Tim Sandlin - Social Blunders

I turned to look at her. “Would it be personal if I asked your name?”

Her eyes were on Jake. “Atalanta Williams.”

I pronounced it like the city the first time and she had to correct me. Then I got it right.

“Atalanta,” I said. “That’s pretty.”

Gilia glanced from the photographs to me. Jake’s eyes were different from mine. And the nose. Heck, I don’t know if we looked alike. I’ve always made it a point to avoid mirrors.

“So talk,” Atalanta said.

“I’d rather not.”

“I didn’t ask what you’d rather do.”

“You owe it to her,” Gilia said.

This wasn’t what I wanted. When Shannon had said wreak vengeance by destroying their wives, it had sounded good in theory, but the reality sucked.

“Jake may have been my father,” I said.

Atalanta took it well. She didn’t speak or anything. Just stared at the pictures on the piano. I followed her line of sight to see which one she was staring at. I think it was a five-by-seven head-and-shoulders shot of Jake wearing a coat and tie.

“Five boys had sex with Mom and she got pregnant,” I said.

“Was she white?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What do you mean, ‘had sex’?”

I looked at Gilia but she gave no answers. “They raped her.”

“It’s a lie,” Atalanta said.

“I don’t think so.”

All the years I’d lived in North Carolina, I’d never seen a black woman cry. She made no sound. Nothing but tears and sharp intakes of breath. I looked down between my hands at Jake, wishing he hadn’t been there that night. Wishing he wasn’t dead and I wasn’t born.

“Get out of my home.”

“That’s fair.”

“And put down my picture. You can’t touch him.”

I put down the picture.

“You are a lying little white boy. How dare you come into my home desecrating the memory of my husband.”

“I didn’t want to.”

“You are trash.”

“Yes.”

“That house was nothing but one big shrine,” Gilia said. “I’ll bet you anything Jake left for the army about a month after he married her, when life was still perfect and she hadn’t had time to stop worshiping him. It’s love cut off at the peak that cripples people, not the long, ugly divorces.”

I had been highly confused when we left Atalanta Williams’s house, so I drove south a while, then east, then back north, not really aware of where I was going. Having pain is nothing—you live through it and go on—but causing someone else pain is totally unacceptable. I can’t stand hurting people. Won’t stand hurting people. And, yet—guess what?—I’d just trashed a perfectly nice woman.

Gilia was cool. She seemed to know that movement eases turmoil. After an hour or so of silently circling Greensboro, she suddenly got talkative. Mostly she talked about college days and the busted marriage with Jeremy. She had a story about a roommate sleeping with her boyfriend that was pretty good. Usually when a woman tells the roommate/best friend/sister-slept-with-my-man thing, they’re pissed off at the whole female gender. They never seem to blame the guy, but Gilia completely left out the self-pity part of the story.

“Those two sluts deserve each other,” she said. “Their biggest problem was who got to face the mirror when they did it.”

My fathers didn’t come up until Bojangles chicken, where we stopped for a bucket of wings. We sat in the car, chewing bones and sucking grease off our fingers while she gave me the love-cut-off-at-the-peak theory.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What?” Gilia had a dribble of barbecue sauce off the left corner of her lips.

“Or Elvis Presley. Or Marilyn Monroe. If any of that bunch had lived past fifty, they’d have been forgotten. Die young if you want worship.”

Gilia stuck a wing in her mouth and stripped meat as she pulled out the bone. She ate like a little kid who wants everything at once. I like a woman with an appetite. “So this teacher sat in a dark room for thirty years, mourning her perfect husband, having no life outside his memory, and you come along and smash everything to hell.”

“You’re the one said I owed her the truth.”

“By then it was too late.” She took a slug of Mr. Pibb. “You’d said too much to leave her alone with her imagination.”

“But the truth was worse than anything she could have imagined.”

Gilia sucked her thumb, then examined the nail. “Don’t you see, knowing for certain is better than imagining, even when what you know is awful. Imagining makes you doubt your sanity. At least when you know the person you love is a pig, you can get on with the grief process.”

“You’re talking about Jeremy.”

“He had me believing I was clinically paranoid. I’m at the school counselor whining ‘I know he’s a good man and it’s all in my mind’ when the jerk is screwing every bimbo on campus, including the school counselor.”

I thought about Wanda. Would it have been better to suspect she was a slut but not know, or to know? To tell the truth, I hadn’t even suspected. The first I heard about her migratory snatch was when she said I didn’t meet her needs and I’d driven her into the arms of another.

“One thing I do know,” I said, “is I’m done with fathers. I don’t plan on seeing another male relative again. Ever.”

“What if they aren’t done with you?”

I dipped a corner of my napkin into my 7Up and reached across to blot the barbecue off Gilia’s chin. “I am no longer involved.”

Fat chance. While we’d been circling the streets of Greensboro, pockets of people affected by my actions had been choosing up attitudes. Not near as many chose passivity as I’d hoped.

The first mistake was not taking Gilia back where I found her. Since the Saunderses lived a half block from the eighteenth fairway, she’d walked to the club, and, in our innocence, it made sense to drop her at home.

Before I even turned off the key, angry hands reached in both doors and yanked us into the open.

“Sonny!” Gilia yelled.

Then, “Ryan, you let go of him!”

A lot of people were shouting at once. The sucker pinning me against my own Dodge ordered Gilia into the house. This had to be the macho brother.

“Let go of him, you little shit!”

I agreed with the shit part, but Ryan wasn’t little. Sons of linemen grow up big.

He breathed beer in my face. “Stay away from my sister.”

“She’s my sister too, jerk.”

That set him back a moment. Meanwhile, the goon Gilia had called Sonny came charging around to our side of the action. One look told me here was the spawn of Skippy. Sons of quarterbacks grow up compact and sneaky.

Sonny even had Skip’s snarl. “You, mister, are going to take back every lie you said about my dad.”

“Forcing me to call the truth a lie won’t make it less the truth.” Let them work their way through that logic.

Didn’t take long. Ryan came back with the tough guys’ universal retort. “Oh, yeah.”

Beyond Ryan’s fat shoulder I could see Skip Prescott standing on his own porch. With a drink in his right hand and his left hand sunk in his tennis shorts’ pocket, he came off as the slightly amused massah who’d ordered the whipping of a bumptious slave.

“Still afraid to fight your own fights, huh, Daddy?” I called out, which got me a frown from Skip and a jerk forward, hard shove back against the car from Ryan. Behind us, I could hear Gilia begging Cameron to call off the dogs.

Ryan had a jaw big enough to club cattle. “What were you doing with my sister?”

“Communicating.”

He didn’t like that. The kid wasn’t stupid—just big and Southern.