Cora smiled around her cigarette. “You don’t got to believe me. That bitch still in the ground, even if you don’t believe me.”
She wasn’t lying. She was too happy to be giving me this terrible news to be lying.
He was dead. I had just now realized that he might be my father and it was already too late. I willed myself not to cry in front of her. I even pressed my fists against my eyes, trying to hold back the tears. But it wasn’t any use. Despite having cried more these last few days than I ever had in my entire life, I couldn’t control my tears now.
“Stop crying,” Cora said. Like I was still a little kid and embarrassing her. “He ain’t your daddy.”
I shook my head. I really wished that she would just stop talking. It was like she had trained herself to only say the things that would be the least amount of help to anyone.
“Here, sit down,” Cora said. She put her hand on my shoulder and kind of pushed me down onto the red pleather love seat that had replaced the couch that I used to sleep on. It was the first time she had touched me since beating me right before the Farrell party.
I sat down on the ridiculous piece of furniture and started wiping away my tears with the bottom of my Strokes T-shirt. I heard her walk out, and a few minutes later she returned with a box, which she plunked down beside me.
“Listen,” she said. “This is all the stuff you left. You going to have to take it with you, because I ain’t got room to be storing your shit for you.”
My eyes widened when I saw the rainbow-covered scrapbook sitting on top of everything else in the box. I pulled it out. My James Farrell scrapbook. I couldn’t believe that she had kept it all these years. I opened it and found all the articles I had clipped and the Polaroid I had stolen. I touched two fingers to the smooth film. He looked so young and carefree, with his hair cut in a box-top fade. Nothing like the man I had known in L.A. It was hard to believe that this was the same James that I had initially fallen head over heels for. My very first love.
I closed the scrapbook and went back to the box. There were several VHS tapes, including Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, and of course, Sixteen Candles. But there was also Say Anything and Some Kind of Wonderful, and, bizarrely enough, Labyrinth. I had forgotten that I had also liked those films.
Underneath the VHS tapes, I found a framed photograph of my grandparents. I blinked, because I hadn’t seen this picture of my grandmama and my grandfather, who had died of a heart attack before I was born, in years.
They looked different somehow. My grandmama’s lighter face was not quite as kind as I remembered it. And my grandfather seemed even more unfamiliar, even though he was dark like me.
Dark like me . . .
A thought occurred to me then—a thought I started to dismiss at first because my grandfather’s name was Arnold, not David. But then I remembered it wasn’t just Arnold. It was Arnold D. Jones. I had seen that once on the deed to the house.
I turned around and asked Cora, “What was my grandfather’s middle name?”
Cora went completely still.
And quite suddenly I knew that we were in dangerous territory here. What had just been a thought a few seconds ago was now transforming into a real and devastating possibility. “Was it David?” I asked. “Was I named after him?”
There was a second where nothing happened, in which Cora just looked at me. Then she whispered, “Get out!”
“Mama,” I said then, because I finally understood why she was the way she was.
Her transformation to enraged was instantaneous. She threw the scrapbook and tapes in the box and pushed it into my chest. “Get out,” she said again.
“Mama, we can talk about this. I didn’t know—”
She screamed, “Get out my house! Get the hell out my house!”
Her hands were on my body, pushing me, shoving me. And then suddenly, I was out on the steps.
“So my grandfather is also my real father,” I said, outside the door.
She slapped me. Hard. Then she slammed the door in my face.