My father came back holding hands with Reverend Alicia Maya, who looked absolutely radiant in the last full rays of sunshine.
“Alex,” my dad said, “Mom. I’d like to introduce you to my best friend, the woman whose love saved me. My wife, Alicia.”
For the umpteenth time in the last two weeks I got tears in my eyes.
“I’m so sorry I had to lie to you that day in the cemetery,” Reverend Maya said, coming to me and holding my hands. “But your dad thought that things would be better for you if you just went on believing he was dead. He considered his chance to see you a gift from God, and he said that was enough for him. But after you’d left Florida, he realized it wasn’t enough. He wanted to know you, to be a part of your life. To do that, he had to come back and face Bell and destroy the life he’d made for himself.”
The story came out from the two of them as the day ebbed toward twilight, and everybody at the party stopped to listen.
Reverend Maya found my father just the way she’d told me, weak, homeless, and limping into her church one day. She’d allowed him to sleep there. She’d provided him with counseling and helped him battle his addictions.
“Through Alicia, I found God and have been sober for thirty-four years,” my father said. “I was guilty of abandoning you boys, and you, Mom, but I was terrified of what might happen to me and to all of you if I ever returned to Starksville.”
Reverend Maya said, “He confessed it all to me one night about a year after he started living in the church. He told me about seeing Marvin Bell kill your mom, about being arrested and shot, surviving the gorge, recovering with the help of his beloved Clifford. I told him I believed that God would forgive him.”
“Is that when you fell in love with him?” Nana Mama asked.
“No, love came later, after the war, when I realized how close I’d come to losing him.”
The night my father met Alicia Maya, he had fake papers that identified him as Paul Brown. But shortly after he confessed to the reverend his true identity, a tragic miracle occurred.
A nineteen-year-old named Peter Drummond came into the Reverend Maya’s church seeking counsel, just as my father had a year before. Drummond told her that he was an orphan and had been out of foster care in Kansas City for less than a year. He’d been homeless, and so, on a whim, he’d enlisted in the Marine Corps.
“He said he’d made a mistake,” Reverend Maya said. “That he never should have enlisted and that he knew he was incapable of handling the pressures of war, especially of killing other men.”
She paused, and my father put his hand on his second wife’s shoulder, said, “You couldn’t have known.”
“I know.” She sighed. “Turns out he was in far deeper psychological and spiritual pain than I’d sensed. I told him to pray about it and trust that God would show him the right…” She choked up.
My father said, “Drummond went out in back of the church and shot himself in the face with a shotgun.”
“Jesus,” Pinkie said.
“We were the only ones who heard the shot,” Reverend Maya said. “I was hysterical when your father and I found him.”
“She told me to call the police, and I didn’t dare because I was scared,” my father said. “Then I started going through his pockets. And there was his ID and his enlistment papers that said he had to be at Camp Lejeune in two days.”
“You switched papers,” Ali said.
“Very good, young man,” my father said. “Alicia wanted no part of it at first, but I showed her that, for me, it could be a total rebirth and a chance to do something hard and good for the first time in my life.”
“No one questioned the papers?” Bree asked.
“Both ID photographs weren’t the best, and he’d shot himself in the face,” Reverend Maya said. “The police in Pahokee never questioned that the dead man was Paul Brown.”
“And the Marines were glad to have me,” my father said. “I made corporal and went to Kuwait during the Gulf War. I was part of a crew that was supposed to seize and protect the oil wells that the Iraqis set on fire as they retreated. One blew, and I was too close.”
Reverend Maya said she and my father had kept in contact, writing letters back and forth before the explosion.
She said, “When I saw him lying there at the VA hospital, I don’t know, I just knew that I loved him and couldn’t live without him ever again.”
“I felt the same way,” my dad said. “You don’t know what it did to my heart when she came in to see me.”
“And then you became a cop,” I said.
“I’d been a criminal,” he replied. “I figured I’d be good at catching them.”
“He’s good at it,” Reverend Maya said. “But when he found out that you’d gone into the same field, Alex, he was beside himself with pride. He’s followed your career every step of the way.”
“And you bump into each other in Belle Glade, Florida,” Nana Mama said.
“What are the odds of that happening?” Jannie asked.
“Astronomical,” Reverend Maya said. “That’s why I believe we were guided by a divine hand.”
“You believe that?” Nana Mama asked.
“I do,” she said.
“I do,” my father said.
“I do too,” I said.
“How else do you explain it?” Nana Mama said, and she smiled.
We all fell into a reflective quiet that had me wondering about the mystery that had been my life and how perfectly complete I felt at that moment.
“I’d like to make a toast,” my dad said. “So everyone get a glass.”
By the time we’d all gotten glasses and gathered together again, fireflies were flashing in the pines.
My dad raised his ginger ale and said, “To our extended family and all our friends, living, dead, and now living again: May God bless the Crosses.”
“Amen,” Nana Mama said, and we all echoed her. “Amen.”