Landon appeared at the door as if she’d been watching and waiting. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Kasir.”
“And the same to you,” he replied as they went inside.
He handed her the bread. She peeled back one end of the foil and inhaled.
“I love the way homemade bread smells,” she said with a smile. “Just sit there at the table and . . .” She paused. “You aren’t using your cane!”
“I’m trying to grow young,” he told her.
“Good luck,” she said. “So am I. You sit here, and I’ll bring you some cider. I’ll cut a few slices of the bread, too.”
When she left the room, he got back up, went to the mantel, retrieved the photograph that reminded him of his girl, and set it on the table. He got the piece of shrapnel from his pocket and put it beside the picture. No need to be coy about any of this; he was determined to tell her today.
When she returned to the parlor with the cider and bread, she picked up the photo.
“Christmas was never good at our house when I was growing up,” Landon said. “My father used it as a threat with Nick—my brother, here—always telling him that Santa wouldn’t come because he was such a bad boy. It hung over us like a dark cloud.”
Mr. Kasir sat quietly next to her, sensing she had more to say.
“My father never told me or anyone that he was sorry. He didn’t say much other than what he yelled at my brother. But a few days before he died, when he was heavily sedated, he told me a war story.”
Mr. Kasir nodded. He knew how war could change a man, make him hard.
“By then, I was grown up,” Landon continued. “Degreed and practicing. I was sitting in his hospital room, and he told me that, on Christmas Eve 1944, his ship was on a shakedown cruise from Seattle to San Diego. The crew docked in the harbor. He was an ensign fresh from midshipman’s school, and this was his first Christmas away from home. The war in Europe was winding down, but not in the Pacific. He had been assigned to an attack transport ship whose purpose was to load boats to evacuate casualties, if I remember correctly. And to deliver marines and army infantrymen to invade islands. The men would spend Christmas Eve and Christmas day in San Diego, then on the twenty-sixth they would sail into the Pacific. He told me there was a veteran officer twice his age who invited him over for Christmas Eve dinner. He was so moved by that invitation, that gesture of kindness. I wanted to ask him why he never extended that kindness to his own son, but I didn’t. What would his answer matter? My brother was gone. The damage had been done at that point.”
Mr. Kasir noticed for the first time since he arrived that, aside from Landon’s red sweater, nothing in her home spoke of Christmas. She offered him a piece of the banana bread and took one for herself.
“I fought in that war, too,” he told her.
“What branch?”
“Army. My generation believed there would never be another war. We thought we’d won the worst of them. But then there was Korea. And Vietnam came along and took my son with it. He survived, but it did something to him. He can’t hold a job, spends any money he makes on drugs.”
Mr. Kasir looked at Landon. She furrowed her brow, and he felt embarrassed.
“I assure you he will never be your landlord. All my properties eventually will go to my grandson, Jason. He’s nothing like his father.”
“He’s a good boy like you, isn’t he?” Landon asked.
The morning light fell gently, blanketing the dining-room table, the buffet, the china cabinet, the piano. And he knew it was time to talk.
“This photograph, of you and your brother.”
She nodded. “We were seventeen, I think.”
“I want to tell you . . .” Mr. Kasir took a deep breath, mustering his courage. “You remind me of a girl I met.”
“Tell me,” Landon said, leaning back into her chair and fixing her eyes on him. Her gaze was gentle, and he felt reassured. This must be how her patients feel, he thought.
“I was sitting outside a field hospital in France,” he began. “The shrapnel had been removed from my leg. I was recovering from my own injury as I took care of my wounded men. My head was in my hands, not knowing how they would fare. I know I was looking down because it was her feet I saw first. She was wearing sandals. I didn’t look up. I didn’t want a villager to see me like this. I wanted to be a brave American. She was wearing a dress, a white cotton dress.”
Landon nodded, and he knew it was all right to say more.
“Her hands . . . ,” he began, and then his voice broke.
Landon touched his shoulder. “It’s all right.”
“She gave me a sip of water. I didn’t know any French other than oui and merci. She didn’t know English. We had to talk with our eyes. For a minute, I thought I was hallucinating. I’d heard of some soldiers . . . The mind and body can take only so much, you know? And some men snap. Maybe that’s what happened to your father.”
Landon flinched, then reached for his cup. “Want more cider?”
“Thank you. But no, I’m fine.”
He waited, worried that he’d upset her.
“Keep going,” she urged.
“Carissa. She was just an ordinary girl being kind to a soldier. Every day, she’d meet me at the hospital and take me home with her. I met her family. Sometimes, we’d lie under a tree, and I kept feeling like she wanted to ask me something. She was speaking French, but there was urgency in her face.”
Landon put her hands over his. “Maybe we can figure out what her question was.”
“Maybe so.”
On the way home, Mr. Kasir left the car windows open. He hadn’t felt this way in a long time. He felt connected. He drove up the hill, then turned right to cross the mountain.
When he got home, Mrs. Kasir was in the kitchen cooking his favorite meal: chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, and squash casserole. He liked the warm comfort of these foods together. Plus, they were easy on his teeth.
She was at the stove. Her back was to him.
“How is Landon?”
She had an apron on. He stood behind her and put his arms around her waist.
“Have you lost your mind, Abe?” she asked, not even turning from the stove.
Since he was no longer alone with his secret, Mr. Kasir felt unburdened. He was filled with appreciation for his wife, the meal she was cooking for him, the strength she had when they were going through those years with Abe Jr. It made him love her all the more, something he didn’t quite understand but most definitely felt. It fell over him like a blanket.
SAM
Sam was stepping out of the shower when he heard a knock on his door. He threw on some jeans and a T-shirt and looked through the peephole. It was Landon and Jet. His grandfather, Poppy, had taught him about hospitality. If friends came to see you, no matter who or when, you should welcome them.
Jet made him nervous, so he was glad that Landon was with her. He opened the door and invited them in.
“You look like the Wicked Witch of the West, girl,” Sam said upon taking in Jet’s ensemble. “Those boots in particular.”
She bent to unlace them at the top, which revealed black stockings.
“You should take that coat thing off, too.”
She stared at him. “You mean my cape?”
But taking off her cape didn’t help. Underneath it, she wore a sheer top, blood-red. Sam scratched his head and looked at Landon.
“This is starting to remind me of Joe Cocker’s ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On,’” Landon said.
“True that.”
Sam figured Jet was there to get high, though he wasn’t sure about Landon. He gave her a look-over, as he had when he first met her. She was older, but he was certain Unc would go for her.
Landon reached into the back pocket of her jeans and retrieved a hundred-dollar bill. “This is to pay for Abi’s daddy, whatever he needs next,” she said. “She said you can’t just give her what it’s gonna take. You’re too generous as it is.”
/> A remark like this coming from a woman his mother’s age made him feel good. He had spent a lot of time as a boy feeling bad.
“Y’all want to get high?” he asked Jet.
“Not really,” Jet said, and this set him back a bit.
Sam suspected Jet had a thing for him, but he was spoken for. Not uninterested, just unavailable. Plus, she always looked like an angel of death.
He stared at the bill Landon had handed him. Ben Franklin stared back at him. He could sense the two women also staring at him. Feeling awkward, he offered up his favorite party trick.
“I can do something not many people can. I can tell you who’s got their faces on currency.”
This was something his grandfather had taught him when he was growing up, working in the family’s country store back home.
“Oh, yeah?” Landon asked. “That seems pretty easy.”
Sam smiled. “That’s what they all say. Try it.”
“Well, Ben Franklin,” Landon said, gesturing toward the bill in his hands. “Jackson on the twenty. Hamilton on the ten.”
“Washington on the one,” Jet piped in. “Lincoln on the five.”
“And?” he asked the two women.
“And?” Landon said, “Did we forget something?”
“Grant on the fifty.”
“Oh, the fifty!” Landon said, slapping her hands together.
“Everybody always forgets something. My granddaddy taught me that. Would y’all like to sit?”
The two women sat next to each other on the sofa by the door. Sam sat in a dining chair that he pulled up to the coffee table. He reached for a nearby baggie and pulled out a purple and green bud.
“Sure you girls don’t want to smoke?”
“No thanks,” Jet repeated.
“Tell me about your family, Sam,” Landon said.
“You’re not going to analyze me, are you?”
She laughed. “Only if you want me to.”
“Well, I was raised by my mom and my granddaddy,” Sam said. “My daddy died of a heart attack when I was five. Mama was a schoolteacher, so it was Poppy—that’s what I call him—who took care of me. Poppy is what you would call a pillar of the community—businessman, lay pastor. And he was one of the Tuskegee Airmen.”
“That’s incredible,” Landon said.
Jet leaned forward dramatically. “Sam,” she said, sounding aggravated or excited—Sam couldn’t tell. “You never told me this! I was a history major!”
He didn’t know.
“I can’t believe you’re kin to an Airman. Their success is what made it possible for Truman to integrate the military. They paved the way for the civil rights movement. Speaking of which,” she went on, “I have those Obama yard signs in the back of my car, if you want one.”
“You better ask Mr. Kasir before you put up signs in our yards,” he said. “It’s his property, after all. Don’t you think she should, Landon?”
“Yes, but I’m sure he’ll be fine with it. I’d love a sign, Jet.”
Sam couldn’t for the life of him understand why these two women believed a black man had a chance at becoming president. It was always the white folks who thought so, which was odd. In all their excitement, there was no way to explain it to them. White folks were going to have a hard time handling it when Obama lost. Black folks, on the other hand, knew better than to get their hopes up. Nobody back home was putting signs in their yards. The men who gathered to talk shop at Poppy’s store didn’t mention it. Nobody, including Poppy, preached it from the pulpit. They had all seen too much, gotten their hopes up too many times.
Growing up, Sam never really knew a white person. His community was made up largely of extended family. White folks were mostly referred to in hushed tones. The men at the store would keep an eye on the white deliverymen who came in with boxes of sandwich bread or cartons of milk. Most of them had lived through it all—the violence, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the cross burnings, the dogs and fire hoses. Some of them had participated in the bus boycotts and joined the march in Selma. To these men, white folks were foreign.
That’s why Sam was shocked when he moved to Birmingham for school and suddenly white girls were all over him. He had hardly shared space with whites, much less touched them, talked to them, flirted with them. Sometimes, he wondered if they—even Jet and Landon—were going out of their way to prove their colorblindness by being so friendly with him.
Thank God for Tanya, his girlfriend. Whenever anybody asked who she was, he’d reply, “Tanya’s my girl, my girl.”
He was glad to be going to the university, studying engineering. It kept him focused. And contrary to what people probably thought, he never went to class high. But when he walked home from school every day and turned the corner onto Cullom Street, there they’d be, waiting outside his apartment—a gathering of blond girls with Obama ’08 buttons on their shirts and pipes in the pockets of their designer jeans.
He was glad they came in groups. Being alone with a white girl made him anxious because they tried so hard. The things they said, the way they struggled to find the right word for black made him feel embarrassed for them, and for himself. Poppy would say, “‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’” What he wanted them to do unto him was to chill. And so, thus far, he had maintained a cool reserve.
He wished Jet understood all this.
She was still talking about the Airmen.
“They started flight training in the army’s PT-17 Stearman biplane. They were an experiment to see if black men could be trained to fly combat aircraft,” she said.
Sam looked at her. He was surprised she knew all this. “You should be a teacher,” he told Jet as she and Landon got up to leave.
She shrank back when he said it. It was endearing, the way the compliment embarrassed her.
“I mean,” he said, “couldn’t you work on getting your teaching certificate and keep your job at the bookstore?”
“I guess so,” she said quietly.
“You guess so?” he pressed.
“I’ve thought about it.”
He smiled at her, and she looked down at the carpet.
“I’m serious, Jet. You need to be a teacher.”
“Like your mama?”
“Yes, just like her.”
He put a finger under her chin to lift her face, to look her straight in the eye. All of his fears about getting close to her vanished. He felt like Poppy—as if it were his responsibility to practice the gift of exhortation.
After they left, he went to his bedroom, which Tanya had recently redecorated. No matter how nasty his apartment got, he always tried to keep the bedroom nice and inviting, for only the two of them. There was a king-sized bed with ivory sheets and a dark blue comforter and pillowcases. The bed took up most of the room, but Tanya had brought in a glass-topped bedside table from her mother’s place. Sometimes, Tanya stayed overnight, and she’d set her jewelry on the table, probably like her mother had done.
Tanya had a job as a legal secretary and made good money. She had no use for his business or the white girls that it serviced, and occasionally she threatened to leave him if he didn’t stop. He had made it clear to his clients that if her SUV was there, they were not to come knocking, so she was a mystery to most in the neighborhood. He liked it that way.
This afternoon, he and Tanya were headed to his family’s place for Christmas. Tanya was a city girl, Birmingham born and raised. Her skin was darker than Sam’s, probably because her ancestors, unlike his, had not been slaves at the mercy of white planters. People in Greene County used the term high yellow, and though Sam never liked when folks commented on his light skin, he at least preferred that terminology to mulatto, which made his skin crawl. He hated the sound of it.
He thought about Jet and her Obama signs. Obama, with his Kenyan father and Kansas mother. Did he really have a shot? He wondered if anyone would mention it today. Some of his family were Hillary supporters. They had
an affinity for the Clintons that puzzled him, even referred to Bill Clinton as “the first black president.” He couldn’t wrap his mind around it, but it made more sense than the thought of Obama getting sworn in next year.
When they got to Greene County, Tanya went straight to the kitchen. That’s the way it was at family gatherings—the women hung together around the simmering pots, and if it was warm enough, the men gathered outside, huddled in groups of two or three, smoking cigars and talking about who was the best bet for the Super Bowl. Sam headed outside and found Poppy sitting on the porch swing. He sat next to him. Sam wasn’t interested in letting the women fawn over him—how tall he was, how educated he was going to be, when was he going to marry Tanya.
Poppy put an arm around Sam. “How’s my boy?”
Sam shook his head and grinned. He looked at the old trees, the mess of cars parked haphazardly in the yard, his uncles, his younger cousins playing a game of tag football. He knew Poppy had been waiting for him and was eager to discuss things deeper than sports.
After a period of comforting silence, Sam took a leap. “You like Obama for president?” It was worded that way to mean, Do you think Obama can win? Like sports fans placing a bet.
“What do you think?” Poppy asked.
“I don’t think he can,” Sam replied.
Poppy grinned and looked at Sam. His eyes were penetrating. They always had been, which was one reason he was such an effective pastor. The irises and pupils were slightly opaque now, the whites populated with thin red lines like tiny road maps. Still, they demanded attention. Sam waited for him to answer.
“Are you registered to vote?” Poppy asked.
“No.”
“Well, there’s your answer. If folks don’t turn out, he won’t win.”
Sam nodded. Poppy always made everything seem so simple, so obvious.
“So, what is the mood where you live?” his granddaddy continued. “That neighborhood is mostly white, right?”
Once in a Blue Moon Page 8
