Unexpected Dismounts (25 page)

“You got me.”

“I don’t like social workers,” he said.

Evidently Chief didn’t either. He was sitting up in bed, still-massive arms crossed over his chest, eyes piercing a somewhat lumpy-looking middle-aged woman. Chief was back in full force.

“I can manage fine at home,” he was saying.

“No, Mr. Ellington, you can’t,” was her reply. She didn’t have the voice or the physicality to compete, but then, he was attached to a bed by traction, and she wasn’t. It would have been amusing if smoke hadn’t practically been coming out of Chief’s nostrils.

“She better look out,” Desmond muttered to me.

“Keep quiet and I’ll take you to Sonic later,” I muttered back.

This was not the time for Desmond to come out of his sullen silence and slip back into his outrageous self.

“Hey,” I said. I didn’t usually do breezy, but it seemed like a good choice at the moment.

The social worker gave me the official this-does-not-concern-you look, but Chief waved me in.

“This is Allison Chamberlain,” Chief said. “She’s handling things for me until I go home, which is where I’m going straight from here.”

“And why wouldn’t you?” I said.

“He is going to need round-the-clock care for several weeks.” The woman tugged her too-tight blazer over her stomach, but to no avail. “Maybe you can get him to choose a convalescent home, because that is where he’s going to need to go.”

“You talkin’ ’bout a nursing home?” Desmond said.

Sonic evidently didn’t have the power it once had.

“My granddaddy was in one of them,” he said. “Them places is nasty.”

“My point exactly,” Chief said. He grinned at Desmond, who grinned back, shyly, timidly, and every other adverb that had never matched the boy before. Not when it came to Chief.

“There are some excellent facilities covered by your insurance,” the woman said.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“Barbara Bush. And spare me the jokes. I’ve heard them all.”

Yeah, Chief had definitely sucked the delight out of this conversation.

“Ms. Bush, just so I’m clear, why is it that Chief—Mr. Ellington—has to go to a rehab facility?”

“Rehab?” Desmond said. “He ain’t on drugs. You ain’t, right, Chief?”

“
Physical
rehabilitation. That leg is not going to be completely healed and usable if he doesn’t have physical therapy.”

“Can he do it as an outpatient?” I said.

“Yes, but he can’t drive himself there. He can’t see to his basic needs. With no one else residing with him—”

“What if he stayed at my house?” I said.

To be honest, it wasn’t me who said it. My mouth was used, but the words totally came from someone else.

I had never seen Chief look dumbfounded before. But his frozen-in-the-unexpected face was no match for the expression on Desmond’s. He looked as if I were coming after him with a hypodermic needle. Yeah, we
were
going to Sonic, and we were staying there until I got out of him whatever was eating him up. I mean, for Pete’s sake, I was inviting his idol to be accessible to him 24/7.

“Classic.”

I turned to Chief. He was beckoning me over with both hands. When I reached his side, he put his hand on the back of my head and pulled me close to his face, as if neither my twelve-year-old nor the First Lady of Social Work was in the room.

“Are you sure about this?” he said. I could feel his breath on my mouth.

“It was a Nudge,” I said.

He studied my eyes before he turned his head toward the woman still waiting with her clipboard.

“Start the paperwork,” he said.

I expected her to quiz me about whether I was really willing to cart him to physical therapy every day, see that he was bathed … oh, sheesh,
bathed?
But she just clicked her pen and stood up and said, “I think you can handle him.”

That wasn’t the problem. I wasn’t sure I could handle
me.
This was God’s idea, so God better know what God was doing.

“Hey, Big Al,” Desmond said when the woman had bustled out to fill in forms. “I’m feelin’ faint. I think I need to visit the vending machine.”

“Get me something too,” Chief said.

I gave Desmond a handful of change and pondered his exit.

“He doesn’t want to talk to me,” Chief said.

I perched on the edge of the bed. “Then it’s not just me. I don’t know what’s going on with him. Well, I know why he’s freaked out around me. I haven’t even had a chance to tell you this.”

I filled him in on both Priscilla Sanborn’s visit and the one from Vickie Rodriguez.

“We have to go to court now, and she says I need somebody to represent me.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Chief said.

“You just came out of a coma.”

“I said I’ll take care of it. Unless you don’t trust me, now that I’m nursing-home material.”

I loved the mischief in his eyes. But, then, what didn’t I love about him? Except the fact that he wasn’t pulling me into his arms this very minute.

“Of course, I trust you,” I said. “I just don’t want you to take on more than you should right now.”

“Classic. Enough.” He touched my arm. “If you want to get in somebody’s business, find out what’s going on with Desmond. You might start with the elephant that’s in the middle of the room.”

“You mean Priscilla.”

“That. And what he remembers from the accident.”

“He says he doesn’t remember anything, but, Chief, he never lost consciousness.”

“Is he drawing?”

“Not that much. Oh—” I told him about the silhouette, and about my conversation with Ms. Willa, and about the cops going to Sacrament House. I thought I knew how much I’d missed him, but I’d only known the half of it.

“You’re tired,” I said when I was almost hoarse. “Get rest. And eat healthy. And do what they tell you.”

“I may want to rethink staying with you,” he said.

“You have no idea,” I said.

Desmond decided he didn’t want to go to Sonic. His excuse was that he filled up on a Snickers bar and couldn’t do an order of cheese fries justice. I didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to know he didn’t want to be confined with me in a space he couldn’t get out of. So when we got home, I didn’t let him out of the kitchen.

“Okay, Clarence,” I said after I’d ordered him to the bistro chair. “Here’s what I’m thinking, and I could be wrong, but I know you’ll set me straight if I am.”

He looked at me suspiciously, but he nodded.

“I’m going to talk first and you’re going to sit there, but after that, feel free to move about the cabin.”

“Huh?”

“The kitchen.” I swiveled in the chair so I wasn’t looking him directly in the eye. “I think you’re freaked out because that woman who showed up here in the beige car is your aunt Priscilla.”

“She ain’t my aunt,” he said.

“She’s your mother’s sister,” I said. “That makes her your aunt.”

“That don’t make her family. You and Mr. Chief and Miss Hankenstein and all them? That’s my family. She can’t take me.”

“So you’ve already figured out that’s why she came here. To try to stop me from adopting you.”

“She can’t,” he said again, with even more authority, “’cause my bi-o-logical mother left a letter. It’s final.”

“That’s what we’re hoping for,” I said. “Chief is still going to—”

For the first time in the conversation, fear flashed through his eyes. “Mr. Chief s’posed to make sure it happens?”

“He’s our lawyer,” I said slowly. “And he loves you.”

“He can’t!”

Desmond sprang out of the chair and was headed I wasn’t sure even he knew where. I grabbed a handful of sweatshirt and pulled him back until I could get him by both shoulders.

“Desmond, he’s okay. He can do this.”

“He ain’t gonna want to! Not after he remembers!”

“Remembers what?”

“That I made that accident happen!”

He struggled to get free, but I held on.

“Tell me what you mean,” I said.

“You won’t want me neither if I do.”

“Are you serious?” I shook him. “It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you held up the Walmart. You are my son. Bottom line. Now talk to me.”

He went so limp I had to plant him back in the chair, where he stared dismally at the salt and pepper shakers.

“Start from the beginning,” I said. “Desmond?”

“I was all freakin’ out ’cause that woman came here.”

“Priscilla,” I said.

“Yeah. I know you say we ain’t s’posed to use the H-word.”

“The H-word.”

“Hate.”

“Oh, that one. Right.”

“One time, she said she’d take me and my mama to the clinic ’cause we both sick. This when we was livin’ with my granddaddy, and he was too sick to take us hisself.”

“So you were about, what, seven, maybe?”

He held up his hand, fingers fanned out.

“Five,” I said.

“But I remember it, it ain’t like I was too little. My mama, she throwin’ up in a trash can, and I was jus’ throwin’ up on my
self,
and she—”

“Priscilla.”

“Miss Prissy, I called her in my head, ’cause she always drawin’ in eyebrows on herself with a pencil and—stuff—like that. When I got older, I left out one of the letters, but you won’t let me say that word so I’m not gon’ tell you what that was.”

“I appreciate that,” I said.

“So she get us in the door, and she says, ‘Geneveve’”—his voice sounded remarkably like Priscilla’s—‘you go on in now, and I’ll pick you up later.’”

“Did she have to go to work or something?” I said.

“No,” Desmond said in falsetto. “She jus’ didn’t want nobody to see her in that place. I climbed up on a chair and look out the window, and there she was, sittin’ in her car. And there’s me with throw-up all over me.”

I thought I might throw up myself.

“She done stuff like that all the time. You don’t even know. But
I
know this: She don’t want me. Come to think about it, I ain’t even worried about her.”

“But you were freaked out at the time,” I said.

He looked as if he’d been caught with his hand in the Oreos.

“That’s what you said a minute ago. You said you were all freaked out the day of the accident.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

It clearly wasn’t, but I let him go on.

“So me and Mr. Chief was riding and I was all fussing over it in my mind and then I saw that car and I yelled or jerked or somethin’ and I distracted Mr. Chief like you and him always tellin’ me not to do and he didn’t see the car and he run into the pole. I coulda’ killed him, Big Al.”

So he did remember. And from the way it was gushing out of him he hadn’t just suddenly put it all together. He’d had this in his head since the day it happened.

“Okay, just listen to me now,” I said.

He nodded. I noticed tiny beads of perspiration on his upper lip. I always broke into a sweat after I threw up too.

“Chief doesn’t remember any of that, and I’m going to leave it up to you whether to tell him. But if you do, I guarantee you he isn’t going to stop loving you. Love wins out every single time. You got that?”

“God tell you that?”

“God tells us all that, all the time,” I said. “It’s what God’s about.”

“He ain’t never told me nothin’.”

I drew in air. The potential for getting this all wrong was huge.

“Have you ever asked him anything?” I said.

“Yeah, and he ain’t never answered, which is why I ain’t doin’ no baptism.” Desmond stopped, waited. “You not gon’ make me, are you, Big Al?”

I shook my head. “That’s not the kind of thing you make somebody do,” I said. “That’s between you and Jesus. But I will say this: You’re not going to find out if that’s what he wants for you if you don’t talk to him.”

He seemed to consider that, although what came out of his mouth next was, “When Mr. Chief comes here, he can stay in my place and I’ll move upstairs. He can’t be goin’ up and down them steps with his leg all messed up.”

“Great idea,” I said.

“His leg gon’ be a’right, ain’t it? He gon’ ride his Harley again?”

“That’s the plan.”

He nodded again, and then stuck up his fist to knock it against mine. “Imma start movin’ my stuff,” he said.

I started in on a long relieved sigh, but I thought of something.

“One more question,” I said.

He turned from his doorway.

“Did you see the car that Chief swerved to miss?”

The air went dead.

“No,” he said. His door snapped shut behind him.

I would have felt like Claire Huckstable herself right then, getting all that information out of him and turning him around, if I didn’t know from that single syllable that there was still a piece of something stuck inside him that he wasn’t letting go of. And it was stuck inside me too.