Dinner is waiting when they get home: fried fish, potatoes, bright and bitter collard greens. Gabe sits at his usual spot at the kitchen table, his mother to his left, his father to his right. His grandmother sits across from him, though her setting is empty, and she is asleep. Gabe finds it difficult to look at her, the spittle that has collected in the lines around her mouth, the fuzz of her chin, the way her lips fold in over the place where she once had teeth. He stares at his food, which sits mostly uneaten on his plate. He lost his lunch sandwich in a bet with Chub Larson over who could spit the farthest, and he knows he should be hungry, but he can’t bring himself to eat. He pushes the fish around with his fork, the crisp brown skin and the flesh, Buddy Cunningham’s voice sounding in his ear: nigger fry, nigger fry, nigger fry. And he can’t help wondering what it looks like, a man being fried to death, whether Willie Jones’s skin will bubble and crisp like the batter around a fillet.
He sets his fork down and looks up. His parents both stare at their plates as they eat, their knives and forks clacking. As an assistant prosecutor, his father used to tell them stories at dinnertime, about the thieves and arsonists he tried, about schemes of small-scale embezzlement and insurance fraud, mostly petty crimes. When Polly became DA, Willie’s case was his first, and he does not talk about it; the silence is so ringing that Gabe thinks Willie might as well be sitting at the table. Gabe knows his parents have tried to shield him from almost everything to do with Willie Jones, but talk around town has been enough to poke chinks in the armor they’ve tried to fashion. The details of Willie’s case and trial are all still hazy, but they’ve been slowly coming into distressing focus.
He looks at his father—the lines bleeding back from the corner of his eyes, the hard bone of his nose, the flat space between his eyes, the quiver of muscle along his jaw as he chews—and for a frightening moment Gabe can’t find in all those features the father he knows. He can’t see the man in the backyard, shirtsleeves rolled up, pitching him a ball, or the man with the fishing rod and tan hat at the edge of the bayou, or the man sitting on the edge of Gabe’s bed at night, reading glasses on the tip of his nose. For a frightening moment, studied hard, his father’s features combine into the face of someone he can’t recognize, someone willing to send a man to death, and he feels himself reel the way he did when he took a slug from the Kane twins’ father’s flask, the world suddenly shot into the distance. Gabe finds he has to close his eyes.
“Son,” he hears, in a moment. His father’s voice.
Gabe opens his eyes, and dares to look. His father is his father again.
“Everything OK?”
Gabe nods. He looks down at his food, pushes his plate away.