“Would you like to sign our petition to-”
And then he recognized me as the son of a bitch who wouldn’t sign it the last time I was in.
“Oh, you,” he said, still looking like he was picking up a bad smell off of everyone around him.
“Still not interested,” I said.
“So you don’t care that our parade, this town’s traditions, are being hijacked by special interests out to promote their agenda?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Those gays, and the lesbians. They want to ruin our parade.”
“I see,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve heard about those starving kids in Africa?”
He nodded.
“Global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer and how the polar ice caps will probably all melt someday and we’ll all be underwater?”
He nodded again, but his eyes were narrowing.
“Crack babies? The shortage of safe drinking water in the next few years? Rogue nations with nuclear bombs? You’ve heard of those things?”
Henry nodded a third time, and this time he spoke. “What’s your point?”
I tapped the petition on his clipboard with my finger. “And this is what you’re collecting signatures for? This is what’s got your shorts in a knot?”
I handed over a twenty to the cashier, grabbed my bagful of items, and said to Henry, “I’d love to chat longer, but my boyfriend gets very pissy if his lunch isn’t on the table on time.”
I walked out of the grocery store, past a phone booth, crossed the street and opened the door to the truck.
“Tell me how much you spent and I’ll reimburse you,” Dad said.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to shop there again,” I said. “In fact, you might not be able to shop there again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Dad, you okay here for a while?” I said. “I ran into someone in the store, I’m just gonna grab a quick coffee, I’ll just be a few minutes.”
“Who?”
If I told him, he might object, or at least have more questions than I had time to answer. “Just sit tight, okay? Here, I bought you The Braynor Times, and a Newsweek.”
“I could stand to pee,” Dad said.
“We all stand to pee, Dad,” I said. “That’s what makes us men.”
“Are you going to be long?”
“Can you last fifteen minutes or so?”
“Just try to be quick.”
I ran down half a block to Lana’s, caught her eye as I walked in, and took a table in the back corner. There was no sign yet of May Wickens.
Lana strolled over. “Where’s your father?”
“I ditched him,” I said, giving her my just-kidding smile. “Listen, could I trouble you for a couple of coffees? I’m supposed to be meeting someone.”
“Comin’ up.”
The door opened and May Wickens came in, head down, jacket collar up, acting like she thought she could make herself invisible. I raised my hand and she slid into the booth opposite me. The seat backs were high, and she slid over to the far side, slunk down so she was barely visible from the window.
“Where’s Jeffrey?” I said.
“My father would kill me, but I gave Jeffrey a bunch of quarters to go to the video arcade at the corner. He’s always begging to go and I’m always saying no. He thinks I’m at the drugstore.”
Lana Gantry showed up with two mugs of coffee. She smiled at the two of us, but no small talk. Her eyes did a little dance as she wondered what I was up to, having a coffee with a young woman. She’d know, of course, that I was married.
“Thanks,” said May. She wrapped her hands around the mug, as though taking strength from its warmth.
“You seem,” I said, trying to find my way, “frightened.”
May tried to take a sip of coffee, but it was still too hot for her. “You don’t have any idea,” she said. “He’s, he’s poisoning my son.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Not, I mean, I don’t mean that he’s actually poisoning him. It’s with his ideas. He tells me what to teach him.”
“We’re talking about Timmy, your father,” I said, just to be sure.
May nodded. “He decides what Jeffrey will be taught. Not just math and spelling and geography, but history, and, like, social studies, he calls it. Like how homosexuals are trying to lure our children to their side, how the Jews are running everything, how all this talk about the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated, how the Negro is an inferior race, how he has a greater sex drive”-at this she blushed a bit-“and how Negroes, black people, are not as advanced as the white race. I mean, I’ve met Negroes, and I don’t know about their sex drives, but, Mr. Walker, do you believe that sort of stuff?”
She asked it innocently, like she was asking whether I thought it might rain tomorrow.
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
“Well, I don’t either. I listened to my father say these things for years, and then I was gone away for a while, I was out on my own, and I learned that so many of the things my father had taught me, they just didn’t seem true. I hate to say this, but I think my father may be something of a, well, a racist.”
“I guess that’s something you’d have to consider,” I said.
“Anyway, I’ve kind of had a lot of sadness in my life, going way back. I got pregnant eleven years ago, with Jeffrey, of course.”
“He seems like a wonderful boy.”
“Thank you. I was on my own then, I’d met this man, it was just a short-term thing, he wasn’t the right man, you know? But I had the baby, on my own, and Daddy was very upset, he wanted me to come home and live with him. This was a few years after my mom died, and a few before he met Charlene. But I didn’t want to go back and live with him, listen to all that hate that’s bottled up in him.”
“I can understand that.”
“But he can be very forceful, you know? But I tried to make a go of it for a very long time, and it was hard, raising a small boy, getting jobs. And I’d no sooner get a job, it seemed, and then I’d lose it. About three years ago, I met this man named Gary. Gary Wolverton. A really wonderful man, and, we, you know, we became close. The thing is, he wanted to be a writer, a newspaper reporter? Like you? He cared about the way the world was, and wanted to write about things that were wrong and what could be done about it. Well, like I said, we were close, and he seemed to really like Jeffrey, which was terrific, because I so wanted a father for him. But Daddy, it was like he thought he should be Jeffrey’s father figure. I mean, he’s his grandfather, and that’s great, but he wanted to be the main influence. Am I making any sense?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So, Daddy made it very difficult when Gary and I decided to get married. Daddy figured I’d never come back home then.”
“Well, of course not,” I said. “You’re entitled to make a life of your own.”
May Wickens paused, took another sip of coffee. “Anyway, something happened. There was this accident? Gary was crossing the street, this was a couple blocks from where I lived in the city, we weren’t actually living together yet, but he was coming to see me, and he’d stopped to get some wine, and that was when the car hit him.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“It was one of the crazy things. A hit-and-run. He died instantly.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did they arrest anyone?”
May shook her head. “No, they never did. They figured it was some drunk driver.” She paused at the memory. “I took it bad, but so did Jeffrey, he really loved Gary. I tried to make a go of it, alone, and my father was really pressuring me then to come back and live with them, by this time he’d hooked up with Charlene and her boys, Dougie and Wendell. My stepbrothers, I guess, sort of. Anyway, he wanted me to move in with this new family of his, this was before we moved to your dad’s farmhouse. And I really didn’t want to, but I kept losing jobs. Things would be going great, and then they’d call me in and tell me I was fired.”