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Imani’s in the living room, two inches from the TV, telling Ella she shouldn’t keep Anna out of the room. Max and William are sitting at the kitchen table, talking softly, like they don’t want anyone to hear. Max is in her after-work sweats. William’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, all scrubbed up. When I first started working with him, he was definite about how a painter shouldn’t be wearing paint samples when he’s not on the job.
I open the oven door. Meatloaf! I’m starving! I reach for the hot pads to take the pan out of the oven.
“Not yet,” Max says.
“Looks done,” I say.
“Turn the oven off. It’ll keep. We need to talk,” Max says.
“Okay,” I say, leaning against the counter.
William nudges a chair out with his foot. “Have a seat.”
Max looks at me, all serious, long enough to make me nervous.
“What?”
“Mr. Hockney called this afternoon.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“He didn’t say you did. Just said he brought you home to keep things safe.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“Eddie...there’s a lot you didn’t tell us, say, about all of that social media stuff, and who slashed your tires...”
“I don’t know for sure who it was. I didn’t see anyone do it.”
“Yeah, okay,” William says, his voice going way deep the way it does when he gets all serious. “You didn’t see anyone do it, but you’re probably pretty sure who it was. Right?”
Shrug.
“Mr. Hockney seemed pretty sure he knew who it was, not that he was sharing any names with us,” Max says.
Silence.
“And who was it that posted a bunch of nasty stuff about you online?...Eddie?” Max says. “C’mon, Eddie. Make a guess.”
“Well...I guess it was probably those Patriot guys. They’re usually the ones that blast stuff like that on walls.”
“Patriot guys?” Max says.
“Yeah. That’s what they call themselves. Like at the Black Lives Matter thing? The P8RIOTs?”
William starts pacing around the kitchen. His face goes darker. How is that even possible? “Bad news. Those guys are bad, bad news.”
“You know them?” Max says.
“Yeah—from the march back in September. Buncha stupid ass honky white supremacists, out there with their baseball bats and broken bottles, their storm trooper boots and pockets full of rocks.”
“Those were high school kids???” Max asks.
“Some of them, yeah, school boys following their dumb-shit daddies...the Patriots,” William sneers. “Here’s a patriot!” he says, pulling up Max’s right pant leg and showing the deep scar that runs all down the front of her shin from knee to ankle. “That’s a patriot!”
He stomps into their bedroom, comes back out with two boxes, one a hand-carved wooden box and the other, one of those old cigar boxes. He dumps their army stuff out on the table—Max’s Purple Heart, William’s, too, and a bunch of other ribbons and medals. I don’t know what they did to get the other ones.
“Patriots!” William yells. “Patriots fight for their country! Not against it!”
Imani comes to the kitchen, eyes wide.
Max is standing, her arm around William’s shoulder. “William...”
“For equality! And justice!” he yells, even louder. “For democracy! Not for hate and racism!”
“William...”
He shakes his head and looks straight at Max, like he’s just noticed she’s there. “They’re not patriots,” he says, softly now. “We are.”
She’s got her arms around him, rubbing his back. They’re locked together, and I see by the rise and fall of William’s back that he uses that deep breathing trick to calm down, too. “God, I hate those bastards!” he says, in a near whisper.
“I know. I know,” Max says.
Yeah, well, I know now, too. Probably the neighbors on both sides and across the street know, too. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard William full blast. I’ve heard him mad before, but God! William’s got some voice on him when he goes all out. The way Imani is looking at him, I’m guessing she’s not heard him full volume before, either.
Max puts the medals and ribbons in their boxes and takes them back to their bedroom. William stares off into space for a moment, then reaches for the hot pads, takes the meatloaf from the oven, sets it on top of the stove and gets a knife from the drawer. I get the plates, three regular size, white with flowers, and one Imani-size, with Anna and Elsa. William cuts a small slice for Imani, puts it on her special plate, and hands it to her. She shakes her head.
“No, you have to have some, Baby. Just a little bit.”
“That’s too much!” she whines.
“Just try it.”
She carries her plate to the table and sits staring at the meatloaf.
“Eddie?”
“Yeah. Please.”
William puts a slice of meatloaf on each of the three regular plates and sets them at our places. I get utensils, Max puts a salad and bread on the table, and William pours water.
“Salad?” Max asks. I hold my plate within reach and she piles it on—lettuce, tomato, avocado, cucumber, croutons—then it’s a spoonful for Imani, who gets right to work picking the cucumbers out. We eat in silence, like there’s a moratorium on talking. Imani’s not even doing her usual talk about Anna and Elsa, like: if they were at her school, she’d be best friends with Anna, but maybe Elsa and Ms. Lee would be best friends because Ms. Lee would know how to help Elsa manage her super powers, etc., etc. All silence. Awkward.
It’s me and Max’s turn for dishes tonight. I scrape, and she loads the dishwasher. Max is particular about how the dishes fit in the dishwasher. I wipe the table, and she puts leftovers away. We do that in silence too, until we hear William starting the bathwater for Imani, then Max takes up where we left off, before William got all heated about the Patriot stuff.
“I’m worried, Eddie.”
“Max. Stop. They’re nothing. They’re cowards.”
William comes into the kitchen to get a glass of water. “The guys in white who went around lynching black people were cowards, too. That didn’t make the people they’d lynched any less dead,” he says, taking the water back to Imani.
Max says, “People who are afraid are the most dangerous—especially those true-believer types...Mr. Hockney wants you to stay home from school tomorrow.”
“That sucks! I’m not the one who should be suspended!”
“It’s not a suspension. He says it’s just...”
“It’s a suspension. What else is it if he says I can’t come to school?”
“Like all of a sudden you love school?”
“Some of it,” I say. “Besides it’s the principle. I don’t mean like principal, like the principal is your pal, I mean it’s just wrong.”
My phone rings. Rosie. “I need to take this...”
Max nods, walks out to the living room. I take the phone outside.
“Hey, Rosie.” I lean against the eucalyptus tree, pull off a leaf, crumble it between my fingers, breathe the strong, fresh scent.
“I heard you got suspended,” Rosie says.
“Not officially.”
I tell her the story, all but the panic attack. She tells me about new Patriot hate posts, and how everybody’s talking about it, and how everyone is totally on my side. I change the subject with talk about the cornhole games we missed on Friday night. Rosie says Brent and Brianna seem to like each other. Meghan told Rosie that cornhole was actually fun.
“Brent says he’s setting up a practice tournament this Sunday,” I tell her. You want to come with me? Give it a try?”
“Maybe after church. But what do you mean, a practice ‘tournament’?”
So, I explain to Rosie about Brent’s bet with his dad. And starting this coming Friday, Brent’s dad’s off on business, somewhere in Canada. And Brent wants to practice, practice, practice while his dad’s away—doesn’t want his dad to see how much his game has improved. His dad’s been practicing a little, but nothing like Brent.
“You talked to Brent? Does he like Brianna?” Rosie says.
“I don’t know. We talked about cornhole.”
“He must not like her, or else he’d have said something.”
“He probably likes her. He’s obsessed with cornhole, that’s all,” I tell her.
“Hey, I’ve got the car tomorrow,” Rosie says. “Do you want a ride in the morning?”
“Sure. And do you think you could drop me at Big O’s tomorrow afternoon? It’s over there near First and Huntington.”
“Okay. I’ll have to get Zoe from school first, but then we can swing by the tire place.”
Rosie says she’s probably going to be up until after midnight what with an English paper due tomorrow. The paper will count for 15% of her grade so she’s all stressed about it.
“I’m so tired of always feeling so much pressure about grades. I think I liked school back when we were at Palm Avenue, but now, I can’t even remember how it felt to like school—not to always be worried about grades, and college, and the future.”
“Yeah. I’m glad not to be worrying about that stuff. It must totally suck.”
“It does! Maybe I should forget being a music therapist—just be a painter like you.”
We both laugh at that, but I don’t exactly like how she says, “...just be a painter...” like it’s some loser job. I don’t say anything about that, though. I mean, why sweat the small stuff?
“I better get back to my homework,” she says, tapping her phone three times. I tap back: one (I), two (love), three (you).
Imani’s in bed when I come back inside. William and Max are in the living room watching some TV news program. William mutes the TV and motions for me to sit down. Max has those deep worry lines, like the kind she wore constantly for months after she got home from Iraq.
“You’re right about going to school tomorrow,” William tells me. “You can’t let fear of those guys keep you away.”
“I’m not afraid of them,” I say.
“Well, you can’t let Hockney’s fear of them keep you away, either.”
“I don’t know...” Max says.
But it’s settled. It was already settled anyways—Rosie’s picking me up in the morning.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
