“Well, she’s at the school,” Joseph said, closing the door on the subject.
“Living there?”
“What I said.”
“On campus, then?”
Iris opened her mouth to speak but changed her mind. Her eyes darted to the boy Darren assumed was her son, Sera’s brother. Darren took in more of the living room. The wall opposite the front door had waist-high built-in shelving. The Fullers had a large Bible and no other books, not even a drugstore paperback. There were school photos on the shelves — of the boy and of a teenage girl whose face looked fuller than the one he’d seen in the Rho Beta picture online. But it was the same girl. She was in a cap and gown the same blue as the Thornhill logo on Joseph’s uniform. There was also a sprinkling of porcelain figurines on the shelves — horses and angels with golden wings, a sleeping baby cushioned in a white cloud — the kind of art you pick out of the backs of magazines left behind at a doctor’s office. A middle-of-America-white-bread-and-mayonnaise aesthetic that Darren frankly associated with white folks. He might have thought the Fullers had wandered into the wrong home were it not for the smell of the oxtails cooking in the kitchen and the framed photos of the obviously black family everywhere — photos that he now saw included one of Joseph and his son at what looked terrifyingly like a rally for the forty-fifth president of the United States. Joseph had his arm around his son as they stood in front with a sea of red hats behind them.
For a good ten seconds, Darren thought he was seeing things.
Joseph Fuller was a Trump supporter?
It made about as much sense as a hog driving itself to slaughter.
Even putting in for gas.
Darren felt a buzzing confusion about where he was and with whom he was talking, paranoia lighting little fires at the base of his skull, warning signals in the back of his brain. He felt his politics taking over. Or was it just his common sense that told him this fact about Joseph Fuller and his family made them suddenly suspect, unknowable to Darren, at least? He caught Joseph eyeing him closely, taking in his clothes, the contours of his face, as if he were trying to place him, as if he recognized him. Darren felt himself flush, felt a rush of fear, remembering his lawyers telling him his likeness was out there among Trump followers. All it takes is one idiot with a gun.
“Are you a friend of Sera’s?” her mother, Iris, asked.
“No way this man is a friend of Sera’s,” Joseph answered for him.
He’d seen Darren studying the photo from the rally, and Darren’s distrust of Joseph Fuller was now being mirrored back to him, the older man sneering at Darren’s judgment, which he sussed out with the ease of a man who’d many times been on the receiving end of poorly disguised expressions of revulsion. Joseph lifted his chin in a pose of unsullied pride. There would be no apologies in this house. “I voted for Obama. Let’s just get that out of the way now. So I don’t want to hear none of that race-traitor mess.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Darren said.
But his expression must have betrayed everything.
“You’re one of them, huh?”
Iris frowned. “Joseph, he’s a guest.”
He ignored her. “World’s a different place since Obama was in office.”
“That I think we can agree on,” Darren said. The only thing, he thought, as he was forever dumbfounded by how differently folks saw the country these days.
“I like a man who wants to earn my vote,” Joseph said. “Who doesn’t assume he’s got it in the bag, who doesn’t think he can talk down to me. I like a president who sees me as a man, who respects the fact that I think and weigh things for myself.”
Darren let out a weary sigh. What bizarro Mayberry town had he walked into?
He got back to the point. “Where’s your daughter, Mr. Fuller?”
“Already told you.” Then, eyeing Darren, he said, “You a police officer?”
He might have been fishing for what, if anything, he owed Darren, whether he had to answer any more of his questions. But Darren felt an accusation somewhere in Joseph’s tone. Were the grim warnings from his lawyers making him hear things too?
Iris stepped forward, newly attentive to this stranger’s sudden appearance in their home. “He’s a cop?”
“Ranger, ma’am,” Darren said, regretting the affirmation as soon as it slipped out of his mouth. It had been pure reflex, a refusal to truck in shame over what had been his life’s work. “I’m Darren Mathews, and I’m a Texas Ranger, ma’am.”
It was a lie, and it was also his truth.
“Is Sera okay, Mom?” It was the boy, speaking for the first time.
He looked at Iris, an anxious expression on his young face.
“She’s at school, Benny,” Joseph said gruffly. “She’s fine.”
Then, realizing he’d barked his anger at the wrong person, he said, his voice softening, “You got her text just yesterday, son.” He looked at Iris then, seeming to prompt her.
“That’s right,” she said, taking a steadying breath. She tucked the dishrag into the waist of her dark blue jeans and smiled at her son. “Seraphine’s got her head in the books. We’ll see her when she comes up for air, Benny. Soon, she said, remember?”
“So she’s living somewhere on campus, then?” Darren asked.
Iris’s voice shook a little as she said, “Why do you ask?”
He saw a mother’s love in the deep wells of her eyes, felt her fear.
He sensed she was speaking out of turn, taking a chance before Joseph shut her down, which he did just a second later. “Iris, don’t say another word to this man.”
Joseph opened the front door.
He didn’t need to shove Darren out of it because the Thornhill cop he’d encountered earlier was waiting on the welcome mat, his hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Time’s up,” the officer said.
9.
