HE STAYED for two more days to see it through, long enough for Wally to be arrested for first-degree homicide in the death of Joe Sweet, just one of the heap of charges Shelby County rained down on him once anyone bothered to look closely. The prints Darren had lifted from his truck the night he found the bloody fox in the truck’s cab belonged to Wallace Jefferson III. No one could put the drive-by shooting at Geneva’s on him, but Van Horn—who himself had a lot to answer for, considering that all this shit had played out under his nose—arrested Wally for that, too. But the thing that made the Texas Rangers offer Darren his job back were the charges brought against Wally for drug possession with the intent to sell, based on evidence seized during a search of the icehouse: a small meth lab working out of the kitchen, bags of product and scales galore. Isaac might have been arraigned and already sitting in a cell in the county jail. But Wally’s name was about to be added to the federal task force’s suspect list. Darren had been right about the drugs and the Aryan Brotherhood running free in Lark, Texas, but he’d been wrong about everything else. Michael’s and Missy’s murders were race crimes, yes, but that was mainly because of the ways race defined so much about Lark, Texas, especially in terms of love, unexpected, and the family ties it created. He had forgotten that the most elemental instinct in human nature is not hate but love, the former inextricably linked to the latter. Isaac had killed Michael to keep Geneva’s love, to have a seat at her hearth. Wally had killed Joe because he couldn’t accept, or even understand, what he felt for Geneva, just as he couldn’t stand the fact that they were, all of them, related. Geneva, Lil’ Joe, Keith Jr., and Wally.
They were one big family.
It was the same with Keith, a man who, despite himself, loved a son who shared the blood of a black man. It was an eternal connection that shamed him, a fact he couldn’t erase no matter how many Brotherhood tattoos he got when he ended up back at the Walls in Huntsville for killing Missy—no matter how much distance he tried to put between his white skin and Geneva’s brown. Wally’s and Keith’s lives revolved around the black folks they claimed to hate but couldn’t leave alone. It was, as his uncle Clayton would say, an obsession that weakened them, that enraged and eventually enslaved them within their own hearts, Darren thought.
The morning of Missy Dale’s funeral, his mother called twice. Both times Darren let it go to voice mail: We need to talk, son. A term that felt like neither endearment nor fact but an angle, a naked play for his attention and affection. As he finally packed up his truck to leave Lark for good, he had a terrible sense of foreboding that there would be trouble waiting for him at home.
Geneva had twice asked if he was hungry, and then, unbidden, she made him a plate for the road. It was as close to expressed gratitude as she would ever get. That and the way she’d hugged him a bit longer than she needed to. She’d been in a bright mood for such a dark day because Laura had brought the baby by.
“I don’t think he knows what’s going on today,” Mrs. Jefferson said as she handed Keith Jr. to his grandmother. “Missy’s people left him in my care, and I don’t think he really needs to be there.” She was wearing a black dress with a ruffled collar, which she fussed with. “Why don’t you take him?”
Geneva had the toddler on her hip, his chunky legs swinging at her waist as she stood at the door to her cafe seeing them off, Darren and Randie. As he backed out of the cafe’s parking lot, he watched Geneva in his rearview mirror, and the sight of her put a lump in his throat, made him think of his own mother—long for her, even—in a way he knew would only cause him pain. He’d arranged for Randie’s car to be picked up by the rental company so he could drive her to Dallas himself. He wanted a long good-bye with her and a chance to say the same to Michael—to in some small way pay his respects to a man whose wife he’d come to have tender feelings for, a man he’d tried to do right by, whose death was a reminder of the meaning of the oath he’d taken as Ranger. Along the ride, they talked about what was next for her. She wanted to stop working for a while, she said, maybe sit still somewhere. There was a town outside Vancouver she’d fallen in love with a few years back. Maybe this was her chance to start over. She wasn’t sure about Chicago, wasn’t sure she wanted any part of this country after it was all said and done and Michael was laid to rest—services she’d have to put together on her own. “You going to bury him up there?” Darren asked. “In Chicago?”
“Where else?”
He looked out across at the Texas landscape, the low hills and pines.
They were about forty miles outside of Tyler.
Randie grew silent. “Just think about it,” he said.
They rolled into Dallas in silence, and as he parked the car outside the medical examiner’s office, she reached across the leather seat for his hand. “I was wrong,” Randie said. “About a lot of things.” It mattered that Darren wore the badge. Those were the last words she told him as they stood in the hallway outside the room that held her husband’s body, just after she said thank you.