I began flipping through. Here he was, my baby’s father, captured in moments that had happened in his real, full, life. Batman smiling, then Batman serious. Inside on a sofa, then outside by a lake, then in a ski hat with some snowy hills behind him.
He didn’t change his profile picture often, because one more click brought me to a shot of his family’s Christmas tree from three years back. He’d told me about it while we were playing Words with Friends. That year, he and his dad had conspired with all the older grandkids to scandalize his deeply religious mom. They’d turned her tree into a scene straight out of Star Wars.
They’d picked out the darkest dark green Douglas fir they could find, then dotted it with twinkling white lights for stars and large colored balls for planets. All over the tree, they’d hung TIE fighter ornaments flying in formation against X-wings. Carefully arranged sprays of tinsel acted as laser blasts, and they’d twisted red and orange and yellow tissue paper into flames, strategically gluing them onto damaged ships. His dad had even found a Millennium Falcon tree topper, displacing the angel.
I sat staring at my screen for several endless minutes. I couldn’t take my eyes away. It was not because of the tree. Well, the tree was hella cool, no doubt about it, and it was right in the middle of the frame. Even so, it was not really a picture of a tree.
It was a family. A whole family. His parents and him and all the kids who’d helped, clustered around this enormous Star Wars tree.
I was having trouble swallowing. Batman’s mother was tall and elegant, a very dark-skinned woman with a crown of graying braids, glaring at the tree with comical mock horror. His father, skinny and bespectacled, had an enormous Adam’s apple and high-waisted grampa pants. He was the biggest dork that I’d ever seen in a picture, except for maybe my own dad. In a dorkcathlon there would be no clear winner, but the two of them would both make the Olympic team. He’d given Batman his big eyes and those ridiculous long lashes.
Batman was there, one arm around his dad, the other holding an adorable round-bellied toddler. His dad cradled a very new baby. All the older kids were clustered around, the three biggest kneeling in front and making ta-da jazz hands at the tree. There were seven of them all told, and they came in a rainbow of shades that ranged from tan to Cyprus umber. No matter how he came out, Digby was going to fit onto their spectrum.
I wasn’t looking at a tree; I was looking at a treasure chest. A mawmaw and a poppy, as his sister’s children called them. Aunts and uncles, not pictured, but no doubt close by, one of them holding the camera that had snapped this shot. Seven cousins—no, eight soon. His youngest sister was due in a few weeks, he’d said. Cousins who ranged from Digby’s own age to Lavender’s. Cousins who looked like Digby’s father. Cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents who knew what it was like to grow up in America with brown skin. They were spread across Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina, a host of relatives who didn’t have to shift their gaze to know when they’d crossed into the Second South. Relatives who always knew.
Digby deserved to have them, these smiling human beings clustered tight together. Poppy cradled the littlest baby with wise hands that looked like they’d cradled umpty babies before her. Those hands deserved the opportunity to hold Digby, and Digby deserved to be held in them.
Most of all Digby deserved a father. I could vet Batman forever if I wanted. I would eventually see past his shiny second-date persona to his flaws, whatever they might be. Maybe he’d turn out to be a bit of a jackass, but there was a righteous jackass in my Birchie’s kitchen right now, and he was fixing necessary cocoa for his kid.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, a prayer more than a blasphemy, and my voice had gone all funny—breathy and thick. I had to tell him. I had to tell him now, while I was wonky and punchy and exhausted enough to do it. If I waited, I would find a thousand reasons not to. I would coward my way out of it and pretend that it was logic.
I got my phone and opened our long string of texts, then navigated to his number. I pressed it, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my eyeballs, in my throat, in my shaking hands.
Two rings and he picked up. Just as JJ had when I’d called him from his daughter’s phone. Maybe that was how many rings it took to call a man to fatherhood.
“Hello?” he said. He’d been asleep. Even if it hadn’t been past four in the morning, I would have known it from his graveled voice. I couldn’t answer. I hardly knew what to say. He must have looked at his screen and seen that it was me, because he said, “Leia? Hello? If this is a butt dial, I may kill you later.” He didn’t sound mad, though. He sounded amused, if sleepy.
“Not a butt dial,” I said. My own voice was scared and small.
“Hey. Are you fff . . . good?” he said. More awake now. A little hesitant.
“I’m okay. I’m good. I’m just . . .” I paused, my heart pounding. Now I wanted to say that this was a butt dial. I wanted to hang up. But I kept thinking of all his nieces and nephews, pressed in close and grinning by that gonzo Star Wars Christmas tree they’d made with him. “Pregnant.”
It was the only way to end the sentence, really.
“B-beg pardon?” he said, nonreactive. Polite. Like he hadn’t quite heard me.
“I’m pregnant. We are. You and me,” I said, except he wasn’t. It was just me, actually. “Well, no, that’s not how biology goes. I mean that you and me together got me pregnant.”
There was a silence, and then he said, “I . . . I . . . I . . .” And then stopped talking.
I was gripping the phone so tight I was surprised my screen didn’t shatter. He was breathing on the other end like he’d been running. So was I, I realized. We were both panting like dogs, almost in sync. This was going poorly, although I wasn’t sure what would have to happen to qualify this call as going well.
“I wish you’d say something,” I said.
“I . . . I . . .” he said, and stopped again. “Can’t talk.”
“Okay,” I said into the phone. “That seems fair.”
It did. I hadn’t wanted to talk about it for months, and now I’d woken him up and blatted the news into his barely conscious ear. But at the same time, a selfish bit of me wanted his immediate reaction to be different, or at least definitive. If he would only yell that this was my damn problem or say he doubted it was his baby and hang up. It would be awful, but at least everything would be decided. Or in some ideal world, he could ask interested questions, say something supportive or hopeful.
I tried to think of the kindest things my pregnancy test might have said to me, if it had been a person.
“I know you need time. It has to sink in. It worked like that for me anyway. It didn’t seem real at first, and so I’m sorry it took me this long to tell you. But it’s happening, so you have to think about what you want to do. Me, I know what I’m doing. I’m having a baby.” I thought I would end there, but I wanted all my cards on the table. I didn’t want him to make some bad decision in a vacuum of what was easiest. I didn’t want to be one of those self-sacrificing talk-show ladies who says to the guy who knocked her up, “You don’t have to be involved. I can do this on my own,” and then the audience cheers and claps, as if it’s noble to tell a man he holds no value beyond a scoop of sperm, to tell a man his own child will have no use for him. I kept talking. “I also want you to know that I’m happy about it. Your kid is so, so wanted over here on this side of the phone. And I’m lucky. I have a good job, a good family, a lot of friends with kids. Babies get born with much, much less, and they still have good lives. . . . I know that. It’s just I love this kid like crazy. I want him to have everything. That’s why I’m telling you. I want him to know his dad. I want him to know your family.”
A longer pause, and then Batman did talk. He said one word, very soft. “Him?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry,” I said, wincing, because that was poorly done. When Rachel was pregnant, she’d planned a reveal party for the day after the ultrasound. Mom and Keith and I gathered
with her closest friends to find her house tricked out in stark black-and-white decorations. Rachel brought out an ice-white cake and set it in front of JJ. When he cut it open, we’d all seen that it was pink and stuffed with strawberries. Now Batman had found out he was having a son in a tongue slip in the same fraught conversation where he learned his one-night stand at FanCon had gotten all complicated. “He’s a boy. I’m having a boy.”
Then my phone buzzed and trembled directly in my ear, like an insect. I pulled it away, startled. A text had landed. I opened Messages and saw that he had sent it. While we were on the phone.
I literally can’t talk right now, the text said.
I stared at the words, and I had a flash of fear that he was not alone. I swallowed. His Facebook profile said that he was single, and he’d sounded happy to hear from me when he picked up, but still. I had this image of some other woman that he’d met last night who liked caped crusaders and tequila, too. She could be sleeping beside him right now, exhausted from a long, long night of making Digby’s little sister.
Why not? He owed me nothing. Hell, he barely knew me. So we’d had a fun time on Facebook. So we’d been flirting over texts. He was probably alone right now, but he could have fifty women on strings that were fine and light and never meant for binding. For all I knew, he played Words with Friends every night with different women who’d already had his babies, all up and down the eastern seaboard.
Not that it mattered. What was that to me? Nothing. So why were my stupid eyes stinging, and why did my throat feel so thick and closed?
“Well, call me when you can talk,” I said, and ended the connection.
17
We walked over to Martina Mack’s house right after breakfast, while Birchie had some stamina. She was a little off this morning, but I needed Birchie and Wattie to be seen. Going to First Baptist had shown me that even Birchie’s closest community was divided and most folks were uncertain of how to feel about her. Wattie was to Redemption as Birchie was to First Baptist, and that congregation must be equally astir. Wattie had been leery enough of her reception to skip church entirely last Sunday.
I needed more people, pillars-of-the-community types, firmly on our side. The county prosecutor was asking for a DNA test. If—or when—she proved that the bones belonged to Birchie’s father, what Regina Tackrey did with them next would be shaped by public opinion. Was Birchie an ancient monster caught at last or the most beloved Birch to ever live in Birchville, now too old and too ill to explain herself? Would filing charges be long-overdue justice or the persecution of old ladies?
The town’s answers would spread through the county. So far we’d holed up and left Martina and her ilk to shape this conversation. A bad idea, especially since the Macks and the Tackreys had old ties. If the last day or two had taught me anything, it was that Cody and Martina were pulling us down a path that ended in pitchforks and torches. And shotguns.
We hadn’t been working more than half an hour when Alston Rhodes came walking down Crepe Myrtle Avenue, seemingly oblivious to the great crowd of us in Martina’s yard. I’d played with Alston every summer, so I recognized her the second she turned the corner. Her hair had not changed since 1994, when she’d cut it to look like she had just stepped off the set of Friends. She had on a full face of makeup, but she was wearing sweatpants and Nikes and dragging her fat pug, Punchkin, on a string. Punchkin was being the worst excuse for a power walk I’d ever seen. He tried to sit down twice as Alston marched him along.
She was out of her neighborhood, too, but we’d passed quite a few First Baptist people on the way here. The phone tree had activated, and Alston was the first wave of townly recon, careful to keep her gaze on the sky and the grass and parked cars and trees and anything else that wasn’t us even as she beelined our way, a woman on a mission. I was glad they’d picked Alston, or that she’d volunteered. It boded well. She had planted her butt firmly on Birchie’s side of the church last Sunday.
I’d stationed Birchie and Wattie deep in the front yard, under the shade of a puffball tree. They were bait, and Alston couldn’t get to them without passing Rachel and me, picking shreds of Charmin from the leaves of the big gardenia near the mailbox. I handed Rachel the trash bag and intercepted Alston at the curb.
“Oh, hello!” Alston said, faux surprised but seeming genuinely pleased to see us out of hiding. The second she stopped walking, Punchkin flopped onto his belly, panting. “Goodness, what happened here?”
“You’re raising teenagers,” I said, grinning at her. “I think you can guess.”
We both paused to watch Lavender pluck another string of toilet paper off the azaleas. Frank Darian had to be in court this morning, but Hugh was here. He’d helped Jake carry his dad’s big ladder over.
It was odd to see Jake still in Birchville, red-faced and sweating through his polo shirt. When I’d finally quit sketching to scare up some breakfast, Birchie and Wattie were in the kitchen and Lavender was sitting at the dining-room table, cheerfully horking down a fried egg and biscuits with syrup. She’d told me that her parents were taking a walk. I’d wondered if Jake would return from it. Rachel could send him back to Norfolk alone, or, more likely, years from now some descendant of mine might find his bones hidden in their own trunk in the attic. But Lavender had seemed unconcerned that her dad might disappear again. She’d been practically glowing.
“Finish eating and put your shoes on,” I’d told her. “We’re all going down to fix Mrs. Mack’s place as soon as you’re ready.”
Jake returned with Rachel as we were leaving, sporting a sheepish expression and pink, exhausted eyes. She was cloaked in cool blond dignity. They were not holding hands the way they used to, but he didn’t get into his truck and go, and he turned down the nap that Birchie offered him, choosing instead to come along and help us.
Now Jake held the base of the ladder firmly against the trunk of Martina’s big loblolly pine. Hugh Darian was at the top, too high up by half for my taste, trying to yank down the white banners he’d lofted so professionally last night. It wasn’t going well.
We’d had a heavy dew, and the dampened toilet paper stuck to everything and disintegrated easily. We were practically having to remove it square by square. As Hugh jerked the streamers, they broke off, and the bits at the top were well beyond the ladder’s reach. It would take the fire department or Cirque du Soleil to get them down. It probably said something very damning about my character that I secretly wanted those white crisscrosses fluttering on for a few days, until rain or the wind dissolved them or carried them away. They looked like little flags proclaiming Martina’s jackassery.
“Oh, goodness’ sake, Hugh Darian! You know better. I hope my Connor wasn’t helping?” Alston called up to Hugh, then added aside to me, “Those two are thick as thieves.”
“No, ma’am!” Hugh hollered back. “It was just me and Lavender.”
Behind her, coming up Crepe Myrtle from the other direction, I saw Grady and Esme Franklin walking at a good clip toward us. They were a comfortably portly couple in their fifties, recent empty-nesters. Grady was a deacon at Wattie’s church, the one who most often picked up Birchie and Wattie on their Redemption weeks. Our march around the square had activated the Redemption Baptist phone tree, too.
The Franklins lived close, west of Cypress Street. Their part of the neighborhood had the same postage-stamp yards and gardens, the same brick ranches. Most of the houses were tidy and well cared for, though a few had bald yards and moldering sofas on the front porch, just like here. But black families lived on that side of Cypress Street, and on this side the neighborhood was white.
I took ruthless hold of Alston’s arm. “Oh, look, here come Esme and Grady Franklin.” I headed fast to intercept them, dragging reluctant Alston and exhausted Punchkin down the curb with me, talking with relentless cheery volume over Alston’s protests. “Do you know each other? Come and meet them.”
As we traded good-mornings and handshakes, Lavender came over and
joined us. She knelt down to pet Punchkin, saying, “We should have brought water bottles. This poor guy needs a drink.”
“Don’t we all,” I said, so damn perky. I was wishing mine could be tequila. “Lav, maybe take Punchkin and run the hose for him? I doubt Ms. Mack would mind. She’s got dogs, and it’s shaping up to be a scorcher.”
Martina probably would mind. Well, too bad. I was doing public-relations work here. It would be awesome if she came out into the street and publicly begrudged a pug dog a drink of water. Lavender took the leash and dragged Punchkin off toward the side of the house.
“Yes, it is,” Alston said. “Should Miss Birchie and Miss Wattie be standing out here in it?”
It was the opening I needed.
“I don’t think so, but they both insisted. They feel responsible. Lav and Hugh were defending their honor, after all.” I tipped my head significantly at the house, and Alston followed my gaze. The drapes in the front window twitched; Martina Mack was watching. To Esme and Grady, I added, “The lady who lives here implied some rather harsh things about my grandmother and Miss Wattie down at First Baptist on Sunday.”
As I spoke, Rachel drifted toward us, picking up fragments that led her close enough to hear the conversation.
“Oh, no!” Esme said, but then she caught the implication and asked, amused, “You mean the kids rolled her house for it?”
“It’s a young way to react, isn’t it?” Alston said to Esme, chuckling.
“Yes, but a little too ‘eye for an eye’ for Birchie and Wattie. They wanted to show Lav and Hugh that you have to turn the other cheek.” It was spin, tailored to this small-town Baptist audience, but there was truth in it. I was reminding them of the kind of women Birchie and Wattie were. The kind that they had always been. “Even if that means standing out in eighty-percent humidity making sure teenagers get every bit of the Charmin out of the bushes.”