Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Five: The Ones We Chose by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where Hidden in Plain Sight (Volume 4) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Saturday July 16, 2016
10:24 pm
Anthony's House, the Upstairs Nursery
Claude didn't understand her.
He heard the words, but they came at him the way a punch comes when you aren't looking, all sound and no sense. He stood there with his hands still on her shoulders and his tie still crooked from two little girls pulling on it, and he waited for the words to turn into something.
They didn't.
"Angel eyes," he said slowly. "What are you talking about?"
Kelly held up the paper. Her hand was shaking so hard the sheet rattled.
He took it from her. It was a single page, folded in thirds, full of columns of numbers he couldn't read. At the bottom, in a box by itself, were three lines.
Alleged father: Lawrence Vance.
Conclusion: EXCLUDED.
Probability of paternity: 0%.
He read it twice. He read the man's whole name, which he hadn't let himself say out loud in months, and then he read the zero.
"Excluded," he said. "So it's not him."
"It's not him."
"Okay." He nodded like a man agreeing about the weather. "Okay. That's good, right? That's good. That means he never had nothing on her. He was lying the whole time. He was..."
He stopped.
Down on the lawn a hundred people laughed at something the DJ said. Claude looked down at the paper, and then up at his wife's face, and the zero slowly turned over in his head like a key in a lock.
If it wasn't Larry, then it was somebody. And there had only ever been one somebody else.
"Kelly."
"Let me say it." She took a breath that shook all the way down. "Let me say it all one time, in order, because if I don't say it in order I'm going to lose my mind in this room."
He let her.
"The clinic," she said. "That spring, before everything. When it was done, the nurse gave me a sheet. She said, Come back in two weeks, honey, so we can make sure it's complete. It almost always is. Once in a long while it isn't, and that's what the follow-up is for. I put that paper in my purse. Two days later I was in the back of a van. I never went back. They called me, Claude. They called me a couple of times when I got home, and I deleted the messages without listening to them."
He didn't move.
"Then the test. You remember the test. A couple of days after I got home. A couple of days, Claude. Nothing from Georgia could have shown up on a test that soon. Nothing. But I didn't think about that, because I didn't want to think about anything. I didn't let a doctor touch me until I was almost thirty weeks, and when they asked me for a date I gave them the Georgia date, because I was sure. Because who else could it be? So they wrote it down. They dated everything from what I told them." Her mouth twisted. "And when she came, they wrote thirty-seven weeks on her card. Little bit early. That's what they said. And I never asked how early. I never asked."
"She wasn't early," Claude heard himself say.
"She wasn't early. If you count from before the clinic, she came right on time." Kelly pressed both hands over her face and took them away again. "I was already pregnant when they took me. I was pregnant the whole time I was in that house. I just didn't know."
The room was very quiet. The moon lamp on the dresser threw a soft gold circle on the ceiling.
And then, out of nowhere, Claude heard his own voice.
The voice from two years ago, in their bathroom, with Kelly on the edge of the tub holding a white stick in both hands, and him in the doorway with his arms folded.
Well, you're not keeping this one.
He had said it again a week later, louder, when she cried and told him she couldn't take another life. And months after that, in a hospital conference room, somebody had slid a form across the table to him, because they were married and the law called him the father, and he had signed his name so hard the pen went through the paper.
He had thought he was signing away another man's child.
His legs went out from under him. He didn't fall. He just sat, all at once, on the nursery carpet next to the crib where his son was sleeping, with the paper in his lap and his back against the bars.
Kelly sat down beside him. Their shoulders touched.
"I told you not to keep her," Claude said. He didn't recognize his own voice. "I told you twice."
"I know."
"I signed..." He couldn't finish it. "I signed my own daughter away like she was a car."
"We both did." Kelly took his hand. Hers was ice cold. "We both signed, Claude. I'm the one who turned my face to the wall. I'm the one who had this in my Bible since March and never opened it. Don't you take it all. You don't get to take it all."
He looked at the paper again, and then he looked at her.
"Are you sure?"
"No." She shook her head slowly. "That's the thing. I'm not sure of anything. The paper only tells us who she isn't. It doesn't say who she is."
"She's got the mark, Kelly." The words came out of him rough. "She's got Daisy's mark. Right there on the back of her neck. I saw it tonight when I picked her up. I saw it and I didn't even think nothing about it. I thought, that's cute, she got one too. She ran straight to me. Out of everybody on that floor."
"She calls every man Da."
"She ran to me."
Kelly didn't argue. She put her head down on his shoulder, and he put his face in her hair, and they held on to each other like the last two people on a boat.
"Kelly? Claude?" Myra's voice floated up the staircase, bright and happy and a little bit tipsy. "Where did y'all go? We're cutting the cake! Anthony won't cut it without his best man and my matron of honor, so get down here before he eats it with his hands!"
Neither of them moved.
"Coming!" Kelly called. Her voice came out almost normal. Claude stared at her.
"We can't," he whispered.
"We have to." She wiped her face hard with the heels of her hands. "It's their wedding night, Claude. Your father waited his whole life for tonight. My mother is down there. My sister just told the whole world she's pregnant. We are not taking this night from them." She folded the paper back into thirds along its old creases and slid it into the envelope, and the envelope back into the Bible at Psalm 139, and the Bible back into the bag. "We go down. We smile. We cut the cake. We get through it."
"And then what?"
"And then we figure out what's true."
She stood up and held her hand out to him, the way she had once on a snowy schoolyard in Detroit, a little girl in braids and mittens telling him to get up because he wasn't done.
He took it. He got up.
In the crib, Claude Jr. stirred and made a small sound, and Kelly lifted him out with his blanket and settled him against her shoulder. At the door she stopped and looked back at Claude.
"Fix your tie," she said softly. "They pulled it all crooked."
* * *
Saturday July 16, 2016
10:41 pm
Anthony's House, the Lawn
The cake was five tiers tall, white with blue sugar flowers running down one side, and Anthony cut it with Myra's hand on top of his while forty phones went up in the air at once.
Kelly stood beside the table and smiled. She smiled when Myra fed Anthony the first bite and smeared frosting on his nose. She smiled when Uncle Dev yelled, "Now kiss it off!" and Anthony did. She smiled when her mother came up behind her and squeezed her waist and said, "You okay, baby? You look flushed."
"It's hot, Mom," Kelly said. "It's July."
"Mm-hm. Drink some water." Latoya kissed her temple and moved on, and Kelly let out the breath she had been holding.
Forty minutes. She had sat on a witness stand for four hours and looked at Larry Vance while she told twelve strangers what he did to her. She could stand at a cake table for forty minutes.
But she kept looking for Lori.
Lori under the dessert table with Junior, stealing strawberries. Lori on Jennifer's lap, going for Jennifer's earrings. Every time Kelly found her, she looked at the back of that little neck, at the dark curls lifting in the breeze off the bay, and every time she made herself look away again.
The paper only tells us who she isn't.
She had said it to Claude to keep him on the floor. She was saying it now to keep herself standing.
"Okay, okay, family!" The photographer, a small, sweaty man with three cameras around his neck, had been herding people all night like a border collie. "I need the best man! Best man with the little ones. Where's my best man?"
Somebody pushed Claude forward. He came out of the crowd slowly, in his sky-blue suit, with his tie fixed now and his face set in a smile so careful that Kelly's heart hurt to look at it.
"There he is. Let's get you with the flower girls. Where's the flower girls?"
Daisy marched over at once. Arianna was asleep on a lounge chair under Tiffany's jacket. The photographer looked around.
"That one," he said, pointing. "The little one in the blue sash. She's been following you all night anyway. Mom, is it okay?"
Valerie laughed and waved her hand. "Go ahead! She's been trying to climb him since we got here."
Claude bent and picked Daisy up on his right hip. Then he turned, and Valerie put Lori into his arms, and he settled her on his left hip, and Kelly watched his whole body go still.
"Beautiful. Beautiful. Look at me, girls! Look at Mister Funny Man!" Daisy giggled. Lori stared at him like he was crazy, then turned and grabbed Claude's ear and said, "Da," very firmly, like she was telling the photographer who was in charge.
Valerie burst out laughing behind the camera. "See? See what I told you? Every man. Every single man."
"Spin!" Daisy commanded. "Daddy, spin!"
So he spun them. Slowly, around and around on the grass under the stars, the two girls shrieking, their curls flying out, and the camera went off and off and off.
Kelly stood at the cake table holding her son and smiling, because everybody was looking at her husband and nobody was looking at her, and because if she stopped smiling she would start screaming.
When Claude finally put them down, Lori ran straight to Daisy's flower basket, dug out the last handful of petals and threw them in the air, and then grabbed Daisy's pink cup off the grass and started drinking out of it.
"That's mine," Daisy informed her.
Lori held it out generously. It was her own cup, it turned out, the same pink with a white lid, and Daisy's was still sitting on the table. Neither girl cared. They traded cups three times and sat down in the grass together, and when they wandered off, Kelly picked both cups up off the grass and stuffed them in the diaper bag without looking, because her hands needed something to do.
* * *
Saturday July 16, 2016
11:30 pm
Anthony's House, the Front Gate
Lori fell asleep at eleven-fifteen in the middle of the dance floor, standing up, with her face against Clinton's knee.
Clinton scooped her up, and Valerie went to find her purse and her shoes, and Claude stood by the bar with a glass of water he had forgotten to drink.
"I got the car seat," Clinton said, passing him. He had Lori over one shoulder and Valerie's big quilted bag over the other, and he was grinning. "Bruh. You see her in them pictures? She's gonna be a model. Watch. Gonna have to beat these little boys off with a stick."
"Yeah," Claude said.
"You good? You look like you got hit."
"I'm good. Long day."
Clinton looked at him a second longer. Then he grinned again and bumped his shoulder, gentle, the way he'd been doing since their last spar in June. "Get some sleep, old man. I'll see you Wednesday."
Claude followed them down the long driveway anyway. He didn't decide to. His feet just went.
The silver stars were still turning in the trees. At the gate Alfonso nodded to Valerie and opened the side gate, and her white Lexus sat on the road beyond with the hazards blinking.
Clinton handed the bag to his mother, opened the back door and leaned in to snap the car seat into place. Then Valerie gave him Lori, and he lowered her in so carefully that she didn't even stir. He did the straps. He checked them twice. He tucked a little white blanket around her legs.
Claude watched him do it.
That was his job. That was supposed to be his job. Clinton's big, scarred hands buckling that little body into a car seat was the most loving thing Claude had seen all night, and he wanted to rip the door off its hinges.
"Thank you for having us, Claude." Valerie came to him with her shoes in her hand and hugged him. "Tell your father congratulations. Tell Kelly happy birthday again. That was beautiful. That whole thing was beautiful."
"Valerie." His voice came out wrong. She pulled back and looked up at him, still smiling. "Valerie, I..."
A hand closed on his arm.
It wasn't hard. It was barely anything. Just Kelly's fingers, cool, wrapping around his forearm above the wrist, and he didn't know how long she had been standing behind him.
"We'll call you this week," Kelly said warmly. "Drive safe, okay? Text me when y'all get home."
"I will, baby. Night night." Valerie kissed Kelly's cheek, went around the car and got in.
Clinton slapped the roof twice and stepped back. The Lexus pulled away, and Claude watched the red taillights go all the way down the road to the corner. Then they turned, and they were gone.
He was shaking.
"Not like this," Kelly said quietly, behind him. "Not at a gate. Not in the dark. Not on your father's wedding night."
"She's in that car."
"I know where she is."
"She's in that car, Kelly, and they're driving her away, and I'm just standing here."
"You're standing here," Kelly said. "Good. Keep standing."
Alfonso closed the gate. He didn't look at either of them. He had worked for this family long enough to know when not to.
* * *
Sunday July 17, 2016
12:20 am
Anthony's House, Guest Suite
Daisy was asleep in the middle of the big bed with her flower crown still on, and Claude Jr. was asleep in the portable crib, and Kelly sat on the edge of the window seat in her white dress with her shoes off and her feet tucked under her.
Claude was walking.
Bathroom door to window and back, shirtsleeves rolled, hands on top of his head. He had been doing it for twenty minutes.
"Talk to me," Kelly said.
"I'm thinking."
"I know what you're thinking. That's why I want you to talk."
He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked down at Daisy, at the crown sliding over one eye, and he reached out and took it off her head very gently and set it on the nightstand.
"We go get her," he said.
There it was.
"We go get her," Claude said again, quieter, like he was trying it out. "First thing. We call Fenwick, we call whoever we have to call. That's my daughter. That's my blood. She's been living in somebody else's house for nineteen months because of a lie that sick..." He bit it off and looked at Daisy. "Because of a lie. And we just found out. So we go get her. That's what a father does."
"Sit down, Claude."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Then stand, but listen to me." Kelly put her feet on the floor. She had been thinking too, all night, under the lights with the cake knife in her hand, and she had come to the end of it somewhere around the third slow song. "We don't do this like we did everything else."
He looked at her.
"I mean it. I hid an abortion from you. You hid the bachelor party from me for two years. You put your fist through a wall instead of telling me you were scared. My father kept secrets for twenty years. Every time this family hides something, somebody gets hurt worse than the thing we were hiding." She held up her hand and counted on her fingers. "So here's how it goes. No hiding. No fists. No lawyers first."
"Kelly..."
"No lawyers first," she said again. "I'm not saying never. I'm saying not first. I can ask Gloria what the law says, that's me finding out where I stand. But nobody sends a lawyer to that woman's door. Valerie hears it from me. Not from a man in a suit, not from a process server on her porch like he did. Woman to woman. She opened her door to me when she didn't have to. She promised me my daughter would know me. I owe her my face."
Claude looked at her for a long time.
"She's mine," he said finally. It wasn't an argument. It came out of him like something that had been stuck in his chest all night. "Kelly. She's mine."
"She's hers," Kelly said gently. "Lori's. Remember?"
He remembered. She watched him remember. The laundry room last December, the cupcake on the dryer, Kelly asking him not to make the day about Larry. She's not his. She's not anybody's but hers.
He sat down on the end of the bed. Finally. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and his shoulders started to move.
Kelly crossed the room and sat beside him and put her arms around him and didn't say anything at all.
"Two years," he said into his hands. "She learned to walk. She learned to say Da. Some other man taught her that."
"I told you to get rid of her."
"I know."
"How do you forgive somebody for that?"
"I don't know yet," Kelly said honestly. "I think we're going to find out."
* * *
Sunday July 17, 2016
2:40 am
Anthony's House, the Study
Claude couldn't sleep, so he went where he always went in this house when he couldn't sleep.
The study was dark except for the green banker's lamp on the desk. Out on the lawn a crew from the rental company was working under two work lamps, because Myra had paid double to have the grass clear by Sunday brunch.
They were taking the stars down.
Two men on ladders unhooked the little silver stars one at a time and passed them down to a man with a box. It had taken Claude and Junior all of Thursday afternoon to hang them. It was taking these men an hour.
If the wedding's going to be on her birthday, he had told Myra, then the sky better look like her birthday.
He had been so proud of that.
"I had a feeling I'd find somebody in here."
Claude turned. Anthony stood in the doorway in a white undershirt and his tuxedo pants, with his feet in black dress socks and no shoes. He looked gray around the mouth, and he lowered himself into the leather chair like a much older man.
"What you doing up, Dad? It's your wedding night."
"My wife is asleep. My wife," Anthony said, and smiled, and some of the gray went out of his face. "All these years, and I finally got a wife. She fell asleep with her shoes on, talking about Aruba. I couldn't get comfortable." He propped one foot on the ottoman and rubbed at the ankle. Claude looked at it. It was swollen, puffed up soft over the top of the sock.
"Your feet still swelling?"
"I stood up for eight hours in new shoes, son. Everybody's feet are swelling. Ask Myra about hers." Anthony waved it off and leaned his head back. "What's your excuse?"
Claude didn't answer.
Anthony opened his eyes and looked at him. He looked the way he had looked at Claude across a table in Detroit when Claude was seventeen and lying about everything, until Claude had to look away.
"Whatever it is," Anthony said quietly, "you can tell me."
Claude stood at the window with his back to the stars coming down.
It would be easy. Dad, Kelly opened the envelope. Anthony would understand in two seconds, and by nine o'clock Monday morning he would have every lawyer in Miami on the phone, and the whole thing would be out of Kelly's hands.
Valerie hears it from me.
"It's Kelly's birthday," Claude said finally. "That's all. It's always hard on her. You know. The other... the baby."
It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the truth. He had said it so easily that it scared him.
Anthony nodded slowly. He didn't believe it, Claude could tell. But he let it go, the way he had learned to let things go with his son, by leaving a door open instead of kicking one in.
"Whatever it is, son," Anthony said, "we handle it together. You hear me? You and me and Kelly. Same as always."
"I hear you."
"Good." Anthony closed his eyes again. "Now go to bed. And tell that crew if they drop one of my wife's stars I'm taking it out of their tip."
Claude almost laughed. At the door he looked back at his father in the green lamplight with his swollen feet up on the ottoman, and for a second he almost said it.
He didn't.
He went upstairs, and he lay down beside his daughter and his wife, and he looked at the ceiling.
* * *
Sunday July 17, 2016
4:10 am
Anthony's House, Guest Suite
Kelly gave up on sleeping at four.
She slid out from under Daisy's leg and took the nursery bag into the bathroom. She sat on the closed lid of the toilet with the Bible open on her knees.
It fell open at the same place. It always would now.
Psalm 139. The envelope lay there between the pages like a pressed flower. She had underlined verse thirteen in blue ink in the summer of 2014, sitting on her mother's back porch, already showing and too scared to pray anything longer. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. Because if God had knit that baby together, then maybe it didn't matter whose hands had been on Kelly in that house in Georgia. Maybe the baby was His before she was anybody else's.
She read it again now.
Knit me together. He had been knitting all along. He had been knitting while she told the doctors the wrong date, and while she turned her face to the wall. He had sent that little girl to a woman who had prayed for a second chance, and then He had sent her across a dance floor into her father's arms on Kelly's birthday, and He had waited, all this time, for Kelly to look.
"Why didn't You tell me?" she whispered.
The bathroom fan hummed. Nobody answered. She hadn't really expected anybody to.
Because you didn't want to know, she thought. You wrote it down and signed it. Never tell me. You made sure.
She found a pen in the side pocket of the bag, one of the cheap hotel pens from Claude's own hotel with Biscayne printed on it in gold, and in the narrow white margin beside verse thirteen she wrote, small and careful:
July 16, 2016. I looked.
She looked at it for a long time. Then she closed the Bible and held it against her chest.
When she came out, the sky had gone the deep gray-blue that comes before anything else, and the lawn was empty. The oak trees stood there bare, like nothing had ever happened under them.
Claude was sitting up against the headboard. Maybe he had never slept at all. Daisy was sprawled across both of his legs, snoring softly through her mouth.
Kelly sat down on the edge of the bed beside him. Neither of them said anything for a while. They watched the window go from gray to pale gold, and somewhere out over the water a boat horn sounded, long and low.
"I've been thinking about it all night," Claude said.
"I know."
"I been thinking about her in that car seat. Clinton buckling her in. I been thinking about the Christmases. Two of them. Two Christmases, Kelly, and her first steps, and the first time she said a word, and I wasn't there for none of it, and I'm not going to miss one more thing." He turned his head and looked at her, and his eyes were red and very calm. "So I know what I want to do."
"She's a whole little person, Claude," Kelly said. "With a whole life."
"Then we go bring her home," Claude said.
The sun came up over the edge of the bay and laid one long stripe of light across the bed, across Daisy's curls and Claude's hands and Kelly's bare feet on the floor.
"No," Kelly said. "First we go tell her mother."
To be continued in The Ones We Chose, coming soon.
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