Friends 2 Lovers, Volume Nine: The Whole Truth by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Heads up: this book picks up right where Flesh and Blood (Volume 8) ends, so this chapter gives away how that book ends.
Sunday June 21, 2020 (Father's Day)
12:17 pm
Anthony's House, the Patio
Nobody moved.
Anthony would remember that afterward more than anything, how long it went on. The pool filter hummed under the stones. Out on the water a boat was still passing, the same one, or another one, the sound of its motor coming across the lawn low and steady and then thinning out to nothing. Somewhere behind him a cup tipped over on a children's table and nobody went to pick it up.
He couldn't feel his hands. He knew they were there, flat on the white cloth on either side of two little bracelets, because he could see them. He could feel Myra's hand on his shoulder, and the weight of it was the only thing in the world he was sure of.
He told you my name was Doreen, baby. It still is.
He had a whole life of first sentences for her. He had made them up on benches and in group-home bunks, and later in hotel rooms and once in a hospital bed with his son's kidney in him. Why did you go. Did you want me. Where did they put you. None of them was any use. They were all for somebody who was dead.
What came out of his mouth was the plainest true thing he had.
"You served me snapper."
His voice sounded strange to him, rough and very quiet. Two years ago this week, on a terrace on Key Biscayne, at a long table in the sun, a housekeeper in a white apron had set a plate in front of him and gone away without looking up. A whole fish with lime down its side. He'd moved it from one side of the plate to the other for an hour.
Marta looked at him. She was still standing behind Myra's chair with her hands folded on the top rail and the white mask in her fingers.
"You didn't eat the rice," she said. "You never did. You'd push it to the side of the plate when you were two."
That was the first thing his mother ever told him about himself. It was about rice.
And it went into him further than the bracelet had. He had been ready, somewhere under everything, for a face. He had not been ready for somebody to know what he did with his rice. Nobody alive had ever been able to tell him one small, ordinary, useless thing about himself from before he could remember, and here it was, set down on the cloth in front of him like a plate.
He put his hand over his mouth.
From across the lawn, high and outraged, a child's voice broke it.
"Miss Marta! Why'd you call Grandpa Anthony baby?"
Lori. Standing up on her chair at the Dixons' table in her yellow sundress, one hand still caught in Valerie's, her mask down around her chin, scandalized to her bones.
"He's old!"
The lawn laughed.
It was the way people laugh at a funeral, all at once and too hard, because something has to give somewhere. Uncle Dev put his face in his hands. Clinton laughed out loud and looked around guiltily. Even Valerie's mouth went crooked.
And Kelly was already moving. She came out from behind Anthony's chair with Charlie on her hip and her voice pitched exactly the way it had been pitched a year ago at this same table, when another child had asked another question nobody could answer.
"Popsicles," Kelly said. "All of y'all. Again. Kitchen. Let's go."
Evette was up before she finished the sentence. Shellion scooped Grace off her chair, tutu and all. Jennifer took AJ by the wrist. Arianna, five and a half and an aunt, slid off her chair at the children's table and walked straight over to Marcus's knee and held out her hand to Eli like a hostess.
"Come on," Arianna told him. "I know where they keep the good ones."
Eli looked up at his father. Marcus nodded, barely, without taking his eyes off the woman behind Myra's chair, and Eli climbed down and took Arianna's hand and went.
Valerie let go of Lori last. Lori went. But she walked backward half the way across the patio, and when Kelly turned her around by the shoulders she went the rest of the way looking back at Miss Marta, all the way to the French doors, as if she was making sure nobody let her disappear while Lori was getting a popsicle.
The doors shut behind the last of them. Grown people only now, at their separate tables, six feet of grass between each. Nobody had remembered to put a mask back on.
Myra's hand left his shoulder.
She was still standing beside her own pulled-out chair, where she had been standing since before the envelope, and now she put both hands on the back of it, beside Marta's, not touching them.
"Sit down, Miss—" Myra stopped. She didn't know what to call her either. Anthony heard her not know it. "Please," Myra said. "Sit."
The woman looked at Myra for a moment. Then she looked at the chair.
A year ago an old man in navy had come around the side of this house on a cane, and Myra had pulled out that same chair for him. Anthony thought she knew that. He thought there was very little that had happened at any table near that old man that she didn't know.
She came around the side of it and sat down.
She sat the way Kelly's grandmother used to sit in church, with her back not touching anything and her hands folded in her lap over the white mask, as if she had never in her life been invited to and wanted to get it right.
"I've stood behind every chair in that house," she said. "I'll sit in this one."
And Anthony stopped calling her Marta in his own head. It was just gone, the way a word goes when you find out it was never the right one. She was sitting at his table, and her name was Doreen, and it still was.
He had learned from his father what to do next. You got exactly what you asked that old man, and not one word more. So he picked one thing.
"Did you know where I was?"
Doreen looked at the two bracelets, not at him.
"Every day he knew," she said, "I knew. And he always knew."
Anthony waited.
He waited the way he had waited a year ago at this same table, with an old man beside him and a photograph on the cloth, for the rest of it. What came was different.
"Not today, baby." She said it gently, but there was nothing soft under it. "I'll tell you the rest. I'll tell it from the beginning, in my order, and I'll tell it once. I won't have it pulled out of me in pieces by people who want the part that's useful to them." Her eyes moved, only a little, toward the far end of the patio and back. "I've had that done to me enough."
Anthony heard what she wasn't saying. He didn't know what it was, but he heard the shape of it, the way you hear a wall behind a curtain.
"Then I'll wait," he said.
"You're good at it." For the first time something moved at the corner of her mouth. "So am I."
"Let me look at your hands," Doreen said.
He laid them flat on the cloth, the way they already were. He didn't know what else to do with them. She looked at them a long time, his long fingers, his big knuckles, and then she reached out and put one of hers over the back of his left hand. Fingers spread wide. Covering it. The way you hold something down in a wind.
Anthony knew that hand.
He had seen it in April through a wall of glass, in the gold glare off the bay. A white apron, and a hand on a pale blue blanket, come to rest over his father's hand, fingers spread, and above it nothing but sun on the glass. He had put his palm flat on the outside of that glass and gone home because his wife was watching the clock.
It was you.
He didn't say it. He looked at her hand on his, and she let it stay there a moment longer, and then she took it back and folded it with the other one in her lap.
Down the patio, a chair scraped.
Reggie. He had stood up out of his chair before the mask came off, and he was still standing under the far umbrella with his hands hanging at his sides. Now he had taken a step toward Anthony's table and stopped. His face was gray.
"Miss Marta," Reggie said.
It came out like a question. Like a boy's question, from the door of a kitchen.
Doreen didn't turn around in her chair. She didn't have to. She had known where that voice was coming from for fifty-three years.
"Sit down, Reginald," she said, "before you fall down."
Anthony felt Myra go still beside him. Sit down. Before you fall down. Myra had said it herself, a year ago, to an old man in navy, pulling out the very chair this woman was sitting in. Myra didn't say anything. But her hand came back to rest on Anthony's shoulder, and he felt it hold on.
Reggie sat. He sat straight down where he was, in the nearest chair, which happened to be Uncle Dev's, and Uncle Dev, standing beside it, let him have it without a word.
Marcus hadn't moved at all.
He was at Anthony's left, in Latoya's good-china place, with his arm still curved around the empty space where Eli had been sitting, as if he'd forgotten to put it down. He was looking at Doreen's hands.
Doreen looked at him. Then at the space in the crook of his arm.
"You're the one with the buses," she said.
Marcus swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."
"Your daddy liked buses."
Marcus turned his head and looked at his father. Neither of them had known that. They just looked at each other across the corner of the table, the two of them, with the same hands.
At the next table over, Latoya set the lemonade pitcher down.
She set it down carefully, the way you set down something you're afraid you'll drop, and then she sat down hard on the nearest chair and put a hand flat on her chest.
"Lord," Latoya said. "I said I'd stand at her grave."
Nobody answered her. There wasn't any answer.
And at the edge of the patio, where the stones met the grass, Detective Arnold stood with his hat in his hand. He was turning it, slowly, by the brim. He looked down at it as if he didn't know how it had gotten there, or when he'd taken it off.
* * *
Sunday June 21, 2020 (Father's Day)
3:00 pm
Anthony's House, the Study
Doreen chose the room, and she chose who was in it.
At a quarter to three, after the children had been fed twice and the grill had gone out, Doreen had stood up from Myra's chair and said to Anthony, "Is there a room with a door?"
There was. There was the study.
"You," she said to Anthony. Then she turned and looked at Myra, straight on, for the first time all afternoon. "And you. Because a wife ought to know. And because you carried me a chair."
The funeral. A woman alone under a banyan tree in a black dress, and Myra walking across the grass with her own folding chair because she couldn't stand to watch anybody stand that long. Thank you, Mrs. Richards. Myra had not thought the woman had looked up long enough to see whose chair it was.
Nobody argued about the door. This family argued about everything, grills and seating charts and whose turn it was to host Thanksgiving, and not one person on that patio argued about being left outside the study. Kelly took the children upstairs to a movie. Claude walked Marcus out to look at a car engine neither of them cared about. The Dixons went home, because Reggie couldn't sit up straight anymore.
So it was the three of them. Anthony behind the desk, Myra on the arm of his chair, Doreen in the leather chair across from them, not leaning back.
The photograph stood against the brass clock, in its plastic sleeve, where it had stood for a year.
Doreen looked at it from the doorway, and at the other one beside it, Marcus at five on a different stoop. Then she crossed the rug and picked hers up by the scalloped edge, the way you'd pick up something that might still be hot.
She held it a long time.
Myra could have drawn it from memory. The railing that curled like a treble clef. The girl on the top step in a dark dress with a white collar, squinting, one hand on the iron and the other spread wide on the back of the baby on her shoulder. Myra had always wondered whether she was cold.
"He took this," Doreen said.
She said it to the photograph.
"It was cold for April. Everybody else had their coats on. I wouldn't wear mine because I wanted him to see the collar." She touched the plastic over the baby's head with one finger. "You'd just learned to hold your head up by yourself. You were so proud of it. You held it up the whole time."
Anthony made a sound. It wasn't a word.
Myra laid the long-form birth certificate on the blotter, turned so Doreen could read it. Mother: Doreen Martha Pettaway. Age 19. Birthplace: South Carolina. Doreen set the photograph back against the clock exactly where it had been, at exactly the same angle. She looked down at the paper. She didn't pick it up.
"Eleven minutes past four," she said. "You didn't cry. The nurse thought something was wrong with you. You just looked around the room like you were counting."
Anthony laughed. It came out of him wet and broken in the middle, and he put the heel of his hand against his eyes.
"He still does that," Myra said. She didn't know she was going to say it. "He counts rooms. Every room he walks into."
Doreen looked at her. Then she nodded, once, as if that was a thing she had been owed and had finally been paid.
That was all of 1963 she gave them. Myra understood it was all there would be today.
Anthony took his hand off his eyes.
"What do I call you?" he said.
He said it quietly, not to the room. To her.
Doreen folded her hands in her lap.
"You don't have to call me anything," she said.
Myra went very still on the arm of the chair.
A year ago, this room, this same hour. Anthony asking what to call an old man who had sat across the street in a car for fifty years, and Claude, from the couch, giving him back the best thing he'd learned in a doctor's office. You don't have to call him anything.
Nobody had told that story outside this room. Myra was nearly sure of that.
She didn't say anything. She sat with the small cold touch of it on the back of her neck and let it go by. Some things were just true twice. She let it be that.
Anthony nodded slowly. He looked down at his hands.
Myra kept the clock. It was three-forty, and there were things that needed saying, and nobody else in the room was going to say them.
"Miss Doreen," she said. It was the first time she'd tried the name aloud. It fit. "The government sent a letter about the house. Reggie told us. They said everyone on the grounds has to be out by the end of August."
"The thirty-first," said Doreen. "I've read it."
"The cottage too?"
"The cottage too. He left me a cottage for my lifetime." The corner of her mouth moved again. "My lifetime's going to have to be somewhere else."
"Then come here," Anthony said at once. "There's room. There's a whole wing nobody uses, there's a sitting room and a—"
"No, baby."
She said it the way you'd stop a child from touching a stove. Not unkind. Final.
"I've lived fifty-three years in a man's house," Doreen said. "I'm going to live in my own."
Anthony opened his mouth and closed it.
"I've been paid every other Friday since 1967," she went on, quite calmly. "Every other Friday. I never spent it on anything. Where would I have gone?" She looked at the window, at the bright lawn and the pool beyond it. "I'm seventy-six years old. I'd like a door with my own key in it before I'm seventy-seven."
Myra felt something open in her chest, sharp and warm.
"Then let me help you find it," she said.
Doreen looked at her a long time. Myra had the sense of being weighed on old scales that didn't lie.
"A woman who keeps a clock," Doreen said. "All right."
Myra took out her phone and typed D. — apartment — by Aug 31, and under it, after a second, Ask what she wants. Don't decide for her.
"What name do you want it under?" Myra said. "The lease. I'm sorry. I have to ask. I don't know what's on your papers."
"My papers say Martha Seabrook."
Anthony looked up.
"Seabrook was my grandmother," Doreen said. "My mother's mother. She died before I was born. He picked Marta." She said he the way she'd said it all afternoon, flat, no name on it, as if there had only ever been one. "I picked Seabrook."
It was such a small thing. A woman choosing her own last name on a piece of paper in 1967, in a house where somebody else had chosen her first one. Myra thought it was the fiercest thing she had heard all day.
"And Doreen?" Anthony said.
"Doreen is what my mother called me." Doreen smoothed the white mask across her knee. "When she wasn't calling me something else."
She didn't say what. Myra watched the question come up into Anthony's face and get set down again, carefully, like something he'd been told he could have later, and she loved him for it so hard she had to look at the clock.
At four-thirty Doreen stood up.
Anthony walked her out. Myra stood at the front door and watched them go down the drive in the long gold light, her husband and his mother, side by side, not touching, the man bent a little toward her the way he bent toward Arianna to hear her.
The long black car was waiting at the foot of the drive. The driver stood beside the back door with his hands folded. A man of about forty, gray at the temples, who never seemed to turn his head. He had stood outside every door that mattered for three years.
She saw Anthony look at the man. She saw him realize something, and start to open his mouth, and close it again. Later he would tell her what it was: that he'd seen that man a dozen times and had never once asked his name.
The driver opened the back door.
Doreen stopped beside it and turned around.
"Next Sunday's too soon," she said. Myra could just hear her. "I'll call you. You don't call me."
Anthony nodded.
Then Doreen lifted her hand and touched his face. Once. With the backs of her fingers, along his jaw, the way you touch a child's face to see if he has a fever. Then she got into the car, and the driver closed the door, and walked around to his own side, and the long black car went down past the gate and out into the street and was gone.
Anthony stood on the drive for a long time after.
Myra let him. Then she went down and got him, and brought him in, and sat him at the kitchen island, and put a plate in front of him, and he ate all of it, rice and all.
* * *
Sunday June 21, 2020 (Father's Day)
9:00 pm
The Dixon House, the Back Steps
The pond pump poured.
Reggie had dug it himself in April, when he couldn't do anything else. A little fall of water over the coral stone, all night long, and under it the fish moving. Mister, gold. Snow, white. The spotted one, who still didn't have a name and still hid under Tom's lily pad. Every so often a mango let go overhead and hit the grass like a knock on a door.
He had his tea. Valerie was beside him on the step, close, her shoulder against his. Neither of them had said anything for a while.
Inside, Lori was asleep. It had taken a long time.
She had held it in through the car ride and supper and her bath, which for Lori was a feat on the order of the pyramids, and then the light went off and she had sat straight up in the dark and said, "Mama. Why'd Miss Marta call Grandpa Anthony baby?"
Valerie had been ready. She had called Dr. Pierce by video at six, and Dr. Pierce had said the thing she always said, which Valerie kept on an index card in her Bible: Short and true. Answer what she asks. Let her ask the next part.
"Because Miss Marta is Grandpa Anthony's mama," Valerie said.
Lori considered that in the dark.
"Then she's my what?"
"She's your Miss Marta."
A long pause. Reggie, listening from the hall, had held his breath.
"Okay," Lori said, and lay back down.
And then, at prayers, after Mama and Daddy and Clin and AJ and Miss Kelly and Da and my Daisy and my CJ and my Charlie and Julian and Grandpa Anthony and Arianna and Junior and Mister and Snow and the spotted one, she had added, in the same voice, without stopping: "And Miss Marta."
Valerie had looked at Reggie over the bed. Miss Marta had never once been in Lori's prayers.
"Why'd you put Miss Marta in, baby?" Valerie said.
"Because," said Lori, already half asleep, as if it were obvious, "she's in them now."
Reggie set his tea down on the step.
He had been trying all evening to make it stay still long enough to look at, and it wouldn't. It kept turning over.
Miss Marta.
The woman who had held his wrist over a mixing bowl when he was nine, in a kitchen with the bay going by, and said, That's a pinch, Reginald. Not a handful. A pinch. Who had put a cold cloth on his head the summer he had the fever. Who had stood at the back of the church at his wedding, and at the christenings of all four of his children, and never once sat down in a pew. Who had never looked at anybody.
His brother's mother.
She had lived in his mother's house for thirty-seven years.
"Val," he said.
"I know."
"No, but—" He stopped. He didn't know how to start it. "Mama knew."
"Your mother drove a thousand miles not talking," Valerie said quietly. She kept accounts. She had kept accounts her whole working life, and she kept them still, of everything, and she laid this one out for him in the dark the way she'd lay out a column of figures. "New Jersey to Georgia, in her good gloves, and not one word. You told me. You were eight. You thought she was sick." She was quiet a moment. "She'd just been told, Reggie. Before they left. And then a year later, he brought that girl down on the train and put her in your mother's kitchen."
Reggie closed his eyes.
"Two countries," he said. "One kitchen." He heard his own voice say it, the way he'd said it to Anthony at a hotel table a year ago, with a laugh in it. "I said that to him like it was a funny story, Val. Like it was something cute about my mother."
He thought about his mother.
He thought about her at the window of the front room in the evenings, with her back to the house, looking at the water. He had thought she liked the view. He thought about her going down the front steps in the rain when he was fourteen, by herself, with nobody holding anything over her, and his father in the front hall watching her go. He had never asked anybody in that house why about anything.
He waited to hate somebody.
It didn't come. What came was grief. Just grief. For his mother, at the window. For a girl of twenty-three on a train with one suitcase, coming south to cook in the house of the man who'd done whatever he'd done to her. For both of them, in one kitchen, for thirty-seven years, polite. For the border you could feel when you went in for a glass of milk.
It was worse than hate. Hate would have been something to do. It was better, too. He didn't know how it could be both, but it was.
"She raised the half of me that knows how to do anything, Val," he said. His voice cracked on it. "Mama raised the half that knows how to sit up straight. Miss Marta raised the half that can cook an egg."
Valerie didn't say anything for a while. Her shoulder stayed against his.
"Then you've got two mothers to be sorry for," she said finally. "Pick one at a time."
The screen door creaked behind them.
Julian stood in it, in his socks and an old T-shirt, with the light of the den behind him. The monitor on his ankle made a small hard shape under the hem of his sweatpants. He hadn't been at Anthony's today. He couldn't be. Valerie had told him at supper, across the kitchen table, in four sentences, and he had put his fork down and not picked it up again.
"I used to think she was the only free person in that house," Julian said. "She went to market. And to church. Wednesday nights and Sundays. Nobody ever stopped her. Nobody ever asked her where she was going. I used to watch her walk down to the gate and think, there goes the only one of us who gets to leave." He looked out at the pond. "I was twenty-six."
He went back inside, and the screen door eased shut behind him on its spring.
Reggie turned back around. The mango tree let go of another one, out in the dark. A fish turned over in the pond.
The phone on the step beside him rang.
He flinched. He couldn't help it. Father's Day eve after Father's Day eve, the phone at nine o'clock exactly, and his father's soft voice, and Reggie on this same step waiting for it. And then it had stopped coming, and now it never could. The old man was under a stone with his name on it, and this wasn't even the eve.
He looked at the screen. A number he didn't know.
He picked it up.
"Hello?"
There was a small silence on the line. Then a low voice, with a Carolina softness in it.
"Reginald."
Reggie sat very still.
"…Miss Marta."
"Have you eaten your supper?"
He didn't answer for a moment. He couldn't.
"Yes, ma'am," he said.
"All of it?"
"Most of it."
"Hm," said the voice. And then, more quietly, "Good night, Reginald." And the line went dead.
Reggie sat there holding the phone in both hands.
"What'd she want?" Valerie said.
"She wanted to know if I ate."
He started to laugh. He didn't mean to. It came up out of him from somewhere low, and it shook his shoulders, and Valerie put her hand on his back, and after a while she understood that it wasn't laughing, and she didn't take her hand away.
"Sixty years, Val," Reggie said, when he could. "Sixty years, eat your supper was the worst thing anybody in that house ever said to me." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "And she just made it a question."
To be continued in The Whole Truth, coming soon.
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