Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Six: The Sins of the Father by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where The Ones We Chose (Volume 5) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Sunday June 18, 2017 (Father's Day)
4:35 pm
Anthony's House, the Study
The clock on the desk was an old brass one with a glass dome, a gift from some bank in New York, and Claude had never noticed until this minute how loud it was.
It ticked. Anthony sat on the edge of the desk with his straight hands on his knees. Kelly breathed in the doorway. The paper in Claude's hands made a small dry sound every time his fingers moved, and they wouldn't stop moving.
I lied to him too.
There were a hundred questions. There was the bridge, and the hospital, and the station, and the back room, and nine years of Christmas mornings and tuition checks and son. There was a man in a Georgia prison who had once held a gun to his face. There was a silver-haired man in Skybox 12. There was tomorrow morning at five-thirty. Claude's body could not hold any of it. His body could manage one question, and it asked it.
"Who else knows?"
He didn't know whose words those were. He didn't remember a tall man in a linen suit standing in a Miami Gardens kitchen a year ago, asking Kelly the same thing in the same flat voice. They just came up out of him, because that was the question you asked when the ground had moved and you needed to know how far.
"Pruitt," Anthony said. "Me. Now you two."
"Myra?"
"No."
"Detective Arnold?"
Anthony shook his head slowly. "He signed what he was handed."
Claude looked down at the sheet. Alleged father: Anthony Richards. Conclusion: EXCLUDED. The paper had been folded in thirds so long that the creases were soft as cloth. He folded it back along them, carefully, the way you fold a flag, and his hands knew how to do it without him.
He held it out.
Anthony didn't take it. "Keep it," he said. "It was always yours."
For a second Claude stood there with his arm out and the paper at the end of it, like a man waiting for somebody to take a coat. Then he brought it back and put it in the envelope, and put the envelope in the front pocket of his jeans.
He didn't say anything about the morning. He didn't say anything about the kidney, or the room next door, or five-thirty. He didn't say Dad and he didn't say Anthony. He turned around and walked to the door, and Kelly moved her hand off the frame to let him by.
He didn't stop. She didn't ask him to.
Behind him, the old clock kept ticking.
* * *
Sunday June 18, 2017
4:50 pm
Anthony's House, the Driveway
Kelly found the babies where she had left them, asleep in the guest suite, Daisy sprawled across the big bed in her Father's Day dress with one shoe on, CJ on his back in the portable crib with his arms thrown over his head like he had just won something. She picked up CJ. Claude came in behind her without a word and lifted Daisy, and Daisy murmured "Daddy" into his neck and went back to sleep.
He carried his daughter out to the Escalade and buckled her in, and checked the straps twice. Then he stood by the driver's door with the keys in his hand and looked at them.
His hand was shaking so hard the keys rang.
Kelly came around the car and held out her palm. He gave them to her. He got in on the passenger side and shut the door, and she got behind the wheel and moved the seat up, and backed out past Alfonso's man at the gate, who lifted two fingers off the steering wheel of his car.
She didn't say anything.
She had promised him on the porch, not twenty-four hours ago, that she would stand where he could see her. She had not promised to stand in the middle of it. This was his to carry first, and she knew the difference between a woman who stands beside a man and a woman who climbs inside his head and starts rearranging the furniture. She had been the second kind once. Not tonight.
So she drove. Down Anthony's long street with the royal palms, onto the expressway, north toward Miramar with the sun going orange behind them. In the back, CJ talked softly to his own feet. On the dashboard the old index card curled at its corner, Anybody can hit. A champion decides.
Claude sat with his right hand flat over the pocket of his jeans where the envelope was. He looked out the window. Once, around the Hollywood exit, he lifted the hand and looked at his little finger, and then put it back.
Kelly kept both hands on the wheel and her eyes on the road, and she prayed without moving her lips.
Father God, I don't know what to ask you for. So I'm just going to ask you to be in this car.
* * *
Sunday June 18, 2017
9:30 pm
Anthony's House, the Master Bedroom
Anthony told her sitting on the edge of their bed in his dialysis robe, with the tape still on his arm from the evening's session and his bare feet on the cold floor.
He didn't leave anything out. He had decided that much in the study after the door closed, sitting alone with the brass clock. There had been one safe in his life too many. He told Myra about the hospital in 1991 and Susan swearing on her mother. He told her about Friday, August 29, 2008, and a back room in a Detroit police station that smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax, and Leonard Pruitt handing him a sheet of paper with one word in a box. He told her how much he had paid. He told her about the reprint, and the phone call, and the word confirmed. Then he told her about 2014, and the man nobody named, and what Anthony had sworn to him on his life.
Myra stood at the window the whole time with her arms crossed. She didn't sit. She didn't interrupt. When he was finished she stayed there a long while, looking out at the dark lawn and the pool lights, and he could see her face in the glass.
"I watched you carry that envelope to the shredder," she said finally. "With my own two eyes. I stood in that doorway in a ball gown and watched you turn the machine on and turn it off again. And you let me think it was business."
"I know."
"Old business. That's what you said to me."
"It was old."
She turned around. Her eyes were dry, and that was worse than if they hadn't been. "Don't you dare get clever with me tonight, Anthony Richards. Not tonight."
He bowed his head.
"You gave me the combination," Myra said. "The week after our wedding. In case. You trusted me with the numbers to that safe, and you didn't trust me with what was in it." She laughed, a short hard sound with nothing in it. "I've been married to you eleven months. I've slept in that chair beside your machine every night since Christmas. I learned to work the lines. I learned to read the numbers. And the whole time there was a paper in that wall that said your son isn't yours."
"He's mine," Anthony said. "That's the one thing that paper never said."
Myra closed her eyes.
"I'm not leaving," she said. "You hear me? I'm not going anywhere. Arianna's asleep down the hall and you've got surgery at seven and I'm not leaving." She opened her eyes. "But I'm not forgiving you tonight either. Don't ask me to."
"I won't."
She went into the bathroom and shut the door, and after a while he heard the water running.
Anthony sat on the edge of the bed and looked at his hands.
He's twenty-six years old, he thought. He has a wife and three children. He has one body. And he found out today that he was going to cut it open for a man who stole his name.
He thought about the boy on the plastic chair. He thought about the young man who had stood in the study three hours ago folding a piece of paper like a flag.
He thought about the thing he'd almost said, before Claude stopped him. A man who isn't.
Somewhere around ten o'clock, alone on the edge of the bed with the water still running behind the bathroom door, Anthony Richards decided he would not take his son's kidney. He didn't tell anybody. He had always made his biggest decisions alone. It was the one habit he hadn't learned yet to break.
* * *
Sunday June 18, 2017
11:50 pm
Claude and Kelly's House, Daisy's Room
The glow stars on Daisy's ceiling had faded to almost nothing, the way they did by midnight. The night-light by the door made a little yellow moon on the carpet.
Kelly found him there, on the floor beside the bed with a roof.
He was sitting with his back against the wall and his knees up. He had reached through the gauzy curtain of the canopy and found Daisy's hand where it hung over the edge of the mattress, and he was holding it. Daisy was asleep on her stomach with her mouth open and her curls everywhere, the crescent at the back of her neck just showing.
Claude wasn't looking at her. He was looking at his own right hand, the one that wasn't holding hers, turning it slowly in the yellow light. The little finger. The bent top joint.
Kelly stood in the door. Then she came in and sat down on the carpet, not touching him, close enough that he would know.
"Nothing to eat or drink after midnight," Claude said quietly. "That's what Reyes's sheet says. I keep looking at the clock like it's the only rule I've got."
"It's ten minutes."
"I know."
They listened to Daisy breathe.
"If I don't go in tomorrow," Claude said, "what does that make me?"
Kelly thought about it. She owed him that, a real answer, not a fast one.
"Honest," she said.
He nodded slowly. "And if I do?"
"Still honest." She looked at him. "As long as you know why."
He turned his hand over again and didn't answer. She could see him reaching for the why and not finding it, the way you reach for a light switch in a strange room. He didn't know yet. She could see that too.
That was all right. It was ten minutes to midnight. He had until five-thirty.
Kelly lay down on the carpet beside him, on her side, with her head on her arm and her knees drawn up, the way she used to lie on the floor of Mrs. Anne's living room in Detroit when they were nine and the grown folks were talking too late. After a minute Claude slid down the wall and lay down too, still holding Daisy's hand through the canopy, his arm stretched up over his head.
Neither of them slept much. But they stayed.
* * *
Monday June 19, 2017
5:30 am
Memorial Hospital, Transplant Center
Paula Reyes was waiting at the check-in desk in her scrubs and gold reading glasses with a hospital bracelet already printed, and she smiled at him the way she always did, like this was all perfectly manageable.
"Good morning, Mr. Richards. You ready?"
"Yes, ma'am," Claude said.
She didn't look at him any longer than usual. If she remembered Friday, the grid and the long silence, she kept it off her face. She snapped the bracelet on his left wrist. She handed him a gown and a plastic bag for his clothes and a pair of socks with rubber treads, and she walked him and Kelly down a hallway that smelled of hand sanitizer and new floor wax to a curtained bay with a bed and a monitor and a chair for Kelly.
He changed. A nurse with tattooed forearms started an IV in the back of his left hand and taped it down. Somebody took his blood pressure twice. Somebody asked his name and his date of birth, and he said Claude Richards and February eighth, nineteen ninety-one, and both were true and neither one felt like his.
At five-fifty Reyes came back with a woman he hadn't met.
"Mr. Richards, this is Marisol Vega. She's the Living Donor Advocate on your case. The program requires that you meet with her alone the morning of surgery. Mrs. Richards, it'll only be a few minutes."
Kelly squeezed his good hand and stepped out.
Marisol Vega was small and round-faced, in her forties, with a cardigan over her scrubs and a lanyard full of badges. She took him down the hall, rolling his IV pole for him, to a little room with two chairs, a box of tissues and a painting of a sailboat. She closed the door and sat down across from him, knee to knee.
"I'm going to say the same thing I say to every donor," she said. "I work for you. Not for the recipient, not for the surgeons, not for the hospital. Just you." She folded her hands. "You can stop at any point. Right now, in this room. In pre-op. On the table, up until the moment they put you to sleep. If you stop, the team tells the recipient's side only that the donor is not able to proceed. That's all anybody hears. Nobody needs a reason. Not your family. Not his. Not me."
Claude looked at her.
"People think it's a promise," Marisol said gently. "Once you say yes. It isn't. It's a gift. And a gift is only a gift if you're free to keep it."
He sat there in the paper gown with the tape pulling on the back of his hand. Down the hall, a phone rang and rang.
"Can I have five minutes?" he asked. "By myself?"
"Take ten." She stood up. "I'll be right outside the door."
When the door clicked shut, Claude bent forward. His jeans were in the plastic bag at his feet. He opened the bag and dug in the front pocket and took out the envelope, gone the color of weak tea, DETROIT — AUG. 29, 2008 — L. PRUITT, M.D.
He didn't open it. He didn't need to. He knew the box by heart now.
He just held it in both hands, with the IV line looping off his wrist, and he looked at it, and he thought.
He thought about Charles Daniels under the hood of a car, the street light coming on, showing a boy how to turn a hook over at the end so it landed with the whole weight of you behind it. Any fool can swing, son. He thought about Charles going out of the world saying Claude with his last breath, never once knowing that the boy he'd claimed was his own.
He thought about a plastic chair in a Detroit police station and a man in a gray suit who had flown in from New York to sit beside it, who had no reason in the world to be there. Who had looked at a piece of paper that said no and had gone and bought one that said yes, so they'd let him take that boy home.
He thought about every hospital that man had sat in since. Every graduation. A wedding on New Year's Day. Christmas mornings. A wedding of his own last July with silver stars hung by Claude's own hands. A hospital bed last November, and a man going gray in the face and saying I said no.
He thought, I don't know what he is to me this morning.
He thought, But I know what he did.
When Marisol Vega knocked softly and opened the door, ten minutes later, Claude was sitting up straight with the envelope in his fist.
"I'm going to proceed," he said. "But I need to see him first. Before they take him back."
Marisol looked at him for a moment, as if she was reading a page he hadn't meant to show her. Then she nodded.
"He's in Bay 4," she said. "I'll walk you."
* * *
Monday June 19, 2017
6:05 am
Pre-Op, Bay 4
The surgeon stood at the foot of the bed holding the clipboard in both hands, and for the first time since Anthony had met her she seemed to have no idea what to say.
"Mr. Richards," she said carefully. "I want to be sure I understand you."
"You understand me fine." Anthony's voice was hoarse. He had slept maybe an hour. "I decline the organ. I'm withdrawing my consent. Put me back on the list. Put me back on the machine. I'll wait like everybody else."
"Anthony," Myra said.
She was standing at the foot of the bed beside the surgeon with her arms folded, in the same clothes she had pulled on at four o'clock, and she had not said one word since they took his vitals. She had heard him say it to the nurse, and then to the anesthesiologist, and now to the surgeon, and every time her arms got tighter.
"I won't take it from him," Anthony said.
"He's your donor," the surgeon said. "We've been working him up for seven months. He's—"
"I know what he is."
He did. That was the whole trouble. He knew exactly what that young man was, and what he wasn't, and he had known it for nine years.
The surgeon looked at Myra. Myra looked at the ceiling.
Then the curtain moved.
Claude came in wheeling his own IV pole, in a hospital gown and tread socks, with the tape on the back of his hand and his hair still flat on one side from the hospital pillow, and in his right fist, crumpled at one corner, was a long yellow envelope.
The surgeon stepped back without being asked. Myra put a hand on the bed rail.
Behind Claude, through the gap in the curtain, Anthony saw Kelly. She had stopped just outside, in the hallway, in jeans and an old gray hoodie of Claude's with the sleeves pushed up. She had one hand on the edge of the curtain. She didn't come in.
Claude stood at the side of the bed and looked down at him.
"They told me you said no," he said. His voice was low and very even. "A nurse was talking about it at the desk. Bay 4 is refusing."
"I am refusing."
"Why?"
Anthony made himself look at him. It was the hardest thing he had done in a long time, harder than opening the safe, because the safe had only asked him to give something up. This asked him to watch his son's face while he did it.
"You don't owe me anything," Anthony said. "Not after yesterday. You found out yesterday that I bought you. You're not lying down in that room because of a paper I paid for. I won't let you. I've taken enough from you."
"You don't get to decide that."
"I'm the one with the pen."
Claude almost laughed. It wasn't a laugh exactly. It was something that went across his face and was gone.
He held up the envelope.
"In 2008," Claude said, "the paper said no, and you said yes." He let that sit. "This morning I've got the paper. And I'm saying yes. Same as you did."
Anthony couldn't speak.
"I'm not doing it because you're my father," Claude said. His voice shook for the first time, and he steadied it. "I don't know what you are this morning. I swear to God I don't. I lay on the floor of my daughter's room all night trying to figure it out and I couldn't." He looked down at the envelope in his fist, and then back up. "But I know you came. Nobody came for you. You told me that. And you came for me. You got on a plane, and you sat down next to me on that chair, and you never once got up. I'm doing it because you came."
The monitor beside the bed beeped softly, steadily, counting the heart Anthony could feel trying to climb out of his chest.
"Claude," he said. That was all he had.
"Sign the paper," Claude said.
The surgeon was very quiet. Then, slowly, as if she was afraid of startling something, she came back around the foot of the bed and held the clipboard out again, with the pen clipped to the top.
Anthony took it.
His hand, when he signed, was perfectly steady. It was Claude's hand that was shaking, the one holding the envelope. Myra saw that, and later she would tell Kelly she had never in her life seen anything so backward and so right.
The surgeon took the clipboard and checked the line and said, "Thank you, Mr. Richards," to both of them at once, and went out.
At the curtain, Kelly let go of the edge of it and turned her face away, toward the wall, and stood there in the hallway with her hand over her mouth.
* * *
Monday June 19, 2017
6:55 am
The Corridor to the Operating Rooms
They came for the donor first, the way Reyes had said they would, and then the orderlies, two of them in blue caps, wheeled Anthony's bed out of Bay 4 just as Claude's came by, and for thirty seconds in the long corridor the two gurneys rolled side by side.
The ceiling went by over Claude's head in white squares of light. He could hear the wheels. He could hear one of the orderlies humming something.
He turned his head on the thin pillow, and there was Anthony, three feet away, gray and thin under the hospital blanket, with a blue cap over his hair and his eyes open.
Anthony lifted his hand off the blanket and reached across the gap.
Claude looked at it. Long, straight fingers. The fingers that had signed every check and every permission slip and every form for nine years. The fingers that had worked the dial of the safe without needing to look.
He let him take his hand.
They held on, between the moving beds, with the orderlies pretending not to see, until the corridor split at a pair of double doors and the beds had to go different ways, and the hands came apart.
Then there was another room, colder, full of steel and very bright light, and people in masks moving around him with quiet voices, and somebody warm and kind at his head saying, "Mr. Richards, I'm going to give you something now. You're going to feel it in your arm. I want you to count back from ten for me."
"Ten," Claude said.
He thought of Charles in the bay at the shop, the radio going, grease to his elbows, looking up from under the hood with a wrench in his hand and that bent little finger on the handle. There he go. There's my boy.
"Nine."
He thought of Anthony on a plastic chair in a Detroit police station in a gray suit too nice for the place, sitting down beside him without a word.
"Eight," Claude said.
Count back from ten.
He didn't get to seven.
* * *
Monday June 19, 2017
7:40 am
The Family Waiting Room
There were two cups of coffee on the low table between Myra and Kelly, and neither one had been touched since the volunteer at the desk handed them over. They had gone cold, with a skin on top.
The family waiting room had a big screen on the wall with a list of patient numbers and colored bars beside them. Pre-op. In OR. In recovery. Myra had been watching the two numbers she'd been given until they blurred. Both bars said In OR.
Kelly sat with her knees together and her hands folded on top of them. She hadn't said much. Myra hadn't either. There didn't seem to be much to say that the last fifteen hours hadn't already said louder.
"He told you," Kelly said at last. It wasn't a question.
"Last night." Myra looked at her hands. "All of it."
"Are you all right?"
Myra thought about lying, and then didn't, because this was apparently the week for not doing that. "No," she said. "I'm furious. I'm so mad at that man I could spit. And he's in there with your husband's kidney going into him, and if anything happens to either one of them I don't know what I'll do."
Kelly reached over and took her hand. Myra let her.
They sat like that, two women in a row of blue vinyl chairs, while a TV in the corner played the morning news with the sound off and somebody's grandmother slept sitting up across the room.
At seven-forty Myra's phone buzzed in her purse.
She almost didn't look. Then she did, because she ran his whole life now, the calendar and the doctors and the pharmacy and the office, and people would be wondering. It was a forward from Anthony's assistant in the Brickell office, who came in early on Mondays and who knew, as of last week, that her boss would be unreachable for a while.
Mrs. Richards, this came in overnight to Mr. Richards's office address. It didn't seem like something I should answer. —D.
Myra opened the message underneath.
She read the subject line. Then she read it again. Then she turned the screen, without a word, so Kelly could see.
From: Vanessa Cole, Closed Files.
Re: Request for comment — Dr. Leonard Pruitt; a paternity test performed in Detroit, Michigan, on August 29, 2008.
To be continued in The Sins of the Father, coming soon.
Account
Cart