Marie picked up the phone from its cradle on the wall beside the sliding glass door. Her back was to Winston.
“Hello?” she said, and then she turned around and looked at him. “Hey, honey,” she said, her words and the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes telling Winston that Colleen was on the other end. He stood from the table, but she raised her finger to send him a signal that let him know that she wanted to hear her daughter’s voice for as long as she could. It would be his turn after that. She crossed her arms and leaned her back against the wall, the sunlight coming in the sliding glass door playing on her skin, hollowing out her cheeks, and glinting on her hair. “How are things down in Dallas?”
Winston sat back down and took another bite of his sandwich, suddenly hungry and willing to eat because he didn’t know what else to do while he waited. He watched Marie as she knitted her eyebrows together. She looked at him.
“Oh,” she said, “in Wilmington?” She put her hand over the receiver and said, “She’s at the airport in Wilmington.”
Winston stood up from the table and walked toward Marie, his mind alive with scenarios and possibilities. Had Colleen and Scott planned a surprise trip home? Had they separated? Did she need him to pick her up?
“What happened?” he whispered, but Marie raised her finger to silence him again.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Marie said, her voice softer than Winston had heard it in a long time. “It’s okay, honey. We’ll come get you.” She looked at Winston, widening her eyes as if sending him a cue to speak a line that only he could speak or to take some action that only he could take. “Your father’s already on his way.”
Chapter 4
“Those white folks are probably going to eat you,” Kelvin had said. “That’s what they do to Black people up there in the country.”
Jay wasn’t supposed to have been hanging around Kelvin after what had happened, and he’d known he’d be in even more trouble if his parents caught them together. After all, it had been Kelvin’s fault that Jay had been sent up to the country in the first place. Jay shouldn’t have trusted him, but Kelvin was fifteen, a year older than Jay, with an older brother named Terry who’d already finished high school and had a job at the shoe store in the mall in Decatur. Terry had called them both babies whenever he’d seen them hanging out at Kelvin’s house after school.
“Y’all babies found your peckers yet?”
“Y’all babies still watch cartoons?”
“Y’all babies getting sent to juvie?”
And, for a while, Jay thought for certain they would be sent to juvie.
The plan had been that they would walk into Wright’s corner store just like they’d walked into it every day since they’d been old enough to walk home from school. Kelvin would distract Mr. Wright by talking to him, and Jay would make his way to the back of the store, where he would slip two bottles of MD 20/20 from the cooler and slide them into the waist of his jeans before cinching his belt tight. If anything went sideways, Kelvin would use their code word—Thriller—and the mission would be aborted. Jay had wondered why they couldn’t switch places, why he couldn’t distract Mr. Wright while Kelvin pinched the liquor. Kelvin had brushed that suggestion aside. “Because you can’t talk like I can,” he’d said. But it was his brother Terry’s talking that had gotten the whole thing started.
Terry had told them both that girls liked MD 20/20, which he called Mad Dog, especially Banana Red and Electric Melon. Terry had told them both that if a girl drank Mad Dog, she’d let you kiss her and touch her wherever you wanted to touch her. Jay had never kissed a girl before, and he didn’t know what to think about that advice, but Kelvin said he’d kissed a bunch of girls, and he knew that what Terry was saying was true. Kelvin said he’d hooked up with Robin Francis, a tall, skinny girl with buck teeth and braces who lived down the street from him. He’d told Jay they’d take the Mad Dog to Robin’s house next time she had a friend over. He’d said Jay would see.
“I’ll take Robin,” Kelvin had said, “depending on what friend she’s got with her.”
“I ain’t kissing Robin,” Jay had said, mostly to sound defiant, but also because he couldn’t imagine kissing anyone, much less someone taller than him with braces on their teeth. “I don’t want those big old buck-toothed braces in my mouth, clacking against my teeth.”
Kelvin had laughed. “Come on, man,” he’d said. “Pecking on those teeth is just like pecking on a typewriter.” He raised his hands as if placing his fingers on the keyboard, and he began typing. “Click, click, click, ding!” he’d said. At that sound he thrust his hips forward before beginning to type again. Jay had laughed. “Come on, man,” Kelvin had said again. “You’re going to love it.”
Alone in his bed at night, Jay had stared up at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the Braves game on the television in the living room, the squeak of his father’s leather recliner as he leaned toward the side table and poured salted peanuts into his hand from the jar of Planters he always kept there. Later, he would hear the clap of his mother closing her book and getting up from the sofa to go into their bedroom, his father following behind her not long after. Once the house had gone quiet, Jay had lain there and imagined kissing Robin Francis, her breath warm and sweet with what Terry had promised would be the fruitiness of the Mad Dog, her braces shiny and sharp. Click, click, click, ding! he’d thought.
But once he was inside Mr. Wright’s store, all the doubts he’d had about Kelvin’s plan, his story of kissing Robin Francis, and the promise of the sugary sweetness of the MD 20/20 and all the things Terry had said it would get the girls to do, suddenly rose up in his chest like a sickness he feared would spill from his mouth.
After Jay had made his way to the back of the store and was standing in front of the drink cooler as if unable to decide what kind of soda to choose, he’d looked up at the convex circular mirror that hung above him in the corner of the store. In the mirror, he could see Kelvin standing by the magazine rack as if having the same trouble selecting what to read that Jay was having selecting what to drink. He could also see Mr. Wright in the mirror’s reflection, at least he could see his hands where they rested on the counter by the cash register. From this angle—the angle at which the mirror hung and the angle at which Jay was standing—Mr. Wright’s face was obscured by the bank of cigarettes that hung from the ceiling within easy reach of Mr. Wright’s fingers. Jay had seen him find a pack of cigarettes for a customer without even raising his eyes from where his other hand accepted the bills before pecking away at the cash register and making change once the drawer opened.
Jay didn’t need to see Mr. Wright’s face to be reminded of what it looked like. He was Jay’s father’s age, good friends with Jay’s father, actually. He had medium brown skin and a thin mustache and a head full of hair. Jay had grown up seeing Mr. Wright and his father and other men from the neighborhood sitting in his parents’ driveway beneath the carport on Saturday afternoons, smoking cigarettes, telling stories, drinking beer, and talking about whatever it was they were always doing together: bowling or playing cards or fishing; the kinds of things men did when they got off work and got away from wives and kids. Those driveway sessions were just about the only times Jay saw his father smile. He’d even laugh. In fact, sometimes he’d laugh until he cried, tears glistening on his smooth, dark skin, his cap coming off and revealing his bald head whenever he removed it to slap his knee with it or use it to pop one of his friends in the chest as they laughed together, hunched over in their chairs, stomping their feet.