He drove down the same roads that he’d driven down just two days before, but this time everything was different. The sky was hazier today and his windshield dirtier, but to Anton, everything shone brighter. His body pulsed with awareness, felt prickly with sensation, as if now that he’d acknowledged his mother’s sorrow, he was finally in tune with the sway and thrum of the entire universe. But was that really what he’d done, acknowledged his mother’s pain? Or was it simply that for the first time, he had entered the dark cave that he had always been afraid to explore—his own heart? What that heart wanted, what it ached and longed for, he had never allowed himself to know, but now that he had walked through its chambers, he was flooding it with light at every step he took. If he didn’t accomplish another thing in his life, there would be this.
What’re you gonna do when you get to Mam’s? he asked himself, but his imagination led him only as far as climbing up the porch steps and knocking on the front door. What happened after that was a canvas as blank as the sky above. And unlike on his first trip to his mother’s home, when he’d showed up bristling with purpose, he was content with not knowing.
His phone rang, and he glanced at where it lay on the passenger seat, and his heart sank. It was Dad. He knew he shouldn’t pick up, because if anyone in the world could make him reverse his course, it was David, but a lifetime of habit prevailed and he answered. “Hi, Dad,” he said.
“You’re going back? To her house?” David’s voice was so close and urgent in his ear, it was as if he could feel the breath, and Anton jerked the phone away and put it on speaker instead. “Anton? Is that what you’re doing?”
Despite his growing anger, Anton marveled at the impetuous quality in the older man’s voice. David was not someone who gave up without a fight. This was what Pappy had bred him to be—a scrappy fighter. He had tried to do the same with Anton, but what he’d produced instead was a deferential, obedient son.
Until now. And suddenly, Anton heard it, the tremor behind the arrogance, the loss of control, and the fact that David had no clue how to win back that control. His son was six hundred miles away, speeding along a freeway that would take him back to his dark past, into the shadows that David had prided himself on rescuing Anton from. There was nothing in David’s arsenal that could help him understand the choice Anton was making. In the split second before he answered, Anton understood this, and the knowledge made his voice softer when he replied, “Yes, Dad. Katherine spoke to you?”
“No.” David’s voice was curt, and again Anton heard something—a trace of hurt—and knew that Katherine had refused to speak to him. “I heard it from Brad.”
“News travels fast up north,” he said, not trying to hide the amusement in his voice.
There was a short, angry silence. “You think that’s funny? May I also remind you that ‘up north’ is where you’re running for governor? Unless . . . unless you’ve decided to throw that away along with everything else?” This time the wobble in David’s voice was so distinct that Anton felt a pang in his chest. For a moment he saw it all from David’s point of view—the horror of the past rising up, acquiring fangs and claws, and bloodying their present, and then the truest horror: Instead of beating it back, Anton was suddenly, improbably joining forces with it and blaming him, him, David Coleman, who had done everything that a biological father would do, who had given Anton a great education, unconditional love, who had shared his wealth, who, most of all, had conferred upon this ungrateful boy his illustrious family name and had rescued him from a life of poverty and mediocrity. All to have it end up in a pile of ashes, because ultimately, ultimately, the pull of blood, the tug of—say it, say it—of blackness was too compelling. When Anton had turned his car around and begun driving toward Juanita Vesper’s house, he’d been heading toward everything David scorned and feared—the rural South and its untidy poverty, disorder, and squalor.
But here was the rub. Anton couldn’t think of David as just another privileged old white guy. Because for every radiant memory David carried of him, Anton had a correspondingly sweet memory of his father. Of the man who’d been so patient when he had stumbled, but who had instilled in him the kind of confidence that had served him well in his adult life; who had cried tears of joy the day they had formally adopted him, who had been a source of guidance and advice and inspiration on every matter in his life, large and small. David had been a monumental presence in his life, a linebacker who had sheltered and protected Anton so that he could keep his eyes focused on the fifty-yard line, and only the most unforgiving of men would allow the revelation of his one terrible sin to tarnish every other golden memory.
“What am I throwing away, Dad? All I’m doing is spending some more time with her.”
“To what end? Don’t you think you owe the voters something more than your hiney?”
The question was so vintage David that Anton had to suppress a laugh. He waited until the impulse passed and then said, “Dad. This is a woman who has suffered a lot.” His voice trembled a bit. “Who . . . has had a grave injustice done to her.” He bit his lip, suppressing the urge to say more, reminding himself of David’s heart condition, reluctant to wound the older man, but also wanting to make it clear that David was not off the hook. Not by a long shot. “What you and Uncle Connor did, Dad . . . I still can barely understand it. And it’s going to take me a long time to forgive you.”
David made a sound so harsh, so bitter, that it took Anton’s breath away. “Guess I should’ve known,” he said.
“Known what?”
“Pappy used to say blood is thicker than water. It always wins, blood.”
Anton felt a slow burn creeping onto his cheeks. “What does that even mean? You think I’m siding with my—my birth mom—because of blood? How convenient that must be for you, Dad. It lets you off the hook completely, doesn’t it?”