Andre
When I was sixteen, I tried to fight my father, because I thought Evie was going to die.
The doctors had said this was it, that lupus had finally gotten her, so we were going through the phases of grief in double time, trying to come out the other side before the clock ran out. I got as far as anger and drove to Carlos’s house and punched his jaw as he worked in his front yard, clipping the shrubbery into globes. His son—my brother, I guess you would call him—tried to jump in and help, but he was small and I pushed him to the grass. “Evie is dying,” I said to my father, who refused to lift his fists to hit me back. I punched him again, this time in the chest, and when I pulled my arm back again, he blocked the blow, but he didn’t strike me. Instead, he shouted my name, freezing me in place.
My little brother was on his feet now, looking from me to our father, awaiting instructions. Carlos, in an affectionate tone I’d never heard from him, said, “Go on in the house, Tyler.” Then to me he said, “Time you wasted driving over here and fighting me, you could be spending with Evie.”
I said, “That’s all you have to say about it?”
He spread his hands like suffer the little children. At his neck, I made out the glint of a braided chain. Hidden under his shirt was a gold disc the size of a quarter. His mother had given it to him a lifetime ago and he never took it off.
“What do you want me to say?” He asked the question mildly, like he actually wanted to know.
And it was a good question. After all these years, what could he say? That he was sorry?
“I want you to say that you don’t want her to die.”
“Jesus, boy. No, I don’t want Evie to die. I always assumed that eventually we would work it out, get back to being friends some kinda way. I thought that down the line we could patch things up. She’s a remarkable woman. Look at yourself. She raised you. I’ll always owe her for that.”
I know it’s a very humble declaration, but it felt like a gift.
A week later, Evie rallied and was moved out of ICU to a regular room on the hospital’s third floor. On her night table rested a cheery bouquet, a half-dozen pink roses and some green leaves. She invited me to read the card. Feel better. Sincerely, Carlos. After that, things between us improved a little. Out of kindness, he now extends invitations to holiday dinners, and out of kindness, I refuse. Any day now, I should receive a Christmas card, and tucked inside will be a chipper letter from his wife. I don’t read these annual bulletins; I can’t stomach her reports on how healthy and thriving her children are. I don’t begrudge them anything, but I don’t know them.
This is one thing I envied Roy: his dad. It wasn’t that I had never seen anybody with a responsible father before. After all, I grew up right next door to Celestial and Mr. Davenport. But a man who is a father to a daughter is different from one who is a father to a son. One is the left shoe and the other is the right. They are the same but not interchangeable.
I don’t think about Carlos all the time, like some kind of tragic black man who grew up without a daddy and is warped for life. Evie did right by me and I’m a basically solid person. But sitting behind the steering wheel of my truck, stranded in the middle lane of an eight-lane highway, I wanted to talk to my dad. Roy Hamilton was out of prison, seven years early. Not that this changed the dynamic tremendously, but the accelerated clock churned my guts and spun my head.
I longed for a mentor or maybe a coach. When I was a kid, Mr. Davenport would step in from time to time, but now he acts like he can’t stand my face. Evie clucked her tongue and said that no man likes the rusty-butt who is laying up next to his daughter. I tried to explain to her that it was deeper than that. Evie said, “Was he loving all over Roy before he got sent away?” No, he hadn’t been, but that was irrelevant. Now Mr. Davenport was loyal to Roy above his own daughter. In a way, the whole black race was loyal to Roy, a man just down from the cross.
“Stop by anytime,” my father had said casually last year when I ran into him and his wife in Kroger on Cascade Road. He was pushing a buggy heaped with chicken, ribs, Irish potatoes, brown sugar, red soda pop, and everything else you need for a barbecue. He saw me before I saw him, or else we never would have talked. As his wife conveniently drifted off to the salad bar, Carlos placed his hand on my arm and said, “It has been too long.”
How does this happen to families? I’ve seen the pictures. There I am, riding on his shoulders, afro like Little Michael Jackson. I remember day-to-day things like him teaching me how to pee without splashing the floor. I even recall the sting of his belt against my legs, but not often. He used to be my father, and now we never talk at all. It occurs to me that maybe a man can love his son only as much as he loves the mother. But no, that couldn’t be true. He was my father. I wasn’t his junior, but I wore his last name as easily as I wore my own skin.
“You’re always welcome in my home,” he had said.
And so I decided to take him at his word.
I don’t believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight. There is something to shared genetics, but the question is, what exactly is that something? It matters that I didn’t grow up with my father. It’s kind of like having one leg that’s a half inch shorter than the other. You can walk, but there will be a dip.
carlos lives on Brownlee Road in a house almost identical to the one where he lived with my mother and me. It was like he wanted the same life, but with different people. His wife, Jeanette, even favored Evie a little bit, redbone with a generous build. When they first got married, Jeanette somehow managed to make a living making ice sculptures for weddings and such. Back then, she had been much younger than Evie, but after all these years, their ages have come together in that uncanny way of passing time.
Carlos answered the door shirtless, with his bald head covered with shaving foam. As he used a nubby towel to blot his forehead, the gold Saint Christopher medal gleamed bright against his dark chest hair. “Andre, everything okay, my man?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was wondering if I could talk to you right quick.” When he paused, I added, “You said I could come by anytime.”
He opened the door wide to let me in. “Of course. Come on in. I’m getting dressed.” Then he announced to whoever was home, “Andre’s here.”
I stepped inside and was met with the scent of breakfast—bacon, coffee, and something sweet, like cinnamon buns. Before me in the foyer stood a Christmas tree, pine-scented and littered with shiny silver balls. Already, dozens of glittery gifts rested upon a red cloth trimmed in white, like Santa Claus. And like a child, I worried that there wasn’t a present there for me; then like an adult, I worried that I shouldn’t have come by empty-handed.
“Nice tree, isn’t it,” he said. “I let Jeanette handle the decorations. I haul it in, that’s all a man can do.” He bent and connected a green wire to the wall and the tree was ablaze with white lights so clean and radiant that they glowed, even in the sunny room.
Just then Jeanette appeared, dressed in a kimono the color of peacocks. Arranging her hair, she said, “Hello, Andre. It’s nice to see you.”
“It’s nice to see you, too, ma’am.”
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me,” she said. “We’re family. Will you join us for breakfast?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
She kissed my father on the cheek, as if to remind me that this is her house, her husband, and the father of her children. Or maybe it was affection, still blooming after all these years. Whatever it was, I felt disloyal to Evie just being there, even though my mother has been much more relaxed on the subject now that she has found true love of her own.
“C’mon with me while I finish up with this head.” He pointed at the froth on his dome. “When I was young, ladies knew me for my hair. Half black and half Puerto Rican? Jet black and waves for days. A little pomade and a wet comb? Perfection. But now?” He sighed as if to say, Nothing lasts.
I trailed him through the house, which was quiet but for the pots and pans clanging in the kitchen.
“Where are the kids?” I asked.
“College,” my father said. “They both get in tonight.”
“Where did they go?”
“Tyler is at Oberlin and Mikayla is at Duke. I tried to get them to go to black schools, but . . .” He shook his head as though he didn’t remember agreeing to pay for my college only if I went to the school of his choice.
In the bathroom he situated himself between two mirrors and carefully scraped the foam from his head. “Michael Jordan was the best thing that ever happened to black men my age. We can shave our heads and say we’re bald on purpose.”
I studied our reflections in the mirror. My father was a good-size man. There is a picture of him holding me as a newborn, and against his chest, I look to be no bigger than a hickory nut. He must be sixty by now. His muscular bulk has softened some. On his chest, on the left side, is a keloid scar to honor his fraternity. Seeing me looking at it, my father covered it with his hand. “I’m embarrassed by this now.”
“I’m embarrassed that I didn’t pledge,” I said.
“Don’t be. I’ve learned a few things over these last thirty years.”
He returned to the business of shaving his head, and I regarded myself in the mirror. It was as though God knew that Evie would end up raising me alone, so he made me entirely in her image. Wide nose, healthy lips, and hair the color of cardboard but nappy as Africa. The only trait I picked up from my father was cheekbones that jutted like collarbones.
“So,” he said, stretching the word out like a drum roll. “What’s on your mind?”
“I’m getting married,” I said.
“Who is the lucky lady?”
I stumbled, surprised that he didn’t know, probably in the same way he was surprised that I didn’t know where his kids were in college. “Celestial. Celestial Davenport.”
“Aha!” he said. “I peeped that when you were babies. Did she grow up fine like her mama? But wait a minute. Wasn’t she married to some dude that ended up being a rapist? Morehouse cat. Was he Greek?”
“But he was innocent.”
“Who said he was innocent? Her? If she’s still claiming he didn’t do it, then you have a real problem.” Meeting my eyes in the mirror, he adopted a thoughtful tone. “Forgive me for being such a straight shooter. Nowadays they say it’s being direct, but your mama called it being an asshole.” He chuckled. “I’ve been down here in the South thirty-eight years, but I still run my mouth like a New Yorker.”
When he said New Yorker, he switched his accent like he was speaking a word in another language.
“You don’t have all the details,” I said, feeling defensive of both Celestial and Roy. “That’s what I’m here to tell you about. The lawyer got his conviction overturned. He’s out right now. I’m on my way to Louisiana to see him.”
My father put down the razor, rinsed it at the sink. He closed the lid on the toilet and sat upon it like a throne. He beckoned, so I sat opposite him on the rim of the spacious bathtub. “And you’re talking about marrying his ex-wife. I see the challenge.”
“She’s not his ex-wife,” I said. “Not technically.”
“Whoa, doggie,” Carlos said. “I knew it had to be something to bring you over here to talk to me.”
I told him the whole story from soup to nuts, and when I was done, my father pinched the bridge of his nose like he felt a migraine coming on.
“This is my fault,” he said with closed eyes. “This never would have happened if you were trained up under me. I would have taught you to steer clear of a snake pit like this. There can’t be a winner. First off, you should have sense enough not to mess with that man’s wife. But,” he said with a courtly nod, “who am I to judge? When I got with Jeanette, I didn’t have no business doing it. Evie put me out. Granted, I had someplace to go, but it was her call. You know that, right? I didn’t leave her.” He ran his finger over his damp head, feeling for stubbly patches that he skipped over with this razor.
“This isn’t what I came over here for.”
“Then what did you come for?”
“Obviously, I need advice. Guidance. Words of wisdom, something.”
“Well,” he said, “I have been one of the legs in a love triangle, this you know. You also know that there isn’t a happy ending for anyone. I miss your mother every day. We grew up together, too. But she can’t be in the same room with Jeanette and—”
“You could have come to visit us by yourself.”
“Jeanette is my wife now. Then we had Tyler and Mikayla. You can’t say that I made a choice, because your mother was the one who put me out. Don’t forget that.”
“Enough,” I said. “Enough of this historical shit. She put you out because you were chasing tail. She put you out and you married tail, and then you want to blame it on her. What about me? I didn’t put you out. I was in second grade.”
The air in the closed bathroom was warm, despite the noisy exhaust fan. His shaving cream smelled like cloves and made me feel nauseous. What was I even doing here? My father didn’t know me, he didn’t know Celestial, and he didn’t know Roy. How could he steer me in this storm?
From the other side of our silence, Jeanette sang, “Breakfast is ready!”
“C’mon, Dre,” my father said. “Have some eggs and bacon.”
“I didn’t come here hoping for a seat at your table.”
Carlos stuck his head out into the hallway, “I’m coming, Jeanette.” Then he turned to me, with a buzz of urgency like he had bought himself only another minute or so. “Let’s start over,” he said. “You say you want my advice. Here’s what I have. Tell the truth. Don’t try to cushion the blow. If you’re bad enough to do it, you’re bad enough to tell it. You can ask your mama. She’ll tell you she was so unhappy because I didn’t drop lies into her morning coffee. The whole time, she knew exactly who she was married to.
“You go let that man know what you have done, what you’re still doing. That’s all he’s entitled to. You don’t tell him with your chin on your chest. You tell him to inform him, for him to see the kind of man you are—however he sizes it up.”
“Then what do I do?”
“Depends on what he does. My guess is that he gets physical. I don’t think he’ll kill you over it. He’s not trying to get reincarcerated. But, son, you got a real ass whooping coming. Just take it and get on with your life.”
“But—”
“Here’s the ‘but,’ ” he said. “The good news is that he can whip your ass all up and down the state of Louisiana, but it doesn’t matter. He can’t beat Celestial out of you. It’s not a to-the-victors proposition.”
Then he laughed. I didn’t.
“Okay, son, I’m going to get serious. Just because I think you deserve what you’re about to go to Louisiana to get, it doesn’t mean that I don’t wish you well with Celeste. Every relationship requires that you go through some shit.” He ran his fingers over the figure scarring his chest. “This was stupid. We branded each other like cattle. Like slaves. We beat the shit out of each other. But it bound us together. I love every single one of them. When I tell you we went through it, I mean it. Maybe what has held me and Jeanette together all these years is what I had to go through and give up to be with her.”
And with that, he opened the bathroom door and we walked out into the cheerful house. In the hallway, I zipped my jacket against December and headed toward the doorway, past the twinkling tree. Something in me that was still very young hung back in case a gift was set aside, in case he had remembered me for the holidays.
“Come back Christmas,” he said. “There will be a box under the tree for you.”
My face burned at being so transparent, and because I shared Evie’s coloring, he could see it.
I turned away, but my father spun my shoulder. “I never forgot about you,” he said. “Not during the year and never at Christmas. I just wasn’t expecting to see you.” Then he patted his pockets like he was hoping to find something there. Downhearted, he lifted his gold necklace over his clean-shaven head. “My ma bought it in Chinatown when I finished high school. Other boys got typewriters to take to college, or maybe a briefcase, stuff like that, and she gives me a saint. Saint Christopher is for safe travels and buena suerte for bachelors.” He kissed the engraved face before holding it out to me. “I hate that you didn’t get to meet her. There is nothing like a Puerto Rican grandmother. A summer or two in East Harlem would have got you right.” He bounced the gold in his palm like dice. “Look, it’s yours. It says so in my will. But I don’t see why you have to wait.”
My father took my wrist and forced the jewelry into my hand, squeezing my fingers around it with so much force it hurt.