Similar Transactions: A True Story

by S. R. Reynolds

  Joey had even hosted a barbecue and invited Sara. “On Easter Sunday we had a little cookout and I got to see my daughter, my son and all my grandkids. It went real well,” Sara said, a soft smile in her voice.

  17. FAMILY MATTERS

  Sasha opened her laptop early one morning to discover an unforeseen contact from a surprising source:

  Hello, I’m Jenny. I would like to talk to you. Call or text ANYTIME please.

  What followed was a narrative that Sasha hadn’t expected to hear. For Jenny, Joey’s older cousin, memories are often hazy. Whole blocks of her childhood recollections are gone. Timelines are hard to keep straight. Some people in her family consider her unstable, unreliable, but they don’t realize the psyche-altering trauma she’d endured at the hands of her uncle Larry Lee.

  Jenny, born in Detroit, was the oldest child of Ruby’s oldest child, Nancy. When Ruby divorced and eventually moved back to Knoxville, only Brad and Larry Lee came with her at first. Nancy remained in Detroit. But relations between Nancy and Jenny weren’t always so good. At some point, when Jenny was in elementary school, she joined her grandmother in Knoxville. Again, the memories are fuzzy, but she recalled that Larry Lee wasn’t around. At least not at first. Maybe he was back in Detroit. Maybe he was locked up. She couldn’t remember. But however long it was, it constituted a happy period of Jenny’s youth.

  She remembered the time she spent with her grandmother to be the best. Ruby was good to her granddaughter, but not the touchy-feely kind of good. Intimacy and emotional expression were not components of this family’s dynamics. “Do your homework!” “Get off the damn phone!” were more likely to be heard than, “How was your day?” But Ruby smiled at Jenny, made time for her, took an interest in her. She was the center of her granddaughter’s world; she was the best thing that Jenny ever had.

  Jenny believed that Ruby saw the errors in the way she’d raised her own children—although one of those errors, according to Ruby, was working long hours at multiple jobs, which she continued to do—so she tried to do things differently with her granddaughter. When Jenny came to live with her in Knoxville, Ruby doted on her. She made it to her school luncheons and took her on weekend outings to local places like the historic Blount Mansion in Knoxville. They grew grapes and vining flowers all down the side of the house; Jenny remembers a house full of flowers and toys.

  But the days of just Ruby and Jenny came to an end when Larry Lee returned. From where, Jenny didn’t know. She also couldn’t remember exactly when he came back or how old she was at the time. It was around when her mother came down from Detroit and moved in next door. Maybe. All she remembers is that at some point her sadistic teenage uncle began molesting and then raping her. He told her that she could never tell, that if she did, he would kill her mother and grandmother—his own sister and mother. Only a scared child, Jenny believed him. Larry Lee even had a system. He would knock three times on his bedroom wall—BangBangBang—and Jenny knew it was time to go in there, for the terror to start all over again.

  When recalling these stories, Jenny used lingering impressions as markers: the brown cable box that sat on top of the TV as Larry Lee lounged on the couch watching it; the color of the shoes she wore when she ran to tell her mother what had been done to her. Jenny couldn’t quite remember when she finally told, but she recalled the scene back at her grandmother’s house before and after.

  Larry Lee knocked three times on his bedroom wall—BangBangBang. Sitting in the living room on the other side, a pony-tailed Jenny gasped and jumped simultaneously, a feeling of panic coursing through her tiny mind and body, like a tsunami coming ashore. She stared down at the new blue sneakers with the orange stars, the ones her grandmother Ruby had just bought her. With her heart pounding and her mind racing, she stood up and took a step forward. She knew she had a choice. She could either go into her sick uncle’s room, endure another round of torture and torment under his miserable, fat, pimply, sweaty body, or she could escape out the front door.

  For once, she chose the latter. But she made it only as far as the porch stoop before she squatted down on the top step, pulled her knees in tight to her little-girl chest and wrapped her arms around her shins. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if she could go through with it. What if her uncle made good on his threats? What if he killed her grandmother? And worst of all, what if no one believed her? A soft rain began falling and something in her head snapped: NO MORE!

  When Ruby bought her oldest granddaughter those new shoes, she had told her they would make her run fast. Jenny ran fast now, as fast as she could, to confess to her mother what Larry Lee had been doing to her. Don’t let him catch me, she prayed as her legs, propelled by fear, raced forward in a slapping flurry toward her destination. At the time, it seemed like a million miles, even if it was only nearby.

  Jenny has little recall of arriving, telling her mother everything. Yet she remembers the scene in her grandmother’s kitchen when the family gathered there later to confront Larry Lee. Ruby, Nancy and Brad listened as Jenny recounted what she had already told her mother. When she was done, Brad called Larry Lee out of his bedroom. Larry Lee walked into the kitchen with a bed sheet wrapped around his torso in place of a shirt, an unpleasant image that Jenny could never successfully forget. With four pairs of eyes trained upon him, he was questioned about Jenny’s allegation. Larry Lee squirmed and made excuses before he confessed to his family that he had, in fact, had sex with his young niece.

  To Jenny, Brad had always been a fun uncle, but what he did next made him her hero uncle. He grabbed his runty little brother by the throat with his left hand and with the right he wound the sheet around Larry Lee’s thick neck. Then he dragged his bound brother outside where he pummeled him fiercely with his broad fists. “You don’t do that to my niece,” Brad snarled. “Here, Jenny, kick him!” Which she did, with her new shoes. Multiple times.

  “Stop! Stop!” Ruby cried, tears pooling in her eyes.

  “You’re going to kill him!” Nancy pleaded.

  When Brad’s hands came to a rest, Larry Lee lay unconscious on the ground, and the matter was closed. It would join an ever-growing list of family secrets, rarely if ever acknowledged again.

  “Ruby ignored the ugly parts,” Jenny recalled. She had always looked up to her grandmother, so as an obedient grand-daughter, she had followed suit; she sealed off her pain and encased it in thick but fragile layers of mistrust and denial.

  Eventually, Jenny moved in with her mother, but her grandmother remained the bright spot in an increasingly darkening life. When Sara came to live as Larry Lee’s wife in the basement of the Fern Avenue house, back in 1980, she had befriended Larry Lee’s ten-year-old niece, who has fond memories of their brief time together. Jenny eventually confided in Sara about the abuse by Larry Lee. Sara felt great compassion for her. Jenny carries a distinct impression of the two of them roller skating together. To young Jenny, Sara just seemed older. She had no idea that Sara herself was so young, just fifteen, or that Larry Lee was abusing her, too.

  After Sara made her escape, Jenny heard family members tell stories about her drinking and drug use, anything to make her look bad, but they never said anything about Larry Lee’s mistreatment of her. And Jenny never knew of her uncle’s arrest and conviction in Florida in 1982—when she was twelve—for the kidnapping and rape of Katherine McWilliams.

  But she remembers him bringing Maryanne Parker back to Knoxville when he came home in 1986. He had been gone five years, and his niece was no longer a child but an adolescent with a discerning eye. What does she see in him? Jenny wondered.

  By the time she was a teenager, Jenny had learned to repress her memories. She rarely thought about the inexplicable things her uncle had done to her, but she never coped with them either. There must have been some kind of trigger the day the memories came flooding in. She was eighteen-years-old and driving on the interstate the first time she involuntarily flashed back—and it was bad. Suddenly she was relivi
ng a horrific experience so vividly that she struggled to discern the here and now from the there and then.

  She saw the pimples on the rotund abdomen of an adolescent Larry Lee, heard his grunts and noises and the threatening words he uttered to coerce her into compliance, re-experienced his violations upon her body as if they were happening all over again. She had a complete emotional meltdown. Afterward, there was a period when Jenny fantasized about killing her rapist uncle, shooting him at point-blank range.

  In therapy, Jenny confronted some of her buried trauma, but it took a long time—well over a decade—before she was able to admit out loud that she’d been “molested and brutalized.” She gained insight into aspects of her family’s dynamics that she labels “dysfunctional.” She also learned that if she didn’t let go of the past, Larry Lee would forever have power over her. But emotional stability has remained elusive for Jenny throughout much of her adult years, her moods rolling and tumbling like massive clouds roiling across the sky during a summer thunderstorm.

  In a family that shares very little, Jenny, as a rule, was privy to even less. When Larry Lee left for Georgia in 1989, Jenny did not know that his departure was related to a murder investigation. She did know that he’d attacked someone in Georgia and had gone to prison there. But she never knew about any of the other victims. All those years, Jenny thought she and Amanda were the only ones. So the news about Michelle’s case shocked and upset the vulnerable, striving-to-be-stable Jenny. She confided as much in an email to Sasha:

  I’ve had nightmares about Michelle, yelling for me to help her. It was so dark I couldn’t find her. I just kept saying, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I remember him lumbering over me and knowing he probably did the same to her.

  But while learning about Michelle and the other victims stirred Jenny’s memories and related emotional pain, the overall process of talking to Sasha and learning about the other victims helped Jenny to move forward, she said, to feel less isolated.

  Jenny recognized that her grandmother “coddled” Larry Lee, yet defends the behaviors as those of a mother. But watching her mother and grandmother send money and “care packages” to Larry Lee in prison made her “nauseous,” although she kept those thoughts and feelings to herself. In this family, Jenny told Sasha, you learned to “go along to get along.”

  18. RUBY AND EDSEL SMITH

  In a family that stored its secrets—individual and collective—in the deep, dark recesses of silence and repression, information about Ruby’s ex-husband, Edsel Smith, was hard to come by. When Sasha interviewed Joey, he admitted he knew almost nothing about the man who was his biological grandfather, except that Ruby became angry at the mere mention of his name. The only way Joey even learned his name was by accident when Ruby rattled it off absentmindedly (as seniors sometimes do) in a list of male family names, trying to get to the one she meant to say to begin with: Brad, Edsel, Larry, Joey, she finally said.

  “God! I wish you wouldn’t do that!” the teenage Joey shot back. “Edsel? Who’s Edsel?”

  Ruby’s parents never approved of Edsel Ray Smith, but she married him anyway. Seven years her senior, he’d been a Private First Class during WWII. After the war, they moved from Knoxville to Detroit, where he found good factory work. They had four children together: Nancy, Bonnie, Brad, and Larry Lee.

  The first child, Nancy, was born the year they married. She was followed the next year by a second daughter, Bonnie. Nine years passed before Ruby gave birth to a third daughter, Carrie, whose arrival created a family scandal, because Edsel knew that he was not Carrie’s father. Few in the family know the specifics of that story, but Carrie was given up for adoption and taken in by a relative. As she grew up, she remained in contact with her biological mother and siblings. And, despite the scandal, Ruby and Edsel’s marriage remained intact. Brad, their first son, was born the year after Carrie. Their youngest child, Larry Lee, came along four years later in 1961.

  The union of Ruby and Edsel lasted nineteen years, coming to an end in 1965 the same year that their second born, eighteen-year-old Bonnie, took her own life. Edsel was arrested on suspicion that he had raped his daughter, but he was neither tried nor convicted. He and Ruby divorced, and she moved back to Knoxville with Brad and Larry Lee. The family rarely spoke Edsel’s name again.

  Jenny told Sasha she knew only that her grandfather had existed and was now deceased, having died somewhere in Florida. Her mother, Nancy, didn’t talk about him. Joey recalled hearing that after Ruby left Edsel, but before she moved back to Tennessee, she had some wild times with some characters in Detroit who were supposedly connected to the mob. At some point, Edsel remarried. He and his second wife lived in Bonita Springs, Florida.

  When Joseph “Joey” Ray Smith was born in 1980, he had been named after the middle names of each of his grandfathers: Joseph for Sara’s father and Ray for Larry Lee’s, even though Larry Lee hadn’t seen his dad since he was four. After Sara fled with Joey, Larry Lee had some kind of altercation with someone in Sara’s family for which he was charged with felonious assault. He was never tried, but it’s reasonable to imagine that someone in his family—or perhaps an attorney—suggested he go away for a while. He did. He moved to Clearwater Beach, Florida, where he got another job at a Holiday Inn.

  Had he chosen Florida because he thought he might rekindle a relationship with his father, who lived with his second wife in Bonita Springs, a few hours south of Clearwater? Jenny and Sasha both wondered, but they couldn’t say for sure.

  Less than a year later, in early 1982, Larry Lee was convicted and sentenced to prison for the kidnapping and rape of Katherine McWilliams. He added the names of his father and stepmother to his prison visitation list. Upon his release, he moved to Collier County, Florida, which butts up against Bonita Springs. But in July of 1984, just three months after Larry Lee was paroled, Edsel passed away. The following summer, Maryanne pressed charges against Larry Lee. On the arrest report, he listed his stepmother as his closest relative.

  Sasha thought Maryanne Parker might be able to shed some light on the dynamics between the father and his son. But Maryanne knew very little except that the mere mention of Larry Lee’s father, whom she never met, sent Larry Lee into a rage. He told her only that Edsel left when he was young and wasn’t around when he was growing up. If he gave it much more thought than that, she recalled, he went crazy. In his rage he would throw things across the room or take out his frustration on Maryanne, often with his fists.

  But during Larry Lee’s stay in Florida, there was plenty of family drama going on in Knoxville to keep his mind occupied on other things. Brad, whose whereabouts were reportedly unknown for a while, was wanted by the authorities, and Nancy, who’d moved back in with Ruby, was in trouble herself. She’d been arrested for receiving and concealing stolen merchandise—lots of it—in a scheme with some of Brad’s friends. The loot included guns, valuable electronics and jewels taken from break-ins at five separate homes.

  Nancy waived the grand jury and pleaded guilty. She was facing five to ten years in the Tennessee Penitentiary for Women, and although she’d previously spent a few days in jail on shoplifting charges, she was scared. She begged for another chance to pull her life together.

  “I am sorry for what Nancy has done,” Ruby wrote to the probation officer preparing a pre-sentencing report. “She has had a rough time. I know that she has learned her lesson. And I know she has turned to God for help”—Nancy had begun attending church just after her arrest—“and I believe now she is going to live a good and clean life. I pray that she will have a second chance.”

  On the date of the hearing, Nancy was granted probation and the “second chance” she’d requested.

  But trouble still plagued Ruby’s children. One day when Brad was forty years old, he walked into Ruby’s house, laid down on the sofa, reminded his mother that his dog had a litter of puppies in his basement, and went to sleep. He never woke up. Jenny told Sasha that she suspected Brad had willed
himself to death through his drinking and drug abuse. Others in the family claimed that Brad had, in fact, chosen to end his life.

  “Suicide runs in the family,” Jenny told Sasha. Carrie, the daughter who had been born to Ruby and an unknown father and then adopted, was another of Ruby’s children to die by her own hand. She’d been raised partly in Louisiana but was living in Knoxville in October 2008 when she ended her life.

  Joey knew that Ruby had regrets about her kids, the way she’d raised them, the way they’d turned out. And he thought that perhaps she had faced the truth about Larry Lee, even if she never admitted it to anyone. He told Sasha about one conversation in which Ruby had opened up to him, unusual for her or anyone in his family. She told him that being a single parent had been difficult, that she’d been trying to fill both parental roles, but with long hours working multiple jobs just to make ends meet, she hadn’t been around as much as she needed to be when her kids were growing up, when they needed her most. The way Joey heard it, she blamed herself for her children’s mistakes, and he could tell that Larry Lee was there in the mix. She knew, or at least she’d been told about, the things he’d done: to his niece, to his wife, to all the other young girls. “Grandma knew he was guilty,” Jenny had told Sasha. “She knew he was.”

  In early July 2010, on a Monday, Ruby passed away in the Fern Avenue house, surrounded by the remaining members of her family. She was fifty-four days short of her eightieth birthday. “She was ready to go,” Joey said, “and it was good… because her pain was finally gone.”

  Before Ruby died, she had shared a secret with Jenny. She too had experienced abuse as a young girl. Ruby told her granddaughter that she was sorry for all she’d been through, and that she loved her. “People in this family don’t often say, ‘I love you,’” Jenny told Sasha. “It meant a lot.”