Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

Minas asked for ribs, but Fontanot told him that if he was hungry he wanted the restaurant’s special smoked sausages.

“Sausages stick to your ribs, boy,” the big chef declared. “An’ what will you have, Miss Beerman?”

“I don’t eat much meat,” she admitted with a slight bow of her head.

Minas thought that she was such a kind woman that she was afraid that her appetite would somehow bruise Fontanot’s feelings.

“I got catfish come up ev’ry day from Lake Charles, Louisiana,” Fontanot said. “They’s a farm down there where they introduce wild fish every six weeks. You know, the big catfish farms got they fish so inbred that you might as well call’em sole.”

This made Branwyn laugh.

Minas looked at the young, beautiful woman and wondered where she could have possibly come from. He was about to ask her, when Fontanot put a big oval plate of steaming sausages in front of him. One bite and Minas couldn’t stop eating. The sauce was extremely spicy-hot, and so the doctor ate plenty of bread and downed glass after glass of ice water through the meal. But he didn’t turn away the second plate when Fontanot placed it in front of him. Something about Branwyn’s company and the kitchen and loud, loud Ira Fontanot made the doctor ravenous.

Branwyn picked at her catfish, which was very good, and watched the heart surgeon eat. She imagined that he probably hadn’t had a good meal since the day his wife died.

Rich white doctor or no, she thought, it’s an unlucky star that shone down on this man’s backyard.

“I’m not usually such a pig, Miss Beerman,” Minas said when he noticed her smiling at him.

“Appetite ain’t nuthin’ to be shamed of, Doctor,” she said. “I wish that I could see my son eat like you.”

“You should see my boy, Miss Beerman,” Minas replied. “He sucks down formula by the quart. When he cries it’s almost as loud as Mr. Fontanot here.”

“Maybe he’ll be a singer,” Ira Fontanot said. “That’s what I always wanted to be. But my voice was too strong, and they made me lip-synch in the church choir.”

“That’s awful,” Branwyn said. “A boy or a girl should always be let to sing. When you gonna sing but when you’re a child?”

“And who has more reason?” Minas added.

The three were silent a moment, appreciating how much in line their thinking was.

“More sausages, Minas?” Fontanot asked.

“I wouldn’t be able to get in behind the wheel if I had them, Ira.”

“How’s your fish?” the big cook asked Branwyn.

“The best I’ve ever eaten,” she said. “But don’t tell my mama I said that.”

Back in the car, Minas related a long and convoluted joke about a poor woman who fooled a banker into being the shill for a hoax she was pulling on a fancy-pants lawyer.

The story took so long to tell that he had driven to her apartment building and parked in front of the door again before it was through.

Branwyn liked a good story, and she was happy at the end when the trick made her laugh and laugh.

“That’s really beautiful,” Minas Nolan said.

“What?”

“Your laugh.”

This caught the young mother up short. She had never in her wildest dreams imagined that she would be sitting in a car in the middle of the night with a rich white doctor calling her beautiful. White people were fine by her, but she never responded to any flirtation that she got from white men. She wasn’t interested in them. She liked men like Elton, with his jet-black skin and deep laugh.

But Minas Nolan wasn’t flirting. He really thought that she was beautiful, and he was honestly happy to be sitting there next to her.

“I should be going,” she said. “It’s very late.”

“Thank you for keeping me company, Miss Beerman,” Minas said.

They shook hands. Branwyn thought that she had had kisses less passionate than the way that surgeon held her fingers.

The next evening, Minas was waiting outside the ICU at eleven.

“I don’t expect you to have dinner with me or to do anything except to accept a ride home, Miss Beerman,” he said quickly, as if to keep her from protesting.

“You don’t have to do that, Doctor,” she said.

She had been thinking about Minas throughout the day — whenever she wasn’t thinking about her son. Before their night at the Rib Joint, Branwyn would spend her days thinking about what it would be like if Elton came back and Tommy got better and they all moved to a house out toward the desert where they could have a backyard with a garden and a swing.

But that day, she hadn’t thought of Elton at all — not once.

This wasn’t a pleasant realization. If just one impossible night with a man who couldn’t ever really be a friend made her forget the father of her child, then what would two nights bring? She might forget about Tommy next.

Dr. Nolan could see the rejection building in Branwyn’s face, and before it could come out, he said, “Last night was the first time I got to sleep before sunrise. I had a good time just driving you home. It was something I could do. You know what I mean?”

She did know. It was just as if he knew how she understood things. His few words spoke a whole volume to her understanding of the world and loneliness. She couldn’t refuse him the release of that drive. If she went home on the bus now, she would never get to sleep because she’d be up thinking of that poor man lying awake, thinking about his dead wife.

“I can’t go to dinner though,” she said as if in the middle of a much larger conversation.

Dr. Nolan drove Branwyn straight home. They talked about flowers that night. She explained to him how she thought about arranging different kinds of blossoms and leaves. He listened very closely and asked astute questions.

The next night he told her about the first time he cut into a living human body.

“I was so scared that I threw up afterward,” he admitted. “I decided that I wasn’t meant to be a surgeon.”

Branwyn grinned at that.

“What are you laughing about?” the doctor asked.

“You.”

“Because I was afraid?”

“Because you seem like you’re not afraid of anything,” she said.

“I’m scared plenty.”

“Maybe you think so,” Branwyn replied. “But people really afraid hardly ever know it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well... the way I see it, a man who’s afraid stays away from the things he fears. A man afraid of cutting into another to save his life would never put himself in the position to do that. He’d become an artist or anything else and then talk about surgery like he was some kinda expert. Fear makes men bluster. They do that so you can’t tell how they feel, and after a while, neither can they.”

The next night they were both quiet on the drive. The only words the doctor spoke were “thank you” when Branwyn got out to go to her door.

She liked it that Minas stayed in front of her apartment until she was well into the building.

Minas Nolan worked nearly every day after his wife died. And almost every night he stayed late and drove Branwyn Beerman to her door. After many days had passed, he made an appointment to talk to Dr. Mason Settler about Thomas Beerman’s condition.

“There’s nothing more I can do, Minas,” Dr. Settler, head of the pediatric section of the ICU, said. “I’m surprised that the boy has lived so long. You know, his immune system is off, and I don’t like the way he’s breathing.”

“You can’t just let him die without trying something, Doctor,” Minas said.

“What?” the elder Dr. Settler asked.

“Something.”

Two weeks later, when Minas and Branwyn pulled up in front of her building, she hesitated before opening the car door.