“You mean with a gun?” I said, nearly choking on my food.
“Yeah, he don’t care. Got arrested, got right out. ’Cause his family be rich now, they post bail in a second. They got a million something and more, and now they blowing it all away.” Aaron was referring to the lawsuit his mother had brought against the flower-shop owner who shot and killed Brandon. It must have gotten settled and paid out. “Yup, they bought a new home, they got five cars, mopeds, truck, Lexus. He used to just have Oldsmobile.”
I swallowed my mouthful.
“And Jasmine?”
“Jasmine got a baby now.”
“Kayla?”
“She got a baby, too.”
“Cassandra?”
“She got two. Would’ve had three but had a miscarriage.”
Aaron finished his plate and I looked at him casually, trying to pretend I wasn’t watching him. Why had he graduated and not the others? There was the matter of him being male: The pregnant students almost always dropped out, unless they got help from family. But his family also had better education. His mother worked in administration at the nursing home and, I recalled, had graduated from high school; his grandma owned a sewing and fabric shop downtown, one of only a handful of businesses that had survived the economic downturn. Few other students at Stars had a parent who graduated from high school and held a steady job. Did it just come down to these basic metrics in the end—the family’s level of education and quality of employment?
“You ain’t eat nothing, Ms. Kuo,” he said, looking up finally from his plate. “Bet it don’t taste like your mama’s.” He helped himself to some chicken from my plate.
Outside, I asked if he wanted to take a drive through the neighborhood.
“Drive with you, Ms. Kuo?” He let out a chortle. “I ain’t crazy.” Then he got into the front seat.
Unprompted and garrulous, Aaron gestured at our passing landscape and said that he was going to give me a tour of “Hell-Town.” As I drove, he pointed down roads where I should turn, neighborhoods to enter.
“That where Miles used to stay, before they got rich,” he said. “The sheriff, he got that place on curfew.” I asked what kind of curfew. “You know, lockdown. Because someone got shot at in daylight.”
In reality Aaron had probably forgotten that I’d gone to these neighborhoods often, to drop off Patrick and other students. As if on cue, Aaron said offhandedly that Patrick stayed around here, too.
“You hear about what happen to Patrick, Ms. Kuo?”
Again that tone, the gossipy not-quite schadenfreude—yet now I detected something else, a submerged warmth or regret, a tone more like ersatz detachment, a method to avoid mourning.
We passed by a small green patch near Central. Aaron said, “A little sixteen-year-old got killed the other day, coming home from a football game at Central, the homecoming,” he said. “He was beat up, then somebody shot him in his head. They don’t even know who did it.”
Then the police station, a hundred yards from the county jail: “In July, the day after the Fourth, my cousin, he was killed right over here by the jail, right in front of the sheriff’s office. Two or three leftover flowers still there.”
He rolled down his window and so I slowed the car. We gazed together at the makeshift memorial, a ragged, colorful hodgepodge of objects. Pink and yellow bits of old petals; framed pictures; a stuffed animal.
He shrugged off my condolences over his cousin and said, “That happen right after the sixteen-year-old girl who go to KIPP died,” he said, emphasizing the name of the school. Knowledge Is Power Program was a charter school that had been built a few years before I’d first arrived in Helena. “Somebody was shooting at her mama’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend pushed her in front, like she was a shield. She was shot. Chest, arm, and thigh.”
So this was a change. As KIPP expanded into an elementary and high school, its reputation had grown. It was known as a place where students didn’t slack.
“And she be going to KIPP,” he repeated, with a tone of admiration, as if to say she, a studious person, couldn’t have been responsible for her death.
Aaron pointed out the county jail. I did not mention I already knew it. He said he knew someone who had escaped by climbing to the roof and jumping off.
“He didn’t get hurt?” I asked.
“Naw, he chunky. He ain’t hurt himself at all.”
Apparently the escapee hung out, saw family, and went back the next day.
As a final act of nostalgia we visited Stars. It was abandoned. We peered through barbed wire. A garbage can was knocked on its side. The grass was uncut, overrun by tall weeds.
We drove away and Aaron dialed a number on his cellphone.
“Gina, guess who in town, guess who I’m on the road with?” Then he said, “Ms. Kuo,” and a high-pitched scream burst through the other end. Aaron jerked the phone away from his ear and we both guffawed.
“We got lunch,” he continued. “Gina, only thing I can tell you is, ‘Thank God for seatbelts.’?”
I laughed, easing back to our old rhythm.
“Matter of fact, her driving got worse. You know Helena got all these potholes? Ms. Kuo hit about seventy of them.”
He handed me his phone.
“Ms. Gina Gordon!” I said, smiling into the phone. “How are you, my dear?”
She said, “I got a tongue piercing, nose piercing. A little change, not a lot done change.”
—
I HAD MOVED in with Danny and Lucy. Lucy was making granola, and Danny had gotten out the Scrabble. Only their cats seemed unhappy to see me.
They gave me the news about Helena. Good news: There was a new Mexican restaurant and it had margaritas. A new health center featured brand-new treadmills and a yoga class. A new library—from funds Danny had helped raise—would be unveiled at the end of the year. It had a children’s section and computer lab. Our Blues Festival, now an annual event, had another successful year. And construction of “Freedom Park,” a public space dedicated to black refugees in Helena, would soon begin.
KIPP Delta had among the highest scores on the state math and literacy tests: Black children from the poorest part of Arkansas had gotten higher scores than white kids from private schools in the wealthiest parts of Arkansas. Ten years ago, most policymakers would have laughed at this as impossible. Some white families in Helena now complained about being excluded from the school.
—
WHEN I WENT TO SEE Patrick the following morning, there was a new jailer, a Mr. Cousins. He was diminutive and rotund and had a cheerful, almost sinister air.
Again, nobody at the jail wrote down my name or bothered to ask it. My bags were not checked, my cellphone was not taken away; I said merely that I was looking to visit Patrick Browning.
Mr. Cousins looked me up and down. Then he said, smiling, “I ain’t gonna let you see him until you give me a hug.”
I coughed. “Excuse me?”
“A hug,” he said. “You know, an old-fashioned hug.”
He leaned in, waiting.
I held my breath. When our bodies touched, he squeezed my back.