THELMA WAS BALANCING A STACK OF LEGAL BRIEFS IN THE crook of her left arm as she pushed the door open. The telephone chose that moment to begin jangling. “I’m coming,” she told the annoying device. “I’m coming.”
She closed the door, dropped the briefs on the couch, flipped on the overhead light, hustled across the room, and plucked the receiver from its cradle. “Hello?” she said. The operator asked if she would accept charges on a collect call from George Simon. She said yes, thinking to herself that with all these collect calls, the next phone bill was sure to make her cringe. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was forty dollars or more.
“Go ahead, caller,” the operator said.
“Hey, honey,” said George’s voice.
Just the two words, benign and routine. But they didn’t fool her for a moment. Something inside her went on high alert. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
It seemed to take him unawares. “How do you do that?” he asked after a moment.
“What’s wrong, George?” she asked again.
“Nothing,” he said. “Honest. I mean, we’re all fine, nobody’s hurt.”
“But?” she prompted.
She heard frustration push out of him in a long breath. “But Adam left,” he said.
“Left? What do you mean, he left?”
“I mean, he … left. He … ran away, I guess.”
“Ran away? George, what are you talking about?”
“Thelma, he found out. He knows.”
“He knows? He knows what?”
“Thelma,” he said slowly, letting her hear the gravity in his voice, “he knows.”
A chair caught Thelma as she fell, her legs suddenly useless. “Oh, God,” she said. With her free hand, she cradled herself against the sudden cold. She couldn’t get her breath. “Oh, God,” she said again. “How?”
Whereupon George told her a story about an angry confrontation with his brother at the rest home and how Nick Simon had stormed out and taken his rage out on Adam, the awful seven words he had said. George told her how he had awakened that morning to find Adam already gone and how Luther had noticed a box of his wartime memorabilia sitting open on the kitchen table and when he looked into it, the only thing missing was Thelma’s letters to her brother.
“Luther said it’s like he wanted us to know he had them.”
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“Cora called this morning to say he had gone to my father’s house, looking to punch Nick in the nose. She stopped him from that, at least. But she said she put him on a bus at ten thirty this morning. Thelma, it’s after seven.”
“Maybe he’s just blowing off steam,” she said, trying to believe it even as she said it. “Maybe he’ll walk through that door any minute now.”
“Maybe,” said George. “But somehow, I don’t think so.”
“Lord, what must he be thinking?”
“Thelma …”
She glanced to the bookshelf in the living room. Adam grinned down at her from beneath his royal blue high school mortarboard, a replica diploma held diagonally across his chest. “This has been coming for a long time,” she said. “It was foolish of me to think I could go the rest of my life and never have to confront what happened, the choices I made.”
“It’s not your fault,” said George. “And it wasn’t a choice you made. It was something that was done to you.”
She barely heard him. She was thinking.
After a moment, she said, “I’m flying down.”
“Flying?” said George.
He sounded surprised. Not that she could blame him. Thelma had never been on an airplane in her life. “I’ve got some time coming at work,” she said. “I can get Claudette to cover for me in court Monday.”
“Thelma, are you sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything right now,” she said, “except that I’ve got to get there. I know the ticket is going to be expensive. Probably thirty-five, forty dollars, but we have our savings, and as far as I’m concerned, this is an emergency, so—”
He cut her off. “It’s not about the money,” he said. “Thelma, you hate Alabama.”
And this, of course, was the truth. She hated the backwards state where she was born. Hated the whole damn South because it had first hated her. And more than that, she feared it, feared it to the center of her solar plexus.
“But I love my son,” she said.
She paused, giving George a moment to retort. Her husband kept silent and for that, she loved him, too.
“I’ll be down tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll call when I know the time.”