We stopped at a Shoney’s for lunch. There wasn’t much to say or see on the drive. Trees, a few rivers, exit signs that promised Indian Reservation gambling, clubs that promised nude women twenty-four hours a day, flea markets.
At lunch, Ames finally spoke.
“Adele,” he said. He didn’t make it a question.
“I talked to her last night,” I said. “I’ll see her when we get back.”
“Is she keeping the baby?”
“I don’t know,” I said, working on a burger. “She sounded like she was planning to.”
Ames shook his head and pushed away the empty plate that had recently held a chicken fried steak and a lot of green beans.
“You think she should abort?” I asked.
“I don’t like Conrad Lonsberg’s son,” Ames said. “Child will be half his. Carry his blood. The girl’s barely just sixteen.”
It wasn’t the position I expected from Ames.
“So, you think she should abort?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said, getting up. “I don’t believe in killing babies. Maybe she can give it up. Maybe she and Flo can raise it. Maybe it’s none of our business.”
I nodded. That was pretty much the way I felt.
I turned on the radio to listen to talk shows, voices as we passed the turnoff for Gainesville and later crossed 110. Left for a long time on 110 took you to Tallahassee. Right for a long time took you to Jacksonville. I hadn’t been to either one. I had seen almost none of Florida outside of the Sarasota area. This was by far the longest trip I had taken since I had come down from Chicago and parked forever in the DQ parking lot.
Vanaloosa was a little hard to find. It was on the map, not far from Macon, which was a large circle. Vanaloosa, about ten miles outside of town, was a dark dot. We got off of 175 and headed for Vanaloosa.
When we got there it was dark. After asking a few questions at a Hess station just inside the town, we made our way to Raymond’s Ribs. The night was dark and the neighborhood filled with run-down homes. The faces we saw in cars and in front of the houses were black.
Raymond’s was small, little more than a shack. Four cars were parked in front of it. As we got out of the Taurus, we could smell the rib sauce. It hit me with memories. My wife and I loved ribs. There were lots of rib places in Chicago and we… No, not now. A fat black man with a big white paper bag came out the door of Raymond’s Ribs as we walked in.
There wasn’t much there: a wooden counter, a small area for customers to stand and order, no tables or chairs, and an open grill behind the counter sizzling with ribs being tended to seriously by a small black woman. Serving the customers was an old black man who took orders. There was a phone on the counter.
A young couple and a slight man with a small beard who kept looking at his watch were ahead of us. When it came to our turn, there was no one behind us.
“Can I get you?” the old man said.
“Ribs and slaw for me.”
“Same,” said Ames.
“Full ribs, half ribs?”
“Full,” I said.
Ames nodded. The old man turned to the woman at the grill and gave her our order. She wiped her hands on her work dress and started the order while I started talking.
“You Raymond?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“Get many white customers?”
“Fair number,” he said with clear pride. “We got the best ribs in the county.”
“In the state,” the woman at the grill said. “Best outside of New Orleans.”
“Best outside of New Orleans,” Raymond agreed with a smile.
“Last week a white man made a long distance call from your phone,” I said.
Raymond stopped smiling.
“I don’t remember that,” he said.
“The white man who made that call must have paid for it,” I said.
Raymond shrugged and looked back at the woman at the grill. She had her head down.
I took the folded Arcadia newspaper clipping from my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it on the counter.
“He’s about twenty years older now,” I said. “Recognize him?”
Raymond glanced at the clipping and shook his head “no.”
“You police?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We’re trying to find him and his wife. His wife’s brother wants to get in touch with her. Family reunion.”
Raymond looked down at the clipping again and thought.
“That’s Mr. Cleveland,” he said. “Regular customer. Doesn’t talk much. Regular customer. Never knew till now he had a wife.”
“What’s his first name?”
“Don’t know,” said Raymond. “Comes in once, sometimes twice a week, orders enough for four people, says hi and good-bye, and that’s what I know. Here’s your order.”
The woman placed a white bag on the counter and went back to her work.
“Knives, forks, napkins are in the sack,” Raymond said. “Fourteen dollars even.”
I paid the bill while Ames picked up the bag.
“We’re not here to hurt Mr. Cleveland or his wife,” I said. “Her brother just lost contact with her.”
Two teenage boys and a girl- came in. One of the boys was saying, “Singin’? You call that shit singin’? I call that shit ‘shit.’”
“You might try Collier Street,” Raymond said softly. “You might ask around. I wouldn’t do it at night though. Wait till morning.”
“Thanks,” I said.
Ames and I left. The teenagers didn’t look at us. We went back to a Motel 8 we had passed coming into Vanaloosa. The room had two beds, a television, and a small table.
We watched the tail end of a Will Rogers film on AMC while we ate.
“Good ribs,” Ames said.
“Very good,” I agreed.
Besides “good night,” that was all of the conversation we had before we turned off the lights a little before midnight.
When I woke up in the morning, Ames was sitting in a chair reading.
“I need a shave and shower,” I said.
Ames nodded. I looked at the cover of the book he was reading.
It was Conrad Lonsberg’s Fool’s Love.
When I came out of the bathroom clean, shaven, and dressed, Ames, now wearing a loose-fitting gray jacket, stood up, handed me the book, and pointed to a paragraph on page 148.
“Went back to it,” Ames said.
I sat on the bed and read the paragraph.
There was no Amy now. There was no Sherry. She sat in the diner with an enormous double order of corn flakes topped with strawberries, drowning in half and half. She thought about who she should be now. She thought about the baby inside her who was just beginning to kick. She needed a name for him or her. She needed a name for herself. Not something exotic. She knew now that exotic just wasn’t in her and stylish wasn’t in her and New York wasn’t in her. And going back to her mother was defeat. She wasn’t a quitter. She would never quit. She had six hundred dollars in her purse and two lives inside her. She paused with a big spoonful of corn flakes in her hand and decided. Her name was from that moment Diane Lowell. If the child was a girl, her name would be Laura. If it was a boy, his name would be Bradley.
I handed the book back to Ames who picked up his duffel bag and followed me out the door. It was just after eight in the morning. We had toast, coffee, and fruit at the motel’s morning continental breakfast that was served in the lobby. And then we were on our way.
Collier Street wasn’t hard to find. It was one of those run-down side streets on which some developer had thrown up one-story white-frame houses back in the mid-1940s for the wave of servicemen coming back from the war and getting married and raising families in whatever jobs were available in Vanaloosa or for commuting to Macon.
Fifty years later, the houses were long past the wrecker. They were occupied by black families where the breadwinners were women who cleaned house for the Macon middle class and businesses. How did I know? Because it looked exactly like neighborhoods I had seen from California to Florida.
The houses were sagging and dead or dying. A few of them had been shorn up and coaxed like punch-drunk boxers into standing up for one more round.