The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  “That’s just dumb.”

  “Makes sense to me. Black people are taking over everything.” He let the straw dangle in the corner of his mouth like Daddy did with his Marlboros.

  Why had he ever thought the way Corey walked and talked was cool? Or that anybody wanted hair so stiff it never moved? Even the name Midnight sounded as stupid as Daddy always said it was.

  Corey picked up two McDonald’s ketchup packets from the glove box, rubbed them between his hands, and then stuck them in his armpits to warm them. After tearing off the tops of the packets, he squirted both in his mouth at the same time.

  “Now that’s dumb,” Midnight said.

  “Not as dumb as what you said about Black people.”

  “Whatever.”

  “We only get one month out of the whole year, just February. And it’s the shortest month.”

  “But white people don’t even have our own month.”

  “Uh, March, April, May, June, July . . .”

  “Oh my God. Check this out.” When Midnight reclined his seat, he saw something that made him forget all about who was taking over the country. A tattered page torn from a magazine poked out from beneath the seat. He pulled it out and held up a picture of two pink breasts.

  “Are those really . . . ? They’re huge.” Corey leaned in so close that Midnight could smell the ketchup on his breath.

  “I know. Have you ever seen real ones, like, up close before?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes, I watch my auntie Glo when she’s in the shower. Hers are really little and weird-looking, kind of like those plastic dropper bottles we use in science class.”

  Corey laughed, and they groped under their seats to see if they could find more magazines when they heard a loud ding.

  “That’s probably my dad,” Corey said. “He wants to go over my decimal multiplication homework.” He zipped his jacket and pulled his hood over his head, still thumbing through the message on his phone. “And then Mom wants to quiz me on vocabulary words.”

  Midnight rolled his eyes. “We’re not even in school right now. It’s Christmas break.”

  “I know. They still give me work to do. Not for a grade or anything. When I finish, we still have to decorate the tree.”

  The tree. How stupid it had seemed when Corey told him they’d driven forty-five minutes outside of town to buy a Christmas tree. Mom had liked the smell of real trees, but they always found one in Ganton. Pines or firs with soft needles. Daddy didn’t decorate at all anymore, and he couldn’t now if he wanted to, since he stayed in Drew’s apartment. Granny just put up the same fake table tree every year, with the spinning Elvis in a Santa suit on top.

  “Your parents are so strict.”

  “Yeah, and I’m gonna be in trouble. I should have been home hours ago.”

  Before getting out of the car, Midnight stuffed the magazine page into his jacket pocket. The feeling was coming back to his toes, and he wiggled them to get the blood flowing. Their footprints were still visible, a road map to quickly get them back to the fence where they’d come in.

  About ten feet into their walk, they heard something rattling.

  “Let’s go,” Midnight said, and sprinted, wiping his fogged glasses with his mittens and adjusting his backpack straps on his shoulders. Corey bolted ahead of him and made it to the fence first. He pulled on the gate, but it must have gotten stuck in the snow.

  The jangling sound got closer and Corey clawed the chain link, using his upper-body strength to pull himself up. Within seconds, Midnight was there, too, and found his foothold on the fence, but with one arm struggled to pull his body to the top. Before he had a chance to look back, he heard the growl.

  Halfway up the fence, Midnight glanced down and saw the little yellow eyes of the German shepherd glowing in the dusky dark, searing into his backside. He clutched the fence wiring. Any slight stumble could end with him being supper for the junkyard dog. Bones had taught him enough about dogs not to stare and make him think he was challenging him. He looked up instead.

  “Give me your hand,” Corey called to him from the top of the fence.

  The dog barked, and Midnight froze, his body disobeying his mind, which told him to keep climbing.

  “A little bit more and you got it.”

  Looking up, he saw Corey’s outstretched hand. The dog lunged at the fence. Midnight lifted himself up another few inches and clasped Corey’s hand.

  The dog’s growls and barks rumbled in his ears as he threw his backpack over the fence and with Corey’s help propelled himself to the other side. He landed with a thud onto the snow’s cushion, his breaths coming in short grunts.

  “We made it.” Corey dropped to the ground, too, lying on his back.

  The dog was still running and jumping on the other side, fangs bared, lunging at the fence. A trickle of blood oozed from Midnight’s wrist where he must have scratched it on the fence. He licked the blood and then grinned at the dog, sticking his tongue out at him because he could.

  At home that night, Midnight found Granny at the kitchen table going over the books for the shop. Her fat fingers snaked the length of a piece of paper filled with lines and numbers. Auntie Glo and Nicky must have been out visiting one of her weird friends.

  Without looking up from the paper, Granny said, “I made you chicken teriyaki with rice. No skin on the chicken. Doctor says we got to eat healthy.”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said, not hungry, the adrenaline from the day at the junkyard still filling him. From the smell of the house, Granny had already had Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. No greasy bag in the trash. She must’ve hidden it in the big bin out back, but he knew. Still, he didn’t mention it.

  She put away her books and calculator and began setting up the Monopoly board on the kitchen table. They started playing and he watched Granny’s eyes follow the tokens on the board.

  “Never put all your eggs in one basket,” she advised. “Invest in a lot of different properties. One goes bad, you still got others.”

  “Did you and Mom ever play?” he said, taking out a cash loan early in the game.

  “Oh, yeah. I taught her this game and everything else about money.”

  He wondered if Daddy would’ve known how to manage his money better if he’d played Monopoly. In the first round of the game, Midnight sold and mortgaged all his property and ended up in bankruptcy. Even though he knew it was just a game, his loss made him ashamed. When he thought she wasn’t looking, he snatched six hundred dollars from the bank.

  “I saw that,” she said. “Cheaters never win, Patrick.”

  Even with her bad eyesight, she noticed everything. He thought about Corey’s dad working at the real bank with all that money every day and for the first time realized the Cunninghams were likely very rich.

  He said, “Granny, do you wish we lived at the Boardwalk? I do. We could own it and charge people a ton of rent. We’d stay on the top floor.”

  She rubbed her eyes and wiped the crust that collected in the corners. “I’ve never had a lot of money and I’ve made it through. I never stole a dime from anybody.”

  Midnight didn’t know whether or not to believe her. He didn’t smell any cough syrup on her breath, so maybe she was telling the truth. “If I was poor and really hungry, I think I’d steal food.”

  “It’s never right to steal, I don’t care how bad off you think you are.”

  “You mean like what Daddy said Mr. Eli and his grandfather did at the plant?”

  Granny stacked the play money, put away the tokens, and folded the board fast. “Don’t let me hear you bring that up again. Butch should never have said that. He has a temper sometimes and doesn’t know what he’s saying. You misheard part of it, so don’t go repeating it. We don’t know what anybody did or why.”

  Following him to the couch, she waited for him to get settled for the night and then sat on the edge by his feet. She opened a fresh pack of Newports and put a cigarette between he
r lips.

  “I remember when Daddy wasn’t mad,” he said.

  Gazing out the window, she turned away from him to blow out a ring of smoke. “You’re too young for memories,” she said. “You’re supposed to be out there making memories, not looking back on them like some old man.”

  Whenever it got quiet and dark outside, those times he had nothing better to do, thoughts from years ago rattled around in his head. He couldn’t shake them. “What color were Mommy’s eyes? Do you remember?”

  He watched Granny’s flabby neck jiggle when she swallowed. “They were kind of like a chameleon, I guess. When the water at the river had that deep blue color to it, her eyes matched it. But when she’d be out playing as a kid and get blades of grass stuck in her hair, her eyes looked green to me. I guess she had that kind of beauty where you didn’t know what to expect or when. Always a nice surprise.”

  Those times when Granny still put him to bed at night, he thought just maybe she’d live forever, but then light came in from outside—the moon or maybe just a streetlight—and it showed him all the things he never noticed in the daytime. Like how her skin bent and folded. The way her eyes had dulled over time like a lightbulb burning out. What would happen to him when she died? She told him not to worry about it, but he knew it could happen. And if Daddy couldn’t take care of him anymore, who would?

  “Am I really going to have to go to Louisiana?” He looked away from Granny, terrified of her answer.

  She patted his knee. “I can’t say for sure right now.”

  Closing his eyes, he faked sleep until he heard Granny tiptoe away. Miss Ruth’s face appeared in his mind, and he wasn’t sure why, but he allowed himself to picture what it might be like to live with her. They’d conduct paper towel experiments and she’d learn the lyrics to Blake Shelton songs. He’d ride in her Infiniti on summer days with the top down, and it wouldn’t matter that Daddy called her a traitor for driving something other than an American-made car.

  He tucked those thoughts of Miss Ruth into the part of his brain that helped him sleep and usually guaranteed good dreams at night. But still, he tossed on the sheets and couldn’t get comfortable, his mind twisting around Granny’s words about him moving to Louisiana. I can’t say. Her words played over and over in his head and he kicked the covers violently, yet nothing drowned out the sound of her voice. I can’t say.

  He got up and crept down the hall to his bedroom. Kneeling, he ran his fingers along the rough carpet under his bed, pushing aside pencils, notebooks, and an old bike helmet. Finally, he made contact with his dusty old nursery rhyme book from when he was a child. He pulled it out, flipping through the pages until he found the slick, slightly bent photograph. Lying down again with a flashlight, he studied his mom’s face until his eyes burned. He’d snuck the picture out of Granny’s album months ago. It was the only candid shot of him and his mom—the two of them at the Indiana State Fair sharing a cloud of fluffy, sticky-sweet cotton candy. In the photo, a glob of it was stuck to her nose and she was trying to lick it off. The picture came out a bit blurry because Daddy had tilted the camera laughing so hard at how silly Mom was being that day. The memory made Midnight smile, and he held on to that feeling, lying under the covers with the photo on his pillow, until everything inside him dulled to a low, pleasant hum and he fell asleep.

  Twenty-Two

  Ruth

  A haze of cigarette smoke hung in the semidarkness of Wally’s Tavern, stinging Ruth’s eyes. She couldn’t stop thinking about DeAngelo and how he could be the missing link, the compass leading to her child. In a town as small as Ganton, people had to know him, especially if he’d duped so many out of money and had been at the center of multiple adoptions gone wrong. Maybe she could inquire subtly without tipping people off about her own son. And if anyone would know, it would be Wally. She’d been around enough bartenders to know that they heard all sorts of strange things in their line of work and kept many confidences.

  Her eyes adjusted to the shadows and she made her way to the wraparound bar, the sticky floor gripping the soles of her boots. It was two days until Christmas, and a string of lights hung above the bottles. She remembered people saying Wally kept them up all year.

  An older man with a slight bend to his back leaned on the bar holding a wad of cash. When Ruth got closer, she recognized him.

  “Dino, what are you doing here?” As soon as she said it, she realized how obtuse her question sounded. He lived in town, and even if he didn’t, this was a public place and he had every right to be in the tavern.

  He smiled wide, exposing the gold crowns that capped his back teeth. “Well, I’m actually here to p-p-pick up some garlic wings for your grandmother.”

  Hopefully, Dino didn’t see the surprise on her face. She would need to get used to having this man around. Recovering quickly, she said, “Mama loves her wings. Spicy and breaded, right?”

  “You know that’s right.”

  Wally emerged from the back with two Styrofoam containers of food and handed them to Dino with a plastic bag. How long would Dino be visiting with her mother that evening? Ruth had been staying at Mama’s house every night for almost a week, and he hadn’t been back to the house since she first arrived. But would he stay the night this time, and if so, would she be interrupting when she returned to the house? In the college dorms, her roommates always left a ribbon on the doorknob or some other sign to indicate they had overnight company. But this was new territory—her grandmother—and she didn’t have a clue how to navigate it.

  Dino touched her wrist. “I’ve been thinking. Your grandmother’s been working hard around the house lately and I thought it might be nice for her to get away. Not too f-f-far, mind you. Maybe Chicago for a weekend. Something nice downtown, you know.”

  Mama didn’t do a lot of frills. She was a no-nonsense, frugal woman. But perhaps Ruth had no idea what her grandmother liked these days. Once she married Xavier, their calls became less frequent, and as more time passed, the distance became just as comfortable as the closeness they had once shared.

  She tried to picture Dino and Mama wining and dining in some swanky hotel on the Magnificent Mile and she couldn’t. And the way he said it, it appeared Dino was asking for her permission, her blessing. She had no right to forbid it.

  “That sounds like a wonderful time. Maybe Xavier and I can make some hotel and restaurant recommendations.”

  Dino exhaled, as though he’d been holding his breath the whole time. “Yes, I’d like that.”

  He looped the plastic bag with the wings around his wrist and sat a wide-brimmed hat atop his head. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  The bells on the front door jingled when Dino walked out. Ruth took a seat on the end bar stool and watched Wally hang glasses by their stems on a long rack behind the bar. Two of his kids went to high school with her, and his oldest had played basketball with Eli. Everyone knew Wally. He was a fixture here in Ganton, but she’d left town before reaching the legal drinking age.

  “What can I get you, pretty lady?” he said, and she couldn’t tell whether he remembered her.

  “Right now, I’m just curious if you know this guy. I read about him in the paper.” She held her cell phone out to him with a photo of DeAngelo’s mug shot.

  Leaning across the bar, Wally glanced at her phone. “I can’t place him right now, but I can’t say I don’t know him, either.”

  Disappointed, Ruth said, “That’s fine. It was worth a shot.”

  “Wait, let me see it again.” This time, Wally took her phone and brought it up to his face. Twisting his handlebar mustache, he frowned.

  “You recognize him,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. I didn’t at first. But yeah, of course I know him. Wish I didn’t. That’s the lawyer, DeAngelo, who got locked up in that whole baby deal. Took advantage of some good people. He was just in here about a month ago. Made sure to come in when we were slow, if you know what I mean. Didn’t have to see too many people.”

  Ru
th looked past him to the bottles of liquor lining the wall. “So he’s out of prison and here in Ganton?” Her heartbeat quickened, and she recognized the fear now that she was getting closer to the man who might have the answers she’d been looking for.

  “He did his time at Terre Haute and now he’s got a place over on Wayland, just outside of town. Out in the middle of nowhere. A lot of folks wanted to wring his neck for what he did, so it’s safer for everybody that he keeps his distance.”

  Terre Haute. The federal prison. She’d been using the database for state correctional facilities. That’s why his name hadn’t turned up in her search. Not once did Wally ask why she cared to know about DeAngelo. She got the feeling he enjoyed showing off his knowledge of legendary Ganton characters—criminal and otherwise.

  “Oh,” added Wally, “if you’re looking for your brother, he’s back there at the card table.” So he did remember her.

  She hadn’t been looking, but Mama had been right about Eli spending most of his time here now that he was out of work. In a far corner of the bar Ruth eyed the card table where the best bid whist players were crowned. She spotted Eli sitting with several guys and a few women who used to work on the line at Fernwood. She vaguely recognized the older ones and lamented how it’d been months since they’d lost their jobs. Still, they carried the smell of plastic on their skin from their days at the plant.

  “Rise and fly, my people, rise and fly,” said Freddie, an old man with skin like dry, shriveled autumn leaves. If you lost, you had to get up and go so the next player could have your seat in the game.

  If any of them held anger in their hearts, they either hid it or released it here. Cards slapped the table and people talked smack because they took this card-playing thing very seriously.

  “Don’t mess with this bitch,” Eli said as he slammed a queen of spades on the table.