Cole: Now
I waited to drive away until I saw Erin disappear into the doors of the airport and head for the escalator. I’d wanted to park and walk her in to the security gate, but both of us recognized that we didn’t have the money to pay for airport parking on top of everything else. At this point, every dollar made a huge difference.
I so badly wanted to be getting on that plane with her. I needed to do something: something for my family, something for Brenna, something for Erin.
I couldn’t remember the last time she had called and asked for my help for anything. The sound of her voice on the phone, a mix of panic and shock and joy and devastation all at the same time, had left me confused and filled with an urgent sense of need to do something, anything, I could for her.
The thing is … we hadn’t just lost Brenna. We lost our whole family. I’d spent the past two years watching my wife slowly kill herself, watching my son become isolated and depressed, and I bore the guilt of knowing that much of it was my fault.
As I pulled out of the airport, I dialed Jeremiah.
In some ways the two of us had oddly parallel lives. My dad was a Marine Vietnam veteran, his was an Army Vietnam vet. Both of us were military brats and traveled all over the country, and both of us spent our high school years in the Atlanta area … me in Marietta near the Atlanta Naval Air Station, and Jeremiah in East Point near Fort McPherson. Both of us had grown up interested in engineering and had earned scholarships to Georgia Tech.
But there our similarities ended. He was black; I was white. He was a Democrat; I was a Republican. He listened to hip hop and jazz, and I listened to punk and southern rock. We quickly became best friends.
One time, I dragged Jeremiah to the site of the former Metroplex in Atlanta. Long since closed down, the club was a shithole in an old warehouse in an area surrounded by other old warehouses and had burned down in the late eighties. But someone had rented a warehouse down the street for Columbus Day weekend for a revival of the old club. A lot of the old bands came, like the Sex Pistols, Rotten Gimmick, and Henry Rollins, and a couple new ones on the scene like Blink 182.
Before it burned down, the Metroplex had been like an awakening for me. At the end of ninth grade, I’d told Daddy I didn’t want to go spend any of the summer with Lucas. He was my oldest cousin on my father’s side of the family, the younger son of Daddy’s sister.
“Why the hell not?” he’d demanded.
I’d squirmed but finally told him. “It’s bad there. Big Bill’s always drunk and he’s real quick with his fists. Ain’t nothing to do there but sit around and get messed up. I hate it.”
“Quick with his fists?” Daddy asked.
“With Aunt Donna. And Lucas.”
A quick flash of anger crossed his face. Donna was Daddy’s sister, and I didn’t think he cared for Big Bill. “You ain’t gonna sit around the house all summer playing video games.”
“I’ll get a job.”
“All right.”
I did end up working—mostly cutting lawns and yardwork, going door-to-door in our neighborhood most of the summer. A lot of the houses in the area were occupied by current and former military, men who served at Dobbins or Atlanta Naval Air Station, and they were particular about their lawns.
It afforded me freedom I’d never had. On Saturday nights I’d take the bus into Atlanta then the train downtown. I walked the streets, mouth hanging open like a tourist, staring at the high-rises, drinking up the energy of the city. This was an entirely new world.
I stumbled across the Metroplex by accident, walking up Marietta Street one Saturday night right before I turned sixteen, passing a shitty-looking warehouse covered with graffiti. From inside, the pulsing of drums made windows rattle in their frames.
A girl like no one I’d ever seen before sat out front of the building. She had spiked hair, shaved on one side, and wore a jean jacket with tiny metal spikes embedded in the shoulder. Half a dozen earrings shone on her left ear. She was leaning back against the building, smoking a cigarette. She was remarkably pretty.
“You lost?”
I looked around. At the corner were two guys who might have been skinheads, black leather with heads nearly shaved, both wearing what looked like combat boots.
I had short hair, but it was my dad’s preferred high and tight. I was wearing sneakers and blue jeans and a sky blue T-shirt and probably looked right out of the 1950s. So I just shrugged and said, “Yeah. I guess I am.”
She grinned and stood. “I’m Faith.”
“Cole.”
She held out a cigarette to me. I took it, and she lit it, and I coughed and she laughed at me.
That summer, Faith became my first girlfriend. I ended up, by default, being part of the punk scene for a while. I’d spend my week cutting grass and stacking wood and doing whatever else I could to earn a few bucks, and on weekend nights we’d go see shows at the Metroplex: the Dead Milkmen, Gorilla Biscuits, Flipper, and the Circle Jerks. It was an awakening. I’d never imagined a world like this: colorful and loud, music blasting, the smell of pot smoke, and screams into microphones.
It didn’t last past summer. Faith had dropped out of school and wasn’t interested in anything other than partying. I already knew that life wasn’t for me. The Metroplex closed then burned down, and that part of my life came to a close. I’d occasionally run into her in other clubs or around town, but the magic was over.
But freshman year at Georgia Tech—when I saw the flyer for the Metroplex Reunion—I knew I had to check it out. I also knew I had to drag along my best friend and roommate.
“Nah, man. I’m not into that scene,” was Jeremiah’s first reaction. We were in our room in Cloudman Hall, an early twentieth century red brick edifice decades overdue for renovation. Jeremiah was at his desk, an Introduction to Engineering textbook in front of him. I sat across the room, flyer in one hand and a wine cooler in the other.
“Come on, dude. I need my wingman! Besides, Henry Rollins is going to be there. You’ll love it.”
“Why is that? Is this Rollins guy a jazz virtuoso I’ve never heard of?”
I laughed. “Trust me, you’ll love it. The man’s a poet.”
He grunted. “You know how much I love poetry.”
The next evening we caught the bus from campus to Five Points, which ran right down Marietta Street. The reunion was unmistakable as we approached. Three girls in their late teens and early twenties were standing outside an old building wearing tattered clothes. Two of the girls had fluorescent spiked hair, and the third had a spectacular mohawk, its foot-long spikes radiating from the top and back of her head like the rays of the sun.
After we passed the girls, Jeremiah asked in a falsely innocent tone, “Friends of yours?”
I chuckled. Secretly, I had hoped we’d run into Faith; that she’d gotten her life together maybe just a little; that I could introduce my best friend and the girl who had been my first, and thus far only, girlfriend.
She was nowhere in sight. We entered the temporary club, got our wrists stamped (“UNDER 21” in bold letters) and wandered toward the mosh pit.
In retrospect, it occurred to me once again how good a friend Jeremiah had always been. He was correct that this was, in fact, not his scene. Reserved, conservative, studious Jeremiah was far more comfortable in a jazz club or a public library than a mosh pit filled with teenagers slamming their bodies into each other. But he was game to try anything. Both of us were exhausted by midnight when we left the club.
We walked side by side through the dark downtown streets after leaving the club, headed for Five Points and the train station. We didn’t make it more than a block before three guys stepped out of the darkness.
Two of them barely registered on my consciousness, smaller and less visibly hostile, but the guy in the center scared me instantly. Tall and strongly built, a pale man wearing a sleeveless vest with spikes embedded in it, he had a swastika tattooed on his shoulder. His head was shaved clean.
“This the asshole who bumped into you, Ray?” the one in the center asked.
“Yeah,” said the youngest of the three—a kid really, no older than fifteen. “The nigger.”
This guy looked punk, but he sounded white trash. “Hey, man, we don’t want any trouble,” I said. “We’re just headed home.”
“You found trouble,” he replied. “Your nigger friend bumped into my brother in the club.”
My heart was beating a thousand beats a minute. Back in the day, there’d been a small group of skinheads who hung out across the street from the Metroplex and sometimes caused trouble. I didn’t recognize these three, but I recognized the type. They might not be homicidal, but they’d be willing to hurt us. I scanned the sidewalk quickly, looking for a weapon.
As the big skinhead unhooked a long chain from his belt, I grabbed a bottle from the gutter and hit it against the curb. The end of the bottle shattered, leaving a jagged nasty weapon. The sound startled all of us. Jeremiah raised his fists.
The big skinhead said, “That how you want to play, motherfucker? You gonna fuck with me?” He swung the chain at me. I jerked back, waving the bottle in as unpredictable a pattern as I could, trying to force the guy back. But his friends were circling around behind us. As they did, I knew we were screwed. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the fucker with the chain. He swung it in a wide arc, fast, and I had to jerk back, almost bumping into Jeremiah.
Then I had my chance. Asshole swung too hard and lost control of the chain. As he wound up to swing again, I jumped forward, slashing at his face. He screamed and fell back, dropping the chain and grabbing at his face. I spun, just as the other two guys started to grab Jeremiah. I ran at the bigger one, swinging the bottle, just as Jeremiah punched the young one in the face. Both of them stumbled back, the younger kid falling on his ass on the sidewalk.
I caught Jeremiah’s eye. Neither of us had to say a word—we took off at a dead run for the train station. The skinheads didn’t pursue, and finally we reached the relative safety of the MARTA station.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, staggering as I tried to control the rushing breaths. I was shaking.
“Man, that would never have happened if we went to Blind Willie’s,” Jeremiah said, laughing. He was shaking too.
“That was crazy.”
He shook his head. “Thanks for bailing us out there, Cole. That was savage. But don’t ever ask me to a concert again.”
I laughed, loud, making light of it. But the incident tied us together. Since then, it’d been Jeremiah who bailed me out of trouble, way too many times. Jeremiah had argued persuasively that I should stay in college and not accept the job at RalCom. I had tried to convince him to come with me. While he worked slow and steady—graduating early, then working his way up in the restaurant business, I’d been busy doing mergers and acquisitions.
A few days before I dropped out of college, I’d taken up the job offer with him. “Dude, they’re starting me at sixty-five thousand. I’m twenty years old! It’s like a gold rush up there. Stock options, fast promotions. You gotta come with me.”
He shook his head. “Nah. My mom’s sick, Cole, you know that. I can’t leave her. If I dropped out of school, she’d check herself right out of the hospital and come kick my butt. And seriously—you might be able to drop out of college and just start your career, but it’s not so easy for me.”
“What, because you’re black? Come on, it’s the nineties.”
He scoffed, shaking his head. “Yeah, that don’t mean shit. If I want a leg up, I’ve got to work twice as hard. And that means I have to finish college. You go on, and let me know how it goes.”
Later, when I screwed it all up? It was Jeremiah who showed up. He made sure Sam and Erin had a Christmas when I was in prison. He found me a job when no one else would hire me.
I owed Jeremiah everything. That’s not something I could ever forget.
He answered on the second ring. “Cole, what’s going on?”
“I’m going to be driving past your place in about twenty-five minutes, I’m just coming back from the airport. You busy?”
“Come on by. Ayanna will be happy to see you. Is Erin with you?”
“No, I just dropped her at the airport, actually.”
“I got beers in the fridge,” he replied.
Twenty minutes later I pulled up in front of Jeremiah’s house in Douglasville. I remember how astonished I was that he’d taken the job with Waffle House after graduating from Georgia Tech. I’d been baffled by his decision to work at the restaurant, but he had made his way up higher and higher in the company in the intervening years. I didn’t know exactly what regional vice presidents made, but I was pretty sure that by now he was doing very well indeed. He and Ayanna maintained a modest lifestyle, buying a three-bedroom ranch house when he first became a district manager. I’d bought a gigantic house and a flashy car and gone way too deep in debt. Jeremiah had been careful, hadn’t taken out any debt other than his home loan, and that was long since paid off.
I’d once thought his progress was plodding, overly careful. Now I only wished I’d emulated him, because he and Ayanna had security that I could only dream of.
I parked in the front of the house and walked up the driveway to the front door. Three years ago, Jeremiah had added a wraparound porch to the house, giving the place a stately look. The boards creaked under my feet as I walked to the front door and pressed the doorbell.
The door opened, revealing Ayanna. She was a tall, elegantly dressed woman with tightly curled shoulder-length hair, skin a rich brown. Her dress and the string of white pearls she wore made her look as if she were getting ready to go to a party.
“Cole!” She smiled and reached her arms out. We embraced. Then she stepped back and said, “You’ll have to forgive us … Jeremiah will be free soon, but right now we’re having a talk with the twins. You’re welcome to join us.” At the last words, she had a twinkle in her eyes.
I could do that. “I’m game.”
I followed her into Jeremiah’s office, a dining room he had converted years before. Jeremiah sat in his office chair. Across from him, side by side on the loveseat, were Kelly and Antoinette, their fifteen-year-old twins.
Jeremiah stood as I entered the room and grabbed me in a bear hug. “Hey, roomie. Give me just a minute.”
He turned back to his daughters and said, “This discussion is over, ladies. You leave this house, you wear appropriate clothing. Are we clear?”
Kelly rolled her eyes, and Antionette opened her mouth to talk.
They didn’t get a chance. Ayanna interrupted, saying, “That will be quite enough. Let’s leave your father alone with Mr. Cole. Say hello, girls.”
Both of the girls approximated well-mannered greetings to me, despite their age. I complimented the latest news about their grades and they went on their way with their mother.
“You want a beer, or something stronger?”
I thought about it for a fraction of a second. “I think maybe something stronger.”
“Well, come over here to the bar.” Jeremiah maintained a well-stocked bar in one corner of his office. Within a couple of moments he had mixed both of us scotch and sodas. Then he led me outside, where we took seats in the rockers on the front porch.
For a few moments we just sat in silence taking in the smells and sounds of the neighborhood; cicadas hummed in the woods and the frogs and other animals cried out in the darkness. It was the first time in weeks I had done anything resembling leisure. Sitting and listening immediately unlocked a flood of memories of growing up. My childhood had sounded and smelled like this.
I sipped the scotch and closed my eyes. “This is good.”
“What brings you by, Cole?”
I looked over at my oldest friend. “Brenna’s alive.”
He set his scotch down on the small wicker table between our chairs and said, “And you’re just telling me now? I can’t believe you didn’t say that the second you came in the door. Or called me earlier. Tell me what’s happened?”
In short, clipped sentences I told Jeremiah about the phone call to Erin and what little we knew about Brenna’s situation.
Jeremiah instantly zeroed in on what was making me uncomfortable. “How come you aren’t going out there?”
“Sam. It’s been three weeks since they saw Brenna. She could be anywhere. We can’t leave Sam alone and I can’t lose my job … not again. Not to mention, I can’t travel without permission. Technically, I shouldn’t even have brought Erin to Atlanta—I don’t have a travel pass.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s a problem. Jesus. I’d love to get my hands on the son of a bitch that let her slip through the cracks.”
I nodded. I’d been struggling with rage ever since I learned she could have been safe in police custody, and instead, they’d treated her like a criminal.
“So now we wait?”
I nodded. “Erin’s going to the Portland police in the morning, and hopefully we’ll know more then. In the meantime, Sam has school and I have work, and I’ll try to keep life as normal as possible for him.”
Jeremiah frowned and shook his head. “Life ain’t been normal for that boy since the day his sister disappeared.” He took a deep breath then a slow sip of his scotch. “How are you hanging in there?”
“I’m all right.” I shrugged.
He frowned. “Don’t bullshit me, Cole. I’ve got eyes, you know.”
I sighed. “I’m doing the best I can, Jeremiah. This job will kill you.”
“I know it. Hang in there, and before too long you’ll be set to flipping papers instead of burgers and take home real money. Just gotta be patient.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Well, you know how it is. Busy as hell. Ayanna’s going to run for city council, and we’re working on figuring out how that’s going to go. I kinda wish she would wait until the girls graduate from high school, but you know how useful wishing is.”
“I bet Erin might want to help. She’s always loved political stuff.” As I said the words, I knew they weren’t really true. Once it might have been, but with her drinking and depression—I couldn’t imagine her bothering to get involved in something political now.
He eyed me carefully. “How are things with her? With the two of you?”
I took a sip of the scotch. Then another. It had a faintly earthy smell. It felt good going down. I didn’t know how to answer his question.
“That bad, huh?”
I felt my eyebrows pulling together as I struggled to find words. “I fucked things up bad. After Teagan, she can’t trust me. When Brenna disappeared, she didn’t have anybody to turn to.”
Jeremiah snorted. “Except her sister.”
“Right. Lori’s advice is consistent if nothing else. I’m pretty sure she still tells Erin that she should just leave me.”
Jeremiah let out a deep sigh. It sounded like one he’d been waiting to release for years. He cleared his throat then took a sip of his whiskey. “Maybe she should.”
I was stunned by his words. Stunned and betrayed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, Jeremiah?”
He frowns even deeper, deep lines appearing on both of sides of his mouth. “Chill, chill. How long have we been friends?”
“Twenty years. A little more.”
“Do you trust me?”
I nodded, a little dazed by the direction the conversation had taken. “Yeah, I trust you. You’re damn near the only person in the world I trust.”
“Then listen to me. You can’t fix your marriage by sitting around whining about how she doesn’t trust you. I saw how it was then … you were all dazzled by the money and the power and the pretty salesgirls. And I know you try in your own way. You’ve taken a job you hate to keep your family supported. I get that. But she’s not gonna trust you until you trust her. In there.” He pointed at my chest.
“I don’t know what you mean—”
He interrupted. “How often do you talk to her about your fears? About things that go wrong? About how you feel about Brenna?”
“That’s not really who I am, you know that.”
“I do know that. And I pay attention. Erin didn’t marry someone to provide a paycheck … she married someone to be partners with. You used to understand that. And it seems to me that as time went by, more and more you were focused on providing things instead of love.”
I shook my head. Christ, that was harsh.
But was he right?
When I looked back to those heady days when Erin and I first met, things were so different. And one of the biggest differences was that we’d always talked about our dreams. It’s funny how our dreams had reflected our lives. With her hippie parents, Erin dreamed of saving the world, of making a difference, of leaving the world a better place than she’d found it. It’s one of the things I admired the most about her—most people couldn’t see past their own comfort and security long enough to consider anyone else. But even in college, Erin was fully engaged in the world around her.
My dreams had been shaped by my childhood moving from one base to another before my dad’s retirement from the Marine Corps. I’d wanted to give my family stability, a home, a place they could remember for their entire lives. I’d wanted to give them one thing I’d never had as a kid or as an adult … roots.
Like everything else, I’d failed at that too.
My voice was rough when I spoke again. “I don’t even know when we stopped talking.”
Jeremiah stretched, a long luxurious stretch. Then he punched a hole through the silence. “Do you really want to stay with her?”
I almost answered with a simple knee-jerk, Of course I do. But this was Jeremiah, my best friend who had always been able to see through me. So I considered. I thought about what things were like now … Erin drinking herself to sleep on the couch almost every night. The smell of death in our house. The despair.
Then I thought about how she’d looked the other night, asleep on the couch, much like the girl I’d fallen in love with. About her beautiful smile, her outrage when she talked about injustice in our world. I thought about the four of us laughing and giggling together in our living room before we bought that stupidly large house.
I missed her terribly. I missed my family.
“Yes. I want her back.” Unexpectedly, I felt my eyes begin to water. My voice choked up as I said, “I want her to be happy again. I hate seeing her so miserable.”
Shit! I quickly wiped my face with the palm of my hand to erase the tear that had run down my cheek.
Jeremiah put a hand on my shoulder. “You gotta tell her that, man.”
I spoke in a near whisper. “We had everything … and I fucked it up. I fucked it all up. It’s my fault Brenna disappeared. She wouldn’t have been hanging around with older guys if I hadn’t gotten mixed up in the affair. And then when Erin needed me the most I got myself locked up in prison.”
Jeremiah nodded. “Yeah, you screwed up. I don’t think you can blame yourself for Brenna, at least not all of it. Screwing things up is nothing special … that just makes you part of the human race. But here’s the thing, Cole, you’ve got hope. She’s alive. And I don’t think it’s too late to save your marriage, either. But you’ve got to be the one to make it happen. You’ve got to want it bad enough to make some changes.”
Both of us went silent, sitting and listening to the night sounds. Night sounds that took me to an earlier, simpler time, a younger time, a time when I hadn’t lost my daughter and my marriage.
Cole: January 1994
“So what are your parents like?”
When Erin asked the question, she had no idea what kind of can of worms she was opening. But we’d reached that point. After our pre-Christmas visit to her parents, visiting mine in January made sense. I had accumulated way too much vacation, so taking a few days off wasn’t a problem, and she didn’t go back to school until almost the end of January. Atlanta was a considerably further drive from Washington than Raleigh-Durham, and we’d been switching off the driving for some hours, listening to music and talking before Erin broached this particular question.
I smiled. “Nervous?”
She snorted. “Of course.”
I shook my head, my eyes on the road and scanning the countryside as we drove, now through South Carolina. It was greener here than it had been in Washington. “Don’t be. They’ll love you.”
“I don’t have that kind of confidence.”
I grunted. “Seriously, Erin, my bigger worry is that you’ll realize what throwbacks my parents are and you’ll have second thoughts about me.”
“Not possible,” came her quick reply.
“You haven’t met them yet,” I responded. “My parents—Daddy especially—aren’t exactly … um … politically correct.”
That was an understatement.
Daddy had always been a throwback to an earlier era, and not necessarily a good one. Mom was all Southern charm and gentility, nose in the air, her whole family too good to see most of the white trash that surrounded them. Which was the main reason her family always hated Daddy. Brash, bold, and loud, Daddy grew up as a scrappy kid in the mountains of North Georgia in a time when literacy rates were still low and high school graduation rates lower still. The Great Depression came early to the mountains of North Georgia, and its effects lingered long after World War II ended—especially for poor families. And while the mountains of North Georgia had never been big slaveholding country, there were plenty of old racists who were mean as snakes.
Daddy never talked about growing up that much—what I knew, I knew from Mama, or from stories he sometimes told when he’d had too much to drink. James Roberts—everyone called him Jimmy—left home for Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville at the beginning of the seventh grade. Mama said it was to get away from his father, a drunken and bitter man who had seen his entire World War II service inside the gates of Camp Oglethorpe, Georgia, where he trained recruits to go overseas and fight. The hour or so drive between Canton and Gainesville was just enough distance to keep his father from visiting very often, and the academy’s endowment provided enough financial aid that he was able to continue attending even when his father refused to pay.
In those days, Riverside maintained a winter campus in South Florida. For the two coldest months of the year, the entire campus decamped and relocated, occupying an old school on land that had been purchased by the Academy a number of years before. During the rare times when I was growing up that my daddy talked about his own childhood, it was invariably stories from the winters he spent in Florida. They were sometimes humorous stories, stories of practical jokes and friendly harassment among the cadets. But there was often a darker edge to those stories. In the fifties and early sixties, Riverside was, of course, all-white. Jim Crow was still fully in effect, and the general poverty of rural mountain Georgia was even worse for the black population. More than once he told me of the Riverside cadets going as a group into black neighborhoods “to teach the niggers a lesson.”
When my father said such things, Mama would always cringe. Not because she was any less racist than he was; rather, it was because to her, a sophisticated vocabulary, good posture, and a neat presentation meant far more than substance or character. Mama grew up in the dying world of the Charleston royalty, eking out the last vestiges of their antebellum status in the few square blocks of Charleston they still occupied. In those few square blocks, the Civil War (or, as they called it, the War Between the States) might as well have never happened.
Virginia Carolyn Roberts (née Grady) was a sixteen-year-old debutante when she was swept off her feet by my father, at that time a naval ROTC cadet at Georgia Tech. Despite the dire predictions of his own father, Daddy had graduated from Riverside with honors and was accepted to Georgia Tech with a full scholarship.
The two of them married the day after Daddy graduated college and received his commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Nothing in his experience up to that time had changed his perspective about women, politics, or race. He was fundamentally a mountain boy, mean as a snake, and even less predictable. The only thing that had changed over the years was the polish. After decades of trying, my mother’s rough tongue and genteel Southern upbringing had worn Daddy down just like flowing water smooths out the edges of a stone.
I’d struggled to explain some of this to Erin without directly saying my parents were racists. To be honest, it was a little embarrassing, in this day and age, to hear my father talk.
“By ‘not politically correct,’ what do you mean?” Her tone sounded a little wary.
I shrugged. “They’re from the Old South, Erin. Not academics like your parents … Daddy was a Marine.”
“They’ll hate me, won’t they? I’m too liberal.”
I brought a fist to my mouth and coughed. “Karl Marx would think you’re too liberal.”
Erin gasped in mock outrage then took a verbal swipe right back at me. “Cole! Being knowledgeable and caring about people doesn’t make me too liberal.”
I laughed. “Don’t worry. Even my parents care about people. Mama mostly cares about her bridge club, and Daddy cares about the Marines.”
“So, what you’re saying is, we should avoid talking politics.”
“Yeah…” My voice trailed off. Avoiding politics was necessary, but I doubted it would be enough.
Nearly fourteen hours after we left Washington, we drove into my parents’ semi-circular driveway in North Atlanta.
My parents didn’t live in the house I grew up in. Daddy was in the Marine Corps until 1989, so I grew up floating from base to base, year by year. I was lucky enough that he spent his last years in the Marines at Atlanta Naval Air Station, which gave me enough stability to attend the same high school for four years. During those years we lived in a rickety house not far from the base, south of Marietta.
When Daddy retired from the military, he was quickly hired by Lockheed for three times as much as he’d made as a Marine Lieutenant Colonel. The year before I met Erin, he bought a five-bedroom brick colonial in a much better neighborhood than he’d ever lived in as a Marine.
When I parked, it was behind a beautifully maintained ’76 Corvette. Daddy was going all-out with the midlife crisis.
The lawn was shockingly verdant for January, the landscaping precise. Red brick contrasted with the black shutters and front door, and all of it gave the impression of a carefully manicured golf course. The beautiful, almost serene setting was ruined by the appearance of a foot-high figure on the lawn not far from the front entrance, depicting a black boy in a red and white outfit and cap. The skin on the figure was very dark, the eyes oversized and white, standing out only slightly less shockingly than the bright red oversized lips.
“Oh, my,” Erin said.
“That’s new,” I murmured.
“You know my godfather’s African American, right? And that the twenty-first century is right around the corner?”
“I know these things. My father does not.”
She closed her eyes. “Well, let’s do this.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Yeah?” Her voice was pensive.
“Give them a chance, okay? They shocking anachronisms, but they’re also my parents.”
She gave me a smile that I supposed was intended to reassure; in fact, it only increased my apprehension. “Of course.”
The front door opened as we approached. Mama stood there, wearing a green dress with long sleeves which might have easily appeared in a catalog from the fifties. Her hair, still black as always (I suspected she had it dyed, but she would never tell), was bound up in a complicated fashion. She wore a lengthy necklace of white pearls and bright red lipstick.
“Cole,” she said, holding out a hand to mine.
“Mama,” I said. “This is Erin Bennett. Erin, this is my mom.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Roberts.”
“Erin, you must call me Virginia. Mrs. Roberts makes me feel dreadfully old. Come in! Come in!”
We followed Mama into the house.
Erin sucked in a breath as her eyes scanned the entryway. The front atrium was floored with polished cherry, and an awe-inspiring crystal chandelier hung over the entry. French doors opened on either side of the entryway, the formal dining room on one side and the family room on the other.
“This is amazing,” Erin said. “I love your home!”
“Thank you, dear,” Mama said. “Cole’s father worked very hard for it.”
Lest Erin think I grew up in these polished circumstances, I said, “They moved here three years ago. Most of my life we lived in base housing.”
“It’s true,” Mama said, her voice dripping with ennui. “I don’t know what your father does for a living now, but it certainly pays better than being a Marine officer.”
I said to Erin, “He left the Marines, so now he sells things to the Marines.”
“Don’t be crass, dear.”
As always, Mama put me in my place.
“Where’s Dad?”
I swear her eyes showed a wrinkle of amusement. “Oh, he’s around here somewhere. Maybe check out back. In the meantime, why don’t you help your lady friend with her bags? We put her in the front room upstairs. You can stay in the guest room next to the library.”
Mama turned to Erin. “Come with me to the kitchen, sugar. You must be exhausted from the drive. Would you like some sweet tea? Or … I daresay it’s not too early for a glass of wine.”
Erin murmured, “A glass of wine sounds wonderful.”
As Erin followed Mama into the kitchen, I went out the front door to the car to gather our bags. Undoubtedly, Mama would subject Erin to the third degree, but she’d probably do it in such a painless way that Erin wouldn’t even notice. In the meantime, I unloaded my one bag and Erin’s three and got them inside and to our rooms. No surprise that Mama put us at opposite ends of the house. Anything to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
The front room where Mama had put Erin—I didn’t fool myself into thinking Daddy had anything to do with it—had a decidedly feminine cast. The bottom half of the walls was paneled with white wainscoting, and the top half had a somewhat girly flowery blue and white wallpaper. The window was framed with white lace curtains; the double bed was piled high with comforters and blankets, all white.
Erin would be amused. Her own taste tended toward hippie Americana. Her dorm room was festooned with incense burners, a statue of Buddha, and a poster featuring the cover of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It was charming and quirky and somewhat adolescent. I secretly hoped she would grow out of that by the time we got more serious or moved in together … or if we got married.
After putting Erin’s bags away, I wandered downstairs to the guest bedroom in the back. This room, squeezed in next to the library, was clearly not intended for the important guests. A single bed was jammed up against the wall next to a three-drawer bureau. Between the bed and the opposite wall there was maybe a foot and a half of space to maneuver. It was perfect for me. Even better, Daddy was visible in the backyard, bent over a bed of flowers.
I stepped out the back door, down the steps, and walked along the red brick pathway to where my father crouched.
He glanced up at me, raised an eyebrow, then said, “Pass me the clippers from over there.” A few feet away, in the wheelbarrow, were the hedge clippers he indicated. I walked over and got them then carried them back to my father.
He took them and began carefully trimming the tiny bush next to the flower bed. “You had a good drive down?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thought you were bringing a girl.”
I nodded. “Erin. She’s in the house undergoing interrogation.”
Daddy winked at me. “Well, Godspeed to her, then.”
“You want to come in and meet her?”
Instead of answering, he handed me the clippers then began to pull tiny weeds from the flower bed. “You bring her on out here.”
I nodded. I understood … no matter that they had been married for many years, my father assiduously avoided his wife whenever possible. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. Mama was much easier to bear in the abstract.
“Lucas got arrested again.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What for this time?”
“While you’re standing there jawin’ why don’t you throw on a pair of gloves and help me weed?”
“Sure.” I grabbed another pair of gloves out of his wheelbarrow. “What did he get arrested for?”
The creases on either side of Daddy’s mouth deepened until it looked like his mouth might break. Then he spit out the words, “Heroin. Possession with intent to distribute.”
I crouched down next to Daddy. “How am I supposed to tell the good ones from the weeds?”
Daddy gave a low chuckle and said, “The flowers or your cousins?”
“Well, let’s not get into philosophy right now.”
He let out a laugh like a bark then pointed at a flowering plant. “Them there is the ones you want to keep. Pull up everything else.”
This is how it was with Daddy. He was usually a pretty closemouthed son of a bitch, but if you could catch him while he was doing something, like gardening, he would talk. I wasn’t looking forward to dinner, because guests or not, my mom and dad were rarely able to contain the tension between them. For that matter, I couldn’t be near them for long either. I hadn’t finished college like both wanted, nor had I joined the Marine Corps like Daddy wanted. It didn’t matter that I was making almost six figures at twenty-two years old. I’d dropped out of college, and in their eyes, that made me a failure.
An hour before dinner, Erin and I were able to regroup for a few minutes. Outside, of course, on the porch, because Mama was not going to let us be in the same room alone.
“How bad was it?” I asked her.
She laughed. “It was fine. Your mom asked me ten thousand questions. She was thrilled to learn that Dad’s a doctor and Mom’s on the faculty at Duke.”
“Does she know they’re old hippies?”
She giggled. “I left that out.”
“What else?”
“She told me about you as a little boy. Showed me pictures.”
I started. “What? Pictures? Of what?”
“You with your dad. Others with your cousin. You never mentioned cousins.”
“That’s because they’re all white trash.”
She flinched. “Really, Cole?” She wasn’t asking if they were really white trash. She was asking if I’d really said it.
“Actually, yes, really. Dad just finished telling me about Lucas, he went to jail on a heroin rap. Dealing, not possession.”
“Ouch,” she responded. “Pretty harsh.”
“Yeah, well.” I didn’t have anything good to say about Lucas. “Anyway, after dinner, I want to get out of here. Take you to meet Jeremiah.”
“Does he know I’m coming?”
“Yeah. And, he’s got a girl he’s serious about, and I haven’t met her yet.”
“Does she require your approval?”
I grinned at her. “No more than you require his.”
“Smart-ass,” she replied, grinning. “Okay. I’m looking forward to it.”
“Just … do me a favor? Don’t mention Jeremiah around my dad.”
She raised her eyebrows.
I leaned close. “Jeremiah’s black. Daddy … he’s just … he’s not much changed from the past.”
“Your mom didn’t say anything horribly or blatantly racist.”
“Yeah, her manners would preclude that. But my father doesn’t have any manners.”
Reluctantly, she agreed. But her silence was pointless. As we were finishing dinner, when I told my parents we were going out, Daddy said, “Going to see that nigger roommate of yours?”
Mama reproved him immediately. “James, we don’t use that word…”
Erin frowned. “Mister Roberts … you’ve made such a good impression up until now, I’m so sorry to see it spoiled.”
Silence instantly fell on the room.
Erin plunged ahead. “First, you should know my godfather is black. Second, you should know it’s the nineties, and we left slavery and Jim Crow behind decades ago.”
Red spots were beginning to glow on Mama’s cheeks. It didn’t matter that she constantly harped and bitched at Daddy—she would never put up with another woman doing it.
Daddy leaned forward in his seat, a frown on his face. “Now see here, Miss. I’ll make allowances for you because it’s clear Cole really cares for you. But you don’t come insult a man in his own home.”
“I’m sorry, Mister Roberts. But my father told me to always tell the truth and to confront bigotry when I see it.”
A flash of displeasure on his face. “I’m no bigot. I’ve got friends who are black. I served with blacks in Vietnam—in fact, one of ‘em saved my life. There’s some people who are black, and they’re okay in my book. Then there’s some people who are niggers. And that’s just the way it is.”
Mama tried to salvage the situation. “James, maybe we should just drop the subject?”
I just sat there, admiring Erin more and more every second.
Erin didn’t back down. “Let me ask you, sir. Who are the ones most deserving of that label?”
Anger flashed through my father’s tone. “Well, the ignorant ones. The ones who don’t know how to talk or how to act. The ones who go around with guns and killing good people.”
Quietly, Erin persisted. “You mean, the ones from poor neighborhoods, with lousy schools? The ones who come from broken families? Families whose histories of being broken go right back to when husbands and wives and sons and daughters were often sold away without so much as a word? The ones that we prevented from voting, or learning to read, or having decent jobs? Are those the ones you mean?”
“Well, my appetite is ruined,” Mama announced. “I believe I’ll retire to my room now.”
“We should go, too,” I said. I took her hand and practically pulled her out of there, with none of the ceremony you might have expected.
That might have been the end of it. Not long after that, we got out of there and spent the evening enjoying ourselves with Jeremiah and Ayanna. Jeremiah took us all to Blind Willie’s, where we listened to a jazz quartet that almost put me to sleep (the three of them loved it).
Ayanna was enchanting. She was a senior at Georgia State, planning to go straight into graduate school, and had a beautiful smile. Poised and cheerful, she had an electric laugh. Halfway through the show, I leaned over to Jeremiah and whispered, “I’m impressed, buddy.”
We high fived, looking mystified when Ayanna and Erin asked what it was about.
The next morning, the funniest thing happened. Everyone pretended nothing had happened at all, and we had a pleasant breakfast. But before we headed back to Washington two days later, Daddy pulled me aside.
“Just wanted to tell you, Cole … don’t let that one go.”
“What?” I sputtered. “I assumed you hated her.”
He chuckled. “What, because of our disagreement? Naw. Maybe I learned something from her. Maybe not. But she’s got spirit, that one. You treat her right, and she’ll make you happy.”
You treat her right, and she’ll make you happy.
Those words stayed with me, that hour, that month, that decade.
Sadly, more than anywhere else in my life, treating Erin right was the one area where I failed the most.