Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Eight: Flesh and Blood by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where A Seat at the Table (Volume 7) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Sunday June 16, 2019 (Father's Day)
11:58 am
Anthony's House, the Patio
Nobody moved.
The pool filter hummed. Nobody at the long white table so much as lifted a fork. The photograph lay in Anthony's two hands.
She named you for me, son.
He had been called a lot of things in fifty-six years. Nobody had ever called him son and had the right.
Then a small voice came up from under the table, very clear, the voice of a five-year-old who had learned to read in the spring and now read everything out loud whether it was written down or not.
"Papa is Grandpa's daddy?"
Daisy.
It broke the thing in half. Uncle Dev said "Lord," very low. And Kelly was already moving.
"Daisy. Inside. All of y'all. Popsicles." She handed Charlie off to Claude without looking and clapped her hands twice. "Arianna, CJ, Grace, Junior, take Anne's hand. Go on. The good ones, in the back of the freezer. Tell Evette I said."
Evette and Shellion were up before she finished, and Jennifer with them, gathering children off the patio stones like laundry before rain. CJ went out from under the table backward, still wearing his grandfather's glasses, and Shellion set them by Anthony's plate on her way past.
Lori didn't want to go.
She stood beside her mother in her purple sundress with her hand still in Valerie's, looking at the old man, then at Anthony, then back. She knew something had happened. She didn't know what.
Kelly came around the end of the table and held out her arms.
Valerie looked at her for one second. Then she let go of her daughter's hand and lifted Lori up and put her into Kelly's arms, and Kelly settled her on her hip and carried her inside, and Lori twisted around over Kelly's shoulder to keep the old man in sight all the way to the French doors.
There had been a time when Valerie Dixon would not have handed that child to Kelly Richards to carry across a room. Anthony saw it, and it mattered more than he could have said.
What was left at the table was grown people. Detective Arnold was on his feet, standing where he'd been standing since the old man came around the side of the house, with the table on one side of him and the old man on the other. Clinton had AJ against his chest, red gloves and all, his eyes on the old man the way he'd watch a man across a ring. Reggie sat with his wife's hand over his, staring.
And the old man sat in Myra's chair at Anthony's right hand, his soft hands folded on the silver head of his cane, and waited.
Anthony looked down at the photograph.
A young woman on a brick stoop. A white collar. A hand on an iron railing that curled like a treble clef. A baby on her shoulder with its face in her neck.
The boy.
He had a hundred questions. With this man, you got exactly what you asked for. Not one word more.
So he picked.
"Did she know?" His voice came out rough. He cleared it. "That you were across the street?"
The old man looked at him a long moment.
"She always knew where I was," he said.
Myra's hand tightened on Anthony's shoulder. He hadn't felt her come up behind his chair.
"Where is she buried?"
"Nowhere you could visit, Anthony."
He said it gently, the way you'd tell a man the store he was looking for had closed years ago. Anthony waited for the rest of it and there wasn't any.
"Why now?" Anthony said. "Fifty-six years. Why today?"
"Because on Wednesday a man will read my name in a courtroom," the old man said, "and yours will be on a list beside it. I wanted you to hear it at a table first. Not in a hallway. Not from a lawyer. You've given a lot of people that courtesy this year. I thought you were owed it once."
"Fifty-six years," Anthony said.
He didn't mean it as a question. The old man answered it anyway.
"Yes."
No I'm sorry. No I couldn't. Anthony had heard a lot of men build little houses of reasons across a lot of tables and ask him to come live in them. The old man didn't build anything. He said yes and let it stand on the white cloth like a bill come due.
Anthony found, to his own surprise, that he respected it. And that he hated it more than anything else that had happened all day.
He set the photograph down on the tablecloth, very carefully, face up.
Then he stood.
He did it the way he'd stood an hour ago to tell them about Marcus, slowly, because he wanted to. Myra's hand came flat against his back. Down the table Claude was standing too, with Charlie on his shoulder.
"You've been across the street my whole life," Anthony said. "Stay there."
Nobody breathed.
The old man took it the way he'd take a fair price. He didn't flinch. He didn't argue. He inclined his head a quarter of an inch, as if a figure had been named that he'd expected all along.
"I expect the government will see to that," he said.
He put both hands on the cane and stood up. It took him a long time. Nobody helped him. Alfonso and the driver each came a step closer, and neither touched him.
He looked down the table at Kelly, who had come back out through the French doors and was standing just outside them with her arms folded.
"Mrs. Richards," he said. "Our own news. You were right."
Kelly didn't answer. Her chin was up.
He turned to Myra. "Thank you for the chair."
"Don't thank me," Myra said. "I'd do it for anybody."
Something moved at the corner of the old man's mouth. It was gone before Anthony could decide what it was.
He left the photograph on the cloth. He didn't look at it again, and he didn't ask for it back. He turned, which took a while, and Alfonso fell in on one side of him and the driver behind, and he went back across the patio stones the way he had come, step, pause, tap.
He was passing the French doors when a voice came through the glass, high and happy, from somewhere inside with a Popsicle in it.
"Bye, Papa!"
He stopped.
He didn't turn around. He stood there on the stones with his back to the house, and he lifted one hand, slowly, palm out, about as high as his shoulder. Then he went on around the corner of the house, and was gone.
Myra went to her chair, the one he'd sat in, at Anthony's right hand. She took hold of the back of it in both hands and pushed it in to the table, square, the way she'd set it that morning before anybody came. The legs scraped on the stones.
That was the first sound after he was gone.
* * *
Sunday June 16, 2019 (Father's Day)
12:25 pm
Anthony's House, the Front Drive
Valerie touched his back.
That was all. Two fingers between his shoulder blades, the way she touched him in church when the offering plate was coming and he was somewhere else. Go.
Reggie went.
He went around the side of the house past the hibiscus and the air-conditioning units and the coiled garden hose, and down the front drive between Myra's little lamps, and he was sixty-one years old and he was still a step behind. He had been a step behind that man his whole life, trying to match the stride and never once asked to walk beside it.
The old man was nearly to the car. Long and black, the engine already running, the back door standing open. Alfonso had stopped a few yards off on the paving and stood there with his hands folded in front of him. The driver held the door.
"Pop."
His father stopped. He didn't turn around right away. When he did, he did it on the cane, slowly, and looked at Reggie with those eyes.
He'd had sixty years to make a list. Only one thing was still on it.
"Did Mama know?"
The old man looked at him for a long time. A mockingbird was going in Anthony's hedge, running through every song it had.
"Your mother knew what she chose to know, Reginald," he said. "She was better at it than you."
It went into Reggie clean and all the way down, and he stood there and took it. His father never raised his voice. He never had to.
"You never once touched me," Reggie said.
He hadn't known he was going to say it. Not you never loved me; he was too old for that. Just the plain fact. Sixty-one years. Not a hand on his head. Not a hand on his shoulder. His father had shaken his hand at his wedding. Congratulations, Reginald. That was the whole list.
And at Christmas, on the crushed shell under the banyan, Reggie had watched that same hand close on Anthony Richards's arm, just above the elbow, and hold on.
The old man looked at him.
"No," he said.
That was all he gave. Reggie waited anyway, because some part of him was still nine years old at the dinner table with his mother passing the rice.
Then the old man said, "Go back to your brother's table." He said it quietly. "You were invited. I wasn't."
He turned to the car. The driver took his elbow for the step down into the seat, the only person Reggie had seen touch him all day, and that was business. The door closed with a sound like a vault. The long car went down the drive and through Anthony's gate, and the man on the gate closed it behind them, and the car turned left and was gone under the trees.
Reggie stood there.
Your brother's table.
Reggie thought about the drive down.
He'd been eight. 1966. His father had told it at that terrace table a year ago like a funny story: He'd never seen a palm tree. He thought we'd made them up. And it was true, he had thought that. But that wasn't what Reggie remembered about the drive. What he remembered was the back seat of a big green car with his feet not reaching the floor, and his mother in the front, in her good gloves, looking out the side window. New Jersey. Delaware. The long flat middle of everything. And he remembered that from New Jersey to Georgia his mother had not said one word. Not to his father. Not to him. Not one word, for two days, with her gloves in her lap.
He had been eight years old and he had thought it was just how grown-ups were in cars.
He had never in his life, not once, wondered why. Not until this minute, standing on another man's driveway with the sun on the back of his neck.
1966. The year his father came south with nothing.
The year a boy three years old in the Bronx went into the system with a piece of paper that said his mother was dead.
Reggie put his hand over his mouth and stood there.
Then he turned around and walked back up the drive.
He went slowly. He went past Myra's lamps and around the side of the house, and when he came out onto the patio he saw that Anthony Richards was standing at the edge of the stones, by himself, apart from all of them, watching him come.
They stopped about ten feet apart.
Reggie looked at him. Properly. The way he'd looked at Julian on Valerie's front step in December, at the cupcake hour, when he finally made himself see the boy he had. Anthony's long jaw. The way he stood with his weight back a little, like a man who's been told to wait and has decided to do it well. Reggie had sat beside this man in a skybox and on a dock and on a courthouse bench, and had never once looked at his face and seen anything but Lori's grandfather.
He saw it now. Lord. He saw it now. Not in the features so much. In the stillness.
Anthony didn't say anything. Neither did Reggie.
They just looked at each other, two men on the far side of fifty-five on a hot patio, with a pool light shining blue under the water in the middle of the day and an empty chair pushed in square at the table behind them, for the first time.
* * *
Sunday June 16, 2019 (Father's Day)
3:00 pm
Anthony's House, the Study
The photograph stood against the brass clock.
Myra had carried it in off the patio table by the scalloped edge, the way you'd pick up something that might still be hot, and propped it beside the other one: Marcus's picture from the lawyer, a little boy on some Bronx steps. And now, beside him, a young woman on some other Bronx steps with a baby on her shoulder.
Two people on two stoops, fifty-six years and three miles apart, sitting side by side on Anthony Richards's desk.
Claude couldn't stop looking at them.
His father sat behind the desk with his tie pulled loose and his hands flat on the blotter. Myra was on the arm of his chair. Kelly had taken the leather chair, the way she always did in this room, with her feet tucked under her and her phone face down on her knee. Detective Arnold had planted himself in the study door. Latoya had come in with a tray of coffee nobody had asked for and, instead of going back out, sat down on the couch beside Claude with her shoes off.
Everybody else had gone home. Uncle Dev had held Anthony's hand at the door with both of his and said, "Whatever you need, man." Evette and Shellion had the little ones upstairs with a movie. Valerie and Reggie had taken Lori home at one; Reggie had shaken Anthony's hand at the door and held it, and then walked out to the Lexus without looking back.
"Fifty years," his father said.
He was looking at the photograph.
"Fifty years I've told people nobody came. I told it to a grand jury in March." He laughed, a small sound with nothing in it. "He was across the street."
Claude had been thinking about it since noon. About a long car outside a bus station at two in the morning. About ten dollars. About an old man with a mop who'd been paid to sit with a little boy, and had done it, and had given him the bigger half of a sandwich because he wanted to.
"Across the street isn't coming, Dad," he said. "It's watching."
His father looked at him.
"Mr. Odell came," Claude said. "Mr. Odell sat on the bench. That old man sat in a car."
"Then what do I call him?" his father said.
He said it quietly. He wasn't asking the room. He was asking Claude.
And Claude, who had spent nearly three years in Dr. Okafor's coral-rock office learning how to sit with a thing without having to name it, gave his father back the best thing he'd ever been given there.
"You don't have to call him anything."
His father looked at him a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and looked down at his hands.
Kelly turned her phone over on her knee.
"Okay," she said. "Here's the order of things."
Claude almost smiled. When things got bad, Kelly made a list, and said it out loud so nobody had to guess.
"Castellanos tonight. Today. She has to know before anybody." Kelly held up one finger. "Whitlock tomorrow. First thing. Before his lawyers tell her. You want her hearing it from you, with that picture on the table." Second finger. "And Marcus when Marcus calls."
"If he calls," Anthony said.
"He gets the letter Tuesday." Kelly didn't put the fingers down. "That man said so, and that man doesn't say things he doesn't know. Tuesday, Marcus reads your letter. Wednesday he opens a newspaper and reads his grandfather's name." She let that sit. "That's a lot for one man in two days."
His father rubbed his eyes with his thumb and finger.
"I only have his address," he said. "He has my number. I gave him all of it. He calls or he doesn't."
"Then we wait by the phone," Myra said. She put her hand on the back of his neck. "We're good at that."
Detective Arnold made a sound in the doorway that might have been a laugh.
Kelly was quiet a minute, looking at the photograph, and Claude saw her decide something.
"Anthony," she said. "When he put that picture down. I made a noise."
"I heard you."
"At Christmas." She uncurled her feet and sat forward in the leather chair. "On Key Biscayne. There was a picture on a side table by the tree, with the clementines and the Christmas cards. Silver frame. A young man on a stoop, sitting on the top step with his hat pushed back." She pointed at the photograph without touching it. "That railing. The same one. Curled at the end like that. Like music." Her voice went careful. "It said Bronx. 1962. On the mat. In that handwriting."
The study went very still.
"I thought he looked like Tom," Kelly said. "Same long jaw. I didn't think anything else. I didn't know there was anything else to think. And then today he put that down in front of you and I saw the railing, and I—" She stopped. "I should've said something at Christmas. I didn't know it was something. I'm saying it now. No hiding."
His father reached over and picked up the photograph. He held it under the desk lamp and looked at the railing for a long time. The curl of it. The iron scroll turning back on itself.
"He was there before me," he said.
Nobody answered that. There wasn't any answer.
Then Latoya set her coffee cup down on the side table with a small click, and everybody looked at her.
She'd been quiet the whole time, which wasn't like her, and Claude remembered a story she'd told once: a fifteen-year-old girl climbing out a group-home window in her socks.
"Every woman deserves somebody standing at her grave," Latoya said.
She said it plainly. Not soft.
"I grew up in state care, Anthony. You know that. I know what those files look like. I know what deceased after a short illness means on a form a caseworker filled out in a hurry on a Friday. It means somebody didn't want to write any more than that." She looked at the young woman on the stoop. "That girl had a name. She had a baby she held like that. She's buried someplace. Somebody put her in the ground. And nobody's stood there for her in fifty years." She picked her cup back up. "We'll find where she is."
His father looked at her. His eyes were wet.
"He said nowhere I could visit."
"He said a lot of things," Latoya said. "That man's been saying things your whole life. We'll find her."
Detective Arnold, in the doorway, said, "Yes, we will."
His father set the photograph back against the clock, facing the room. Then he picked up his phone and found Castellanos's number and put it on speaker on the blotter.
It rang once.
"Anthony." Castellanos never said hello. Claude had never once heard her say it. "It's Sunday."
"I know what day it is."
"Then something happened." Paper moved on her end. "Tell me in one sentence."
His father looked at the photograph.
"The man I named to the grand jury came to my house today," he said, "and told me he's my father."
There was a silence on the line so long Claude thought the call had dropped.
"Say that again."
He said it again.
Another silence. Then a long breath. "Okay." Then: "Do you believe him?"
"He brought a picture of my mother. With me on her shoulder. In his handwriting on the back."
"Then I believe him too." Paper again. "Tomorrow at nine. My office. Bring the photograph. Don't bring anybody but Myra. Don't call anybody else, and don't answer the door if a reporter knocks, which one will, by Wednesday." A pause. "And Anthony?"
"Yes."
"Don't learn anything else today."
She hung up.
His father sat looking at the phone. Then, for the first time since noon, he laughed. Really laughed, with his head back, so that Myra had to hold on to the arm of the chair.
"That woman," he said.
"That woman," Myra said, "is right. Come eat something."
* * *
Sunday June 16, 2019 (Father's Day)
9:00 pm
The Dixon House, the Back Steps
Lori had asked at bedtime.
Valerie had watched it going around behind her daughter's eyes all afternoon, through supper and the bath, where Lori sat with the washcloth in her lap and didn't splash once.
So Valerie had been ready when it came, in bed, with the lamp on and the purple blanket pulled up and Where Lori Grew on the nightstand where it lived now.
"Mama. Why did Papa say son to Grandpa Anthony?"
Dr. Pierce had a rule. Valerie had written it on an index card in March and kept it in her Bible. Short and true. Answer the question she asks, not the one you're scared of. Then stop.
"Because Papa is Grandpa Anthony's daddy," Valerie said.
Lori thought about that. Valerie watched her think. It went across her face like weather across the bay.
"Then Grandpa Anthony is Daddy's brother?"
Valerie held her breath. "Yes, baby."
Lori looked at the ceiling for a while.
"Okay," she said.
And that was all. She turned over and said her prayers the way she said them every night, with her eyes squeezed shut and her hands under her chin. Mama and Daddy and Clin and AJ and Miss Kelly and Da and my Daisy and my CJ and my Charlie. She added Grandpa Anthony tonight, and Arianna, and Junior. She didn't add Papa. She hadn't since March. Valerie had stopped putting him in, and Lori had never once asked why, and tonight Valerie had listened to the end of the list with her heart in her mouth, waiting to see if he'd come back.
He didn't.
Lori said "Amen" and was asleep in four minutes.
Now it was nine o'clock and the house was dark except for the stove light, and Valerie came out the back door with two glasses of sweet tea and found her husband right where she'd known he'd be.
Reggie sat on the top step under the mango tree with his elbows on his knees and his phone face up on the concrete beside him. Same as last night, when he had sat there until after midnight waiting for a call that came every year on the night before Father's Day and hadn't come.
The mangoes were coming in. Every few minutes one let go somewhere in the dark and hit the grass with a soft heavy sound, like somebody setting down a bag.
She sat down on the step beside him and handed him the glass. He took it.
"She asked," Valerie said.
"I figured she would."
"I told her. Short and true. Papa is Grandpa Anthony's daddy." She drank some tea. "She said then Grandpa Anthony is Daddy's brother, and I said yes, and she said okay."
Reggie laughed. It came out of him half broken. "Okay."
"Okay. And then she prayed for everybody God ever made but one, and went to sleep." Valerie looked at him. "She's all right, Reggie. She has more people than she can fit in a prayer."
He nodded. He turned the glass in his hands. He didn't turn his ring. He hadn't turned that ring since March, and she noticed it every single day.
"I keep thinking about the car," he said.
"What car?"
So he told her. The big green car, in 1966. Eight years old in the back seat. His mother in the front in her good gloves, looking out the side window. And not one word out of her from New Jersey to Georgia.
"Two days," he said. "I thought that's how grown folks were in a car. I never thought about it again. Fifty-three years, Val. Not once." He looked out at the dark yard. "And then I'm standing in that man's driveway today and it just comes up. Like it's been waiting."
Valerie was quiet.
She had spent half her life counting cases in a liquor warehouse. She knew what a number looked like when it was right, and she knew, the way your stomach knows before your head does, when one was wrong. She had heard her husband's father tell, like a funny story about palm trees, how they came down in '66. She knew from Kelly what Anthony's foster file said. March 1966. She had added it up already, in the car this afternoon, the way she added up everything.
"Your mother drove a thousand miles not talking," Valerie said. "That's a woman who knew something, Reggie."
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. She watched it land on him, and she put her hand on his back, the same place she'd touched him at noon.
The kitchen clock inside said nine. She could see it through the screen door, the stove light on its face. The minute hand clicked over.
And the phone on the step rang.
They both looked at it. Reggie didn't move. It rang again, the screen lighting up in the dark between them, and she saw the number, the same number she'd seen on his phone at nine o'clock on the night before Father's Day four years running. Not last night. Last night, nothing.
Tonight.
Reggie picked it up. He held it a second. Then he put it to his ear.
"Pop."
Valerie heard only his side. She sat very still on the step with her tea and listened to her husband listen.
"Yes, sir," Reggie said.
A long pause.
"Yes, sir."
A longer one. His free hand came up and covered his eyes.
"I'll tell her," Reggie said.
He took the phone down from his ear and looked at it. The screen went dark in his hand.
A mango let go somewhere in the yard and hit the grass.
"Well?" Valerie said.
Reggie didn't answer right away. He set the phone back down on the step, face up, exactly where it had been.
"He says they'll come Wednesday," he said. "Early." He looked at the phone. "He says Marta will feed the fish."
Valerie stared at him.
"He called you," she said slowly, "to tell you about the fish?"
Reggie shook his head. He picked up his sweet tea and drank half of it at once, the first thing she had seen him swallow all day.
"He called to tell me he's still my father," he said. "The fish is how he says it."
To be continued in Flesh and Blood, coming soon.
Account
Cart