“Here he livin’ in Beverly Hills an’ all he got is sticks for toys,” the Mississippi-born Madeline would cry.
And what could Branwyn say? Any toys that she or Minas bought for Tommy wound up in Eric’s room. Whenever the blond Adonis would want to play with Tommy’s trucks or handheld electronic games, Tommy always handed them over, and after a while both he and Eric forgot who the original owner was.
One day Minas went into Eric’s room and gathered up all of Tommy’s toys and put them into a box. Eric bellowed and 2 4
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cried. He fell to the floor and pounded it with his fists and feet. Even Branwyn couldn’t console him. Minas brought the cardboard box to Tommy’s room on the third floor while Eric bawled and yelled on the second.
Sometime during the night, Tommy dragged the big box of toys to Eric’s room and left it outside the door.
“Why you do that, baby?” Branwyn asked her son the next morning. “Those toys belong to you.”
“It’s okay, Mama,” the tiny four-year-old replied. “Eric always wants to play with me and I don’t care. I don’t like those toys too much. They’re too bright anyway.”
How could Branwyn tell her mother that?
A year earlier Minas Nolan came home with a two-carat yellow diamond pin for her hat. He gave it to her at the dinner table so that the boys and Ahn could share in their happiness. But Branwyn put the pin away and did not wear it.
Then Tommy remembered the jewel and asked his mother why she never put it on.
“It’s too bright, honey,” she’d said. “Like a big headlight on your head.”
And so he collected dead insects and pitted stones that had faces in them.
Branwyn sometimes worried that Eric took advantage of his smaller brother, but when she saw them together the fears dissipated. Eric and Tommy would go into the backyard every day after kindergarten and talk. Actually, Eric did most of the talking. Tommy was the listener, but Branwyn could see how much they loved each other.
One Saturday, just after they both had turned six, Eric had finally persuaded Tommy to play catch with their new baseball and gloves in the garden next to the glass-walled greenhouse. Branwyn was in her fourth-floor bedroom looking 2 5
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down on the boys. Tommy didn’t usually play catch with his brother because Eric was almost twice his size and threw too hard. But that day at breakfast, Eric promised to be careful.
He was throwing underhand balls, and Tommy was smiling.
But then Eric seemed to be urging the smaller boy to do something else. He kept saying, “Come on, Tommy, try it.”
Finally Tommy threw the baseball overhand. It flew high and shattered one of the panes in the greenhouse wall.
The boys ran into the house.
A big yellow cat came out when they were gone. That was Golden, Ahn’s pet. She always followed the boys but never came out around them. Branwyn watched the cat stretch out on the spot where Eric had been standing. She wondered what the animal was getting from that piece of ground. It was as if the creature knew somehow that the places where the doctor’s son passed were blessed.
She sat there for much longer than she’d intended, just thinking about blessings and the yellow cat Golden. She thought about Eric, who took everything, and Tommy, who kept nothing. Eric the pirate. Eric the cowboy. Eric the spaceman. He could already read books on a third-grade level, but he was stubborn and never agreed to perform for his father’s friends.
Tommy rarely pretended to be anything. He got sick all the time and had not even met his own father.
Branwyn wondered how two such different human beings could even exist in the same world. Then she went down to see what they had to say about the baseball and Minas’s be-loved greenhouse.
The boys were standing side by side next to the dishwasher in the kitchen when Branwyn entered the room. Minas, wearing his golf clothes, stood frowning over them. When she walked in, he smiled for her. This was probably why she 2 6
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found it so hard to leave: the happiness that she felt in everyone’s eyes whenever she entered a room.
“Eric threw a ball and broke a pane in the greenhouse wall,” Minas said.
“What?” Branwyn asked.
“Eric wasn’t careful, and he broke a window.”
“Is that true, Tommy?” Branwyn asked her son.
“Yes,” Eric said.
“No,” Tommy added. “I did it. I threw overhand and broke the window.”
“But I made him do it,” Eric said. “I kept tellin’ him to throw overhand. He didn’t wanna, an’ so it was my fault.”
Minas looked at Branwyn, bewildered at the turn of events. He often felt like this around her. He was so straightforward and certain, taking up facts like Tommy collected stones. But he never looked closely enough at what he saw.
Without Branwyn, he often thought, he wouldn’t have understood the children at all.
After the boys had been chastised, they went out to play catch again. Branwyn and Minas sat at the butcher-block kitchen table.
“Will you marry me, Branwyn Beerman?” Dr. Minas Nolan asked for what seemed to him like the hundredth time.
Branwyn sighed and took his hand. She shook her head gently.
“Why not? Don’t you love me? Don’t you think I love you?”
She didn’t answer him. Her life for the five and a half years before had been like a dream. A rich and handsome doctor, a brother for her son, her son’s survival, and the flower garden.
All of these things made Branwyn so happy that sometimes, when she was all alone, she cried.
At first she refused the doctor’s proposals because she felt 2 7
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that he needed her for Eric and not himself. His headstrong son would only heed her for the first few years. She thought that maybe Dr. Nolan looked on her the way he saw Ahn, a domestic with a few other qualities. But as time passed, she came to believe that he loved her as a woman. They went everywhere together. When they stayed in hotels, she was automatically registered as Mrs. Nolan. After a time marriage seemed like the right thing.
But then Elton came into Ethel’s Florist Shop not long after Tommy’s sixth birthday.
She hadn’t seen the tall, fine-looking Elton in Tommy’s whole lifetime, but he still made her heart skip and her breath come fast.
“Hey, sugah,” Elton said as if he’d only been away for the weekend.
“Don’t sugah me, Elton Trueblood. That’s the last thing in the world I am to you.”
Elton smiled, and Branwyn kept herself from bringing her hand up to still her breast.
“Don’t be like that, baby,” he said. “You know I just wanted to come an’ see how you doin’ an’ what’s goin’ on.”
“Your son is six years old an’ he hasn’t even met you,”
Branwyn stated.
“That’s why I’m here,” Elton said. “I want to know about my boy.”
“Why?”
“Does a father need a reason?”
“The way I see it, you’re less a father and more like a sperm donor.” Branwyn had been waiting for years to hurl that insult. But the minute she did, she realized that all it proved was how strong she still felt about the man.
“Baby,” he said. “Tommy is my son.”
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“How you know his name?”
“Your mother told me,” Elton said with a sly smile. “I know all about you, sugah. Your doctor boyfriend who won’t marry you —”
“At least he don’t mind a woman with a child. At least he don’t mind if that child sit on his lap and ask what the stars is made’a.”
But Elton would not be hurt.
“Come on and have lunch with me, girl,” he said. “Tell me about my boy.”
She said no and told him that she had to get back to work.
When h
e left, she breathed a deep sigh but still didn’t feel that she had gotten enough air.
The next day Elton came back. The first time he appeared he wore sports clothes — a black dress shirt under a lime-green jacket. But today he appeared with gray-and-black-striped overalls.
“I got a job as a mechanic trainee at Brake-Co,” he told her. “In eighteen months I’ll be a licensed mechanic. I could even fix that Volvo you drivin’.”
“That’s very good for you, Elton,” Branwyn had said. “I’m sure that May must be very happy that you’re thinking about your future.”
“May? Shoot. I moved that heifer out. You know, she quit her job, got big as a house, and had the nerve to tell me that I was supposed to provide for her. Shoot. I provided a open door for her to go through and bus fare to take her home to her mama.”
“You just kicked her out? An’ she ain’t got no job?” Branwyn asked. “How’s she gonna live?”
“She moved out my house and three doors down to August Murphy’s apartment. Never even got on a bus. Just 2 9
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walked down the street, knocked on his door, an’ went in.
Now you know she had to know the brother pretty damn well to move in with only five minutes’ notice.”
“What did you do about that?”
“Nuthin’. I was glad she was gone. All she evah did was lie around the house and talk about how this girl had bad exten-sions and that one was a cow.”
Branwyn remembered how May, when she was in a bad mood, had a sour nature. She would bad-mouth everybody except the person she was talking to at the moment.
“So you got tired of all that mess she talked, huh?” Branwyn asked, forgetting for a moment that he’d walked out on her when she was pregnant with his child.
“Even before we started fightin’ I was thinkin’ about you, Brawn,” Elton said. “ ’Bout how you always had a good word to say ’bout ev’rythang. An’ I was thinkin’ ’bout my son. You know, as soon as I found out that he was home I come ovah . . . but you’as already gone.”
Branwyn loved Elton’s simple language and his artfully told lies.
“Why didn’t you come after you found out where I was?”
she asked, swinging her words like an ax.
“I didn’t know, Brawn,” he said, his voice rising into a higher register. “I swear. I went to your mama, but she was mad at me for bein’ a fool. It was only when she seen I was serious about a job and I left May, then she told me about where you was.”
“What do you want with me, Elton?”
“I just wanna see my son, baby.”
“Now how am I supposed to believe that? You left me three weeks after the doctor told me I was expecting. You never came to the hospital once to see your son.”
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“I was scared, honey,” Elton said in a forced whisper. “I didn’t wanna see my boy with a hole in his chest, in a glass cage.”
The bell over the door rang, and a small white woman, who had a tiny hairless dog on a leash, came in.
“Hello, Mrs. Freemont,” Branwyn said. “I’ll be right with you,” and then to Elton, “You got to go.”
“What about Thomas?”
“Leave now, Elton. I don’t wanna lose this job over you.”
Elton gave Branwyn a hard look that she withstood with stony silence. Finally he turned away and walked out.
E lton cam e bac k four more times before Branwyn agreed to have lunch with him. The florist was on Pico, near Doheny. There was a hotel a few blocks away that had a restaurant Branwyn liked. They prepared a delicious tuna salad that she made sure to have twice a week.
Elton was wearing a T-shirt with a three-button collar and tan pants that hugged his butt. Branwyn had been dreaming about his lips and those hips for the two weeks since he’d first appeared at Ethel’s.
Why does he come by so often? she wondered each night. On one of those nights, the doctor had made love to her. And while he did, she closed her eyes and remembered the fever that took her over when Elton was in her bed. And when she remembered Elton and the things he did to her, she got so excited that she had one of those soul-shaking orgasms that left her shivering like a leaf — and crying too.
Afterward she couldn’t even talk to Minas. He lay back with his hands behind his head, proud of the way he’d made her holler and cry. He didn’t know, she thought, that she was cheating on him even while they were making love.
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That was why she refused the doctor’s proposal of marriage that day after Eric took the blame for her son’s misde-meanor. If he knew the passion in her heart, he’d never give her a ring.
It wasn’t that she wanted to marry Elton. She didn’t dream about a house with him and Thomas anymore. She knew that as time went by, he’d come home later and later each night until finally he’d start skipping nights and then weeks and then he’d be gone. Her mother was right the first time when she compared him to heartbreak. But none of that changed how much she wanted him to kiss her and lay the flats of his hands on her sides.
How could she say yes to Minas Nolan when she was wan-ton in her heart? And why wasn’t Elton the kind of man that she could run to and live with until she was old and half-blind?
O n th e day she was to meet Elton for lunch, Branwyn brought Thomas to work with her. She made him wear his nice gray cotton pants and the maroon sweater that Eric, with the help of Ahn, had given him for his birthday.
Ethel Gorseman loved little Thomas because he never got into trouble when he was alone. If Eric came into the shop for any reason, the florist kept her eye on him every second.
She liked Eric too, but he was a “walking disaster” in her opinion. If Eric ever came in alone with Branwyn, Ethel would hire Jessop, who owned the small arcade across the street, to look after him. She’d give Eric five dollars so that he could eat hot dogs and play video games instead of breaking her vases and tipping over her shelves.
Tommy wished that she would give him five dollars and 3 2
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send him over to visit Jessop when he was there, but she never did. Instead she would tell him about how florists keep flowers alive and why it was such a good job.
That day Branwyn had kept Tommy out of school. The excuse she gave Minas was that he had a cold, but that wasn’t so remarkable. Thomas was used to runny noses and cough-ing. Most of his life he’d been sick with something.
When Elton came in at noon, wearing his mechanic’s overalls, Branwyn pushed Thomas forward and said, “Elton Trueblood, this is your son, Thomas.”
She said these words almost as a challenge. But when she saw the love and joy in Elton’s eyes, she bit her lower lip and tasted salty tears coming down into her mouth.
Looking at them together, anyone would have known them for father and son. Elton reached out his hand, and Thomas shook it like he had been taught to by Minas.
“I’m your father,” Elton said.
“Pleased to meet you, Daddy,” Thomas said.
For a long time he had been wanting to call someone daddy. Eric said that to Minas, but Branwyn had always told Thomas that Dr. Nolan wasn’t his father. Minas would say that he wished that Thomas was his son too, but that only meant that he wasn’t.
Eric called Branwyn “Mama Branwyn.” But Thomas knew that that was okay because Eric’s mother had died.
Looking up into Elton’s hard, dark face, Thomas was a little scared, but he knew that he had to be nice to Elton because his mother had made him wear nice clothes. And so he let the big man hold his hand as they walked down Pico to the hotel where his mother liked to eat.
Elton kept asking the boy questions. What’s your favorite color? Do you have a girlfriend at that white school?
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While they were sitting in the restaurant, Elton gave little Thomas a problem to solve
.
“There’s a man,” he said, “with a fox, a big rooster, and a sack’a corn. He comes to a river where there’s a tiny li’l boat.
The boat is so small that the man can only carry one with him across the river at a time. But if he takes the corn, the fox will eat the rooster, and if he takes the fox, the rooster will eat the corn.”
“Then he should take the rooster ’cause the fox won’t eat corn,” Thomas said with a smile.
“Then what?” Elton asked.
“Then he could come back for the . . . the fox.”
“But if he leaves the fox on the other side when he goes back to get the corn, the fox will eat the rooster,” Elton said with a sly smile.
Watching his father’s smile, Thomas forgot the riddle. This was his father he was looking at. His father like Dr. Nolan was Eric’s father. He had the same black skin that Thomas had and the same kinky hair.
“Stop bothering him, Elton,” Branwyn said, feeling that Thomas was confused by being cross-examined like some criminal.
“I’m just doin’ what a father’s s’posed t’be doin’, Brawn,”
Elton said. “Helpin’ him to understand how hard the world is to see sometimes. Is he a li’l slow in school?”
“No.”
“I mean, it’s just a child’s riddle really,” Elton continued.
“Just a trick.”
He looked at Thomas hopefully, but the small boy only stared at him, the foxes and chickens and grain gone from his head. He was wondering if Elton would come live with them in Dr. Nolan’s big house.
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After lunch Branwyn went back to the flower shop and cried. She sat on a stool at the back of the big orchid refrigerator. Thomas stood next to her and held her hand.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?”
“I’m just happy, baby,” she said, choking on every other word.
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