If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  Now the image stayed submerged, mostly, down at the bottom of his brain stem, quite perfect, engaged in a vague personal tragedy almost separate from himself. His memories of his mother had been surfacing since the letter, which he wrote the night after Khalil, squatting over a pile of junk just like this one, had ventured to call him Dad.

  ———

  On this raw Sunday morning as he prepared to drive to Gunnerson, South Carolina, the creamy Lexus purred away and did not come back. Rayne decided that the Sunday-morning white lady was probably a real estate agent hoping that the latest foreclosure might be worth more than three dollars and eighty-five cents. Halfway through her two-year nursing program, Lillie had dropped behind in her monthly payments, with only a few years to go to finish off her mother’s mortgage. It was why he’d moved in with her. Who knew that six months into it Khalil, who’d been so cool for a year, would squat among the found objects—or Found Lost, as Lillie had scrawled on the back brick wall—and address him, secretly, with penetrating intimacy, as Dad with love that made him want to run?

  But after the car drove away and did not circle back, Rayne dismissed the moment, finished unpacking the truck, and went inside quickly to lay out the stuff, say good-bye, and get on the road to his Nana Selma’s. He could almost hear her calling “Yoo-hoo!” as he did.

  Yoo-hoo. You comin home? Or what?

  CHAPTER 2

  It was already past seven. Lillie was filling the cooler with lunch, dinner, and snacks. She was very careful and very intentional about food. As a nursing student and the daughter of a diabetic Filipina mother and an alcoholic black father, she said, she had no choice. She said it regularly as a matter of faith, and Rayne never failed to laugh and counter: “Oh, you had some choices, there, baby. You had choices.” To tease her, Rayne said that he was hoping to grab fast food on the drive.

  She’d already put a twelve-pack of water bottles and his construction thermos filled with fresh coffee next to his duffel bag by the vestibule. She’d peeled his favorite navel oranges, torn them into sections, and put them into a plastic container for him to eat right away. The house smelled of coffee and oranges, which made him want to sit down in the kitchen and read the paper as he had when they’d first fallen in love and she’d spent the night at his apartment. No morning now was that relaxed. Every day was a push as Lillie powered through a two-year postgrad nursing program at Jefferson University, “while she had the help,” she’d once said before apologizing, but that’s how it was: he’d cosigned the educational loan, and he was paying the mortgage on the little house her parents had left her. At first Rayne and Lillie said that living together would be “like family,” which each of them missed: hers having died young, his, in prison, down South, gone. But, in fact, the easygoing lovers made for watchful, even tense, cohabitants. Everything was hard: nursing school was hard; starting the construction business was hard; sharing the space and their lives tentatively, and figuring out how to handle the boy together; all of it kept them on edge. And Rayne’s sense that she was pushing him to be other than he was. Only Lillie’s son, Khalil, made the decision to commit, full stop.

  Lillie bent over the cooler as Rayne walked the boxes through the house to the backyard, making sure not to let them weep dust along the way. The thin floorboards vibrated. The countertop was crowded with food, and it irritated him that she worked so hard. He really would have been just as happy with fast food.

  “Everything all right?” she asked, head down.

  “Yeah. I told you that I had to go make sure they’d locked up the little job downtown properly, didn’t I?”

  Lillie flashed him a tight grin and shrug; he’d left at 5:00 a.m., after she’d obliged him with perfunctory early-morning sex. He’d said something, sure, but she couldn’t remember what.

  He told her how he’d driven to his shop in North Philly to collect the boxes quickly at 5:20 a.m. and to switch trucks. Then, when he drove by the downtown construction job whose building permit was still pending, he saw that the demo crew he’d hired had “lost” the padlock on the construction door and tied it with an old rope. He’d thought about simply nailing the place shut, but the neighbors there were suspicious. Instead, he drove back to the shop in North Philly for a new padlock, left the new key on his desk with a note, and drove back downtown to secure the building before leaving town for five days. “So now it’s seven, and I should be, like, halfway through Maryland.”

  ———

  “Khalil would’ve been happy with one box,” Lillie said as Rayne stomped through with the last of the heavy parcels. Everything in them was made of metal and brick, concrete and wood. There were faucets with glass handles cut in the shapes of long crystals, claw feet without their table legs, a large, rusty knocker forged in the shape of a wolf’s head. “Spring vacation is just for the week.”

  “You know what I really want?” Rayne stopped and shifted the box under his arm. Lillie’s glasses were on, and her thick, wild hair was pulled back and tied in a scarf as always when she cooked. The warm kitchen smelled of corn bread. This was as close to home as he could imagine creating; but he did not trust contentment. Neither, Lillie admitted, did she.

  “What do you really want?” she asked. She came toward him, pulled the step stool from the corner with her foot, stepped up, and kissed him deeply. A desire flared up and caught them off guard, careful as Lillie usually was when Khalil was nearby.

  Rayne held her to him with his free arm. She smelled like oranges and early morning. “I must have been too fast this morning.”

  “I was sleepy.”

  “Now you’re awake.”

  “It’s seven o’clock.”

  “Just a quickie.”

  Lillie surprised him by looking slyly from him to the kitchen door to the yard and back again. “Give him that box.” Then she scampered upstairs.

  When Rayne stepped into the backyard, a chilly mist carried the familiar smell of horses. From the box he was carrying, he handed Khalil what he thought was the best find of the lot: a stone-carved gargoyle about a foot and a half high. Khalil made a first inspection, running his palm over the spikes and curves and poking his finger down its throat. Rayne explained that a downspout would run into a pipe in the throat to conduct rainwater, and they could make a small funnel from the house downspout through this gargoyle when they mounted it.

  “If your mom says yes. I’ll have to angle it so that it hits the drain there by the corner of the house.”

  “Whoa,” Khalil said. He cradled the heavy demon to his wiry body and sank down onto his haunches to inspect it, ignoring the sound that still startled Rayne each time he heard it here in West Philadelphia: the whinny of a horse and the pawing of her hooves on the packed yard.

  Across the alley from Lillie, a bizarre, quasi-legal stable, maintained by a leathery urban cowboy in his sixties, took up two house plots on the next street. It featured a dirt yard, alternately dusty, muddy, or frozen throughout the seasons, where one beautiful old chestnut mare sometimes came out for air, or to be saddled, or groomed. The horseman wore a hard brown saddlebag frown and a dusty cocoa-brown cowboy hat and chaps. He ching-chinged through Rite Aid and Pathmark in pointed boots with spurs. He and a dozen and a half comrades called themselves Buffalo Soldiers. They rode singly or in a movie-soundtrack cantering group over the tough green-and-brown bank of Cobbs Creek. On Saturdays they gave rides and dispensed history lessons and tough love to neighborhood boys.

  At first Rayne had leaned a ladder against the wall so that Khalil could climb up and look into the tiny corral. Soon enough, the boy began to play on the ladder, straddling one of the middle rungs and the top of the fence, or grabbing a handhold on the sill of the bay window. They began to plan the Climbing Wall to replace the ladder, with a perch past the second story that would command a view of the barn and the alley. The found objects from Rayne’s demo sites would serve as handholds and foot supports. Lillie had not okayed the idea yet, so Rayne had held off building
, just as he’d held off stripping the black paint off the front. Until she came around, he told Khalil, they could sort and design the wall, and then redesign and draw plans.

  When Rayne brought in his boxes of found objects, he and the boy knelt together in the intimate space under the bay-window overhang, discussing their attributes and possible placements. It was there that Khalil had first called Rayne Dad, so quietly and tentatively that Rayne could not be sure he’d heard properly. And it was in that same space now, crowded with new boxes for Khalil’s inspection, where Khalil asked, as lightly and naturally as if Rayne were going to the supermarket: “Can I go?”

  Rayne’s hand was on the storm door knob, and his mind had already traveled upstairs to where he hoped Lillie was still waiting. Had he heard him?

  “To South Carolina?”

  Khalil nodded. “Yeah. It’s Easter break. I’m off’a school anyway. Ooh—and we could go fishing in that mermaid place, where you said the sea backs up into the river.”

  Khalil looked up at Rayne, wanting to ask again but afraid to knock over the delicate balance of Rayne’s quite real consideration. Khalil gripped the gargoyle’s head and dragged his hand over the ears and across the rough neck, as if he were petting a new family dragon.

  “Can I?” Khalil asked again, almost a whisper that traveled nearly six feet up to Rayne’s ears only.

  They’d talked about it that year: the fact that Khalil was just about old enough to join Rayne on a trip south; how good it would be for him to have the experience of earlier generations, to spend time in a rural setting, to know from their own experience that black people hadn’t always lived stacked in matchboxes, and that they owned land and barns and silos, that they had rights to water from creeks and streams. Besides, speaking of that land, Rayne planned to talk to Nana Selma about selling it so that he could set her up, down there or closer to him in Philadelphia, in a nice retirement facility. It was not a conversation he looked forward to having with her. Khalil would be the perfect buffer.

  “If it’s okay with your mother, it’s okay with me.”

  Khalil jumped right up from where he’d been squatting.

  “Shh-shh-shh. Yo, Lil. Half a yes can still mean no. Lemme ask her. You stay here. I’ma go ask her. Do not come in till I call you. Hear me?”

  “You don’t want me to go pack?”

  “C’mon, man, don’t wreck it. What I tell you? Lemme go talk to your mom, okay? So we get everything straight about when I’m gone. Okay?”

  Khalil did not look up, but shook his head happily. He put down the gargoyle, selected a screwdriver from the small, ancient toolbox Rayne had given him, and tried to release a purple glass doorknob from its rusted housing.

  “Here,” Rayne said, reaching into the corner of the toolbox for a can of WD-40. “Soak it up real good for five minutes and then go back to it. Use that rag over there to hold the knob so you don’t drop it when it’s greasy.

  “Don’t come up till somebody tells you, hear?”

  ———

  Upstairs, Rayne stopped in the bathroom to wash his hands. He scrubbed them under the hot water, not only to clean but also to warm them. When he stepped into the bedroom, Lillie closed and locked the door behind him. She had taken off her clothes and glasses and scarf. He breathed in sudden delight. She used to call it the sneak attack, one of his favorite surprises in his apartment after he gave her the key. She’d be waiting for him, nude, sometimes sitting in the living room, wrapped in a blanket. “Do me!”

  Now she said, “What took you so long? Look, I turned on the computer. I was about to check e-mail,” she said, loosening his belt and pants.

  “E-mail get you hot?”

  “Depends. You send me anything good?”

  “Khalil was talking to me. He had something to ask me.”

  “Shhh. Stop talkin. Pick me up. Come on. Just like that.”

  ———

  They enjoyed each other fast and hard and simply. They laughed and groaned together happily, easy, like before. Rayne called it country sex, suitable for barns and lean-tos, best suited for early morning or late evening, unwashed. When they finished, he sat down with her straddling him on their one bedroom chair.

  “Khalil asked me to take ’im. I said yes—if you agreed.”

  “What do you mean, take ’im?”

  “Take him with me today for the week.”

  “Down South?”

  “Yeah, down South. What do you say: five days to study alone?”

  “Five days? You sure? It’s a lot, baby. The K-boy’s a handful when you take him on twenty-four seven. Or even twenty-four five.”

  “You think I’ll leave ’im at the rest area?”

  “Hadn’t thought of that. Scary.”

  “I won’t. This’ll be good for us. So, he’s seven. That’s how old I was when I went down there to live.”

  “Oh, so you’re gonna take ’im and leave ’im there. Compulsive repetition. You are not convincing me that this is a good idea.”

  “Nah, baby, Nana Selma ain’t in the kid business no more. I guess I want him to see the old place.”

  “Okay. I can’t believe I’m giving you push-back, bad as I need study time. He asked you? He must’ve been thinkin about it all the time since we talked about it. He hasn’t mentioned it to me.”

  “He’s strategic.”

  “Yep.”

  “And when I come back, can I get some?” He made a nest in the top of her hair, laid his head in it and surprised himself by dozing. He was back on the farm. As soon as his neck threatened to relax, he woke.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Yes, you are, you were thinking so loud it woke me up.”

  “Khalil loves you. If anything happens between us, it’ll break his heart. That’s what I was thinking. And then I was thinking how I shouldn’t say that, because it might sound desperate.”

  “We said we’d get you through school, baby. Let’s do one thing at a time.”

  “That’s what we’re doin,” she said. “Khalil’s busy with his own agenda.”

  “I get it, baby,” Rayne said. “Who you think gets it more than I do? Now, lemme get goin and try to talk this old lady outta that damn trailer in the swamp.”

  “She could come here, you know. I’m fine with it. I’ve told you that.”

  He wrapped his fleece sweater around her naked back, feeling the fineness of her skin against his rough hands. Selma had lived on that same land since she was a girl. “Might take dynamite to blast her off the place.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve gotta just tell ’er no.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I tell her. She says I was born to inherit that land, and I tell her I was born so that somebody could say no to her besides King.”

  “Did he ever say no to her?”

  “He never had to. She worshipped him. She was a girl, really, when they married. Like seventeen or eighteen.”

  “Maybe she’s got another twenty years in ’er. You said she was tough… Oh, God, I hear Khalil calling,” Lillie said. She pulled on her clothes so fast that Rayne felt the breeze of her movement. She motioned for him to pull up his pants. Rayne reached for a handful of her hair before she pulled it through an elastic and retied her scarf. She swatted his hand, then turned with the bright look of a new idea: “Bring back some farm implements or handles or something from down there for the Climbing Wall,” Lillie said.

  “Whoa. That’s perfect. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  ———

  When they opened their door, Khalil was standing at the top of the stairs with his backpack.

  “Man, didn’t I tell you stay downstairs?” Rayne said.

  “I was just gettin my stuff. So I’d be ready.”

  Lillie looked from one to the other, afraid to trust the love her boy had for this man. “I gotta pack his stuff, and that’s putting you even later,” Lillie said.

  “No, see,” Khalil said, poin
ting to the backpack, “I packed!”

  “C’mon, baby,” Rayne said. “Just some jeans and a couple T-shirts and some drawers.”

  “I packed. All that stuff I packed already.”

  “Toothbrush?”

  Khalil jumped sideways into the bathroom and grabbed it along with his brush. He shoved them into the bag.

  “And his asthma medicine,” Lillie said. She’d crossed to the top of the steps, scooped up the backpack, and was looking through the clothes stuffed in.

  “I don’t really need the medicine anymore.”

  “You wanna go?” Lillie asked her son pointedly. Then to Rayne she added: “I know you think I fuss too much. But this is the time of year he gets it. Weather changes, and boom.”

  “No, you’re right. We don’t want ’im fallin out down there. It’s the country, Little Man. Your medicine might not have been invented down there yet.” He spoke to Khalil, but motioned his chin in the direction of the boy’s room, where Lillie was opening and slamming drawers.

  Khalil made a face meant to show how ridiculous that sounded, but he also appeared just a tiny bit nonplussed.

  “No socks, Khalil,” Lillie shouted so that he could hear her. “No underwear.”

  Rayne raised his eyebrows. Khalil made an embarrassed face and batted Rayne’s big hand between his smaller ones, hitting it back and forth to contain his excitement.

  ———

  “I’ma go pack up the truck,” Rayne called to Lillie.

  “Oh, geez, I gotta put in more food.” She came from the room with the backpack and an ancient half-sized duffel bag with Oscar the Grouch on one side. “Here.”