George Wier - The Last Call

“Come on in here, child,” I heard her say behind me. “Don’t be shy, now.”

Just inside the kitchen I turned and waited.

First came Keesha, with Julie’s hands resting gently on her shoulders, propelling her forward with just a touch. Julie looked worn out. Her eyes met mine.

There came an indefinable moment, no more than just an instant, in which something passed between Julie and me. We had been alone before, had been as physically close as two people could be, and yet this was, for some reason, a far more intimate moment. A sharing. Her somewhat pale, thin lips moved soundlessly. I was vaguely aware of little-girl eyes looking up at me, head tilted, and for an instant rapt. Keesha was watching.

I acknowledged Julie, smiling in spite of myself, and mouthed the same.

Hank came after Julie. I noticed the color was returning to his face. His hand had stopped bleeding through the makeshift bandage of one of Julie’s brown socks.

“Ya’ll go on in and sit at the dining room table,” she said, shooing us further on into the house. “I’ll get some coffee going.”

“Thank you, Ms. Coleeta,” I said.

“ You,” she told me. “You and me are going to have some words, right after I find out what’s going on.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. What else could I say?

“That child needs a bath,” she said, turning toward the dining room.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said.

Ms. Coleeta was Lawrence’s mother. I had been on a nodding acquaintance with her for a good number of years, but this was my first opportunity to get to know her without Lawrence being there.

When Lawrence left the Army back in ’88, he’d been home only a week before he fired up the grill. His uncle, Benjamin Finley, came up from Houston and spent two weeks with Lawrence and his mother, showing Lawrence the ins and outs of the barbecue business. Ben ran one of Houston’s most successful barbecue stands off of Jensen Drive. I got to know the fellow when I was in college down there. That was the history of White’s Barbecue according to Lawrence.

Ms. Coleeta had a different version of the same story. According to her, about the second night Lawrence was home, he practically cleaned out her refrigerator. Somewhere along the line, Lawrence had learned how to eat. He ate and ate and ate. Whether it was in his genes-his grandfather, after all, was a big man-or just his inclination, the man put groceries away faster than they could be purchased.

That second night Ms. Coleeta got up to fix herself a late night snack and found there was nothing in the refrigerator. Even the six month-old pickled relish was gone.

She didn’t bother closing the door. She went to the telephone, picked it up and called her dead husband’s brother in Houston, and the next morning the man drove up Highway 290 to Austin. By sundown that night there was more food in the house than Lawrence could possibly eat. Ben even sprung for a new deep freeze. Within forty-eight hours Lawrence was cooking and dishing out platters of food for the neighbors, and he was making money while he was doing it. Word spread rapidly through the community and Lawrence and his mother were in business.

And that was White’s Barbecue, a history of.

Personally, I liked Ms. Coleeta’s version better.

About six months after Lawrence got his barbecue stand going-regardless of which version a fellow chose to believe-a certain Austin do-gooder and financial consultant got a late night call. Somebody was pulling in too much cash. In fact, according to Uncle Benjamin, Lawrence didn’t have a bank account. What he did have was about ninety thousand dollars in greenbacks.

So I went to work.

That was all of fifteen years before. In that time I had put on about fifteen extra pounds. Lawrence, however, had added an extra Lawrence-size-wise.

Fifteen years.

I sat at Coleeta’s dining room table. Next to me was Hank with a beer in his hand. Across from me was Ms. Coleeta. Julie was in the bathroom giving Keesha a good scrubbing. We heard the occasional loud splash and explosion of giggles from both of them.

Those two were rapidly becoming inseparable.

Having been raised in the neck of woods I hail from, namely the Brazos River Valley area of east Central Texas, I had met a good number of large-boned black women in my time. My father had been an insurance agent for many of my formative years and he used to take me along while collecting on his debit route. From about the age of eight to eleven I must have highly favored a young Jerry Mathers (either that or all of us little white boys look the same) and along my dad’s route in many a black home such as Coleeta White’s I became known as “Beaver”, or just plain “Beave”.

Coleeta White and her warm home called to mind those days.

“Now,” she began. “Let’s see how much of this we can sort out before my son gets back from Waco.”

“Well, ma’am…” Hank started in.

“Hold on, Slim. I want to hear from Mr. William here first.”

It took awhile, but I told her everything that had happened thus far. She took the news about the murder attempt on Julie pretty easily but when I told her about the explosion I noticed a shocked look had come over her face. Her mouth was open and her eyebrows were drawn down into a heavy v-shape of sheer anger. At that moment I swore I would never, ever do anything to make the woman mad at me.

“What’re you gonna do, Mr. William?” she asked.

At that moment Julie and Keesha came into the room. Each of them had on a new dress and were smiling from ear to ear.

I looked down at Keesha. Her eyes sparkled and she was moving from side to side in excitement.

“Ms. Julie says you bought this dress for me, Bill.”

“That’s right, darlin’,” I said. “And don’t you look pretty?”

“She does,” Ms. Coleeta agreed. “Come over here, child” she said.

Ms. Coleeta pushed her chair back. “Come on and hop up here with me,” she said.

“Yes’m” Keesha said.

With the kid in her lap, she turned back to me.

“Well?” she asked.

“She’s why we came here,” I said, nodding toward Keesha. I looked up at Julie.

“Hoo-boy,” Ms. Coleeta said. “I see now.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “I’m sure that right now you can see better than any of us.”

She looked back down at the child who was curled on her lap.

“Ma’am,” Hank said. “I’m only glad you didn’t see the conditions this child was living in. It would have broken your heart.”

“I heard it, though,” she said. A tear slipped down her cheek before she could catch it. “I heard it in what William wasn’t saying.”

I felt Julie behind me. She put her arms around my neck and whispered in my ear.

“You’re amazing,” she said. I patted her arm.

“We’ll talk about all this tomorrow,” Ms. Coleeta said. “It’s getting plenty late and it’s been a long day-for everybody. You folks can bed down now. Miss Julie, Keesha, you both can sleep with me. You two men can sleep out here in the livin’ room. I might wake you when Lawrence comes in, which I expect will be sometime between two and four.”

With that said, the meeting broke up.

Lying awake in the darkness, the loud tick of an old-fashioned cuckoo clock to track the passing half-seconds, I waited for the sound of tires crunching on gravel. It didn’t come.

There in the pier-and-beam solid wood-floored home, lavish with green and red Aubusson throw rugs and aging pictures of a sad Jesus, I became comfortable for what felt like the first time in ages.

I successfully fought off sleep for an hour, maybe longer.

Big trucks whistled along in the night down I-35, half a mile away to the west, and there was the occasional whoop of an ambulance siren: approaching, dwindling, gone.