Anton thought of what Delores had suggested—bringing Juanita back home with him. And he replayed over and over what David had said about never apologizing to him for what he had done. To his enormous surprise, he found himself agreeing with his father. David was right. He did not owe Anton an apology. At Carine’s house, tears streaming down his cheeks, Anton had remembered the housing project where he’d lived with his mother. Over the years he had forgotten the details about the bleakness of his early life. But what he remembered now was the boredom. The tedium of poverty. A tedium whose only antidote, whose only disruption, came from a gun burst of violence, of an unexpected scream shattering the quiet of a Sunday morning, or a stream of loud obscenities wafting from the streets at midnight. Maybe that’s why Mam used crack, Anton thought, to handle that tedium. He remembered how the energy in the apartment used to change when she had those people over. Even though she’d lock him in the bedroom so that he would not witness her using, he could hear the thud of the music, the sudden peals of laughter, the voices getting louder and higher. For the most part, it hadn’t frightened him. Rather, he found it reassuring, because it proved that there was more to their lives than soul-wrecking jobs and occasional visits to fast-food restaurants.
He wouldn’t have survived the boredom. Anton knew that now. In order to not succumb to it, he would’ve joined a gang. He had been a good boy, quiet and polite to his elders. But he was also intelligent, and that intelligence would have been his downfall. Some resourceful neighborhood drug dealer would’ve figured out how to make that brightness work for him. And Mam would’ve been able to protect him less and less, the crack eating away at whatever maternal protective instinct remained. No, David was right. Between being groomed by a shrewd dope dealer and rescued by David and Delores, there was no doubt that he had hit the jackpot.
It wasn’t Anton’s forgiveness that David needed to ask for. It was Juanita’s.
He was so struck by this thought that he almost drove past his exit. He saw it too late, slammed on his brakes, and yanked the wheel to the right, going over the striped lines to get on the exit ramp. For a split second he couldn’t bear to look in the rearview mirror, as if he expected Trooper Flynn to be right behind him. But the sun was low in the sky and the road deserted. Anton pulled into the parking lot of the first gas station he saw and once again called up the directions to his mother’s address. If he didn’t run into any traffic along the way, he would be there in about twenty-five minutes. He smiled with pleasure at the thought of climbing up those porch steps, his footsteps lighter this time, his eyes unclouded with hostility and suspicion, and of the look on her face when she opened the door and saw that it was him. Him. Her son. Come for her again.
And what then? he asked himself as he drove down the two-lane road. What’ll you do? Sleep on the couch tonight? Will she be okay with that? The giddy feeling deserted him for a moment as he considered the logistics and the inevitable complications his reentry into Juanita’s life would involve, but then he thought: First things first. First I’ll take her out to dinner. To the most expensive restaurant in the county. He sighed, the very thought of ordering a bottle of a good red soothing him, but then he remembered that she was a recovering addict. No, he’d have to do without alcohol tonight. And what if you run out of things to say to each other? he thought. What if you find her to be, you know, limited in her vocabulary or interests or general knowledge? The thought depressed him. But then he remembered the proprietary way she’d called him “Baby Boy,” the way she’d looked at him, looked through him, and he knew: He had a mama he could be proud of. What Juanita Vesper knew, what she had lived through and experienced, he could only read about in books. No, the danger was exactly the opposite—that he would disappoint her, that she would see through him and realize that he was made of cotton and straw, an empty suit lacking vigor and conviction. When she asked him why he’d returned, for instance, what would he say? That he’d had a change of heart? Or would he credit Carine for asking a question that had made him see what he’d been too blind to see on his own?
One thing he knew for sure he would tell his mam: the recently surfaced memory of when he’d returned to the housing project to find her. She had earned that story and its meaning—that her son had not forgotten her after two and a half years of living in luxury. That he had been willing to give it up just to move back into the dingy apartment with her. That in his deepest, darkest hour, in the hour of his abandonment, when he believed that she had forsaken him, he had sought her out.
Anton drove along in this manner, alternating between a chest-pounding excitement and a sobering dread. It was all too soon, too fast, too unexpected. This was to have been a quick trip to a new place—the South, so deceptively soft and beautiful, with its rich bloodred earth and magnolia trees and wildflowers growing alongside the highway—but it had become a different kind of journey. As long as Anton had known him, Pappy had had a big hand-painted sign hanging in his home office that read, “Know Thyself.” Anton had claimed the sign after Pappy had died, and it now resided on the floor in his own apartment. He had always intended to put it up, but as with so many things, he had not gotten around to it. That small procrastination, easy enough to explain away in his busy daily life, now assumed symbolic meaning. He had been raised by people whose creed revolved around Know Thyself, a family steeped in the wisdom of its secular saints, Emerson and Thoreau. Anton had no doubt that his father knew himself, even if it meant acknowledging the black stain on his own heart. Because, for all his flaws, David was a complete man, someone who knew exactly what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror.
As did, Anton suspected, his mam. You couldn’t have twenty-five years of sobriety without knowing thyself. It was obvious in the clearness of those brown eyes—Juanita Vesper did not owe the world anything and did not expect that the world owed her a thing. Not a single thing. She had repaid her debt to society by sacrificing her proudest creation. No matter how modest her life, no matter how pinched and narrow her circumstances, when Juanita laid her head on the pillow at night, she knew that everything around her belonged to her. She had paid for all of it with her own flesh and blood.