Bell’s aging Nissan wasn’t parked in the driveway of the house on Lanana Street, Darren thanked God. He was prepared to go through her if he had to, but he was afraid of what he might do to her on the other side of a night in the San Jacinto County jail. The house’s front door was open, and through the screen, Darren could hear the whinnying neigh of a horse and the shrill pop of a gun as he came up the porch steps. Pete was watching a Western, the volume sky-high. Inside, Pete was on the couch, long legs stretched out in front of him. A man Darren couldn’t have picked out of a lineup a week ago. Pete sat up and said, “Who is it creeping around out there?”
He set a ham sandwich down and reached for the TV remote.
“Your nephew,” Darren said.
He hung in the doorway as Pete shut off the TV. The two men stared at each other, neither sure what the protocol was here. Did a fatal break between mother and son mean that Pete and Darren had no relation either? Darren didn’t know, but he would step no further over the threshold until he was assured that she wasn’t in the house. “Ain’t gotta worry,” Pete said, reading his mind. “She’s gone.”
Bell was out on a job interview. “You’re good, if this the way you want it,” Pete said in a way that quietly invited Darren to consider that he might be making a mistake, that in this lifetime, you only get one mama.
“I’ll be in and out,” Darren said, heading toward his mother’s bedroom, where they’d sorted Sera’s things when he’d arrived at this house. He wanted to be done and gone before she returned home, he said as he entered the blue bedroom where Sera’s belongings were stacked neatly between sheets of wax paper, the way they’d left them.
Methodically, he laid out the items in a grid across the bed, re-cataloging it all in his mind and working his way to the school notebooks and papers. He started scooping these together in their own separate pile as Pete leaned into the room. “Not gon’ stop you,” he said. “But don’t think I’m not gon’ tell it, second she walks in the door. It ain’t no lies between me and my baby sister. However it is between y’all.”
“Lies, Pete,” Darren said. “That’s all it’s ever been with me and my mom.”
“Aw, now, you shoulda seen how she was tore up after they took you to jail.”
“She tell you the part she played in getting me arrested?”
Pete wore a wounded expression, hearing this, upset by someone speaking so acridly about his sister, his lifeline. His whole world. “She would never hurt you.”
“Too late.”
“The woman she is now, not a drink in almost two years, she wouldn’t —”
“Let me ask you something,” Darren cut in, “when she went to San Jacinto County a week or so ago? How many days was she gone? ’Cause she came to see me around the exact time it appears there was a grand jury hearing testimony about whether or not to string my ass. And she just happened to be in San Jacinto County.”
Darren felt a flame of anger licking at his ears, making him hot.
“That’s a hell of a coincidence, don’t you think?” he said.
“In her own way, she loves you —”
“She’s the one who gave them the gun in the first place.”
“Gun?” Pete now looked thoroughly confused, wore the expression of a child that had wandered off into the world and gotten lost. “What gun you talking about, son?”
“Uncle Pete,” Darren said, using the term as an endearment to soften his tone. He just wanted to get Sera’s schoolwork and get out of there before Bell returned. “I’ll be in and out of here in just a few minutes. Why don’t you go back to your program?”
Pete hung his head and nodded.
Then he shuffled back into the living room.
Darren went through the rest of Sera’s things, making sure he’d missed no other school notebooks or papers. His hand brushed against the bottle for Sera Fuller’s prescription for Lenarix, the sickle cell medication that her mother said had changed her life, made college possible. He pocketed the bottle and then scooped up all of Sera’s schoolwork. A few moments later, he walked down the porch steps with Pete following behind him, looking distressed, as if he’d had a chance to mend Bell and Darren, and he’d blown it. He stood on the porch, his good hand gripping the paint-chipped railing.
And because he was still angry, Darren turned back to his uncle Pete.
“She even made up a story about how my father died, did you know that?” Darren heard the curdling bitterness in his voice and hated himself for taking this out on Pete. “If he didn’t go to Vietnam, how did he die, then?”
“Oh, son.”
This time, Pete’s voice took on a note of pity.
Darren was the confused child now, the one who was lost.
“You trying to catch her in something when dead is dead, son. That pain don’t know or care the why or where of it. Life is wild, son, ugly and crazy, then as it is now. People are doing the best they can. And maybe I don’t know all that’s gone on between you and your mama, but I feel grateful it swung you by here, even if just for a little bit.”
Darren didn’t respond, just kept walking to his truck parked at the curb.
It’s not that he didn’t want an uncle Pete. He just needed at least one person wholly on his side, who saw Bell for who and what she truly was, and that wasn’t Pete, whose voice carried all the way into the cab of Darren’s truck as he climbed inside.
“Looking just like Duke, boy.”
Darren closed the truck door on Pete’s last words.
He felt a sour thickness in the back of his throat, as he felt tears he didn’t understand well in his eyes, a pressure building in his skull. He was newly gripped by a longing to hear the circumstances of his birth from the one man in all this he had so rarely considered: his daddy. Darren “Duke” Mathews. Something he could never have.
26.
IT HAD started simply enough: Rose-Marie Stein, née Hammel, a first-year professor in the economics department at Stephen F. Austin, had expressed interest in the fact that Sera Fuller’s family lived and worked at Thornhill, a place she’d had only vague information about, though no one driving past the town on Highway 59 could miss it, this mix of industry and residential living. As Stephen F. Austin University had various disciplines of study — agriculture, logging and its history in the state, and environmental science — that the community of Thornhill seemed to encompass in one way or another, Professor Stein suggested Sera write a paper about the town and her family’s experience there to demonstrate how she might approach a major in medical humanities, a catch-all field of study that a student could easily get lost in without the strong guidance of an adviser. Sera was precociously bright and curious, and she had a vested interest in medicine as a business and wanted to study public policy as it related to health care and how it affected millions of Americans, many with chronic illnesses like her. Sera said she’d come up with a take on the return of the mill-town model to twenty-first-century industry and present it at the start of the term. From there, Professor Stein said she’d see if Sera was serious about pursuing a degree in medical humanities and decide whether she would serve as her adviser.
“The Mill-Town Model and the Future of American Industry” by Sera Fuller sat on the passenger seat of Darren’s Chevy truck. He’d pulled into a parking spot in Nacogdoches’s town square, across from a gazebo. Sera’s schoolwork was spread all over the truck’s cab. The paper was surrounded by spiral notebooks, all of them bent and a little stained from having been pulled out of a trash dumpster. There was red ink across the front of the paper. Left-leaning cursive writing. Only it wasn’t a grade or even an accolade.
No Well done or Nice work.
Instead, written across the title page: And you have actual evidence of this?
By now, he’d read through the notebooks twice, and he’d read Sera’s paper four times. Her research had started in her own home; she’d rifled through her parents’ “office,” a tiny nook in a corner of the kitchen where her dad kept a lockbox of important papers, birth certificates and such, and on top of it sat a weathered manila folder with a copy of her parents’ employment contract with Thornhill, as well as years’ worth of monthly statements they’d received, an ongoing ledger of sorts. Since she’d lived there, Sera had never understood how, if they finally had housing and her medical bills were taken care of — the single thing that had most destabilized their family’s economic situation — they had so little money left over for all the things she’d dreamed of when they were desperately poor and homeless. Trips to the movies, clothes that weren’t secondhand, or a computer newer and faster than the clunky desktop that came one to a family at Thornhill and on which she had written this very paper, an exercise that finally explained her family’s predicament. Inside that manila folder had been news that her parents were being paid less than minimum wage. Sera wasn’t sure how this was legal, though she noted that Thornhill considered rent on their three-bedroom house, a flat fee for health care, and a technology package that included internet, cell service, and a satellite dish as part of their salary, and it appeared they were being taxed on this total rather than the three dollars an hour they took home in pay. Darren also wasn’t sure it was legal, if this was allowed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But it felt all kinds of wrong. To Sera as well. She had found that it was the same for Rey’s family next door.
