He clapped his hands hard. A crack echoed through the house.
“Where should we start?” Buddy Lee asked.
“I guess we should split up maybe? I’ll go check the bedroom, and I think Isiah had an office in the back. I remember him saying they had closed in the back porch. You wanna check around in here?” Ike said.
“Yeah, that’s cool. I’ll just go through anything that has a drawer pull on it,” Buddy Lee said.
“Alright. Holler if you find something,” Ike said. He walked through the living room and down a short hall. Buddy Lee started with an end table that sat next to the sectional. It was full of junk mail and odds and ends. He moved on to a coffee table with two drawers on each end. He thought that was a strange design choice, but what did he know? He used milk crates for furniture. A multitude of remotes were in one drawer. The other drawer held a few magazines. Buddy Lee closed the drawer and studied the wall of pictures. He hadn’t noticed an accent table that was sitting under the pictures. There were two tiny book-shaped picture frames sitting on the table. He picked one of them up and felt his chest heave. It was a copy of the picture he kept in his wallet. The other frame showed a young Black boy and a man that was a much younger Ike. The boy was on Ike’s shoulders. Buddy Lee put the frame back on the table. Next to this picture was a photo he hadn’t seen in over twenty years.
It was Christine and Derek. They were sitting on the steps of the trailer the three of them had shared before Buddy Lee got himself locked up the last time. Christine was as beautiful as a sunset. Auburn hair falling down her back like a waterfall. Big cornflower-blue eyes. That dimple in her chin that had driven him crazy all those years ago when they had first met. He’d asked her to dance at a bonfire and she had said no. Not in a cruel or haughty way. Just a simple, succinct, I-can’t-be-bothered fashion. He’d gone and found a handful of wildflowers just inside the tree line. He returned to the log she and her friends had been sitting on and got down on one knee.
“Dance with me. Just one dance and I’ll never bother you again for the rest of your life.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You don’t look like much of a scout.”
“And you look like the prettiest woman on God’s green earth. C’mon, one dance. I won’t even try and dip you.”
She had laughed at that. A full, throaty laugh as bright and sweet as summer itself. They had danced. They had kissed. They had gone down a long dirt lane in his Camaro and found paradise under a harvest moon. For a few years it had been magic. But magic was just sleight of hand, and eventually the magician’s assistant had seen every trick. By the time he’d done his second stint inside, Christine had seen enough. He didn’t begrudge her moving on and marrying that rich prick. Hell, he would have divorced him, too. That was understandable. But the way she erased Derek from her life was just wrong. He knew he wasn’t much of a father, but what kind of mother did that to her own child?
Buddy Lee removed the picture from the frame and put it in his back pocket. He moved on to the kitchen. Buddy Lee was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of equipment that was crammed into this space. The decor in here had an old-school Americana vibe. Black-and-white-checkered floors. Stainless-steel appliances. Black cabinets with granite countertops. Buddy Lee figured those countertops had to be granite to hold all the cooking utensils and machinery Derek had acquired over the years. Buddy Lee didn’t know what half of this shit did, but he knew his son had probably mastered all of it. Derek had loved to cook ever since he’d first seen his grandmother stirring cake batter. Buddy Lee’s cousin Sam had been a hell of a cook, too. Culinary skills ran in the Jenkins family. It had just leapfrogged over Buddy Lee and landed on Derek. Derek’s affinity for cooking had never struck Buddy Lee as gay, per se. It was just something he was good at. Even when they argued—which wasn’t often, because, if he was being honest, he didn’t see Derek that much—he’d never thrown any shade at him for being a chef. Not that he deserved a medal for that. He’d said plenty of other shit that he regretted. It was just too bad it took Derek dying for him to realize it.
Buddy Lee went through the cabinets checking sugar dishes and saucepans with tops. He wasn’t surprised when he found some weed. A lot of people hid their stash in the kitchen. He’d robbed enough houses to say it wasn’t an anomaly. There was nothing in the drawers except knives, forks, and spoons. Buddy Lee put one hand on his hip and rubbed his forehead with the other.