Civil War. They freed people, but nothing really changed. Well, it’s time for a change, and who better to give it a push than someone like me, who grew up there?’
Gerald and Davita Evans lowered their eyes. Impossible to argue with him. Maryland had never seceded, but it was an unrepentant slave state, and in rural areas Confederate flags still flew proudly from homes and the Stars and Bars were ubiquitous on T-shirts, caps and bumper stickers.
‘You can’t go. You were lucky to get out once. You, of all people, cannot go back.’ Davita spoke barely above a whisper, but it was as though she’d shouted. It was the thing of which they never spoke, none of them, as though when they’d left Chateau, they’d closed a heavy iron door behind them, turned the oversize key in the lock and dropped it into the river on their way out of town, shedding memories as it sank through the dark waters and buried itself deep in the muck below.
‘I’ll go.’
Grace looked around the room as though someone else had spoken, letting her eyes fall on the familiar objects from their home in Chateau: the rag rug – made anew by Davita every few years from scraps of worn-out clothing – in front of the sink; the pair of snarling black-glass panthers on the mantel; the framed baby pictures on the sideboard, herself and Bobby in black and white, Kwame in color. And the unfamiliar, too: the view through the kitchen window of the back ‘yard,’ a patch of concrete softened only by the border of geraniums that Davita planted in empty five-pound Folgers cans.
She liked Baltimore, liked its energy, and the ease that came from living and working among black people, able to let down her guard for hours and even days at a time, and she loved her job at the Afro. But, much as her mother missed their old house, she missed the damp cool of grass under her bare feet, the ceaseless hum of insects, the chatter of birds and, above it all, the high, lonely honk of geese. The family hadn’t been back since they’d left.
She stopped her survey of the room and focused on her parents’ faces, looking each in the eye in turn.
‘I’ll go. I’ll stick with him every minute. He won’t be able to get up to any trouble.’
That single word – trouble – perhaps comprising the biggest understatement Grace had made in her twenty-two years.
TWENTY
Nora drove home from Grace’s in a haze of regret that fell away only when she saw the red and blue lights flashing in front of Quail House as her truck emerged from the cedars and rounded the last bend in the lane.
‘Mother!’ she gasped.
She floored it the final hundred yards, slewing into a skid behind the police car, jumping out just as it came to a stop, rushing up the stoop to her mother, who stood clinging to her walker as she spoke with the officers on the steps below her. Brittingham again, along with Nelson, the black cop, released from his door duties.
Nora pushed past them and put an arm around her mother. Penelope trembled within her embrace. Michael Murphy, who’d pressed himself against her walker, pushed his nose into Nora’s hand, then lay down, seemingly content to let her take over his self-appointed task of guarding Penelope.
‘Are you all right? I was afraid—’ She stopped herself. She’d been afraid that Penelope had fallen and lay unconscious or maybe worse.
Penelope lifted her chin and squared her thin shoulders. The shaking stopped. That was the mother Nora remembered. ‘I’m fine. But you’re not.’
‘What do you mean?’
Brittingham cleared his throat. ‘We’re here because of that.’ He pointed to Electra. Sun glinted off its shimmering surface. Nora shaded her eyes and details leapt into view – the ragged red letters splashed across the trailer’s flank, stretching from step to roof, zigzagging across windows and the door.
RACIST GO HOME!
‘I only noticed it just before you got home,’ Penelope said. ‘You’d been gone so very long, and, of course, I worry.’
A none-too-subtle reminder to Nora about how she’d avoided her mother’s calls and emails during the worst of the time after her break-up with Joe, leaving Penelope to read in the newspapers (although she’d likely heard from tech-savvy neighbors first) of Nora’s kidnapping and near-demise, not to mention her arrest, lurid tidbits that set Chateau abuzz despite the fact that Nora had been gone for decades.
Nelson stepped forward. ‘Did you know about this?’
‘Of course not,’ she snapped. ‘I’m seeing it for the first time. I’ve been in town all morning.’
He pulled a slim notebook from his back pocket and removed a mechanical pencil from the slot in his shirt pocket. He twisted the top of the pencil and poised it over the notebook. ‘What time did you leave the house?’
About a thousand years ago. ‘An hour, give or take.’
The pencil scratched on paper. ‘Where’d you go?’
To Robert Evans’s aunt’s home. ‘I was running errands.’
‘What kind of errands?’
The kind that made me wish I’d never gone. ‘I was delivering a cake to a friend.’
He waited for her to elaborate.
Careful, Nora. She, too, could wait.
Nelson tapped his pencil against his no
tebook. ‘And the friend?’
Nora glanced skyward, as though waiting for a different name to tumble providentially from a cloud. ‘Grace Evans.’
‘Who?’ Nelson’s visible annoyance gave way to shock.
‘Grace Evans. She used to work …’ For us, she started to say. ‘Here.’
Brittingham stepped forward, cellphone in hand. He tapped the screen and held it up. ‘Is this you?’
For the second time in an hour, the words caught her eye first, the font bold and black – Justice for Robert Evans.
And below them, the photo. Two people in a rowboat emerging sideways from beneath a bridge, faces in profile but still identifiable. The mortifying smaller type below it:
Killer Cop Has a Side Piece.
Nora looked everywhere but at her mother.
‘Yes. That’s me.’
Her mother never saw the photo.
Brittingham tucked his phone away, seemingly as reluctant as Nora to spend any more time on that aspect of her morning.
‘That’s all we need. It’s clear you didn’t do this yourself.’
Brittingham’s words seemed directed as much to Nelson as to her.
‘I’m sorry you got caught up in this. It’s not fair. Not to you, not to Alden, not to any of us. Come on. Let’s go.’ He looked at his colleague and jerked his head toward their car.
‘But what are you going to do about it?’ Penelope inched forward with her walker, to the very edge of the stoop.
‘Looks like we’ll file a report,’ Nelson said. Was Nora imagining the sarcasm in his voice, the weary assumption of motions made, the minimum done?
‘A report. When some stranger came into my yard, even as I was in the house. Anything could have happened.’
‘Anything didn’t, Mother,’ Nora murmured.
Brittingham’s face went stern, Nelson’s blank. ‘No, your mother’s right,’ Brittingham said. ‘When you’re dealing with this bunch, anything could happen. I see you’ve got a dog.’ Michael Murphy, sensing the glances turned his way, lifted his head and wagged his tail. ‘What about a gun?’
‘My father had shotguns. He hunted, of course. He taught me how to shoot. Nora here, he taught her, too.’
Nora harkened back to predawn mornings with men in waxed jackets and pants milling about the kitchen, filling Thermoses with coffee as Penelope sliced Grace’s beaten biscuits in two, buttered them with quick slashes, and filled them with thick-cut ham. It was Nora’s job to enfold them in foil packets – and to keep them out of the mouth of Kathleen Mavourneen, one of Murph’s predecessors, who bounded among the men in paroxysms of excitement as soon as they pulled guns from cases and rubbed them a final time with soft, oiled cloths.
The dog would return with the men late in the morning, when the geese had ceased to fly and settled for the day amid the stubble in cornfields, pecking about for stray kernels. But all morning long, she’d have done the job she was bred to do, leaping from the blind at the crack of shots – sometimes having seen the goose tumbling from the sky before Nora’s father could give the command – landing with a reverberating splash, legs pumping through the frigid water with mighty strokes, returning with a ten-pound Canada goose held so gently in her massive jaws that the soft down beneath the water-shedding outer feathers was barely disturbed.
‘You might want to dig out those shotguns, keep them handy, the two of you living out here alone the way you do,’ Brittingham said, the subtext – without a man – so clear that even Penelope winced.
She shook her head. ‘Long gone, I’m afraid. I gave them away to one of my husband’s hunting partners after he died. They were beautiful old pieces. He wanted to pay me, but I told him to donate the money to the church.’
Penelope had always loved playing Lady Bountiful. Nora wondered if the money from the guns might have covered the repair of the threadbare patches in the rugs, or maybe repointing the bricks in the chimney.
‘Think about getting new ones,’ Brittingham said bluntly. ‘You can call nine-one-one until you’re blue in the face, but even if we drive a hundred miles an hour, we won’t get here in time if you have a true emergency. You’re lucky this is all you’re dealing with.’
They all looked at Electra, the red slashes like wounds across her flanks. Nora didn’t feel lucky.
‘You’ll want to get that taken care of,’ Brittingham said. ‘Nice unit like that, you don’t want to do it yourself, risk messing up that finish. Try Burris’s dealership. Their body shop does good work.’
He nodded his goodbyes and left.
Penelope turned to her daughter.
‘Nora, I’m worried about you. Clearly, you’ve upset people. The kind of people who have no compunction about sneaking up to our house and vandalizing your trailer.’
‘Mother, I’m fine.’ All evidence to the contrary.
Penelope spoke past the obligatory demurral, clutching her daughter’s arm to underscore the urgency of her appeal.
‘I love having you here. It means the world to me. But maybe, just for a little while, it would be better if you leave Chateau.’
TWENTY-ONE
Penelope was already at the table the next morning, teacup in hand, distressingly bright-eyed in comparison to her daughter’s pre-caffeinated fog. They’d stayed up late, in a running verbal push-pull that ended when Nora slammed her hand on the table, saying, ‘I’m not leaving you until your leg is healed, and that’s final,’ and stomped up to bed.
True to form, Penelope greeted the day as though nothing had happened, chattering about a fox she’d seen running across the lawn with a half-grown duckling in its mouth, a mallard hen in frantic pursuit. ‘That poor mother. I felt so sorry for her. It’s a terrible thing when a mother can’t protect her young.’ Said with a sly glance at Nora.
Nora made her way to the stove, added water to the still-warm pot and turned on the flame beneath it. She retrieved the plastic cone, fitted in the paper filter and shoveled in a tablespoon of ground coffee, then added a second tablespoon. She decided to ignore her mother’s gibe. She poured the water, and the bright arabica scent hit her, almost as good as the first sip.
Penelope, having made her point, changed the subject. ‘Have you read the Baltimore Sun today?’
‘We don’t get the Sun.’
‘I thought maybe you’d read it on that phone of yours.’ Penelope continued to resist her daughter’s blandishments to get a smartphone. She had a cellphone, of sorts – a little flip phone that nestled in her handbag, which she kept charged only so she could play the solitaire game Nora had shown her. As far as Nora knew, she’d never once used it to call anyone.
‘We got it today,’ Penelope said. She lifted the newspaper from its concealment on the chair beside her and smoothed it out on the table, pushing it toward Nora’s place. ‘Someone was’ – she paused, seeking the right word – ‘gracious enough to leave it on our doorstep. Perhaps the same person who decorated your trailer.’
Nora took a swallow of coffee and ran to the window. Electra was there and, but for the painted message slowly darkening to a scablike color, did not seem to have suffered further injury.
She returned to the table, gulped the rest of her coffee and, thus fortified, turned to the newspaper lying in wait for her.
Prime front-page real estate went to a banner story about the government’s feeble attempts to track down the children it had forcibly removed from their undocumented immigrant parents, some as young as infants disappearing into the foster care system. But a one-column story below the fold bore a stacked headline:
Shooting
Victim’s
Violent
History
Nora drew the paper closer.
A year earlier, according to the story, Robert Evans had pulled a knife on a classmate in his Baltimore high school, sliding it from temple to jaw, parting flesh to the bone beneath. The reporter – Stephen Abrams, the same one who’d called Nora – had interviewed Evans’s victim, one Henry Little
, who’d obligingly tilted his face toward the photographer’s lens to show off the raised keloid scar running the length of his face.
‘Another inch or so, he’d have cut my throat. I’d have bled out right there in the cafeteria in the middle of Taco Tuesday.’
Because Evans was a juvenile at the time, his record – including the charges filed against him and the penalty levied – was closed to the public, the story continued. Nora wondered how the reporter had found Little, who helpfully filled in the blanks.
‘He never did no time in juvie. Got off on, what do you call it? A technicality.’
She read on. There’d been another brush with the law, a misdemeanor involving marijuana. The paper had somehow obtained the photo from that arrest – one she recognized as Number Four in the photo lineup the Chateau police had shown her. She rolled her eyes. Evans was lucky to have been arrested while still a juvenile, given the wave of laws sponsored by tough-on-crime politicians eager to advance their careers at the expense of the tens of thousands of people, disproportionately young black men, who did hard time for crimes as innocuous as possession of a joint. The story continued:
Those youthful incidents set a troubling pattern, police said. Chateau police are investigating Evans’s possible ties to Baltimore drug gangs. ‘We can’t rule it out,’ said Detective Sgt Thomas Brittingham. ‘The road-rage incident just before he assaulted our officer speaks to a certain state of mind.’
A certain state of mind?
Brittingham would not identify the motorist involved in the road-rage incident, but a source named her as Nora Best, an author and Chateau native recently returned to her hometown following her husband’s killing in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains.
‘Ex-husband,’ Nora said aloud, mentally editing the piece as she read. She’d have liked to edit her name out of the story entirely. But there was only one more mention, the obligatory line: When reached by telephone, Best refused to comment.
Another feeling welled up, washing away the discomfort at seeing her name in print. Robert Evans had a violent history. He was probably running drugs. Not only was the shooting justified, but Alden was lucky to have escaped alive.
