Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Ten: In This One Life by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where The Whole Truth (Volume 9) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Sunday June 20, 2021 (Father's Day)
12:45 pm
Anthony's House, the Patio
Nobody moved.
Anthony would remember that later, more than any word that was said. A long white table in the June sun, and not a fork or a glass moved on it. The pool filter hummed. Out on the water a boat went by, and the sound of its engine came across the lawn and faded, and still nobody moved.
Behind the French doors a small lavender shape stood with both palms flat against the glass.
He turned his head, finally, and looked at his mother.
She wasn't looking at him. She was looking at Agent Whitlock, past Julian's shoulder, with her chin up and her long neck straight and her hands flat on the white cloth on either side of Evelyn's folded gloves. It was the way she had looked at him a year ago at this same table, the first time in his life he had ever seen her eyes.
Whitlock didn't ask whether it was true.
Anthony saw her not ask it. Twenty-six years an agent; he watched her decide the question wasn't worth the breath. She asked a different one, quietly, the way you'd test a step in the dark.
"There was something on the back of every one of those slips, Ms. Pettaway."
"Half a number," said Doreen. "Hymn numbers, Miss Dana. I cut them off the margin of the bulletin. Yellow, mostly. Whatever the church bought."
Whitlock closed her eyes.
It was only for a second. Anthony would learn later what that second held: twelve years of a lab trying to trace half-numbers on strips of cheap yellow paper. A three. Half of a four. Somebody had once written a report suggesting a code. Nobody in the federal government had ever suggested a church bulletin in Coconut Grove.
At the far end of the table a chair scraped. Castellanos was on her feet with her glasses in one hand like a gavel.
"As of right now, Ms. Pettaway," she said, "you're my client. Whether you like it or not."
Doreen turned in the kitchen chair and looked down the long white cloth at her.
"I like it," she said.
Castellanos sat down and put her glasses back in her hair, and looked at the tablecloth as if she were trying to remember where she'd left her place.
Beside the kitchen chair Julian's face had gone the color of the napkin by his plate. When he spoke it came out like a boy's word, from the door of a kitchen.
"Miss Marta."
Doreen didn't turn her head. "Told you, child," she said. "Not the only one."
Anthony saw it go into Julian. Six months the boy had carried those words, since a front door in December. You're not the only one in that house who ever told them the truth. He had thought she meant his uncle. Julian put his hand over his eyes and left it there.
Down the table, Claude had his hand flat on the navy jacket hanging on the back of his chair, over the inside pocket. Kelly's hand was on his knee under the cloth.
His mother looked down the table at Claude, for the first time since she sat down, and then at his hand on the jacket.
"Not today, baby," she said. "The why's in your pocket, not my mouth. When you're ready."
Kelly's hand tightened on his knee. Claude nodded, once. He didn't touch the buttons. He laid his hand flat on the cloth instead.
Across the table and one seat down, where nothing was between his eyes and her face, Reggie had gone gray. And against every rule of the moment, against the bag and the agent and the word Detroit, his mouth was starting to come up at one corner. The way a man smiles when he finds out the house he grew up in had a window in it after all.
Anthony couldn't speak. He thought of a legal pad in his study, and ten past three on Christmas morning, and his own pencil going down a column. Five strokes and a dot. Five strokes and a dot.
When he could, it came out lower than he meant.
"I counted them."
His mother turned to him then. All the way, in the kitchen chair, the way she'd turned to Whitlock.
"I know you did, baby," she said. "Sixty-one. I counted them too."
"I thought they were prayers."
"Some of them were."
Myra's hand closed on his shoulder and held on.
Whitlock unfolded her hands. She had found her voice somewhere and put it back on, level and careful. "Ms. Pettaway, I'm going to need—"
"You're going to need it from the beginning," said Doreen, "in my order. Once." She didn't raise her voice. She never did. "Three o'clock. His study. Lena comes."
Whitlock looked at her watch. Then she looked at the old woman a long moment.
"Then I'll wait," Whitlock said.
"You're good at it," said Doreen.
It went through Anthony like a current. A year ago, this table, his own voice: Then I'll wait. And hers: You're good at it. He thought she did very little that wasn't on purpose.
The French doors opened an inch.
"Can we come out?" Daisy put one eye and half a mouth in the gap. "It's Father's Day."
"Popsicles first," said Myra. "Then yes."
And the table breathed. Uncle Dev said "Lord have mercy" into his napkin. Valerie pried Reggie's fingers off the edge of the table one at a time. Monique got up for the pitcher because somebody had to.
Latoya's hand stayed on the rail of the kitchen chair, right where it had been since noon.
And halfway down the table Detective Arnold sat with his iced tea where he'd set it down without a sound at the words this January. He hadn't picked it back up. He was still looking at the kitchen chair.
Anthony saw Latoya see it again, and not understand, and tighten her grip on the rail.
* * *
Sunday June 20, 2021 (Father's Day)
3:00 pm
Anthony's House, the Study
Doreen chose the room again, and she chose who was in it.
She did it at a quarter to three. She stood up out of the kitchen chair, and the table went quiet without being asked, and she named them plainly, as if reading off a grocery list she'd written the night before.
"Miss Dana. Lena." Then, to Anthony: "You." Then she looked at Myra. "And you. A wife ought to know."
Myra had heard her say that once before, in this same hour of the afternoon. She found she'd been waiting for it.
"Claude," Doreen said. "It started with your people." Claude stood up and took his jacket off the back of the chair and put it on, and buttoned it. "And Reginald." Reggie looked up at her from across the table. "It was your daddy's house."
Nobody argued. Kelly would take the children and the questions, she said, and Claude would tell her tonight, all of it. Claude nodded. No more safes. Kelly had said it to Anthony in this house four summers ago, and none of them had broken it since.
Myra carried the kitchen chair in from the patio herself.
It was a plain wooden chair with the paint worn off the top rail, and it weighed nothing, and she set it where Doreen pointed, beside the desk, with its back to the bookcase where it lived.
The brass clock on the desk. The photographs propped against it, a girl on a stoop with a baby on her shoulder, and a boy of five on a different stoop. And in three squared stacks, fifty-four marbled notebooks, A.R. 1967 to A.R. 2020, with the yellow legal pad on top of the middle one. Doreen looked at the stacks a long moment. She didn't touch them.
Anthony behind the desk. Myra on the arm of his chair, where she could see the clock. Claude and Reggie on the couch. Castellanos in the armchair by the window. And Whitlock in a dining chair from the hall, across from the kitchen chair, so that nothing was between her and the old woman's face.
Doreen sat down, her back not touching anything, and folded her hands in her lap.
"I'll tell you how," she said. "Not why. Why is Claude's. You can sit still for it or you can leave."
Nobody left.
"I dusted that library fifty-three years," Doreen said. "Every morning but Sunday. The desk, the shelves, the glass, the books. He let me because he decided I didn't read anything but the Bible." She looked at Whitlock. "I let him decide it."
Reggie made a small sound on the couch. Myra saw Doreen's eyes go to him and come back, and saw that she let it go by.
"His books were in the long drawer of the desk. The middle one, under the blotter. He kept the key on his chain. Everybody in that house knew where his books were. Nobody in that house ever went near that drawer but him." She paused. "In two thousand four, Mrs. Evelyn sent for me upstairs. First time in thirty-seven years. Reginald's heard this part. She had her good gloves in the drawer by her bed, and she gave them to me. Then she put her hand back in that same drawer and took out a little brass key and put it in my hand on top of the gloves. It was the spare to the long drawer. I don't know how she came by it. I never asked." She looked at her own hands. "She said, 'You might want this someday.' I asked her what for. She said, 'For when you're tired of being quiet.'"
Reggie put his hand over his mouth.
Myra watched him find out something about his mother at sixty-three years old.
"I kept it in my Bible case four years," Doreen said. "I never once used it. I wasn't tired yet." She turned her hands over in her lap. "In the summer of two thousand eight I learned what was in that drawer. How I learned is Claude's. It's in his letter. I won't tell it before he reads it."
She looked at Claude. Claude, on the couch with his jacket buttoned, nodded.
"Christmas week of that year," Doreen said, "I heard him say my son's name into the kitchen telephone. To a man in Atlanta." She did not look at Anthony when she said it. "That's the day I decided."
Myra felt Anthony go still under her hand.
"He went out to his supper on Wednesday nights. His club, or the men from the book, at somebody's house. He'd go at half past six and come home at eleven, every Wednesday God sent. So on Wednesdays I'd open the drawer with Mrs. Evelyn's key when the car was gone, and take whatever pages that week was, and put them in my Bible case, under the Bible. Then I'd walk down to the gate and tell the gate man I was going to church." The corner of her mouth moved. "Which I was."
"You took the bus," said Whitlock. It wasn't quite a question.
"Across the causeway. Two buses. I wouldn't let anybody drive me on a Wednesday. A car has a driver in it, and I wasn't going to put anybody else in it." She said it flatly. "Our church office has a side door. It says OFFICE. Prayer meeting starts at seven, and from seven to eight nobody comes in that office but me. I typed the bulletin on Wednesdays. I ran it off. And I ran off his pages with it."
"On the church copier," said Castellanos, from the window. Her voice was very odd.
"Wore out two of them," said Doreen. "That first one would jam every third page, and I'd talk to it like a mule. Come on now. Come on. They could hear me out in the sanctuary." She didn't smile. "They thought I was praying."
"Then I'd cut a strip off the bulletin's margin with the office scissors. Yellow, mostly. The hymn numbers were printed down that side, so there'd be half a number on the back. I didn't plan that." She looked at Whitlock. "I'd write Sparrow on it in pencil, and put it on top of the pages in a manila envelope, addressed to you people out of the telephone book, and put my stamps on it, and walk to the corner and put it in the blue box under the streetlight. The round-topped one. And ride the bus back, and put his pages in his drawer and lock it. And be in my bed by ten."
"Every Wednesday," said Whitlock.
"Wednesdays I copied. I mailed when it was ready. Some weeks there wasn't anything worth the stamp. Some months he didn't write anything down at all." She tilted her head. "He got careful in two thousand thirteen. I don't know why. That was a thin year."
On the desk, under Myra's hand, Anthony's fingers had found the corner of the yellow legal pad. 2013: two. She had seen it in his writing.
"And every time I mailed one," Doreen said, "I put a little bird in that year's book. Beside the day. So I'd know." She did not look at the stacks on the desk. "Anybody who found it would think an old woman had a doodle."
Anthony's breath went out of him. Myra heard it.
"After they arrested him," Doreen said, "he didn't go out on Wednesdays anymore. He couldn't. So I took them out at night, when he was asleep, and went to the church in the morning. I've had my own key to that office thirty years. Nobody ever thought a thing about it. Sister Martha's always in the office." She folded her hands again. "That's how."
Whitlock had a pad on her knee and hadn't written one word on it. She was looking at the old woman like she was trying to learn her face by heart.
"Ms. Pettaway," she said, very quietly. "How do you know my name?"
"In July of twenty-nineteen," said Doreen, "you sat in my kitchen twenty minutes and asked me what I knew about the business, and I gave you coffee and told you I cooked. You wrote something on your paper. And when you left you gave me your card and told me to call you if I ever remembered anything. You wrote your cell phone on the back of it, in blue ink." She paused. "It's been on my refrigerator under a magnet ever since. That's how I know your name, Miss Dana."
Whitlock looked at her a long time.
"I forgot I gave you one," she said.
"I know you did. That's why I kept it."
"There's one more thing about how," Doreen said. "And then I'm done with how."
She sat a little straighter in the kitchen chair, if that was possible.
"Wednesday the seventh of April, two thousand ten," she said, "I came in at six to start his coffee, same as every morning. And his own desk key was lying on the kitchen table by my cup. Off his chain. Just lying there." She held up one long finger and laid it on her knee, the way you'd set something down on a table. "He came in at seven. He sat down. He said, 'Wednesdays you'll want this.' And he opened his paper."
The study went so still that Myra could hear the clock under her hand, and the house breathing around them, and her own pulse.
"That's all he ever said about it," said Doreen. "Ten years."
Whitlock's pen had stopped somewhere above the pad.
"He knew," she said.
"He knew."
"Since 2010."
"Since then, at least. Maybe before." Doreen looked at the window. "I used Mrs. Evelyn's key till the day he gave me his. Then I used his. I never once thanked him for it." She said that last flatly, the way you'd mention the weather. "He never asked me to."
On the couch, Claude had laid his hand flat on the front of his jacket.
Anthony had his two hands pressed together in front of his mouth. Myra thought of a will read out on a laptop. I ask my son Anthony Richards to see that she is never again alone. She thought, without wanting to, that the old man had never in his life done one thing for one reason.
"The last ones," Doreen said, "since you'll want them in order. The sixty-first was the day before his funeral. Your people were coming with their boxes on the Wednesday. I went in that library on the Monday one more time." She didn't say what she took. "And the sixty-second was this January. The thirteenth."
"The Wednesday table," said Whitlock. She said it the way you say a thing you've read a hundred times.
"His own hand. Twenty-nineteen. Every man who ate at that table and what he owed." Doreen looked at her steadily. "I kept those back. I wanted them last. They'd set a day for the others, and I wanted you to have it in time."
Whitlock set her pen down on the pad.
"May I ask you one thing, Ms. Pettaway?"
"One."
"Why Sparrow?" Whitlock's voice had gone very plain. "You never signed a name. You never asked for anything. Why not nothing?"
Doreen was quiet a moment.
"Because it was the only name I had," she said, "that nobody gave me but my mother."
Myra's hand moved on Anthony's shoulder without her telling it to.
She thought of a letter in a bank box on Brickell. The Sparrow Scholarship Fund for Young Men of the Bronx. Anthony had read it at fifty-seven and told her he'd said that name to telephone operators in 1990 and never once heard the bird in it. And she thought of herself on Friday night, on the couch across this same room, telling him her guess. She wants to put her own handwriting on top of it. She had been right about the handwriting. She had been wrong about the paper. It had never been one piece of paper. It had been sixty-two of them.
Myra kept the clock. It was 3:52.
"Agent Whitlock," she said. "What happens now? This week."
"The government has to tell the defense who the source is," she said. "That's not a choice. It'll be this week. There'll be filings. And I'll need Ms. Pettaway to sit down with the prosecutor. Tomorrow, if she's willing." She turned to Doreen. "At our building, or—"
"Lena's office," said Doreen. "Over the bakery. Not your building."
Whitlock didn't even pause.
"Yes, ma'am," she said.
Myra saw Anthony hear it. Three years of Mr. Richards at gates and hallways, and Dana Whitlock had never once said ma'am to anybody in this family.
Castellanos stood up. "Two o'clock," she said. "I'll call the Boston one tonight. Ms. Pettaway, don't talk to anybody but me."
"I don't talk to anybody but you now," said Doreen. "I like it."
At the door Whitlock stopped with her hand on the frame and turned back. Myra had learned that the things people said at doors were the things they'd come for.
"Ms. Pettaway," Whitlock said. "Why did you invite me to a table? You could have called the number on the card."
Doreen looked up at her from the kitchen chair.
"Because you stood at the edge of everything this family did for three years," she said, "and you never once came in without being asked. A woman like that, you feed."
Whitlock nodded once and went out, and Myra heard her shoes go down the hall, not quite steady.
Doreen looked like a woman who had set down a trunk she'd carried up a long flight of stairs, and wasn't sure yet where to put her arms.
Reggie got up off the couch. He crossed the rug and went down on one knee in front of the kitchen chair, a sixty-three-year-old man in a Father's Day shirt, and put his hand over both of hers in her lap, and bowed his head over it.
Doreen let him.
After a while she took one hand out from under his and laid it on the back of his gray head.
"Get up, Reginald," she said. "Before you can't."
* * *
Sunday June 20, 2021 (Father's Day)
9:30 pm
Latoya's House, the Back Porch
Latoya had waited all day.
Through Popsicles and the long hour when that study door stayed shut, through the drive home with her husband's hands at ten and two, which he never did unless something was sitting on him, through the Tupperware and a shower. Since twenty minutes to one, when she'd looked down the table from behind Miss Doreen's chair and seen his face.
Now she sat down in the white rocker beside his, with two mugs of decaf, and handed him one, and didn't rock.
"Tell me about your face," she said.
He didn't pretend not to know what she meant. She'd married him for that, among other things.
He told her.
He told it in order, plain, like a report for somebody he respected. Wednesday, the thirteenth of January. Nathaniel down with a fever, his first sick day in twenty-two years. The side door that said OFFICE, half past eight, and Miss Doreen coming out of it alone with a thick manila envelope held against her chest with both arms, like a thing you carry in church. The blue mailbox, the round-topped kind, under the streetlight. A whole row of stamps. The upright hand, every letter finished.
"I didn't see the address," he said. "I made sure. There's a thing that happens to a policeman's eyes when paper goes by, Toy, and I felt it start, and I turned my head and looked at a cat on a wall across the street. On purpose. I looked at that cat like my pension depended on it." He turned the mug in his hands. "I'd decided at the funeral I was done watching that woman. So I didn't watch her."
The fern on the rail moved a little in the dark. A moth went around the porch light and around again.
"And today that agent said this January," Latoya said slowly. "And the Grove."
"And the hand. Same hand, every time. Upright." He let out a breath. "I knew it before she finished the sentence. I'd known it for five months and hadn't let myself know it."
Latoya looked at him.
"We tell each other everything," she said. "Before. Not after. That's the rule."
"I know it."
"You didn't tell me."
"There wasn't anything to tell, baby. That was the whole point." He looked at her over the rim of the mug, and he was not apologizing, and she saw that he wasn't, and she loved him for it, a little against her will. "If I'd told you, I'd have had to know it. I didn't want to know it. I wanted to drive a old lady to church."
Latoya sat back in the rocker.
"You didn't look," she said.
"I didn't look."
"Baby," Latoya said, "that's the best police work you ever did in your life."
He laughed. It surprised both of them. He set the mug on the porch rail and laughed with his head back, a tired man's laugh, and she reached over and put her hand on his knee and kept it there.
Afterward they sat a while and didn't say anything.
She thought about her hand on the rail of that kitchen chair, all afternoon. She'd thought she was doing it because she promised, under an avocado tree at a child's birthday party. I'll stand right behind you. Anybody says one wrong thing to you, they're going to have to say it through me.
Now she thought about why the woman had asked for somebody standing in the first place.
"She knew," Latoya said. "She knew she'd need a wall behind her. Something to lean on without anybody seeing her lean." She shook her head slowly in the dark. "She didn't ask the policeman. She didn't ask her son, or Myra, or Kelly. She picked me."
"She picked right."
"She told me somebody should have counted me too." Latoya's voice went funny on her, and she let it. "Nobody ever said that to me in my life, before that woman. I was the one who counted. I was the girl at the window in her socks."
He didn't say anything. He knew that story. He'd been the first man she ever told it to who didn't change the subject.
"There's a trial in three weeks," Latoya said. "They're going to put that woman in a witness chair in front of those men. Those men who sent somebody to Julian's gate. And a lawyer's going to stand up in front of her and ask her things." She set her mug down on the boards beside the rocker. "So here's what I've decided. Wherever she goes for the next three weeks, I go. The lawyer's office. The courthouse. Church. The grocery store. I don't care if she wants me. She's going to have somebody standing."
Detective Arnold picked his mug back up off the rail.
"So do I," he said.
The phone rang in the kitchen.
Not either of their cells. The house phone, the old one on the wall by the refrigerator, which nobody called anymore but Junior's school and men selling roofs. Latoya looked at the clock through the screen door. Two minutes to ten.
She went in and picked it up. "Hello?"
"Latoya."
A low voice, with Carolina in it. Latoya would have known it in the dark at the bottom of a well.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Put the detective on."
Latoya stood there a second with the receiver in her hand. Then she held it out through the screen door, and her husband got up out of the rocker and came and took it, and stood in the doorway with the kitchen light behind him and the porch dark in front.
"Ma'am," he said.
Latoya was close enough to hear it.
"Detective," said Doreen. "Thank you for not looking."
He didn't say anything. Latoya watched him not say anything, with his eyes closed.
There was a pause on the line. Then the low voice came again, and there was something in it Latoya had heard only once before, on a balcony over a mango tree with a candle going out.
"You can look now."
To be continued in In This One Life, coming soon.
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