by Annie Jones
“Different times, Dixie Belle, different times,” she croaked out, her head shaking. “If you can’t stop looking on this through modern eyes and try to see how it was back then, how it used to be so many years ago, then there ain’t no sense even going on with the tellin’ of it.”
“I just... “ Dixie looked at the kind old smile, and her heart melted. “Go on, please.”
Lettie lifted her head and patted the gray-white fuzz of her hair as if it were a mantel of silver. “You know, Founder Fulton hand-picked me to accompany him back to Fulton’s Dominion from New Orleans in the summer of nineteen seventeen?”
“I know.” She thought of trying to move Lettie along, to get to the marriage and the secrets and what needed to be done now concerning Fulton. But she held her tongue, knowing one wrong word might cause the woman with a century’s-worth of history in her to withdraw and not speak of it again.
“He’d saw me standing on a balcony with my mother, who was much fairer than me.” Lettie looked off into an unseen distance as if she were watching it replay again before her age-clouded eyes. “I was brushing her long, black hair, ever-so gentle. She was a frail thing, my mother, prone to headaches and long bouts of taking to her bed. I loved her so and I loved to brush that long, silky hair of hers. I always took care not to tug or fight the tangles, but to stroke them out slow, over and over, until they got good and gone.”
“I remember.” Dixie smiled, recalling the times in her childhood when Lettie had combed through her snarled wet hair without so much as a snag.
“Founder Fulton thought I was my mother’s serving girl and he came straightaway to the house to ask could he hire me off to come tend to his wife and the new baby they was expecting. My mother saw it as the answer to a prayer, seeing as she was so sickly and worried how I’d get on after she was gone.” Lettie fell silent.
Dixie could see in the woman’s ancient eyes how much she still loved and missed her mother. It was a sentiment Dixie knew well.
“Founder Fulton promised my mother that if I said yes and come along, he would look after me, look after my spiritual welfare, and that I’d always be treated like one of his own while in his home.”
“But all those years, Miss Lettie, everyone thought you were the maid when you should have been the mistress of the household. That’s not being treated as one of—”
“That was reality, child. I was the baby maid for a time, until that baby grew up. Then not long after that, the baby come back to live here, and we had more babies to raise.”
“One of them yours.”
“Yes, one of them my Helen Betty.”
“How did you keep who her father was a secret, Miss Lettie?”
She shrugged. “At the time, I figured ain’t nobody cared what a little colored baby maid did, who her child was, or even who her child’s father was. Looking back now, I reckon more folks knew, or at least suspected, than let on. But they never said a thing. They wouldn’t, long as they thought we wasn’t married and I was kept in my proper place.”
“Why?”
“Marriage, now, that represented a threat to too many people. To say back then that a colored and a white could love one another like a husband and wife, to think that a little brown- skinned woman could be respected as a partner by the town’s founder, it would have scared lots of folks—scared them silly. And when a thing like that happens, ain’t no one safe.”
Dixie’s heart ached for all the wrongs she realized Miss Lettie had endured, for all the misunderstandings, many of them her own, that had affected how people had behaved toward the old woman. “But you loved and respected my great grandfather no matter what people might have thought of it, I can hear it in your voice when you talk about him.”
“Yes, I did, as he did me. I never once doubted Founder Fulton’s affection for me, though he rarely showed any kind of emotion toward anyone. That’s the way men acted back then.”
“What about Helen Betty?”
“He loved her, too, dear, but you have to understand—”
“I know, it was a different time.”
“And Founder Fulton was a man of his times, and his times were even farther back than mine. He was over sixty when we married, you understand. I was nigh onto forty my own self.”
“Oh.” Dixie blinked. “I guess I didn’t realize that.”
“He acknowledged Helen Betty and provided a fine upbringing for her and remembered her generously in his will.” Lettie looked away. “For all the good that did her.”
Dixie wanted to ask about the cryptic remark, but before she could find a way to phrase the delicate question, Lettie had started on her tale again.
“When Helen Betty was still quite young, her daddy passed over so that she never really knew him. But we went on living here, your grandfather running that fool automobile dealership of his that never earned a nickel and your grandmother and me raising our babies together. Strange as it may seem to you, we didn’t stop to think what was fair or who deserved to inherit what. We were a family—one of our own making and not to everyone’s taste, for sure, but a family all the same.”
“A family that pretended to the world that you and your child were outsiders, Miss Lettie.”
The old woman set the chair rocking and laid her head against the small, white pillow tied to the back of the seat. “I suppose that’s so. And suppose days came I wasn’t none too happy about that. But it’s all so long ago, child. I’ve let go of any ill feelings I might have harbored and I ain’t no outsider now, not in my heart, not in God’s eyes.”
“But—”
“Founder Fulton been dead half my lifetime ago, Miss Dixie Belle. That’s a considerable long time.” Lettie’s mouth stretched into her broadest grin, revealing the pale gums where she’d been missing teeth since before Dixie was born. “Why you want to fuss over all this now? It don’t make sense and it don’t change nothing. It is what it is: the past.”
“It’s not entirely the past, Miss Lettie.” She laid her hand on Lettie’s bone-thin arm. “You say you feel like you’re a part of this family and you are, just like Sis is, just like Grandpa.”
“Now, you don’t got no call to set to bad-mouthing me.” Lettie held her hand up, coughing out her dry cackle.
Dixie shook her head. “What I mean is we all love each other, but because of this secret you’ve kept for so long, there’s a part of our family that’s missing. You have a grandson--”
“Ain’t the secret that kept him away, lamb.” Lettie shook her head and pursed her lips before she went on. “My Helen Betty was hardly sixteen when she met that no- good Wallace Summers. I begged her not to see him. She ignored my advice. I warned her that if she ever told him about who her father was she might be placing herself and me in jeopardy”
“You actually feared for your lives?”
“It was turbulent times for colored and whites. Who knows what might have happened, and without Founder Fulton alive to protect us...”
Dixie cringed, her stomach tied in knots at the idea of what that must have been like for this sweet, dear soul. “Oh, Miss Lettie, I am so sorry. How many times you must have wanted to just—”
“Blessed is the man who endureth temptation: for when he is tired, he shall receive the crown of life which the Lord has promised them that love him.” She quoted from the book of James without having to open so much as the cover of the Bible still resting in her lap.
Dixie could only nod.
“Helen Betty never told Summers about who her daddy was, I’d swear that much is true.” Lettie placed her hand on top of the Bible as if she were taking an oath in a court of law. “And she promised not to tell her son until he was full growed. Of course, you know she died before she saw that happen.”
“Then don’t you owe it to her, to yourself, to our family to correct that, Miss Lettie? To tell Fulton the truth?”
“Fulton.” She gave a weak smile and her eyes closed. “You found him then.”
“Found him? You mean you knew?”
“Well, I did tell you and Mr. Walker that I had a grandson who was a lawyer in Jackson at a time when you both said you needed a lawyer. Don’t get much better of a rowboat than that, girl.”
Dixie laughed. “Then you want to see him? Because he said you—”
“The question is does he want to see me, lamb?” Lettie’s usually rasping voice grew strong. “It’s been his choice all this time. I ain’t gone nowhere. He could have found me if he wanted.”
“He said you told him he wasn’t welcome.”
“I never did no such of a thing. That Wallace Summers, now, he was not to set foot in this house. Onliest times he ever did come around he come asking after money because he’d spent my girl’s inheritance and he figured to go through mine.”
So Lettie had received some share of the family money. It gave Dixie some comfort to know Founder Fulton had taken care of his wife and child financially She wished he had done more—much more.
“That weren’t the worst of what that Wallace Summers done, you know that. After Helen Betty passed, Fulton was welcome in my home, but not if he come a-toting that man behind him. I don’t think I have to tell you why that is so.”
Dixie bowed her head. “No, ma’am.”
“Now, if my grandson wants to be a part of this family, he has to take that first step.”
“But you told him not to come back. Coming here makes him choose between his father, whom I’m sure he cares about, and you, whom he hardly knows.” Dixie’s pulse skipped as she realized she had never spoken so defiantly to Miss Lettie in her life. Still, she pressed on. “I don’t think you’re being fair!”
“I’m too old and too ornery to be fair, lamb.” She rocked and laughed.
“Well, I’m not so old, but I can sure be ornery if I put my mind to it.” Dixie stood and turned to leave, calling over her shoulder as she did, “Guess that means that I don’t have to be fair, either.”
* * *
“She only wants to know that her grandson has come back to her out of love, not because of some long-kept secret family connection, Dixie. Is that so wrong?”
“They are both so sure they are right. That’s what gets me.” Dixie shut the passenger door to Riley’s truck, the solid clunk reverberating across the parking lot of Fulton’s office building. “Too sure to even listen to the other side and each willing to fight like fools to defend their erroneous positions.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing I didn’t catch on to that family resemblance earlier.” Riley followed her across the lot. His sarcasm came without venom, more from frustration than anything else.
Yes, if one word could describe the time he and Dixie had spent together today, frustration would just about do it. He’d made such big plans for how he would use this time, how he’d dazzle Dixie, make her laugh, touch her heart, then finally confess his love for her.
“I know...oh, you mean…” She whipped around and crinkled her nose up at him. A hint of amusement in her eyes mingled with the wariness she’d worn all morning long like some women wear a second layer of makeup. “I’m going to pretend I find that hysterical so I can keep myself from smacking you across the back of the head. You can thank the family generosity gene for that, I suppose.”
Before he could voice his thanks for all the things she made him grateful for, she stopped just outside the door to the building. He watched her breathe in, saw the moods shift over her beautiful face. Then her expression went still.
“I am in full possession of all my faculties,” she told him. “Common sense included. Now, you have your goals—”
“To give Fulton some very basic instructions about dealing with Marcia, to hear any advice he has to offer, and to get a really good lunch.” He held the door open for her.
“And I have mine, which is to convince Fulton to make up with Miss Lettie.” She swiped her hands together to illustrate how smoothly she expected it to go.
He smiled and gave a quick, silent prayer that all would indeed go well for Dixie today. She’d handled her talk with Miss Lettie yesterday better than he’d hoped. Now what he offered on her behalf helped to focus him as well. His heart swelled. He wanted what was best for her, and right now that was having him in a positive frame of mind, strong and supportive, ready to help her in any way he could. “Then let’s go pay a visit to Cousin Fulton.”
“He does know we’re coming, doesn’t he?” She jabbed the elevator button.
“We have an appointment.”
“Daddy never made appointments with the Greenhows. He’d just barge into their offices like John Wayne in a business suit and start barking out orders. Either that or he’d call over there and say ‘Howard, get over here pronto!’“ She bellowed it out in what he imagined was her best imitation of her father pulling rank on poor ol’ Howard Greenhow.
It was just nervous chatter, Riley knew, but it seemed to help her relax, so he laughed and nodded to encourage her.
“Then he’d time it to see how long Howard took to get from his office to Daddy’s. Daddy said it was his way of keeping Howard in shape. That if he didn’t do it Howard would turn into a ball of blubber.” She exhaled slowly, fiddled with her mother’s pearls then laughed. “The truth was, Daddy didn’t like it very much when Mr. Greenhow Sr. let his son take over. He thought Howard was soft and spoiled and didn’t appreciate how hard some people had to work to bring home a paycheck, so Daddy made sure the junior partner worked for his money”
“No wonder Greenhow longed for the day when he could take charge of your family businesses.” He put his hand to her back and guided her onto the elevator and the doors rolled shut. “Think he’s gotten over losing that yet?”
“Cashing your check as payment for his part in the sale of Fulton’s Cartage went a long way toward assuaging his battered ego, I’m sure.”
Riley nodded.
The buzzer blared to announce their arrival on Fulton’s floor. A gentle backdraft blew over them as the door slid open. They stepped outside.
“This is it.” Riley met her gaze. “You ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be. You?”
“Hey, no problem. The hardest thing I’m facing here today is picking the place we eat lunch.” Riley opened the door to Fulton’s office. “As for the rest of it, I’m just going to trust—”
“Riley?” A woman with hair as wavy as his and almost as dark stood up the second he walked through the door.
His heart stopped. Or that’s what he supposed must have happened, otherwise he’d have felt something, thought something, done something except stand there, his entire body numb, and choke out, “Marcia?”
Chapter Seventeen
“Your sister just showed up at my office this morning unannounced. I tried to call to warn you, but you’d already left town and your cell phone must not have been on.” Fulton stood at the center of the room, his arms crossed like a sentinel keeping watch over Riley’s best interests—and his openly hostile sister.
“His phone had a little, um, accident.”
Riley felt Dixie slip into the room behind him. She edged in stiffly, standing near enough to seem supportive but not so close that her presence intruded on his reunion with his younger sibling.
The full weight of Riley’s scrutiny was not with either his lawyer or with Dixie.
He remained riveted to the spot where he’d come to a dead halt when he’d seen Marcia sitting in the outer office. Now she sat perfectly still in the middle of a row of chairs. Though dressed sedately and thinner than he ever remembered her being before, that did not keep her outfit from looking too teenaged for her to pull it off with much style.
She wore her dark hair shaped close to her face, as if those wisps could hide the crow’s feet and the early beginnings of sagging cheeks, which gave her the appearance of someone aged by more than just the passing of time. The sight of a few coarse curls of gray near her temples and in her bangs took him back. How could his little sister, the girl he remembered more like Wendy looked no
w than as this grown woman, have gray in her hair? It spoke to him of how much time had gone by, how much they had lost together as a family, and it saddened him.
Despite how disappointed he was over Marcia’s actions regarding Wendy, despite how angry he felt when he thought of how much Marcia had worried Momma, she was still his sister. Part of him wished he could tell her off but good for everything she’d done to those he loved, but another part wished he could just open his arms and wrap her in a reconciling hug.
“I’d jump up out of this chair and yell surprise, but then you might get the idea that my coming home was going to be some kind of party.” Marcia crossed her legs, leaned forward, and gripped the arm of her chair. “When, big brother, it’s going to be anything but.”
Riley’s jaw tightened, but he fought the impulse to grit his teeth. He fought every instinct, in fact, to seem defensive or antagonistic. Instead of folding his arms over his chest in a show of putting up boundaries and closing himself off to his sister after all these years, he pushed back his sport jacket and tucked his hands into the front pockets of his jeans.
Remembering his mother’s advice and his own promise to not back down regarding Wendy’s welfare, he steadied his breathing, swallowed to clear away any emotion from his tone, and looked his sister square in the eyes. “What do you want, Marcia? Why are you here?”
“Well, I couldn’t exactly go home, now could I? Seeing as you’ve picked up and moved and didn’t leave a forwarding address with anyone who would share it with me.” Her chin trembled, but her eyes narrowed in cold defiance.
Riley wanted to believe the tremble, but he had to respond to the defiance, for Wendy’s sake. “That’s all happened in the last six weeks. Anytime in the last six years you could have returned home and found us right where we’d always been.”
“Waiting with open arms, no doubt.”
“Just waiting, Marcia. And hoping.”
“Hoping what?” She rose slowly and turned to face him. “That I’d fall off the face of the planet and make everything easy for you to take my child away from me forever?”