Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Seven: A Seat at the Table by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where The Sins of the Father (Volume 6) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Sunday June 17, 2018 (Father's Day)
4:11 pm
Key Biscayne, the Old Man's House, the Terrace
Nobody moved.
Claude would remember that afterward more than anything the old man said. Twelve people and a gull on a coral-stone terrace, the bay shining behind them like a sheet of tin, and not one of them moved. CJ was a warm weight on his hip. Daisy's hand was in his left hand, sticky from Myra's cake. Kelly's fingers had closed on his arm above the elbow, and they were cold, in June, in the sun.
Then his father walked past him.
Anthony did it the way he had done everything hard in the year since the operating room: slowly, with his shoulders back, like a man walking into a board meeting he already knew he was going to lose. He did not look at Claude. He crossed the old stones in his gray suit with his right hand still flat over his breast pocket, and by the time he reached the long table under the pergola the polite young man was already there, drawing out a wicker chair, as if he had known to the inch where Anthony would stop.
Anthony sat down in it.
Myra came after him and stood behind the chair with her hand on his shoulder, and Claude saw her fingers press once, hard, through the gray wool. Arianna had woken up in the car and was holding a fistful of her mother's skirt, her thumb in her mouth.
The old man bent and set Lori down on her sandals. She was off at once, a yellow blur, straight for Daisy.
"Daisy! Come see the fishes! There's orange ones!"
Daisy's hand pulled in Claude's. He didn't let go.
"Daisy," he said. "Stay by me."
She knew that voice. She had heard it in parking lots, and on a night in April when he went out the front door with his keys already in his hand, and she stopped pulling at once and leaned against his leg. Lori stopped too, puzzled, one sandal in the air.
The old man looked at Claude. Nothing in his face changed.
"Of course," he said mildly. "Your children, your rules, Mr. Daniels Richards." He held a soft hand out to Lori without looking down, and she came back and took it, the way a child takes a railing. "In a little while, my patient girl. When your Da says."
When your Da says. He even knew that.
He did the introductions himself, unhurried, the way a host does at a party he has planned for a long time. He stopped in front of Myra first and took her hand in both of his.
"Mrs. Richards. You keep the clock, I'm told."
Myra let him hold her hand. She didn't give it to him. She lifted her chin. "Somebody has to."
"Somebody always does." He bent, one hand on his knee, to Arianna. "And the youngest Miss Richards. Good afternoon."
Arianna put her face in Myra's skirt.
"Very wise," the old man said. He straightened and nodded toward the young man at Anthony's chair. "You've met my grandson, Mr. Daniels Richards. Twice, I think."
The young man stood very straight, hands folded in front of him. "Julian, sir," he said, to his grandfather, not to Claude, as if reminding him of something he already knew.
"Julian?" It was Valerie, behind Claude. She had stopped smiling. Her eyes went from the young man to her husband and back, a face doing arithmetic it didn't want the answer to. "Reggie. Reggie, that's your Julian?"
Reggie Dixon was still looking at the ground. He was looking at one coral stone in front of his good shoes as if it were the only thing on the island.
"That's Julian," he said, to the stone.
Claude watched a father and a son stand six feet apart on a terrace and not look at each other.
He knew only a little. Fifteen months ago, on the second level of a parking garage behind the mediation center, Reggie had stood at the wall beside him turning his ring and talked about his grown children like a man reading a list of debts. Good people. Their mother made them good people. And then, in the same flat voice: One I haven't talked to in three years.
Now that one was standing beside Anthony's chair in a dark suit, on Father's Day. He did not look at Reggie once. He looked past all of them at the bay, the way he had looked at nothing all the way up to Level Four in a service elevator. But a muscle moved in his jaw.
And the thoughts came again, like a clerk reading out charges.
A phone call in 2014 to a man with a gun in his hand in an auto-parts parking lot in Orlando, and the gun had gone down, and Kelly had come home alive. A whole promotion stake, every point of what Anthony had built, handed over the week of a title fight. We're even. For now, Anthony. Tim Escobar, seen to. A dark sedan at the end of every street Lori slept on. Teo's last two men, gone the night of Uncle Dev's wedding. Not arrested, Detective Arnold had said. Not anywhere.
Every one of those was this man.
And Lori had just run across the stones to him with both arms up.
"Well," the old man said pleasantly, to all of them. "You've had a long drive and a hot one. Julian will bring something cold." He looked up at the pergola and the long white table. "We'll eat at half past six. Children first, then the grown people talk."
He went back toward his chair by the wall with Lori skipping beside him.
Claude realized only later, on the causeway in the dark, that in all that time on his own terrace the old man had never once said his own name.
* * *
Sunday June 17, 2018 (Father's Day)
5:20 pm
Key Biscayne, the Old Man's House, the Side Garden
It was the old man who suggested the fish.
He suggested it the way he said everything, as if it had just occurred to him. "The children have been very patient. Perhaps the ladies would show them the pond. It's cooler on that side of the house." And Valerie, who had been sitting on the edge of a cushioned chair for an hour holding a lemonade she hadn't tasted, stood up before she had decided to.
Kelly stood with her. Claude set CJ down, said "Go with Mama, little man," and stayed where he was, beside his father's chair. Myra's hand had not left Anthony's shoulder.
So it was Valerie and Kelly with four children. Valerie meant to lead. It was her husband's father's house; God help her, it was the nearest thing to family she had on this island. But before she had gone three steps, Lori had taken Daisy by the hand and gone around her, down two shallow steps onto a path of crushed shell.
"It's this way, Daisy. You have to go by the flowers."
Valerie followed her daughter.
The path ran along the side of the long white house under the open windows, past a hedge of red hibiscus taller than Valerie, every flower as wide as a saucer. Lori went past it without looking, the way you walk past the furniture in your own living room. CJ held Kelly's finger, whispering "fish, fish, fish." Arianna rode on Kelly's other hip, because Myra had asked.
At the end of the hedge was a low white gate in a low white wall.
Lori stopped in front of it and stood up on her toes. She reached up with her right hand, the one with the little finger that curved in at the top, found the iron latch, lifted it and pushed, and the gate swung open.
Valerie stopped walking.
Nobody had shown her. Nobody had held her up. Lori had reached for that latch at exactly the right height, the way she reached for the light switch in her own bathroom.
On the other side the air was green and wet and ten degrees cooler. A strangler fig stood over everything, its roots running down the rocks like candle wax, and under it, in a ring of old coral stone, was a pond. The water was black and still, and then it wasn't: something orange moved under it, and something white with red spots, and something gold as big as a man's forearm, turning slow.
"Fishes!" Daisy shrieked.
"Not too close," Kelly said. "Hands where I can see them."
Lori had gone straight past the pond to a stone bench under the tree. There was a round tin on it. She pried off the lid with her thumbs and held it out to Daisy with tremendous seriousness.
"You do a pinch," Lori said. "Papa says a pinch. A handful makes them sick." She showed it, finger and thumb. "Then you wait. They come when you're patient."
Daisy took a pinch. The water boiled orange and gold. Both girls screamed with joy, and CJ screamed because they were screaming, and Arianna laughed for the first time all day.
Valerie stood on the path with her hand on the open gate.
She was not a fool. She had been a lot of things she wasn't proud of, a hard mother and a bitter woman and a liar to her own son, but nobody had ever called her a fool. She had worked half her life in a liquor warehouse counting cases, and you didn't count cases that long without learning to see when a number was wrong.
"She's been here," Valerie said.
Kelly looked up from the pond.
"She's been here, Kelly." Her voice came out flat and quiet, the way it did when she was too frightened to be loud. "I have been to this house one time in my life. Ten minutes, on that terrace, and he gave me iced tea and asked how she was sleeping. I never came around this side. I never saw this gate. And my baby knows where he keeps the fish food."
Kelly came and stood beside her. She didn't touch her, which Valerie was grateful for. She stood close enough that their shoulders almost met.
"How?" Valerie said. "When?"
"I don't know," Kelly said. "But I'd bet my house Reggie does."
Someone was coming down the path. It was Julian, with a silver tray of juice boxes, apple and grape, the straws already out of their wrappers. He set it on the stone bench beside the tin and straightened.
Lori looked at him the way she looked at any grown-up she didn't know, a waiter, a man at the bank. "Thank you," she said politely, because Valerie had raised her to, and turned back to the fish.
She doesn't know him, Valerie thought. She's been here, God knows how many times, and she doesn't know him. So he had kept out of her way. Somebody had told him to.
Then Valerie looked at his face. Properly, for the first time, in the green light under the tree.
And she knew it, the way you know a song from the first two notes. A young man on her front step on a weekday morning, in a dark jacket and pressed slacks, a black car at the curb behind him. A small square box in heavy silver paper, held out in both hands. For the little one, ma'am. Every month for three years. A music box with a lamb on the lid on Lori's third birthday. Always a weekday. Always the morning. Always, she understood now, when Reggie was already at the office.
"You," Valerie said. "You're the boxes."
He didn't look away. She would give him that, later.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Three years. At my door."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And you never once said who you were." Her voice shook. She made it stop. "You stood on my step and handed me presents for my baby, and you are my husband's son, and you never once said who you were."
Julian was quiet a moment. When he answered, his voice was polite and level and very tired, and for one second he sounded exactly like Reggie.
"You never asked me, ma'am," he said. "Nobody in my family asks."
He gave her a small correct nod, and one to Kelly, and went back up the shell path past the hibiscus.
Valerie went to the edge of the pond and took her daughter's hand, the sticky one with the fish food on it.
"Mama," Lori said. "Mama, too tight."
Valerie loosened her fingers. Only a little. She stood there in the cool green shade and watched the big gold fish turn under the black water, slow and patient, waiting for whatever came down from above. She did not cry. She had decided a long time ago, in a hospital hallway with a baby in a pink blanket, that she was done crying in front of this child over things grown people did.
Beside her, Kelly put the lid back on the tin and set it on the bench exactly where it had been.
* * *
Sunday June 17, 2018 (Father's Day)
6:30 pm
Key Biscayne, the Old Man's House, the Long Table
The booster seats were already there.
Kelly couldn't stop noticing it all through dinner. Four booster seats on four chairs at the cake end of the long white table: Daisy, CJ, Arianna, Lori. Nobody had called ahead to say how many children were coming or how old. They had simply been there, waiting, like everything else in this house.
She counted exits without meaning to. The hall. The shell path. The lawn down to the bay. A side door where a woman in a white apron came and went with dishes and never looked at anyone. Alfonso was in the public lot at the bottom of the island road with his phone in his hand, because Anthony had asked him to wait there. He asked for family, Anthony had said that morning, and Alfonso had not liked it, and had said so.
The table was beautiful. That was the worst of it. A whole grilled snapper with lime slices down its side. White rice. Fried plantains, the sweet kind, caramel at the edges. A mango salad with red onion. A cake under a glass dome.
The old man sat at the head. He put Anthony on his right with a small motion of his fingers, and Anthony went where he was put. Claude beside Anthony, then Kelly, then Myra at the corner where she could reach Arianna. Reggie and Valerie across.
Julian stood at the far end behind an empty chair.
"Sit, Julian," the old man said, without looking at him. "You're family tonight."
Julian sat. The empty chair was beside his father's. Neither of them turned his head, and between them was a space about the width of a hand that neither crossed for the rest of the night.
Then the pale eyes came down the table and stopped on Kelly.
"Mrs. Richards. Would you say grace? I'm told your family says it well."
I'm told. She thought of all the tables he might have been told about. Anthony's patio. Latoya's dining room with the leaf put in. A Christmas Eve, and a silver box in the front of the tree so Papa could see it in the picture.
She could say Mrs. Anne's grace, the one every child in the family could say in their sleep, and nobody would think anything of it. Kelly decided, with her son moving under her hand, that she was not going to tell one lie at this man's table. Not even to God.
She held out her hands. Claude took her left; Myra, after a second, took her right. Down the table the others joined, Valerie reaching for Lori's sticky fingers, Reggie for Valerie's. Kelly saw Julian look at his father's open hand on the cloth beside him and fold his own hands on the edge of his plate instead.
The old man held no one's hand. He folded his on the white cloth and bowed his head.
"Father God," Kelly said. "Thank You for this food and the hands that made it. Thank You for this day, which is a day for fathers, and for every one of them at this table." She heard Anthony breathe. "Thank You for the ones who came. Every one of us came here today, Lord, and we came together. Keep us together. And keep every child at this table safe. Every one. Whoever has to do the keeping. In Jesus' name."
"Amen," said Valerie, so loudly that CJ jumped.
"Amen," said everybody else.
The old man had bowed exactly as long as everyone else, not one second more or less. He picked up the serving fork. "Mrs. Dixon, may I give you some of the fish?"
So they ate. That was the strange part. Daisy wanted plantains and nothing else. CJ ate rice with his fingers. Lori told Arianna the gold fish was named Mister and the white one was Snow and the spotted one didn't have a name yet because he was new. The bay went from blue to gold to pink.
The old man was good at small talk. He asked Claude whether the hotel's new roof had held through last year's storm, and Claude answered in four words, and the old man nodded as if four words were exactly what he wanted.
He turned to Kelly. "And your boy. When?"
Your boy. Not the baby. The skin on her arms tightened.
"October," she said.
"October. A good month. The heat breaks. Everything starts over." He turned his glass of amber a quarter-turn on the cloth and didn't drink. "Reginald was born in New York, you know. We came down in '66, when he was eight. He'd never seen a palm tree. He thought we'd made them up."
Reggie looked up from his plate for the first time.
"I remember the drive," he said.
That was all. Kelly waited for more, and there wasn't any, and the old man smiled faintly as if it were a whole story and a good one, and passed the rolls.
Then Daisy, with her mouth full of plantain, put down her fork.
"What's your name?"
She said it to the head of the table, clear as a bell, the way she asked the man at the gas station and the lady at the dentist. Kelly had raised her to. Everybody has a name, baby. You ask, and then you use it.
"Everyone calls me Papa," the old man said.
"I know. But what's your real name?"
The table froze.
Kelly felt it go down the whole length of the white cloth like a draft. Claude's knife stopped. Myra's hand stopped halfway to Arianna's cup. Across the table Reggie's thumb went to his wedding ring, the old habit, and touched it, and stopped there, like a man caught with his hand in a drawer. Beside him, Julian's mouth went tight and thin.
The old man smiled at Daisy, a grandfather's smile, with nothing behind it Kelly could see at all.
"In my family, sweetheart," he said, "the children don't say their fathers' names to strangers. It's an old rule."
Daisy considered this with her whole face, chewing.
"Our family says everybody's name," she said.
"Then your family," said the old man, "is braver than mine."
Daisy nodded, satisfied, and went back to her plantains. Lori whispered to her, and both girls giggled, and the table started again, slowly, the way a clock starts after somebody has held the pendulum.
Kelly didn't start with it. The children don't say their fathers' names. A boy of eight on a long drive down from New York. A dinner table where you didn't ask. A grown son in a dark suit who had stood on Valerie's step every month for three years and never once said his own name.
It wasn't a rule. It was a whole house built on one.
The old man had turned to Anthony. Anthony's plate was full; he had moved the snapper from one side of it to the other and back, and he had been holding the same roll for ten minutes.
"Eat, Anthony," the old man said quietly, so only the near end of the table heard. "Your son's kidney didn't come all this way to go hungry."
Anthony looked at him. Then he put the roll down and picked up his fork and ate a bite of fish, and another. Under the table Kelly watched Claude's hand close into a fist on his knee and open again, finger by finger, the way Dr. Okafor had taught him.
The cake was coconut, three layers, with one candle in it that nobody explained. The woman in the apron set it in front of the old man, and before any grown-up could speak, Lori stood up in her booster seat.
"Happy Father's Day, Papa!"
She sang it, mostly the birthday tune with the words changed and some of them missing, loud and badly and with tremendous feeling, conducting with a spoon. Daisy joined in because Daisy would join anything, then CJ, who knew no words and just sang "Papa, Papa," and then Arianna.
The old man sat with his hands folded and let four children sing to him. His face did something Kelly couldn't name.
When they finished, everybody clapped. You couldn't not clap.
And across the table Kelly watched Reggie Dixon clap for his father, on a Sunday in June that was supposed to be his day too, with a little girl beside him who called him Daddy and a grown son beside him who called him nothing at all.
* * *
Sunday June 17, 2018 (Father's Day)
8:40 pm
Key Biscayne, the Old Man's House, the Library
"Anthony. A word."
The old man said it while the women were taking the children inside to wash off the cake. He said it standing, one hand on the back of his chair, and walked toward the house without looking to see if Anthony followed, because there had never been a time that Anthony hadn't.
Anthony stood up. Beside him, Claude stood up too.
"I'm coming," Claude said.
It wasn't loud. It wasn't a question. Anthony had heard that voice in a hospital room and in a skybox and at a curb on a night in April, and once, a long time ago, from a seventeen-year-old boy on the steps of a Detroit police station.
Julian was at the French doors with a hand on the frame. He looked at Claude, then at his grandfather's back, and hesitated, for the first time all day, a young man with no instructions for this.
The old man stopped in the doorway without turning around.
"Mr. Daniels Richards," he said. "Of course." And, as he went on into the cool white dark of the house: "Sons should hear what their fathers owe."
The library was at the end of a long hall. Anthony had never been in this house before today, but he had been in this room a hundred times. Every rich man he had ever done business with had one. Three walls of shelves to the ceiling, leather spines in matching sets, none of them cracked. A rug from very far away. A desk with nothing on it but a fountain pen and a green-shaded lamp. And one big leather chair, worn at the arms, the only thing in the room that looked used, and the only chair in it, and Anthony knew without being told that nobody in this family had ever sat in it but one man. Past it, the fourth wall was glass, full of black. The bay at night, and one light moving on it.
Julian closed the door from the outside.
The old man lowered himself into the leather chair, a hand on each arm. He did not ask them to sit. There was nowhere to sit. They stood just inside the door, side by side, and he looked at them for a while, and then he lifted two fingers, and they came forward onto the rug and stood in front of him like men in front of a desk.
"The dinner is paid," the old man said. "You came. All of you, at my table, when I asked. Your daughter-in-law said a good grace. An honest one." He glanced at Claude. "I noticed she didn't say it for me." Back to Anthony. "I'm a man of my word. It's paid."
Anthony's hand had gone to his breast pocket before he knew it. The card was soft at the corners now, nine months in suit pockets, moved jacket to jacket every morning like a wallet. One dinner. He held it out.
The old man looked at it and didn't take it.
"Keep it," he said. "A receipt."
Anthony stood with the card in his hand. He didn't know what to do with it.
"There's one more thing," the old man said, "and I want to be clear, so you don't misunderstand me. It isn't a debt. It's advice."
"I've had your advice before."
"And it's been good advice, mostly." He folded his hands. "In December a woman from the FBI sat in your study and declined your wife's cookies. She told you you'd be called to a grand jury in the spring." He let that sit just long enough. Declined your wife's cookies. "Her office is slower than she is. It will come this week."
"How do you know that?"
"It isn't important how." The small motion of the hand, brushing away a crumb. "What's important is what you do with it. So here is my advice, and then you can take your family home." His voice didn't change at all. "When they ask you who I am, you'll tell them what you've always told them. You don't know."
Somewhere behind the walls a child laughed, and a faucet ran.
"I know your face," Anthony said.
His voice was steadier than he was.
"I know your house. I've eaten at your table. I know your son. I know your grandson's name. I know which chair is yours." He looked at it. "This morning I could have told them the truth, and the truth would have been that I didn't know. That's gone. You asked me here on Father's Day, and you took it."
"Yes," the old man said. "Then you'll have to be careful what you know."
Claude spoke for the first time. "And if he tells them the truth?"
The old man turned his head and looked at Claude. It was a long look, longer than Anthony had ever seen him give anybody. The pale eyes went over Claude's face slowly, the forehead, the jaw, the open hands at his sides, like a man reading a contract all the way down to the small print.
"Then he'll have told the truth, Mr. Daniels Richards," he said at last, "and we'll all find out what that's worth." He turned back to Anthony. "I've never been very interested in what things cost. Only in what men do."
Anthony put the card back in his breast pocket, slowly, because his hands were not steady and he didn't want this man to see it. Then he said the thing he had been saying under his breath all the way across the causeway, like a prayer.
"I promised my family. No more lies."
"I know you did." The old man nodded, as if he had been there. "Then you've made two promises in one year, Anthony. Keep whichever one you can."
He put both hands on the arms of the chair, and Anthony understood that it was over.
Claude turned first. He didn't take his father's arm, because he knew better, but he walked close, with his shoulder almost touching Anthony's, all the way back across the rug. Claude opened the door. Julian was on the other side, exactly where he had been, and stepped back to let them pass.
Anthony had one foot in the hall when the old man spoke again. He did not raise his voice. He never had. It came across the dark library and found Anthony's back like a hand laid flat between his shoulder blades.
"Tell them you don't know who I am, Anthony. You'd be surprised how true it is."
To be continued in A Seat at the Table, coming soon.
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