“‘Is that what you do? Eat and not even say thank you for the meal?’” I asked. Claudia always thought I was too harsh with Lamont, but I didn’t see why a boy couldn’t learn manners in this life. He didn’t have a job, and there Claudia and I were, me screwing parts together at the phone plant, Claudia cleaning up after spoiled white folks, and Lamont thinking we lived to wait on him!”
She paused, breathing hard, reliving the resentments that hadn’t eased for being forty years old. “So that night, when I said what I said, he kissed his fingers to me and passed some sarcastic comment on the ‘delightful repast’ before going out the door, just wearing that thin jacket, the kind all those hotshot boys sported in those days. The next day was the big storm, you know. When he didn’t come home, I thought he must have taken shelter somewhere. That jacket wasn’t enough to carry him through a blizzard.”
Oh yes, the big storm of ’sixty-seven. I’d been ten then, and it seemed like a winter fairyland to me. Two feet of snow fell; drifts rose to the height of buildings. The blizzard briefly covered the yellow stains that the steel mills left on our car and house, painting everything a dazzling white. For adults, it had been a nightmare. My dad was stuck at the station for the better part of two days while my mother and I struggled to clean the walks and get to a grocery store. Of course, the mills didn’t shut down, and within a day the mounds of snow looked dirty, old, dreary.
“It was only later we got worried.” Miss Ella’s harsh voice brought me back to her living room. “Later, when we could get out and about, and, by then, we couldn’t find anyone who had seen him.”
It was when I asked for a photograph that Miss Ella seemed startled. I was surprised, actually, that among all the framed slogans and pictures of Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders, that I hadn’t seen any family pictures at all.
“Why do you need one?”
“If I’m going to look for him, I need to know what he looked like forty years ago. I can scan it and age it, see what he might look like at sixty.”
Miss Ella returned to the sideboard and fumbled inside for a photo album. She looked through it slowly and finally took out a shot of a young black man in yellow graduation robes. His hair was cropped close to his head in the style of those pre-Afro days. He stared seriously at the camera, his eyes hard and bleak.
“That was when he graduated high school. Even though he’d started down a wrong road, I made him stay in school until he was done. The rest are all just baby pictures and such. I want this back, and I want it back in the same condition it is today.”
I slipped it into a plastic sleeve and put it in a file folder. I told her I’d return it at the end of the week, after I’d made some copies and preliminary inquiries.
“But I don’t want your sister to imagine this will be easy. I never guarantee results. And, in this case, we may end up with too many dead ends for you to want to continue.”
“But you expect me to pay you even if you don’t find him.”
I smiled brightly. “Just as your pastor expects to be paid even if she can’t save your soul.”
She eyed me narrowly. “And how will I know you’re not cheating her? My sister, I mean? And me?”
I nodded. She had a right to know. “I’ll give you a written report. You, or Pastor Karen, can do some spot-checking to see if I’ve done what I claim I did. But until you give me the names of your son’s friends, there’s very little I can do.”
When I left a minute later, I heard all the bolts on the door snap shut in reverse order. I stood in the hallway, already depressed by the inquiry.
IN THE DETECTIVE’S ABSENCE I
“HI, MISS ELLA. YOUR SISTER SPENT AN HOUR IN HER chair today. We’re going to see if she can get to her feet tomorrow,” the nurse’s aide said brightly. “Have you come to give her her supper? She’s tired after working so hard on her therapies today.”
Miss Ella nodded but didn’t answer. Claudia, the family beauty: it was harsh to see her like this. Was it a judgment on them, Claudia lying in bed, hardly able to move or talk, wearing diapers like a great big baby? Pastor Hebert would have said so, but Pastor Karen didn’t agree. Pastor Karen said God wasn’t an angry old man handing out punishments like an overseer or a prison warden.
“But it feels like it, Lord,” Miss Ella murmured, not realizing she had spoken aloud until the aide said, “What was that, Miss Ella?”