Hope was hungry. And not for warmed-over-whatever in a chafing dish. She wished she were on her way to Grandma’s with the other appropriate ladies— but there was no way for her not to be on her way to Abel’s house, to what he had snarlingly called offay Ardmore.
Ajay was in Ardmore. Before Hope could do any other part of getting on with her afternoon and her life, she would check in on her son.
There was a doormat emblazoned with a dancing turkey wearing a cowboy hat on Sammie’s doorstep, and a straw cornucopia filled with plastic fruit was hanging on the door. Standing on that doormat, staring at that cornucopia, Hope hated Abel.
She smiled wider and tighter. Waycross knocked. They waited a polite thirty seconds. When no one answered, Way-cross pushed open the door to the house Abel had shared with Sammie and seven children. The distinctive odor of Thai food—basil, chili oil, and garlic—hit them immediately as they stepped across the threshold that had so recently been barred to them.
The place was god-awful. The carpet, an off shade of royal blue, was baby-, child-, and dog-stained, though it appeared, from the presence of vacuum tracks and the scent of powdered carpet cleaner, as if someone had been trying to prep the rooms for company.
Little in the antebellum farm house was less than two years old—and nothing was more than four years old. Everything was cheap and oddly coordinated blue and green plaid; everything was dinged or dented, much was dusty. New Barbies and baby dolls and the boxes they were torn out of and old Barbies and baby dolls in bits and pieces of pink outfits were everywhere. Waycross was embarrassed for dead Abel.
Hope was perturbed. Staring into the room, she remembered Abel making the joke “Some wives shop at Cheap and Cheerful— my wife shops at Dismal and Depressed.” Hope didn’t want Ajay spending a minute more than necessary in dismal and depressed.
Abel had been amused by the near squalor of his all but white family. Amused and embarrassed. Amused and embarrassed was a favorite Abel emotional cocktail. He had developed a taste for it early in his first home and he had taken it to every home after.
Pinigree Pinagrew was talking loudly, explaining to somebody Hope didn’t know that Abel had loved being linked with one of the oldest names in the South, that Abel particularly had loved spending long weekends down at the restored family plantation, Everlay. “Always came with Goo Goo Clusters in one arm and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the other. Abel didn’t hunt but he was a good drinker with hunters,” laughed Pinagrew, before lifting another glass to the dead man.
Hope watched Ajay playing with the oldest of his half sisters, Lauro, holding her upside down, all the while holding up his end of two different conversations, one with Abel’s old girlfriend, Margot Linden, and one with Caldwell Lyttle, the lawyer who had already called about the will. Lyttle seemed to be trying to flirt with Margot. Sammie, passing by on her way to the back porch, brushed the top of Ajay’s head with her hand. The boy almost dropped his little sister before regaining his balance.
Ajay was fine. Hope could leave. She felt for her cell phone. She checked to make sure it was on. Ajay would call when he was headed to Grandma’s. Pinagrew was bringing him. That was their plan. Hope would stick to it. It was appropriate for Ajay to spend two hours at his deceased father’s house after the burial. It was appropriate for the ex-wife and stepfather to make a ten-minute appearance and move on. Hope would do what was appropriate.
She found Samantha in the backyard, flanked by her brothers, standing on the concrete in her stocking feet, lighting a cigarette. Seeing them together, Hope was reminded that the three of them had been, for a hot second, a hot country act, and that they were, oddly, triplets. Somewhere she probably had had a copy of their only album. Ajay had told her they had sometimes played Branson. Hope did what had to be done, pay her respects to the mother of her son’s half siblings. She stuck out her hand.
“You did a better job than me. I am very sorry for your loss. You made a lot of his dreams come true,” said Hope.
Samantha didn’t know what to say so she finished lighting her cigarette, shoved it in her mouth, then took Hope’s hand.
Just when Hope was thinking this might be the moment their relationship changed, Samantha covered both of their touching hands with her free hand, taking custody of the moment. It was a gesture Sammie had performed a hundred times at county fairs and meet ’n’ greets, a gesture that looked good across a room. Usually she accompanied the gesture with her trademark wink. This day she didn’t. She was too irritated that Hope was making a good impression on her sibs.
Hope bobbed her head down, a show of respect that ended the conversation before Sammie could drop ash on her. Moments later Hope was back in the house making her way to the front door, where Waycross was already standing with Ajay.
“You’re not leaving me here,” said Ajay.
“We can stay,” said Hope.
“No,” said Ajay, walking ahead of Hope out the door.
An hour and twenty minutes later, the red Expedition was pulling up in front of Abel’s grandmother’s house. As he put the car in park, Waycross gave Samantha her props: “I’ll be damned if Abel wouldn’t have loved that, Sammie serving Thai food to New Negroes and old rednecks.” Hope glared at him.
“Where did all the army men go?” she asked.
“Back to wherever they came from,” said Waycross.
“They won’t be at Grandma’s,” said Ajay.
Grandma’s was on a curving street atop a hill that overlooked the old Agricultural and Industrial College that had exploded into a mainly black but definitely integrated Tennessee State University, where, before his death, Grandpa had taught studio art.
A little like Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard before the celebrities came, Grandma’s little corner of the world was insular and quietly triumphant, but triumphant. Neutral-hued Cadillacs, black and gray and navy and cream, were parked in front of the houses.
Grandma’s street was a haven of black, well-salaried people: people with predictable incomes and insurance; people with excellent credit scores; people with birth certificates and passports; people spending their old age in homes in almost every way different from the homes in which they had spent their undocumented childhoods.
Significantly suburban, perched between the cities and the farms, Grandma’s neighborhood was no Gold Coast or Sugar Hill. There was no swagger or blues about the place. It was tidy and green, a last refuge of radicals who had lived long enough and wise enough to see their ideas become, in some quarters, conservative.
Every house stood on its own two or three hilly acres. There was very little flat, not enough flat to run, or play, or remind anyone of cotton fields. There were steep sloping front lawns, houses perched on top, and steep sloping backyards. Every brick house with hill and shrub spoke of prosperity and intelligence, of modesty and modernity.
Because the houses were built into the slopes of hills, from the front you entered on one floor and from the back you entered on another. Entering Grandma’s from the front you stepped into a vestibule with a staircase up and a staircase down. The down staircase led to an apartment where she put visiting family; the up staircase led to a hall that ran the length of the house. That hall was a gallery of her dead husband’s lesser paintings. The masterpieces had been sold to provide Grandma’s daily bread and shelter and hunks of cash to help whittle down college fees for children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Off that hall you could immediately see a family room that opened into a kitchen; to the right was the large room where Grandma received her guests on formal occasions: bridge games, club meetings, weddings, and funerals.
The big room was a strikingly bright space, elegant and bohemian. Light streaming in from the windows fell on a rectangular sea of blue carpet and a large, square gold silk couch big enough to hold five grown folks, several children, and however many babies needed laps. Well-chosen, perpetually dusted gee-gaws, artifacts, and paintings, collected over seven decades of living among makers and
sellers, writers and painters, beckoned the eye one way, then another, until finally the eye rested on the simple beauty of the couch and the rug and the sunlight and the charming, long and tall volumes of a Deberry McKissack–designed home.
Waycross closed the door behind them and headed straight up for the kitchen. Hope headed straight downstairs to the bar. There was a God in heaven. Mo Henry was pouring drinks.
Mo, more properly Moses Henry, Hope’s favorite bartender, was a Nashville native and fixture who had left town to play football at Tuscaloosa. After a splashy career playing Alabama football, he had migrated north to study photography. He had earned an M.F.A. at NYU supported by his dentist daddy. No one could explain or got far into puzzling out why he had come back to Nashville and started serving drinks at rich folks’ parties. When anybody asked him, all he would ever say was that his mama and papa had needed him to come back home; his own wife didn’t like to go out much; and he wanted to make sure he got to lots of parties. It didn’t make sense, but he said it often enough, and he was such a good bartender (never forgetting what people preferred to drink, never getting drunk, never gossiping about the other drinkers), that most people found it convenient to believe him.
Hope was one of the most. She didn’t know why Mo made her feel safe but she knew he made her feel safe. And she knew anything she told Mo went no farther than his sweet brown Santa Claus head. He reminded her of her cousin Hat. Mo made Hope feel safer than generals. And Mo loved Abel. She quick made her way to the front of the line. Mo made strong drinks and she needed a drink. And she needed to be reminded that there were nice people who were not his blood relatives who could love Abel.
Without asking, Mo handed Hope a gin martini with three very big olives. Hope ate one, then another. Then she took her first sip of icy gin for the day.
“Good, aren’t they?” said Mo.
“Used to be you couldn’t get good olives in Nashville,” said Hope as Mo handed her another spear of three.
“Now the Cumberland is a river in the Middle East,” said Mo. Hope looked up from her drink.
“Abel said that,” she said.
“Probably quoting me,” taunted Mo.
“What does it mean?” asked Hope, teasing back.
Hope turned toward the sound of soft thuds: a little girl was bumping down the steps on her bottom. Mo started making a Shirley Temple. Three more plonks and the little cousin was tugging on Hope’s skirt. Hope was wanted by Grandma in the kitchen that doubled as a family room.
Hope was stopped as she made her way back up the steps by a middle-aged dark man she recognized but whose name she didn’t remember, an old friend of Abel’s from the neighborhood. He had a message for Ajay.
“Abel was always getting popped. It didn’t take no generals or the U.S. government to make a man out of our Abel. His daddy did that. You tell Ajay.”
“Thank you for coming,” Hope said.
Phoebe Redmund, the messenger’s mama, was sitting on the side of Grandma’s chair telling her about the short film she was preparing to direct, The Wife of His Youth, based on the Charles Chesnutt story.
Phoebe was the grandchild Grandma said most reminded her of the aunt who had raised her—a midwife born, and full grown, in slavery times. Phoebe wore her hair in twists and dyed it a crayon-orange shade of red. She was tiny-thin, tall, copper colored, and a semi-regular on a hit television show. She supplemented her income buying and selling vintage advertisements. Phoebe looked a lot like Ajay and Hope thought Phoebe was the inspiration for Ajay’s hair, but she didn’t hold that against her. Hope jumped on the other arm of Grandma’s chair.
Out of the corner of her eye Hope saw Waycross at the sink talking to the woman she thought was called Ruby. Hope was about to get jealous, then another woman entered the conversation by kissing Ruby full on the lips and giving her what looked to be a taste of her tongue before she said a word. Hope turned her attention to the more immediate conversation.
Grandma, round and butter colored, head to toe in black, with large clear glasses like goggles that didn’t shield her angry eyes, was saying that she had met Chesnutt in 1930, the year she had married.
Somehow it made them all sad that Grandma, who had been born in 1910 and who had known someone, Charles Chesnutt, born in 1858, was still alive and someone born in 1959, Abel, wasn’t.
They all three stopped talking. Grandma got up. She had to keep moving or she would cry. No one alive had seen Grandma cry.
On her way back to the chair Grandma took a picture off a wall covered with photographs, a wedding photograph of Sammie and Abel. In wedding pumps the bride was taller than her six-foot groom. With rouged red lips, powdered white skin, and jet-black hair, Sammie looked like Snow White.
“That woman ruined my family,” Grandma said.
There was so much Grandma could say but wouldn’t about the woman, and it all boiled down to those five words. Her grandson had had a habit of oversharing in romantic and sexual matters when he had come to talk to Grandma. It was something she had enjoyed about the boy. His stories had kept her feeling alive. She knew so much she couldn’t tell. Even with her favorite Phoebe trying to pry. Dead men tell no tales, but mourning friends tell all your secrets. Grandma wasn’t a mourning friend, she was mourning family. She kept her mouth shut.
Phoebe took the picture of Sammie and Abel out of Grandma’s hands. She hung it back on the wall. It was near time for Phoebe to leave for the airport, to get back in time to go to work. But first, she took down a picture of a brown girl in a long white gown and a beige man in a cutaway— a picture of Hope and Abel.
She put the frame that held that image in Grandma’s hands. If Phoebe and Hope hadn’t looked away the two comparatively young women would have seen the old lady cry. They looked away.
Hope turned her gaze toward another photograph. A man and a woman wearing near-matching wool pants and bright yellow L.L. Bean jackets: a picture of Hope and Abel on their wedding trip to Martha’s Vineyard.
Hope knew the photo. She had hung a copy of it in Ajay’s room, trusting he wouldn’t see what she saw.
Abel and Hope were standing right next to each other but headed in opposite directions. They didn’t know this. It was a honeymoon.
Hope kissed Grandma on the head, collected Waycross, then walked down to the basement to claim Ajay—who wanted to rest a longer while at Grandma’s. There was just time to drop Phoebe at the airport before Hope had to rush to meet Nicholas. Somewhere in the basement Mo was slipping a drink to Ajay.
The day was too much for all of them.
SIX
NICHOLAS GORDON STOOD in the Hermitage Hotel’s Oak Bar, one of the few grand bars of the Old South that had transitioned to the modern era, trying to remember what he and Hope Jones had drunk in the time and place of the People Power Revolution.
If the barkeep hadn’t had such pretty, pretty green eyes, eyes that matched the hotel’s famed men’s room, it would have already come back to him.
Their drink should have been gin and tonic, but Hope had never trusted his ice, and Nicholas had always liked to drink what his guest was drinking. He hazily recalled trying kir royale. She had decreed it too pink and too sweet.
He clearly recalled encounters with Hope necessitating the application of gin to brain and her vulnerability to champagne. As he processed the same facts he had processed almost twenty years earlier, a cocktail from the First World War tripped to the tip of his tongue.
He asked the barkeep for two French 75s. Three minutes later, champagne flutes in hand, he returned to the table in the bar alcove that overlooked the dining room. Curled up, with her shoes off, in one of the two tiny green leather overstuffed sofas on either side of a low table, was Hope.
She, like he, had changed out of her funeral suit. Now she was wearing a long, straight, black knit skirt, a black V-neck sweater, a triple strand of dark South Sea pearls, and cowboy boots.
She took her drink from his hand before he had a chance to offe
r it; he took his first sip before he even sat down. It was still that kind of day.
Settling into the couch, wearing pressed jeans, a blazer, a knockoff of a Turnbull & Asser shirt with its distinctive collar and cuffs sewn by an Ayala Center tailor, and an absurd cravat actually from Jermyn Street— wearing the very same clothes he had worn in Manila in the eighties— Nicholas felt his mind slowly adjusting to the radical change in Hope’s appearance.
She was no longer the slight and precocious girl he had known. There was a new ease in her body that suggested her spirit had expanded with her waist, bosom, and hips.
He was sad for what he was often sad for since he had turned seventy, that he was so far beyond boys and women.
He didn’t miss girls because he had never liked them that much in the first place. Hope had been a true exception. He didn’t miss men because he still had them.
He would keep missing boys and women. They required from him passions long ago spent, some of it, if he remembered correctly, on this woman when she was a girl.
“This cocktail, this bar, Abel would have loved this.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
Hope drained her glass. Nicholas drained his. She started to rise. He waved her back down. “You don’t know the recipe.” Nicholas got up and rolled back to the bar, leaving Hope perched on the sofa.
He gave the barkeep very specific instructions: “A jigger of Bombay Sapphire gin, a jigger of Cointreau, not Grand Marnier, juice from one lemon, unless it’s a dry lemon, and then I want juice from two lemons, and six very thinly sliced strips of lemon peel. Mix it all in a crystal pail, a clean ice bucket will do, then pour in a full bottle of champagne. Funnel what fits back into the bottle, pour the rest into a glass for yourself.”
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