Chapter Thirty-Four

Edwin always knew his brother was an odd man. Quiet, gentle, softspoken. “One of those sissy boys,” he’d tell his friends growing up, flapping his hand, and prancing around like a lady. They all laughed. They loved Edwin and the things his mouth would say that his heart would never stop.

He had a feeling he loved his brother deep down somewhere, but he never really liked him. He hated the way the boy would fawn over their mother like she hung the moon. Edwin found her mostly ridiculous—a walking, talking, movie screen that played the past on repeat. That woman would hardly ever shut up about “the massacre,” going on and on like it was the only piece of history she had ever lived. It wasn’t that Edwin didn’t feel bad for her or the family he never knew because of it. He just couldn’t see the profit in bellyaching about something you just couldn’t change.

He cried though when she died. His daddy died first, leaving his mama in their care, and Edwin nodded the whole thing off. How was he supposed to afford the gas to get back to Elaine on the regular just so she could fry him up some ham and collard greens and make him listen to the time the white man destroyed their hope? He didn’t blame her. He had seen too many white men in his own time giving him the eye or the lip or trying to knock his clock off at the bar for leering at their women. But again, Edwin knew better than to bellyache. He wasn’t like everyone else on the planet with all that whining and suffering on. He knew how to count his blessings.

It was his brother, Franklin, who would take his family down to see their mother and then come back to brag about the whole thing like Jesus had asked him to dance across the lake with him. Always the sacrificial lamb, that one, while Edwin looked like the bad guy just because he didn’t want to spend his drinking money listening to the woeful tales of people he’d never get to know.

“She’s your mother though,” Franklin said to him one day when he had brought his son, Jamal, over. Douglas hadn’t been born yet, so it was a time when his wife, Dolores, was still interested in the concept of children, showing off the scarves she had bought from some infomercial she had seen on TV. She sat on the couch next to Jamal who seemed more interested in the Klondike bar he was gumming than Dolores’s desperate attempt to get someone to think she was interesting.

That was a little bit unfair, too, Edwin knew because he loved his wife like he loved his brother—the love just happened to have excised itself from him a long time ago and now floated in a deep, dark space somewhere in his stomach acid.

“I’m aware, Franklin. I’m no stranger to truth. But some of us got responsibilities and them responsibilities are starting to add up a bit.” He shot a look at his wife who was floating the scarves through her fingers while Big Bird stared through the screen and asked Jamal if he knew the alphabet.

“You don’t think I got responsibilities?” I think you got a wife who loves you and a son who adores you, Edwin said in his head. It was one of those things that wouldn’t get a laugh or hard pat on the back, so he kept it to himself. Besides, Franklin wasn’t the back-smacking type. He was the quiet older brother who got to be the winner in this life, his trophies a beautiful wife and adorable little boy. Anette, his wife, was one of the most good-looking women Edwin had ever seen, but not in some obvious way. She wasn’t the flaunting type. She was a good woman who loved her man and boy, and every time Edwin thought about her at night, Dolores groaning her breath through her nostrils, Edwin could feel any ounce of love in his acidic stomach start to deteriorate.

He had thought about it in the beginning when Franklin started dating Anette, bringing her around and showing her off in that absurdly innocent way he had. Dolores was a gut reaction to the darkness Edwin felt. He refused to look like the loser younger brother, the third wheel following along like a lost puppy dog. Plus, he thought it better to have an excuse like Dolores around for when he pounced and made Anette his own.

It was early in the marriage, one of those times Franklin made his sacrificial trek back to Elena and Anette had refused to go. Franklin made up some excuse like she was feeling sick, maybe there was a baby in there, but Edwin knew it was because Anette was a smart woman who knew a lost cause when she saw it.

“Well, hey there, Eddie,” She had said and opened the door wide to him. She smelled like peach perfume, a fragrance his own wife had snatched up at the five and dime but had managed to make smell like spoiled fruit.

“Hey there, Anette.” She was a living doll with smooth skin and almond eyes. She was a tall woman, the word “lithe”—a word he had reluctantly read in a book once—came to mind. She moved with a forward sense of the future, not like someone stuck in her own past.

“Franklin ain’t here.”

“Oh, I know. I know he went to see Mama. I just was hoping you could help me with something.” He went there under the guise of “woman troubles.” It wasn’t a lie because his woman was trouble, but it wasn’t a problem he couldn’t solve. Give Dolores some cash and she would spin like a top, too focused on everything in her orbit for her to worry about him. But he was used to it, and even prided him himself on it in his backyard while shooting dice with Leo and Tony. The mouse could play whenever the cat was away spending his money.

Anette nodded and her face softened. He could tell she’d always liked him. Must have been a relief to know at least someone in the family could crack a joke.

Edwin watched his sister-in-law move smoothly to the kitchen towards the back of the house. They lived in a small, respectable home edging close to a trailer park, but by the way Franklin carried himself, you’d think he was God’s appointed. And that Bible he always had in his hand, worn in just a way that made you think it wasn’t an act. Edwin wasn’t sure what turned him off more, his brother’s flagrant lack of self-respect or that old, tattered-looking book. 

Anette made tea at the stove. It was a classy move, one Edwin admired. He admired a lot in the ladies he came to know as “friends.” One of his friends, Margie, had an excellent way of tipping her chin skyward when she laughed. But Anette was more subtle, never brought attention to herself. If Margie was a cat, then Anette was most certainly a lioness.

“So, tell me about these troubles,” Anette said, offering Edwin a delicate cup of something warm but bitter. He liked that too, how Anette hadn’t even asked but just gave.

“Well, I don’t know. I like to think I’m a good man, that I’m good to Dolores, but she be treating me something fierce. She don’t love me like she should. She don’t respect me. I work my behind off at Timex, and when I come home, she always has her hand sticking out at me. She’s no saint, nothing like you, Anette.” Edwin sheepishly lifted an eyelid, hoping the compliment had stuck. But that was Anette for you. She didn’t even blink an eye. She probably ate compliments for breakfast.

“Are you a good man? Is there any such thing?” Edwin looked up to laugh at her joke, but he saw Anette wasn’t smiling. She was studying the wet contents of her cup, little tea leaves drowning in their own sweat. How could he answer that? Here she was married, supposedly happy with his brother, a man whom Edwin nurtured a bitter heart toward but knew deep down was light years ahead in the “good” category.

“I care for her.” Edwin mumbled under his breath. He didn’t like to look at it, that word “care.” Care was what his father had done for his mother all those years. He had worked a hard life but made a home for his wife and his boys. He put food on the table. He never played dice and thought liquor was the devil. Edwin had felt suffocated growing up, looking at the three of them—his mother, father, brother all fitting into a life God had taken time to carve out with his own hand. And then there was Edwin, a leftover piece of clay drying alone and now too hard to fit where he knew he was supposed to belong.

“Care is a curious word, Edwin. We can give everything away to another person, and then we can still sit dry as a cistern. They can love us in their own way, never filling us up. Don’t you think that’s selfish, them not loving us like we deserve?”

Deserve. The word tumbled out of her lion’s mouth. Didn’t Edwin deserve real love too? For a moment, something clapped hard inside him, like a pair of hands grasping his heart. He blinked away glimpses of all those times Dolores’s face stared expectantly at him, hopefully, when she’d cry in their bedroom, and he was a man who couldn’t give her what she needed. He blinked away all those times his mother asked him to make biscuits with her, her broken heart floating above her shoulders when he’d laugh at her and run out the screen door. He was a weak man, and his weakness became the size of him, separated out until it was sitting right there next to him on his brother’s couch. And it was his weakness that said “yes” although his heart cried the soft tears of his mother’s stories.

“Then, come,” Anette said, her arm stretched out to him. He slipped his hand into hers as she led him down to the back hallway. It was like entering that space inside his heart and violating it with a knife.

After they finished, Anette stretched herself out on the bed and gave him a curious leer. She knew what he was now and had the proof. He kept mumbling about having to be on his way, trying to gain the upper hand. But he knew that was forever lost now that he had slept with his brother’s wife.

Edwin had spent all those years calling Anette a saint, convincing himself and attempting to convince Franklin she was something other than she was. Because what would happen if Franklin found out? What would have happened to Edwin?

Now, years later, his brother sat on his couch, and Edwin felt like Franklin was the one being punished. His wife was dead and his son too, and now his grandson sat rotting in a cell at the mercy of the law. And Edwin knew, as all black men knew, it wasn’t a comfortable seat to take.

“What will I do.” There was no question in it. Franklin said it declaratively like it had become a mantra he’d been whispering for far too long.

“Nah, man, no need to worry. Worry makes you looney.” Edwin tried hard not to look at his bedroom door where his wife was watching the second TV, probably trying to send money to some preacher whose jet cost more than their house.

“I tell Him all the time that I tried my hardest. But it obviously wasn’t good enough.” Franklin smiled through his pain, the corners of his mouth reaching out towards Edwin’s ceiling.

“Who? Travis?”

“No. God.” Edwin took a swig from the beer bottle sweating in his hand. He had a hard and fast “no God talk” rule he wore like an invisible jacket, but he made a concession for his grieving brother.

“What does he say back?” Edwin asked, pretending the floor was much more interesting than the answer. It didn’t allude him, this God thing. He probably even felt it more than Franklin, the boulder that he felt welded to. The weight of all the things he’d never done right.

His brother was a saint. A real one.

“I haven’t been able to hear Him lately.” Franklin said this like he was concerned for a friend. Edwin held in the giggle in his chest. His hands were uncomfortable holding his bottle that seemed to be crying more than sweating now. He tried not to make eye contact with his brother when Dolores whooped “Hallelujah!” from behind the closed bedroom door. He wanted Douglas to come in and break up the racing thoughts in his mind. But Douglas was a whole other side of the coin, one that scared Edwin more than he scared himself.

“What’s he sound like?” Edwin had meant for it to come out as a joke, but the heavy air made it land at their feet. How many times had his mother come in to kiss him on the forehead and to pray over him only for him to resent her. His lashes took to blinking again, this time sweeping away how she had smelled so close to him.

“Like something inside me pulling the strings. The wind. The way Anette used to feel in my arms.” Franklin looked like he wanted to reel that last admission back in, and Edwin wished he would. How many times had it been hovering over his shoulder, what he had done with his sister-in-law, to his brother, to himself. Edwin hated admitting that last part. He’d been with enough women to give Hugh Heffner a run for his money, all the time living the lie that his heart was still intact. But he could hardly feel it beat anymore, and there certainly wasn’t anyone or anything pulling its strings except for him. And look what good that did him.

“She wasn’t a saint,” Franklin said. All those years, Franklin had never said a word. So often Edwin would feel sorry for his brother, playing poker with the boys in his smoky kitchen or out with some honey he picked up at Ralph’s Bar. The man just didn’t know how to live. The man was a cuckold, and if you don’t pounce first, the womenfolk will, Edwin thought, the shame in convincing himself looming eerily close to his worthless heart.

“She wasn’t a saint, Eddie,” Franklin said again, using the name he’d call Edwin when they were kids. It was a knowing look, and for an instant, Edwin teased himself with the possibility of telling Franklin everything, this man of God who knew the sound of his creator’s voice. But then Douglas did come in, shuffling around with his shorts hanging down his backside. Edwin had no patience for a man who didn’t know how to dress right for the ladies.

And whose fault was that?