Charlie and I exchanged looks. What do you say to a kid?
"Years ago, when Chrissy was a child, about your age, her father.." I tried to figure out how to explain it.
"Did he rape her?" Kip asked.
As usual, he was way ahead of me.
"Yeah. She says so."
"So why did it take all these years for her to kill him?"
A kid's question. And a juror's.
"She forgot," I said, realizing how stupid it sounded.
"Forgot?"
"Actually, it's more like she pushed the memory aside so she wouldn't have to remember. Then the memory came back."
Kip looked at me skeptically. "That's your case? She forgot something that awful and then remembered years later, and that's why she killed her father?"
"A lawyer can't make up the facts, Kip. You play poker with the hand you're dealt."
"I know, Uncle Jake. Granny taught me to play. She said never to draw to an inside straight, and fold your cards when you know you're beat."
10
The paddle fan above my bed was making its endless circles with a sleepy whompeta-whompeta. Outside, a mockingbird sang its lonely song in the chinaberry tree, calling for a mate. The TV in Kip's room was turned low, but I could still hear its metallic drone. I was sitting up in bed, rereading a Travis McGee novel, envying the life of that "big brown loose-jointed boat bum." No matter how tight a jam he was in, he could think and fight his way out. Me, I'm just a second-string jock turned night-school lawyer who tries to do the right thing but usually ends up leading with his chin.
I got out of bed and walked to the head of the stairs. The door to Kip's room was closed, so I didn't bother him. He'd fall sleep when he was ready, and if he wanted to watch TV all night, let him. After a couple of days, he'd be so tired that he'd adjust his schedule without any help from me. I belong to the hands-off school of child rearing, because that was how Granny raised me after my mother ran off and my father was killed.
"We are each the sport of all that goes before us," Clarence Darrow once said. That's an argument a lawyer makes when trying to spare the life of a ruthless killer who had a lousy childhood, but it applies to more mundane matters, too. We unconsciously pick up the habits and attitudes, likes and dislikes, biases and tolerances of those who raise us. Maybe I missed out on some things, but Granny taught me never to pick on anyone weaker and to help those who deserve it. She taught me to have a healthy disrespect for authority and to make my own path through the woods. She would have been just as happy if I'd been a shrimper like my father, or a trucker, bartender, or fishing guide, like the men who passed the time with her over the years. Ever since my teenage years, I've tried to follow her credo of going through life doing the least damage possible.
Wearing my red-plaid boxer shorts, I padded barefoot down the stairs. Chrissy was still asleep on the sofa, purring softly into a pillow. Her face was in such peaceful repose, she was almost childlike in her beauty and innocence. I stared at her a moment and felt a stirring, then a pang of guilt at being a voyeuristic satyr.
I walked into the kitchen and pulled a piece of Granny's peanut butter pie from the fridge. The first bite was melting in my mouth when it hit me. Granny. I hadn't heard her leave. Or Charlie.
They weren't upstairs. They weren't downstairs. Where were they? My house is a compact two-story box with a backyard overgrown with junglelike trees and vines.
The yard.
I looked out through the jalousie windows. The yard was illuminated by an eerie glow from my neighbor's sodium-vapor anticrime lights. There, in the hammock slung between a live oak and a poinciana tree, was my mentor. And my granny. All curled up on this warm, humid night scented with jasmine, sleeping soundly, arms wrapped around each other. Crazy kids.
I finished my pie with a glass of cold milk and headed back up the stairs. The TV still hummed in Kip's room, and as I passed the door, I heard his voice.
Then another voice. And a giggle.
What the hell?
I tapped gently on the door and opened it.
Kip was in bed, a pillow propped behind him. Jim Carrey was on the tube, trying to rescue Dan Marino from an insane cross-gender kidnapper. Frankly, Dan's a better quarterback than actor.
Someone else was in bed, too, also propped up on a pillow.
"All righty then!" Kip said. "Uncle Jake, this is Tanya."
"Hello, Tanya," I said to the girl, because it's more polite than saying, What are you doing in my nephew's bed, harlot?
"Tanya lives across the street," Kip said.
Of course. "Tanya! You're Phoebe's daughter."
"Hello, Mr. Lassiter," she said sweetly. She was a dark-haired, petite girl of about twelve. The last time I noticed, she'd been maybe six years old, riding a bike with training wheels. Now she wore cutoff jeans and a T-shirt that blossomed with her budding womanhood. Oh, Lord.
"How's your mom?" I asked.
"Great," Tanya said.
"Does she know you're here? This late, I mean." I didn't like the sound of my own voice, old and uptight.
"Sure. She's spending the weekend doing the smokehouse and fire-walking shtick at the Miccosukee village, so I'm sort of on my own."
"I see," I said, my voice filled with disapproval. I had already concluded that Phoebe's mothering didn't measure up.
"Mom's into a lot of neat stuff," Tanya said. "She has her own shaman who teaches naturopathy, herbalism, psychic healing."
No wonder she didn't have time to trim the hedge.
"I asked Tanya to sleep over," Kip said.
"Uh-huh," I said, as if this were as natural as mosquitoes following a rain.
"But if there's a problem," Kip said, "we could stay at her place."
"No!" I responded, a little too quickly, the volume a little too high. "Tanya can stay here. Of course, we don't actually have another bedroom."
They both giggled, and I knew I was the object of adolescent ridicule. I considered having her mother arrested for conduct unbecoming a parent. I remembered Phoebe had a tattoo on her shoulder and wondered if Tanya did, too, and whether Kip would see it before the night was out.
Now I was getting angry at myself. Just when had I become so judgmental? All this time, I'd thought I was such a hip surrogate dad, and it turned out I was really Ward Cleaver.
"It's okay, Mr. Lassiter," Tanya said. "I brought my sleeping bag." She gestured toward the corner of the room, where indeed a sleeping bag was stretched across the carpet between piles of videotapes and Sega game cartridges.
"I see," I said for the second time, because I was utterly speechless.
"Hey, Uncle Jake, you're not going to get all freaky on us, are you?" Kip said.
"No. Why? I mean, of course not."
" 'Cause just now you seem like a major goober."
Tanya's voice managed to be both soothing and mature. "Kip and I just hang out. We're not, you know…"
I looked at my nephew, trying to remember what I'd been like when I was twelve. I seem to recall thinking a lot about girls but never doing anything icky like kissing them.
"All right," I said. "But don't stay up too late, and…"
And what?
"And don't forget to brush your teeth."
That set them to giggling again.
I left the room, closing the door behind me, feeling like a major goober indeed. Back in bed, I got back to my book, following Travis across the Gulf Stream toward Bimini, chasing a very bad character named Junior Allen. I remembered my own trip across the stream, where I'd followed a beautiful but lethal board-sailor named Lila Summers.
I was feeling sad and alone when there was a soft knock at my bedroom door. If Kip was going to ask permission to share a sleeping bag, the answer was a firm-