He’s wearing a beige camel-hair coat. A navy sweater-vest with an open-collar purple gingham shirt. Khakis. Burgundy driving shoes. A tan driving cap. It suddenly occurs to me that he’s wearing his version of kicking-around-the-house clothes. A calculated attempt to appear softer.
“Here,” he says, handing me my neatly folded suit jacket and tie—the bundle he was carrying.
I accept them, but I’m still speechless.
My mom walks in. “Sweetie, who is—” She freezes when she sees Judge Edwards. “Sir, why are you here?”
“Ma’am, I came to see if—”
My dad enters and pales when he sees Judge Edwards. “Your Honor. May we help you with something?” When my dad gets emotional, his Irish accent thickens. Right now he sounds like he just stepped off the plane.
Judge Edwards meets his eyes with an even gaze. “I was about to ask your wife if I could borrow Carver for a few hours—if he’ll allow me. To better acquaint me with my son.”
“You tried to take our son from us.” Blistering fury radiates from my mom. Thankfully, she’s better at controlling it than Georgia. Even still, my dad gently touches her arm.
Judge Edwards’s face conveys that he views the matter as somewhat more nuanced. However, he responds calmly. “I called for justice. I understand if we have very different views of what that means.”
“He also asked the DA not to prosecute, Mom,” I say. Now I’m defending him?
“I would prefer that we not spread that around too much, as I said.” There’s a trace of the old Judge Edwards in his tone.
“Sorry.”
He nods, and the new, gentler Judge Edwards returns to his face.
“If that’s true, then thank you,” my mom says softly.
He nods.
“I know you are a judge, sir, but if this is some sort of…” My dad’s voice trails off—deferential, respectful, but with a honed edge.
“Trick? Ruse? It is not.” The old Judge Edwards tone returns. “It would mean a great deal to me, and I’ve had a difficult past few months, as I’m sure you’ve surmised.”
My mom regards him with a sudden flash of sympathy. I give her a look that says: This is an opportunity I need to take. “If you want to, sweetie,” she says.
“This is your choice, Carver,” my dad says. “You don’t have to go.”
“I want to tell him about Mars,” I say. “I know stuff about him Judge Edwards doesn’t.”
My parents trade wary glances but stay mum.
“This is important,” I say. “What if it were someone wanting to tell you about me?”
They stand down. Judge Edwards shakes hands with them.
Judge Edwards and I leave and sit in his car for a moment. My adrenaline at seeing him come to the door is cautiously evaporating.
“You might be relieved to know that I’ve exhausted all of my ideas for the day. So I’m open to any you might have,” Judge Edwards says.
He looks like he could use something sweet and rich, and I certainly could. “Do you like milkshakes, Your Honor?”
“Let’s dispense with the ‘Your Honor’ business for tonight. And yes.”
“Peanut butter and banana? What’s wrong with chocolate and vanilla?”
“We could’ve gotten pumpkin spice instead,” I say.
Judge Edwards snorts. “Worse still.”
“Peanut butter and banana was Mars’s favorite. You might like it too.”
“They have to make everything complicated,” Judge Edwards grumbles, and takes a sip. “Not bad.” He takes another, holding up his cup as if in a toast. “All right. Better than not bad. I can see why these appealed to Mars.” Every time he says “Mars,” he trips over it.
I scan the park from the picnic table where we sit, but I don’t see any squirrels. I explain squirrel rodeo to Judge Edwards.
He chuckles and shakes his head. “Good lord. Mars’s grandfather marched with Martin Luther King Jr. so that his grandson could chase squirrels around Centennial Park with impunity. If that’s not progress…”
I smile for the first time that day. “That’s exactly what he thought you’d say.”
The glimmer fades quickly from Judge Edwards’s face. He takes another drink and savors it for a moment, gazing into the darkness. “I’m sure Mars thought I was hard on him.”
“He did.”
“I was hard on him. True. But understand that young black men have no margin for error in this country. I had to teach him that. I had to teach him that he can be the son of a judge, but if he acts the way young white men do—the way his friends do—he will be treated more harshly. People, police—they won’t see a judge’s son. They won’t see a kid who worked hard and mostly stayed on the straight and narrow. They’ll see another ‘young thug’—the term du jour for all young black men in certain circles. They’ll go through and find every picture of him wearing clothes that are too big, or flipping off a camera, or acting like a normal, rambunctious young man, and that will be all the proof anyone will need that he got what was coming to him.
“You want to know why I asked the DA not to prosecute you? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not because I wanted to be your new best friend. It’s certainly not because I think you’re blameless.”
I both wanted very much to know and very much not to know.
“I’ll tell you why,” he says before I can respond. “I didn’t want my son put on trial for his own death. And that’s what would have happened.”
“I wouldn’t—” My voice is frail.
“You wouldn’t what? Try to pin the blame on him? To save yourself from the consequences?”
“No.”
“You say that now. But nobility has a funny way of disappearing when accountability raises its ugly head. Plus it wouldn’t have been your call. Not really. It would have been Krantz’s. And I know Jimmy Krantz very well. No. I did this to protect my son. I did this for him, not you.”
I begin to deflate inside. Maybe this was a bad idea.
Judge Edwards swirls his straw in his milkshake. Something about the gesture puts me back at ease. “Anyway. That’s not what we’re here for. The point is I was never allowed to forget that I had to be hard on Mars or the world could be even harder. I see it in my court every day.”
My wave of adrenaline begins to crest and subside. I’m feeling brave enough to keep pushing into potentially fraught territory. I assume my poor man’s Dr. Mendez role. “Is that why you wanted me to throw out his artwork? To forget?”
He shifts uneasily and watches his feet. “I never understood the artwork. It was not my choice to send him to art school. But when his mother and I divorced, in our agreement I got custody while she got to decide where he went to school. I thought the art school was to spite me.”
“It wasn’t. It was what he loved.”
“I see that now.”
“That’s why we’re here.”
“Yes.”
“Did he ever show you his artwork while he was alive?”
“Never.”
We take sips of our milkshakes.
“I’m sure I’d have reacted badly,” Judge Edwards says. “And I imagine he wanted to please me.”
“Dude, come on,” I say. “It’s more fun with two players.”
“Bruh,” Mars says, “I told you. Tonight I’m sketching. I have work to do.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
“Dude.”
“Dude. Do you think I’m going to make it if I don’t work my ass off constantly? Think I’m the only person out there who wants to write and illustrate comics? Plus black people have to work twice as hard for everything.”
“You definitely have to work twice as hard to get girls.”
“Oh, all right. All right. I see how it is, funnyman.”
“Mars. Just one night off.”
“One night off leads to two. Two leads to three. Three leads to…”
“Four?”
“A hundred.”
“You sound like your hard-ass dad right now.”
“That’s not from him. That’s all me.”
“He’d be impressed.”
“Honestly, dude, can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
“For real, though, I don’t give a shit about impressing my dad.”
“Serious?”
“Yeah, man. He’s never going to get or dig what I do. So why’m I gonna break my ass trying to impress him?”
“Yeah, I mean, makes sense, I guess.”
“I’ll tell you what I am gonna do: I’m gonna take all that work ethic he’s always going on about, and I’m pouring it into what I love doing, and I’m making it so he can’t help but be impressed someday. But I’m not trying for his approval.”
“So that’s why you won’t hang out and play.”
“Exactly.”
“But it’s way more fun with two players.”
“Really, bruh?”
“Mars didn’t care about that, actually,” I say.
“What? My reacting badly to his artwork?”
“Impressing you.”
A stormy cast clouds Judge Edwards’s face. “Is that so?”
I swallow hard, remembering the ordeal of the day and not particularly wanting to relive any part of it, especially the whole “wrath-incurring” thing. But I press forward anyway. “He was pretty determined to take everything you taught him and be his own man. He…wasn’t going to live his life for your approval. He wanted to live it for himself.”
“You inferred this?”
“He told me.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Judge Edwards sets his milkshake on the table, rests his elbows on his knees, clasps his hands, and stares at them, brow furrowed. His jaw muscles tense and release. He blinks fast and wipes his eyes. He coughs and clears his throat before speaking. His voice is gruff with tears. “I’m glad to hear that. Every father wants his son to want his approval. But I’m glad for his courage.”
“He obviously admired you. You saw that in The Judge.”
He sits taller. “That was something else, wasn’t it? The work he must have put into that. He makes me very proud. I’m very proud that he’s my son. I tried to be a good father to him.”
“He knew all that. I could tell.”
We pull our coats tighter around ourselves as the wind blows from the north, carrying the mossy scent of damp leaves and rain.
“This is the kind of thing you boys did?” Judge Edwards asks.
“A lot, yeah.”
“You just hung out together and talked about life and the way of things.”
“Yep.”
“Must’ve lost our damn minds, sitting on a picnic table at night, drinking milkshakes in November,” Judge Edwards mutters.
“We can go if you want.”
Judge Edwards takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. “No. It’s pleasant. Cold. Clean. Like splashing water on your face in the morning.” He pauses, starts to say something, and stops. Starts. Stops. Then finally: “I’ll tell you what I wish sometimes.”
I listen.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud.”
I listen.
“When he was a baby, I would hold him on my lap and touch his hands in wonder. I would trace the lines along them. Measure his fingers against mine. Marvel at his perfect, tiny form. I wish—” He stops and looks away, blinking fast. I hear him trying to breathe down tears. He removes his hat, rubs the top of his head, and replaces his hat. “I wish I had done that once more. I wish I could have sat my son in my lap and traced the lines of his hands just one more time. My baby. He had talented hands.”
“Yes he did.”
We sit in a prolonged hush, punctuated by throat clearing and attempts at discreet eye wiping.
“We assume that it’s better to survive things, but the ones who don’t survive don’t have to miss anyone. So sometimes I don’t know which is better,” Judge Edwards says finally.
“I don’t know either.”
He turns to me and wags his finger between us. “This right here. Have you done something similar to this with your own parents? Where you tell them who you are?”
“No.”
“You should.”
We trade stories of Mars. Some are funny. Some are not. Some uplifting. Some not. Some important. Some ordinary.
We build him a monument of words we’ve written on the walls of our hearts. We make the air vibrate with his life.
Until our milkshakes are gone.
Until Judge Edwards begins yawning and says that he has to be up early for court; that he’s not as young as he once was.
Until it’s almost my curfew anyway.
Until the wind gusts hard, bringing cool autumn rain, falling like silver arrows.