“Who gave your ten-year-old son the hottest ticket in town?”
“Malcolm was in the office with me. And he was going on and on about how the Rebels are the best college team in the country. How they’re going to win the whole tournament. So Rob just invited him. They’re going together. It’s an exhibition game, Friday night.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, Keisha’s whining, of course.”
“Is there anything interesting about Rob?”
“You mean other than he’s the accountant?”
Coral laughed.
“How about you? Mama said you went on a date with Paul Ormsby. Didn’t he take you to prom?”
“No, he didn’t. We went out Saturday, but it wasn’t a date. He teaches at the high school, and, you know, we just had a drink.”
“Okay. Well, Mama’s very interested in your dates. You better be careful.”
“Should I tell her you’re dating Rob?”
“I’m not dating Rob. This fine woman’s done with men, whether Mama believes me or not.”
“She doesn’t believe you.”
“Well, I’m counting on you to distract her. I need some relief.”
Augusta walked in from the backyard. “That child is mad for those Rebels!” She reached for the beach towel Keisha had left on the counter. “You’d think a college basketball team made the world the way he talks about them. Larry Johnson. Stacey Augmon.”
“Yeah, isn’t that ridiculous, Mom? Almost like someone who had to be taken to the ER after a certain team lost to Indiana?”
“That was a different group, Althea. My Freddie scored thirty-eight points that game.”
“Remember the Oklahoma game? Mama called me and would not stop talking about that two-point shot.”
“His foot was behind the line. It was a three.”
Coral and Althea laughed at the same instant.
“Well, I’m not doing that anymore. The Rebels are a great team, but I’m not having a heart attack for them. They’re so good this year, they oughta win. That’s not the same.”
“Right, Mama. We don’t care if this team wins or not.”
“Well, we care. We can care.”
Coral wrapped her arm around her mother, and the three of them went out back to watch the kids swim. She was glad she’d picked the house with a pool. Glad to live in Vegas with Mama and Althea and her kids.
Coral didn’t want her mother or her sister to know some things about the life she’d lived in California. About Gerald, for example. The sort of boyfriend he’d been.
Gerald was the one person Coral had told about her birth. The only time she had ever choked the words out of her mouth, the only time she’d ever repeated the story her mama had told her, was to Gerald one night, very late. And, of course, he’d made it worse. He had focused on Augusta. Why had she kept it a secret? How much money had Odell Dibb given her? (That was a big one. He brought that one up a lot.) Was any of it even true? Perhaps Coral was Augusta’s child—and the story a way of keeping secret whatever had happened that had made her pregnant. After all, that’s what Coral’s birth certificate said.
Coral had started to cry as Gerald was spinning these scenarios, one after another, as if it were a movie plot and not her life—not her own most personal truth, something she had shared only with him. Finally, she had reached a kind of wail, screaming “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” But he didn’t stop, so she kicked at him in her rage, and he just laughed to see her so out of control. Yet even then, even after that, she continued to live with Gerald.
This was a private shame, one of many things Althea and Augusta didn’t know.
At twenty-nine, the story of her birth didn’t loom quite as large for Coral as it had at sixteen. It was true that her heart could still skitter unevenly if she thought of the instant before Augusta said yes to keeping her. It was true that it still nipped at her not to know how she had come to be, how her hair and face and feet had formed. And sometimes, the thought that this was a mystery to her but not to someone else galled her; didn’t she have the most at stake in knowing this particular truth? But the empty space at the core, the blankness she had spent years not thinking about—even the way she had felt when she first moved back home with Mama last year—it surprised her that these feelings were starting to fade. Or fading wasn’t the right word. She felt them still. They just didn’t hurt as deeply as they once had.
Maybe it was getting older. Maybe it was teaching: seeing a lot of children in ruinous situations. Maybe it was having nieces and nephews, watching her brother and sisters raise their kids, seeing all the different ways a childhood might play out. She had been lucky to be a Jackson.
Still, she wondered about the woman who bore her. She felt loyal to that unknown person—who might have been afraid, who might have been treated badly, for whom her birth might have been tragic.
Who was her mother?
Had Odell Dibb loved her? Had she loved him? Had he forced her to give up their child? Could he have raped her? Where was she now?
Augusta thought Coral should let go of these questions. There wasn’t any way to find her mother, there wasn’t anyone alive who knew anything, and why did she have to imagine such terrible things? Why would Mr. Dibb have asked Augusta to take the baby if he hadn’t cared about her mother? Why would she have been dressed in a pink silk gown? Why would he have been so upset? That was Augusta’s hole card: the way Odell Dibb had cried the night he brought Coral to her. “A man doesn’t fall apart if he doesn’t care; if you aren’t a love child. He doesn’t ask someone to take a baby, to keep a secret, if you aren’t important, Coral. A man like Mr. Dibb doesn’t risk me knowing this about him, me having this over his head, unless you are someone very special. That’s what you should think about your birth.”
Coral saw the sense in Augusta’s words, but she felt things too. Felt her mother deep down, in her skin, in her bones. These were things she couldn’t explain to anyone else, but it was as if she owed her birth mother something, or her birth mother exacted something from her; she really didn’t know which.
And what about Odell Dibb?
A long time ago, Coral had done what research she could. She’d sat in the Clark County Library on Flamingo, squinting at microfiche that listed where he had given his money, how much he had paid in personal taxes, who was listed on his private trust. Once she had seen a photo of him standing outside a bar called Le Bistro. He wasn’t identified, but Coral recognized him from all the other pictures she’d seen.