Everybody's Son

by Thrity Umrigar

  He heard the sharp exhale. “Of course. Connor was the prosecutor.”

  “Jesus Christ. It was a damn conspiracy. All because—”

  “Anton. Stop being melodramatic. We were just trying to—”

  “Why’d you do it, Dad?” he yelled. “I mean, Jesus H. Christ, it’s lie after lie and deceit after deceit.”

  David lowered his voice. “What would you have had me do, Anton? Risked returning you to that woman? And the next time she decided to sneak off hunting for drugs? What then?”

  Anton shook his head. “She’s clean, Dad. She’s been clean all these years.”

  David scoffed. “So she says. And in any case, hindsight is twenty-twenty. You know as well as I do what the recidivism rates are for crackheads.”

  Anton flinched as if David had physically struck him. Crackhead. That’s how David saw his mother. As a statistic, a number, a data point. “You should see her, Dad,” he said. “She’s nothing like what you imagine. Just a good, decent workingwoman. The kind you’ve extolled in a million political speeches.”

  David grunted. “Touché. A low blow, but touché. Though let me remind you that even a junkie can hold it together for a few hours.”

  “She’s not a junkie,” Anton yelled. “And even if she were, nothing changes the fact that you stole from her. This is as bad a case of abuse of power as I’ve ever seen. You could be in jail for this, Dad.” His voice broke. “And you lied to me. You lied. You told me she’d given me up. You lied.”

  “And for that I’m sorry. But I had no choice. You have to believe me.” David’s voice shook, but when he spoke again, his tone was urgent, pitched. “Goddammit, Anton. I’m human, too. I did the best I could, under very trying circumstances.”

  “You had no choice? Of course you did. All you had to do was follow the law.”

  David made an exasperated sound. “I couldn’t. Don’t you see? Because you . . . you were special. Such great potential. And I was the only one who could see it through. Hell, son, it would’ve been a crime, no, a sin, to have wasted that potential. No. Not in a million years. You were worth fighting for.”

  Anton smacked his hand on the steering wheel. “Don’t. Don’t make this about me, Dad. This was about you. What you needed.” He closed his eyes because he was about to go where he knew he shouldn’t, to that cold, wet, dark place where James lay in a grave. “You needed another child to love, Dad. I get that. After James . . .”

  “Anton, you don’t wanna go there. In any case, that’s not true . . .”

  “I mean, it’s very sad what happened, but that didn’t . . .”

  “Anton, I’m warning you . . .”

  “. . . that didn’t give you the right to . . .”

  “Goddammit, you little prick. Stop,” David roared in his ear. “What do you want from me? I’ve given you every fucking thing I’ve ever had. I’m about to give you the goddamn governorship of the fucking state on a silver platter. And you dare talk to me like this?”

  Anton sat frozen in his seat. He could hear William’s concerned voice in the background and David saying he was all right and to please give him some damn privacy. Anton felt a moment of trepidation. Dad had a weak heart, and Dr. Carlson had told them repeatedly that he was not supposed to get too agitated about anything.

  “Dad, listen,” he said. “Calm down. How about we talk when—”

  “No, Anton, you listen. You want me to apologize for what I did? I’ll only say this once, so listen up: I won’t. I will never apologize for fighting to keep you in my life. Because guess what? You were worth it. You were worth all of it. And I will never apologize to you for you. Never.”

  Anton had been beaten by the better man. He knew this. Even with a bad heart and diminished strength, his father was still twice the man he was. Because right or wrong, David had conviction. Whereas he, Anton, sat in the car vanquished while his father growled in his ear, “Now put all this nonsense out of your head and get the hell back into town and get on with your life,” and all he could do was reply, “Yes, sir.” He hung up the phone and sat staring straight ahead, not knowing whether or not to drive back to his mother’s house and, if so, what to say to her. He was acutely aware that he had failed in the most basic of tasks: getting David to apologize to Juanita Vesper for the grievous harm he had done her. She would not have even the smallest of civilities afforded to her.

  Anton turned off his phone. He knew that David would try to call back or Delores would. He didn’t want to talk to any of them yet, not even Katherine. After a few moments, he turned the car around. He would say his goodbye to the woman in the yellow house and then be on his way home. There was nothing more to keep him here.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  She was waiting for him on the front porch when he returned, watching him as he got out of his car and came wearily up the steps. She rose from the porch swing as he approached, but he motioned for her to remain seated and went and sat next to her. She shifted a bit and then reached over and took his hand in both of hers and placed it in her lap. It occurred to him that this was the first time his mother had taken his hand in hers in twenty-five years. He shook his head ruefully, then allowed his head to lean in to hers, and they sat there for what seemed to him like hours, and then she was shaking against him and he lifted his head to see the tears streaming down her face. “Mam, don’t,” he started, but that was a mistake, because all of a sudden her tears acquired a voice and she was making a keening sound that made his hair stand up. If grief had a baby, she would sing like this. The line went through his mind, and he was not sure if it was something he had heard before, a line from a song, maybe, or if it was his own. But he could barely complete the thought, because the woman next to him looked like she was going to keel over. She had released his hand and was holding herself from the waist and rocking as if she would fly apart should she let go of her body. And those terrible sounds kept pouring out of her, released to the air like a poisonous vapor, and he thought absently, How could this frail, small body have carried the weight of this? As if her pain were a living, physical animal that had lain curled up inside her until this moment.

  Anton’s senses felt dull, hazy, his default reaction in the face of other people’s sorrow. When Katherine had sobbed at her beloved uncle Jeffrey’s funeral, all he could do was pat her repeatedly on her back and say, “There, there. It’ll be okay.” His stilted, miserly reaction had led to one of their rare fights, with Katherine accusing him of compounding her loneliness rather than mitigating it. “It’s like you disappeared,” she’d said days later. “You were there, but you disappeared.” And he had dropped his head in acknowledgment, knowing she was right, unable to explain to her how people’s pain paralyzed him, how desperately he wanted to help alleviate it, and how completely he knew that he couldn’t. It was one of the functions of being a governor that he was dreading, truth be told—the comforting of strangers after touring an area struck by a tornado or a flood or a school shooting, the glare of the TV cameras turning every interaction into a performance. Sometimes, even in the midst of campaigning, he would think that he was a politician better suited to an earlier age, say, during the Depression, when the voters themselves were more stoic and close-lipped about loss. Now, it seemed, a calamity was not a calamity until you tweeted it or spoke about it to Anderson Cooper in prime time. He had inherited none of Pappy’s easy affability or David’s intense charm; he was a technocrat, he wanted to fix problems and improve people’s lives but without too much interaction with the people themselves.

  “Say it, son, I beg you,” Juanita was saying, and he blinked, pulling himself out of his disappearance, trying to focus on her.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “I am begging you. To forgive me for what I’ve done.” He looked and saw that her hands were folded in a pleading gesture. Her pixie-like face no longer looked young; grief had given it a timeless quality, like one of those stone statues from antiquity. He stared at her in fascination, unable
to speak, but this only made her sob harder. “You’re angry with me, Anton.” She sniffed. “I can tell. And I don’t blame you at all. Not at all.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her. She took it uncertainly, and he gestured toward her face, and she wiped her eyes with it before handing it back. He held the damp cloth in his hand, thinking, I have my mother’s tears with me. I will carry my mother’s tears home with me, and I will have them forever. Something pinched at his heart then, and he said, “What happened, Mam? Why’d you leave me all alone like that?” And as he heard the question, he realized that he had waited a lifetime to ask it.

  “Anton,” she said urgently, her eyes searching his face, “you’ve got to believe me. I was planning on being gone for half hour. An hour, tops. But . . .” Here she stumbled, her expression wild. “I don’t know what happened . . . I remember taking one hit . . . and then someone, one of the men in that house . . .” She stopped, shut her eyes, rocking slightly, her mouth moving wordlessly.

  He wanted to end her embarrassment, say it was okay and she needn’t continue, but his need to know was too great. “Did you think of me during those days?” he cried.

  She didn’t answer, just sat there with her eyes closed, whispering words he couldn’t hear. He couldn’t tell if she was praying or saying something to herself, but just as he was about to ask, she opened her eyes, reached over, and took his hand back in hers. “I was a druggie, Anton,” she said quietly. “Your mama was a druggie. And I owed money to this guy Victor. He was my dealer, see? And so he kept me there in that house. To repay his loan. You get what I’m saying, baby? Every time I came to, I remembered you and I tried to leave. But those men wouldn’t let me. And Victor would give me another hit and off I’d go. I lost track of time after the first few days.”

  It was the most exquisite pain, listening to his mother telling him that she’d been raped, prostituted off, but below that pain was relief. At last he was finding out the truth, no matter how stomach-churning that truth was. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and for the first time, he was sorry for her rather than for himself. For the first time, he was no longer the protagonist in his life’s story.

  They were quiet for a long time, and then she said, “I went to college for a semester, you know,” a different note in her voice.

  “You did?” he asked, wondering what had made her think of that.

  “Yup. Community college. But then I got pregnant with you.” She looked at him shyly. “It was a big scandal. Because of who your daddy was.”

  He looked away and into the yard, unsure how many more revelations he could handle in a day. He glanced back at her, but she was searching his face, and Anton knew she wouldn’t continue unless he asked. “What happened?” he said gruffly.

  “He was a white doctor who came to work at the county hospital. He was from Chicago. I used to go once a week to clean his house. He had a house right in town. He was older than me, by fifteen years, maybe. So I didn’t ever think of him in that way. But—he liked me, Anton. Poor man, far from home, stuck among us black folks. And he was a kind man, too. Anyway, it pleased me that someone like him took an interest in me. You know? He was always asking me what I thought about this and that. What I wanted to be when I was older. Where I wanted to live. Don’t nobody ever ask me this. Your nana—God bless her soul—she thought I was gonna live out here in Podunk forever. But he treated me like I was something smart. And slowly, I came around to him. And so it happened.”

  “I remember Nana,” Anton said. “She came to visit us once, right?”

  Juanita’s face brightened. “You remember that? You cried for two days straight after she left.” She sighed. “She asked me so many times to move back to Georgia. You see, she’d seen what my life was like up north—single mom, no man, working a shitty job, barely making it. But I couldn’t. You were one when we left Ronan, and I vowed never to raise you here. Folks here have long memories. And wagging tongues. That’s why we got out in the first place. A mixed-race boy in a small town—forget it.” She smiled mirthlessly. “That was before I learned that the North was just a different kind of prison.”

  “And my—The doctor? He just abandoned you?”

  She shot him a puzzled look. “What was he supposed to do? Marry a skinny black ninny whose head was as empty as an old wooden trunk? He was a learned man. In any case, he took a job in Chicago just before you were born.”

  “Bastard,” Anton swore under his breath.

  Juanita looked shocked. “Bad luck to speak ill of the dead, Baby Boy. And that, too, your own daddy.” She caught his start of surprise and nodded. “He died in 1989. Car crash. I heard from Nana. Her old doctor told her. Guess they were still friends.”

  All these screwed-up adults. He was just the end product of their stories, the tail end, an afterthought. So much had gone into making him—poverty, ignorance, racism—all of which would have made it impossible for an educated white doctor to be seen with a black country girl, even if he’d wanted to, even in the 1980s. And then another layer—the unwanted pregnancy, the loneliness of life in the North, the solace of a mind-dulling drug that made you forget the world would never belong to you. Really, it was as if history itself had conspired to deliver Anton into the arms of David and Delores Coleman. And he supposed he should be thankful for that deliverance, because an alternative fate would’ve meant that he’d be either on the streets or in prison or in a morgue.

  He opened his mouth to ask more questions, because his hunger for his past suddenly seemed insatiable, when he was betrayed by another kind of hunger. His stomach growled loudly. And there was no time to be ashamed, because here was Juanita, brushing away the last of her tears, jumping to her feet, apologizing again, but this time for her poor manners, for not realizing that Baby Boy had traveled a long ways to come here and that he was probably starving. He tried shaking his head, but she was having none of it and was already hurrying into the kitchen. A moment later, he heard the opening of the fridge door and then the setting down of a few pots and pans. By the time he entered the kitchen, she was pouring some spices and flour into a bowl and rolling raw chicken into the mixture. “You remember your mam’s fried chicken, baby?” she said, and then turned her back before he could lie and say yes. “I’m gonna make you my famous chicken. It’s your nana’s recipe. And I don’t mind saying, folks come to Sal’s from the next county over to get a taste of it. I make it every Thursday.” She picked six large potatoes from a hanging basket and set them on the counter.

  “You know, I really need to get going . . .” he began, but she shot him a look that made him stop. “Or we could just go out . . .” he attempted feebly.

  “Out?” She laughed. “Nearest restaurant is eight miles up the road. This is the country, baby.” She was girlish again, in her element in the kitchen, and Anton’s heart skipped a beat at how beautiful she looked. “Naw, you just go back in the living room and take a nap on the couch. You must be so tired.”

  But the thought of being away from her was unbearable. “I’m okay,” he said quietly. “Let me help.”

  “You wanna help? Here, peel these. I’ll get the water boiling. I’ll make you mashed potatoes like you never tasted. And collard greens. You like greens?”

  He laughed self-consciously. “I don’t think I’ve ever tasted those.”

  She looked stricken for a moment and then muttered to herself, “Of course you have. You just forgotten.” She drew a pair of scissors out of the drawer. “’Scuse me while I go pick some fresh ones from the yard.”

  WHEN THEY WERE done with dinner, Anton wondered if he’d eaten an entire chicken. He remembered eating at least four pieces, the last one to sate not his hunger but his mother’s. It was as if, with every bite of food that she served him, Juanita was filling up with pleasure and pride. “This,” he said, licking his fingers, “is hands-down the best fried chicken I have ever eaten.”

  Juanita beamed.

  “If you
opened your own restaurant up north, folks would drive in from New York to eat this.”

  She laughed that girlish laugh again. “Oh, Lord. I don’t think my blood could handle that cold anymore,” she said. “I got used to the heat down here.”

  They had already argued at dinner about the fact that he would be leaving tonight. She had looked stunned, then crestfallen, but now he took the opportunity to say, “Well, you’ll have to come up for a visit after . . . after the election is over.”

  “After you become the governor, you mean.” She clapped her hands. “Hallelujah. If someone had told me a year ago that my son would be governor, I would’ve asked ’em if they thought I just fell off a turnip truck.” She looked deeply into his face. “You are a good man. Kind. I can tell. You will make a fine governor, Anton. I know.”

  He wondered how much she knew about Pappy, his family history, the weight that the Coleman name carried back home. He opened his mouth, but just then she said shyly, “And that young lady you are dating? What’s she like? I saw y’all’s picture in the magazine.”

  “Katherine? Oh, she’s wonderful. Really smart. Generous. Beautiful.” And then, because he felt obligated, “You’ll meet her. Soon. When you, you know, come visit.”

  There was an awkward pause. Juanita rose from the table and picked up their plates. “We’ll see,” she mumbled. “You’re gonna be plenty busy in your new job.”

  “If I win.” He laughed.

  She fixed him a look. “Of course you will win.” She cleared her throat and sang softly:

  “And he will raise you up on eagle’s wings

  Bear you on the breath of dawn

  Make you to shine like the sun

  And hold you in the palm of his hand.”

  The lump that formed in his throat mortified him. He stared down at the table, wrestling to control his emotions, and as if to spare him, she turned away abruptly. She put the dishes in the sink and ran water over them. When she spoke, her voice was gruff. “You best be getting back, son,” she said. “It will start getting dark soon, and these are unfamiliar roads to you. Where did you fly into?”