The Kindest Lie

by Nancy Johnson

  Eli had learned bid from Papa. Many of the whites from Fernwood had played bridge, euchre, or rummy until they caught on to bid under the tutelage of Blacks at the plant.

  “Ruth Tuttle. Is that you over there? Your brother didn’t tell me you were home for Christmas.” Gwen, who had worked as an equipment tester, had to be in her sixties by now, but she still looked good, as most Black women did with age, all the years settling in her hips and on her face making her appear strong and assured, not old. She had put three sons through college with her plant job.

  “My brother’s getting forgetful in his old age. Good seeing you, Gwen.”

  Smiling, Ruth rested her hands on the back of Eli’s chair. He grunted and she checked out his promising hand. He had partnered with Gwen for bid, and in the smoky shadows of the bar, Gwen’s eyes followed his and right away Ruth could tell from the way her tongue ran over her top lip that she had the big joker and she was letting Eli know they were about to grab another book.

  The table shook when Gwen dropped that last card, the big joker. Eli howled after their win and rammed his fist into his chest, bellowing a warrior’s chant. After a few more games, Eli took a seat at the bar.

  “I’ll have what he’s having,” Ruth said to the female bartender, who had to be freezing in her low-cut tank top. Reindeer antlers sat atop her head. Ruth slid onto the stool next to her brother.

  “You still here? Why?” he asked.

  “I’m in a bar.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s nowhere near closing time and I want a drink.” The bartender passed her a Bud. Martinis and margaritas were her usual drinks of choice, but on her brother’s turf, she drank what he drank.

  The high from his bid whist win had been short-lived, and she watched it wear off like an old Band-Aid that refused to stick. He rubbed his thumbs over the condensation on his beer bottle as if that bottle were his only friend. She wanted to gather him to her and cradle his head against her chest, but she reminded herself this was a grown man, her big brother, not a child.

  “Get your drink on, then,” Eli said. “I hope you not a lightweight anymore. We’ll see if you can hold your liquor.”

  Glancing down to the other end of the bar, Ruth eyed a bald guy in a tight muscle shirt licking his lips and looking at her like she could be a steak dinner and he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Eli positioned himself to block the man’s view, the way the church mothers draped a handkerchief over a young woman’s lap to cover her legs when she wore a short skirt.

  Nursing her beer, Ruth thought about all the brothers out of work, filling their hours here at the bar, some of them lured to criminal enterprises. She remembered Lena talking about gangs planting seeds in Ganton.

  Turning to her brother, she said, “I hear gangs are cropping up here doing drug deals and recruiting kids to help them.” Just saying those words made her fearful for her son.

  Cocking his head, Eli said, “Who did you hear that from?”

  “Lena. She’s worried about Midnight.”

  “Look, she don’t know what’s going on. I heard about kids at that gas station over on Main getting hassled. But trust me, nobody’s pushing weight right there in the open. And they ain’t messing with little white boys like Midnight, either.” He chuckled. “Real gangsters know that gas station is hot as hell with cops around somewhere.”

  She trusted her brother’s take on it, knowing he’d paid for his own mistake dabbling in drugs. Still, she didn’t want her son anywhere near this kind of activity. “You said kids are getting hassled?”

  “Yeah, you got these wannabe gangsters. In this town, there ain’t shit to do sometimes but pretend you the Nino Brown of Ganton.”

  “I wonder if Midnight’s been approached.”

  “I don’t know, but I do know that if Butch Boyd knew how to raise his kid, he’d stay out of trouble.” The mention of Butch’s name reminded her of that disastrous dinner at Lena’s.

  “Surprised Butch isn’t here playing cards, since so many from the plant are here today.”

  Disgust crept over Eli’s face. “Better not show his face.”

  She wanted to ask her brother about the outrageous claims Butch had made, especially about their grandfather. She had believed in Papa just as she had Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. Even a few years after she discovered both to be mythical, she pretended to still believe, because somehow, she needed larger-than-life legends to steady her in the real world. She wanted to know what Eli thought, but she couldn’t risk him exploding here in public. Not with so many former plant workers nearby.

  “Why do you and Butch hate each other so much?”

  “A man doesn’t just hate another man for the hell of it. There’s always more to it. That more usually has something to do with a woman. A woman that was his or one he wanted to be his. I know that’s what you’re thinking, but it’s never been like that between Butch and me.”

  “Okay, it’s not about a woman. What is it about then?” The last time Ruth remembered the two scuffling had been at a Pratt pool hall as teenagers, arguing over playing heavy metal or hip-hop on the jukebox. But that squabble didn’t last.

  Eli ran his hand over the top of his head. “We’re just different and we don’t mix. That’s all I got. Anyhow, don’t want to ruin my buzz.”

  “What’s really going on with you, Eli?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How did that interview go?”

  “It went.”

  “Does that mean you got the job?”

  He tilted the bottle back and took a big gulp. “They said, ‘Can you lift fifty pounds?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ They said, ‘Can you work nights and weekends?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Then they said they needed somebody who could track inventory online using Microsoft Office applications. ‘Can you do that?’ And, well, that was the end of that. Game over.”

  Frustration clouded his face, resignation pressing his shoulders until they slumped. The same set of grandparents had raised them both in the same house. The same Ganton schools educated her and Eli, and yet her flower bloomed while his never made it beyond a bud.

  “You have to reframe your thinking. Even if you don’t meet every requirement, walk into those interviews like you’re at the spades table about to run a Boston on everybody. You need a winner’s mindset.”

  He laughed. “You must’ve learned that shit in college. Psychology, right? Some book about a hundred ways to get inside the mind of a broke brotha? Am I right?”

  The bottle of Bud swung in Eli’s hand when he talked. Ruth threw up both hands in surrender, hoping he’d see she had come in peace.

  “Look, I’m sick of you feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not the only one with problems. I haven’t told anyone this, but there’s a guy on my job that I trained and now he’s getting better, high-profile assignments.”

  “Damn. Them white people be tripping. Sorry about that, sis. But at least you still got a job.”

  “How are you so sure they’re white?”

  Eli twisted his mouth into a smirk as if he didn’t need any confirmation. Her eye roll must have told him he’d guessed correctly.

  “Hey, Eli?”

  “What’s good, lil bit?”

  “Do you ever feel like life is getting ahead of you, like you can’t control what happens anymore? I mean, it’s your life, but somebody else is pulling the puppet strings. Nothing is the way it used to be or the way it should be.” She knew she wasn’t making much sense, not even to herself. Her thoughts jumbled in her head.

  Eli glanced at his phone. “I know where I should be right now. On the plant floor. The smell of hot steel all around me. All those machines coming alive in my hands just like a good woman. I can still hear the buzzing and other sounds in my head. Sometimes, they wake me up in the middle of the night. It’s like they teasing me, you know.”

  Even the memory of the plant made his face glow, and then that flame was extinguished just as fast. Ruth ached for her brother to regain everything he had los
t.

  “Cassie should be by your side through this thing. She’s your wife, the mother of your children. One thing I can say about Mama is that she stuck by Papa when he got sick. She hung in there till the end.”

  Eli took a swig of his beer. “Mama’s a soldier, man. Ride or die. Now, Cassie. She took it real good in the beginning, rubbing my face, whispering sweet words in my ear. You know how y’all women do. Talking ’bout how she loves me more than biscuits and gravy and I would always be her husband no matter what. That’s what she said until the bill collectors started calling. Then I started smelling some other brotha’s sweat on her.”

  “I didn’t know,” Ruth said, her hands tightening around her bottle. She thought about Xavier and how she’d really handle it if he got demoted at his company, or worse, let go. You like to think you know yourself and those closest to you, but you don’t until you’re tested.

  “Like I told Cassie, she saw my lack, not my love. Then she had the nerve to try to keep my kids from me.” Eli smashed a peanut shell in his fist and his whole body shook, as if to shed the memory.

  He’d never opened up to her like this before, but then again, she’d been a kid most of the years they’d spent together. Men kept their hurt tucked away deep on the inside. If it rose high enough to spill out of them, they ran it off on the basketball court, drowned it in a bottle, or buried it deep inside a woman. But they rarely talked it out.

  Ruth gripped her brother’s arm and forced him to look at her. “Don’t let that happen. Fight for my niece and nephews. I know how much you love them, and I’ve seen the way they look at you. Like you drew every star in the sky by hand.”

  He made a gurgling sound as if he were speaking underwater. “There’s nothing like having your kids in your life. When I miss weeks with mine, it’s like years, you know.”

  Keeping her eyes on her beer, Ruth said, “I know it’s not the same, but I’ve tried for eleven years to convince myself that I could just go on with my life not knowing anything about my son. I was fooling myself.”

  Eli threw his head back. “Here we go. You still digging, ain’t you?”

  “Does the name Stanley DeAngelo mean anything to you?” She studied his face.

  Unexpectedly, he nodded. “Yeah. A lawyer. Kind of shady. That cat had a reputation for being a fixer. Bribing judges and shit. Made problems go away, if you know what I mean. Got locked up for some years, I think. Why?”

  Papa’s legacy helped Eli get his job at Fernwood. Still, even a misdemeanor followed you. What if her snooping blew this adoption fraud case wide open and people started asking questions because she came to town asking them first? Even if it was long ago and for a minor offense, Eli already had a criminal record, and now she knew he’d done time on gun charges. If he were implicated in another crime, would anyone ever hire him again? But she needed answers.

  Swiveling on her bar stool to face her brother, she said, “Did DeAngelo have anything to do with my baby?”

  He appeared genuinely surprised by her question. “What? Hell, no. Let me tell you. Mama took care of the adoption. I don’t know what lawyer she went through, but I can’t see it being him. She not crazy.”

  She believed Eli when he said he knew nothing about a connection to DeAngelo, but her intuition nagged at her. “Okay. Maybe. Maybe not.” She nibbled on a few peanuts underneath the cracked shells on her brother’s napkin.

  Alcohol lubricated her brother’s tongue, this she knew. He used to let secrets slip all the time—once revealing a foreclosure on an uncle’s swanky new house, another time exposing a cousin’s extramarital affair. Right now, he was just drunk enough to tell her the name of her son.

  “Who are they?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The people raising my son. What are their names?”

  Eli paused, maybe to consider the question, and Ruth could tell he knew her son’s adoptive parents. “Mama and Papa, they’re our blood, but they’re not our biological parents. But they were the ones who were there all those years for me and for you. That’s real family. That means something. The people raising your son? They’re good people and he’s their son. You can’t change that.”

  In that moment, Ruth felt like she was paddling upstream against a strong current. The closer she got to her baby, the larger the waves got, and she didn’t know how to swim through them.

  “You talk about family. I’m your family. I’m your sister. Yet you won’t help me.”

  Eli swished his beer like mouthwash. She could see the muscles in his neck straining. “All I did was help you. I helped you keep your dirty little secret so you could go off to college and make something of yourself. So you could do something with your life and not end up like me.” He stretched out his arms, swinging the bottle.

  Ruth tensed on her bar stool. “You’re drunk and you’re unemployed. That’s why I’m not going there with you right now.”

  She watched barely contained rage pass over Eli’s face, tightening and twisting it until each swallow of beer stilled him. Ruth fought differently with her brother as an adult. Their quarrels as children could be excused by youthful innocence and were often smoothed over by some new preoccupation the next day. But now, they knew how the world worked and their barbs carried a more potent poison. They knew better, yet they kept hurting each other anyway.

  Twenty-Three

  Ruth

  The front door to Lena’s house sat ajar, only a sliver of dark space visible. Ruth pushed it open. The text from Midnight had been urgent, and she’d rushed over from the tavern. Midnight’s message read: please come. granny is sick.

  Lena suffered from high blood pressure and diabetes. Mama said that sometimes Lena came home from work too tired to stick herself at night with the insulin needle. She was still relatively young, but the stress of trying to keep the shop in business had taken its toll. A slow death was how Mama put it.

  The house smelled of mildew and cigarettes now. Ruth rotated in a full circle in the living room, taking in the stacks of unopened mail, coupon clippings, and credit card solicitations covering the dining room table and the floor.

  “Lena. Are you in here? Midnight! Lena!” she called.

  Silence.

  On the mantel above the television sat an eight-by-ten photo of Midnight as a baby in Hannah’s lap. For the first time, Ruth noticed her straight nose. Square jaw. Sandy hair. Her chromosomes passed down to Midnight.

  It didn’t seem fair that this woman had been snatched from her son’s life. Standing behind them in the photo was Butch, with a fresh crew cut, his lips turned up in a smile that almost made him look handsome instead of perpetually angry as he usually did.

  A clicking noise came from one of the bedrooms down the dark hallway. Midnight appeared, bumping a small red suitcase against the wall. He smelled like sweat and whatever food had crusted on his shirt. Maybe lasagna or leftover spaghetti. Ruth pulled him by his arm into the living room, the roller bag clattering after him, scraping the baseboards.

  “Tell me what’s going on. You had me worried to death when you sent that text about Lena. Where is she?”

  “She’s okay now.” Midnight plopped on a chair, crumpling the unopened mail beneath him. “I needed to tell you something and I didn’t think you’d come.”

  Need poured from his slender body, desperation stretching out like a hand bobbing above the ocean’s crest, like a swimmer begging someone to pull him up before he drowned. Ruth leaned against the wall, her arms folded, vacillating between hugging and shaking him, and, in the end, she settled on neither.

  He twisted the handle of the luggage. “Are you gonna tell Granny I lied to make you come?”

  The suitcase he carried fell open, socks and underwear tangled with turtlenecks and T-shirts in a tumble on the floor.

  “You must’ve wanted me to come over here to give you a ride to the bus station,” Ruth said, gesturing toward the open suitcase.

  “Huh?”

&nbs
p; “I assume you’re planning a trip.” Her gaze swept his belongings strewn across the floor. From the looks of it, he planned to run away from home.

  He just shrugged.

  “Where’s your grandmother?”

  “She had to work late. Doing the books.” The ritualistic way he said it, she knew Lena must’ve told him that many times before.

  “And your auntie?”

  “Gettin’ high somewhere, I guess. Little Nicky’s at the babysitter’s.”

  When Midnight rattled off all the reasons that he found himself home alone at night, she heard no sadness in his voice. And that had to be the saddest part about it. He didn’t expect more, and any indignation he might have felt had been wrung out of him.

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “Nope.”

  Ruth made her way to the kitchen, where she found a loaf of white bread, sugar, eggs, and a carton of milk only one day past the expiration date. She sniffed and detected a slight sour smell along the rim but decided it would do.

  “It’s too late for breakfast,” he said, pointing to the eggs she was cracking into a bowl. “It’s suppertime.”

  Midnight rested his elbows on the counter, and she handed him a whisk.

  “French toast for dinner is special in a way. It’s breaking the rules, kind of like when you eat dessert before dinner.”

  He seemed to accept that explanation, even be pleased by it. She didn’t know how to cook too many dishes, and relied on Xavier for most meals, but luckily, she’d watched Mama enough to remember how she did the French toast. While she heated Crisco oil in a skillet, Midnight mixed. The ripples made by the whirling liquid seemed to entrance him, and he beat it faster and faster. Ruth smiled, thinking about how Mama’s arm fat would jiggle every time she beat anything while cooking.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “Just thinking I might have to take you home with me. You’re even better than my electric mixer at getting rid of lumps.”

  He whipped even harder, getting so carried away that some spilled over the side of the bowl, but she didn’t bother to wipe up the mess.