by Lori Roy
He says I have five more minutes and then goes on to talk about how much he hates this time of year. The days are so short and he’ll sure be happy when the time changes. I don’t know about the short days of winter or the longer days of summer, but I nod like I do, and when he points off to the left, I look and listen because I don’t want to miss a single thing. I don’t want to forget anything else. I want to have much to remember later when I’m alone again in the basement.
“Over there,” he says. “Over there is Stone Mountain. You can’t see it, but it’s there.”
I take a step in the direction he’s pointing. I know all about Stone Mountain. It’s a rocky mound that looks as if the earth has spit out a bit of itself it didn’t much like the taste of. Mama and me went there once, and by the time we were done climbing, we were puffing and panting and nowhere close to the top, and Mama said she sure did need to get herself more exercise. Stone Mountain isn’t so far from Mama, and pecans grow in Georgia. I was right. Even though Mama is gone, home is still there and I’m not so far away.
“You know Stone Mountain?” he asks, grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me around to face him.
I shake my head but don’t try to talk.
“You sure?” he says. “Because Stone Mountain, it ain’t nowhere near your house.”
I press my lips tight together because I don’t want to say the wrong thing, and then I shrug so he’ll think I don’t know anything about it.
Later, when I’m alone in the basement, I eat a slice of bread, slowly picking off small bits of it and laying them on my tongue, and think hard about the day Mama and me went to Stone Mountain. And I think of the field outside where he and I stood for exactly twenty minutes. Tall clumps of grass that reached nearly as tall as me lined the flat field, rows and rows that stretched farther than I could see. The grass was brittle and the stalks drooped because it’s winter, but not cold winter like Laura has in her stories. It’s cold like Georgia cold, and I think in the spring, the clumps will green up and grow taller, tall enough to hide a girl like me. We had the same grass at our house. Tall, feathery pink stalks will shoot up out of the tall clumps when summer comes just like they did back home, and there will be room enough between the clumps for me to run silently and to zigzag this way and that. I did the same with Mama. I would hide, and she would seek. So I know he won’t be able to run through the grass like me because he’s too wide. If I were to run through those rows and he were to chase after, he wouldn’t be able to hear me. But I would hear him.
Part III
Chapter 33
IMOGENE
Today
Imogene walks out of her bedroom, closes the door behind her, leans there, and shuts her eyes. Garland and Jo Lynne were right about the boy and his mama, and that means one less thing to hurt Mama. They were squatters. Daddy had nothing to do with them being in the basement. No one did. Imogene still has no explanation for the wire, though it could have been run long before Christopher and his mama happened along. Or maybe Daddy was trying to help them, though that doesn’t sound much like Daddy. Whatever the explanation, the boy and his mama could have left anytime.
Imogene will still have Mama’s house to protect and will have to contend with Daddy stealing from the Knights of the Southern Georgia Order and Garland covering it up, and all of that will be trouble enough in the days ahead, but what Imogene’s feeling now is anger. What Daddy didn’t do, this boy’s mama did. She put the locks on the outside of the door, and then the house burned. That’s as far as she’ll let her thoughts go. But she’s also feeling fear. This boy’s mama wasn’t there for him when he needed her, just like Imogene wasn’t there for Vaughn. Exhaustion has left her numb, and she can’t look into that boy’s eyes when he finds out what his mama did, because the hurt she’ll see there will be the same that would have shown in Vaughn’s eyes when he realized she wasn’t coming at the time he needed her most. She just isn’t strong enough.
“Imogene?”
Imogene opens her eyes at the feel of Warren’s hand on her arm.
“Is he awake?” he asks.
“His name is Christopher.”
For a brief few moments, when she ordered Tim Robithan out of her house and when she woke to find the boy still alive, she thought she was doing something after five long years of doing nothing. She was helping change the course and making things better. She was on track to be the person she’d been before she lost her family. At least she felt a spark of who she’d been—a person who would swim across a lake to find her real daddy or be brave enough to move to Atlanta all by herself to escape a family legacy or keep struggling to make classes and get good grades with an infant at home who kept her up most nights. But that spark is gone and that person is gone, because the boy, Christopher, is alone and will always know his mama left him, and because Imogene did the same to Vaughn. She left him alone. She was wrong to think she could get back to the person she once was. As much as her husband and son are gone, so is the person she was before.
“Imogene,” Warren says, his hand tightening around her forearm. “You with me? I need to talk to him.”
“He goes to school in town,” Imogene says.
“So, he wasn’t living in the old house?”
With one good yank, Imogene pulls away.
“Yes, he was,” she says, walking down the hallway. “And so was his mama, if you can call her that.”
The kitchen is quiet again. The floors and counters shine as if the men were never there, and the smell of all that cleaning has replaced the smell of smoke. Garland and Eddie must have left, and Jo Lynne is out on the porch, talking to someone on her cell phone. Imogene begins flipping open cabinets though she doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She’s angry with a woman she’s never met. Imogene loses a child and this woman gets to keep hers, and he loves her, is willing to fight for her, even though she locked him in a basement and left him, what, to die?
“He wants to go back to the house,” Imogene says to Warren. “To find her, I guess, and I don’t know what to tell him. I can’t let him see it all burned down. And Mama, I haven’t told her about the house either.”
“Can’t hide a burned-out house for long,” Warren says.
Grabbing a banana from the basket hanging over the sink and a box of granola bars from the top cabinet, she drops them on the kitchen table and sits.
“Jo Lynne was right,” she says, resting her elbows on the table. Whatever had been keeping her going—adrenaline, fear, whiskey—is gone. She’s exhausted. “It was his mama who was locking him up down there.”
“He said that?”
“Not in so many words,” Imogene says. “But if he was going to school in town, they were coming and going every day. It was the school over near the Episcopal church. They’ll know him there, won’t they? Be able to tell us something about him?”
“Did he say if his mother left him like this before?”
“No. But she’s left him to go with a man before. He did say that. And that she always came back.”
“Then we need to find out who this man is.”
Imogene nods.
“So, it wasn’t Daddy after all?”
It’s Jo Lynne. She’s come inside from the porch. She had probably been calling down to her office to talk with them about the boy. She drops her phone in the basket near the sink, tightens the belt on her robe, and smooths the hair around her face.
“You’ll call over to the school?” Jo Lynne asks Warren, meaning she was listening to their conversation. “And, Imogene, you’ll bring him out? Let me talk to him?”
Imogene closes her eyes and rests her face in her hands. Something has upset her stomach. It might be the burn from too much whiskey and vodka too, or it might be the dread that she is going to be stuck being the person she’s been for the last five years. Everything she does, has done for the last several years, is meant to disappoint. And she knows now why she’s done it. It isolates her. Little by little, the people w
ho love her can’t take any more and then they’re gone and there’s one less person to care about Imogene, one less person to expect more of her or to encourage her to do the hard work of rebuilding.
“Imogene, are you listening?”
Jo Lynne’s arms are crossed, and that one hip of hers is cocked out to the side. As if seeing her reflection in Imogene’s eyes, Jo Lynne drops her arms and straightens.
“I’m not letting them take this house,” Imogene says. She might not be able to help this boy, because what his mama did can never be undone, and she’ll never be able to look into his face once he knows, but she’s damn sure going to help Mama. “I’m going to move in here, take care of everything.”
Jo Lynne starts to say something, but Warren stops her with a simple glance. They’ve had occasion to work together over the years and are slipping into what must be a familiar partnership.
“That’s for another time,” he says. “Jo Lynne has responsibilities to this child. I’ve let this go on long enough. You need to let her do her work. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Imogene says, pushing away from the table.
“Yes, what?” Jo Lynne says, making it clear she’s still angry about Imogene saying she’s moving in with Mama.
“Yes, you can talk to him,” Imogene says. “He’s all yours. His name is Christopher.”
It Rises Again
In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education overturned state-sponsored segregation. This reversal of the Reconstruction-era practice preceded yet another rise in the Ku Klux Klan in America. In September 1956, the Klan returned to Stone Mountain to host one of its largest rallies in years. In response to the civil rights movement, membership grew to approximately fifty thousand by the mid-1960s. The Klan organized and carried out violent and deadly attacks against civil rights marchers, freedom riders, and other individuals and institutions showing support for the civil rights movement. A 1965 congressional hearing and an FBI investigation contributed to the decline of the Klan, and by the early 1970s, its membership had sunk to one of its lowest levels.
Chapter 34
TILLIE
Today
Tillie parks in the same spot behind his shop that he parked in the night before, snug up against the dumpster, where his car is hidden. He looks up and down the narrow dirt alley. It’s quiet because most things are closed on Sunday. The oaks rustle overhead, and somewhere up there, a finch chirps and carries on. From down the alley, someone hollers out to Tillie as he walks toward the shop’s back door. It’s one of the fellows what work down at the café. He’s a scrawny fellow, wearing a white apron around his waist.
“You see it there?” the fellow hollers as he steps out into the alley where he can get a look at Tillie a few shops down. New fellows are always showing up down there. Tillie’s friendly with them but can’t keep up with their names. “Window there in the back is broke.”
Tillie gives the man a wave. “Just kids, I suppose,” he says. “But thanks for calling over to the house.”
The window that leads into the storage room where Mrs. Tillie keeps her cleaning supplies and extra tables for displaying hasn’t just been broken; it’s gone altogether. Tillie reaches for the back door but stops and lowers his arm when something crackles under his feet. He glances up at the hole where a window used to be, and sure enough, it’s broken glass under his feet. The window was painted shut years ago, and kicking at that broken glass on the ground gets him to thinking that someone must have done the breaking from the inside so they could get out, instead of someone on the outside trying to get in. Again, he reaches for the door, but he’s slow about it this time because he’s wondering if the door is going to already be unlocked. He pulls on the knob, but the door won’t open. He exhales, as if it being locked is a good thing.
Mrs. Tillie’s storage room is directly inside the shop, and the door to the small room is open, which it almost always is. Without crossing the threshold, Tillie leans in and takes a look. Rolls of paper towels, bottles of cleaning fluid, buckets, boxes of steel wool, and stacks of rags are all where they should be. The only thing out of place is more glass. There was glass on the ground outside, and there’s glass on the ground inside, as if someone came and went out the same window.
Tillie does manage one comforting thought. Both Robert and Tim Robithan are far too big to have climbed in through that window, either coming or going. They’d have been ones to kick in the back door, which Tillie’s insurance agent has been telling him for years is little stronger than cardboard.
“Called the police already,” Tillie calls out down the narrow hallway that leads to the front of the shop. He stands still, listening. He forgot to turn off the ceiling fan that runs out in the front room. It’s out of balance and squeals with each turn of the blades. Other than that, the shop is quiet.
Walking on through the small hallway, which is dark for having no windows, he pushes through a wooden swinging door and steps out into the main showroom. That’s what Mrs. Tillie calls it, though Tillie thinks it makes her sound too full of herself.
He’d expected to find tables toppled and books thrown all about. That’s what happened last time kids broke in, but if it was Robert or Tim Robithan, or someone doing their bidding, he or she wouldn’t care about tossing things around. He or she would go straight for the watches and would be intent on leaving Tillie a message. He remembers that too from his days in the Klan. They like to leave messages. Maybe they’d set a fire so other fellows would be scared too, or maybe they’d . . . and this is where Tillie thinks of what they could do to Mrs. Tillie, and he pinches his eyes closed to chase away the thought.
It’s what all the fellows are doing, is what they said to Tillie back then. Just a bunch of us trying to do right by our families. We all get on real good, fellows just like you and me. That’s all Tillie had been wanting—to keep his sweet bride safe and to have some other fellows to go fishing with and maybe share a beer with now and again.
Quick as he can, Tillie makes his way through the shop, cracking his shin on a pew Mrs. Tillie pulled out of the old Baptist church out east of town when it shuttered its doors. Stumbling again, but backward this time, he drops down into one of Mrs. Tillie’s fiddleback chairs. She’d have his hide for coming down on it so hard, but not even the thought of him having maybe cracked a spindle keeps him from smiling, because he can see the black safe from here, tucked up under the counter and closed tight. First, he’ll check to make sure the watches are in there, just to ease his mind, and then he’ll give the fiddleback a good cleaning, because he likely smudged it up when he fell, and then he’ll see to boarding up that window.
Once behind the counter, Tillie gives the combination lock a few quick spins and the steel door opens. Inside, two watches are wrapped up inside one of Mrs. Tillie’s vintage doilies just like she said they would be. Not even daring to touch them, Tillie pushes the door closed and stands. And that’s when he sees it. It’s hanging right there from the total key on the register. It’s a necklace—a light blue moonstone hanging from a silver chain—and while Tillie doesn’t know who left it here, he darn sure knows who it belongs to. He pulls out his cell phone, squints hard as he scrolls through the screen, and when he comes to a name that looks pretty close to reading “Imogene,” he hits the call button.
Chapter 35
IMOGENE
Today
Imogene stands and pushes her chair under the kitchen table, taking care not to drag the legs over the linoleum.
“I’ll send Mama to get herself dressed,” she says to Warren and Jo Lynne, “and bring the boy out to get something to eat. Mama doesn’t need to know anything about where we found him. And she doesn’t need to know about the Knights wanting to take her house either.”
Jo Lynne nods. “For now.”
“No, not for now,” Imogene says. “For always. I’ll tell her about the fire, but no one tells her anything about the rest of it. I’m moving in. Mama’s not losing her home.”
Le
aving the food on the table, she walks toward her bedroom but stops and turns when she reaches the hallway.
“Will you know what to say to him?” she says to Jo Lynne. “When he asks about his mama and what will happen next and where he’ll go?”
“Yes, Imogene,” Jo Lynne says. “I know. It’s what I do. Warren and I, we’ll both see to taking care of him.” And then to Warren, she says, “Would you excuse us for a moment?”
Warren glances at Imogene as if to get her okay. When she nods, he steps out onto the porch and pulls the door closed behind him.
“You understand the kind of trouble this means for Garland, right?” Jo Lynne says, walking close enough to Imogene that she can whisper. “You understand how serious it is, Daddy stealing all that money? And I assume you understand who these men are?”
The sudden memory of Tim Robithan’s cologne washing over her followed by the heat of his body and then the feel of his breath on her face causes Imogene to brace herself by placing one foot behind the other.
“If you need money so God-awful bad, why don’t you and Garland sell your house and leave Mama’s alone?”
Jo Lynne says nothing, and her eyes won’t settle on Imogene.
“Oh, I get it,” Imogene says. “Mama’s the one with equity. Your fancy new house came with a fancy new mortgage, didn’t it?”
“Imogene, please. There’ll be money left for Mama to get a nice place in town. Something sweet and manageable.”
“You know the saddest part of all?” Imogene says, glancing outside to see Warren leaning against the porch railing and talking on his phone. “Mama’s been far too good to both you and Eddie over the years, and Lord knows if you asked, she’d probably let you have the place. But I’m not letting that happen. No one is selling Mama’s house. And I’m done talking about this.”