Anton massaged the spot that throbbed in his temple. There was no way to recoup the years they had spent apart. Perhaps it was just as well, to have not witnessed the ugliness of her recovery—the withdrawal symptoms, the shakes, the tremors, the relapses. The slow return of light to her eyes. What would his life have been like if he had been returned to her after her time in prison? They undoubtedly would have lost their subsidized apartment, shabby and claustrophobic as it was. Would he have continued at the same school, where the teachers themselves spread the virus of discouragement and defeatism to their students? Would he have ever met someone like David, who believed in him, who was alternately encouraging and firm but whose very sternness was propelled by a belief that no matter what level of excellence he demanded from Anton, the boy was capable of delivering it? For a long time, Anton had loved Delores more, felt more comfortable around her, because she was easier on him. Delores was like Mam in that regard, soft, undemanding, loving. And he had desperately needed that after his abrupt parting from his mam. But it had taken David’s mix of sweet and sour, his glowing with pride and his glowering with disappointment, to drive Anton to achieve all that he had.
In some horrible way, he understood why David had done what he had. He also understood that the passage of time and its retrospective gaze could lengthen the shadows of an original deed and give it a more monstrous shape. The men who owned slaves were thinking about their cotton yield that year, and how to protect their wives from the roving eye of that particular Negro, and not about original sin. Anton had always believed that the great fatal flaw in Marxist theory was that it had never accounted for actual human behavior—the yawn, the stretch, the shrug, the looking away. And that was exactly what David had done. He had not battled with complexity, had not tried to figure out a way to remain a presence in Anton’s life after his mother was released from prison. What was unforgivable was not that David had wanted Anton to remain in his life or even his conceit in believing that he knew better than anybody else what was in the boy’s best interest. It was that he’d taken a shortcut and exploited Juanita’s situation. It was the oldest story in the world—the ends justifying the means.
The late-evening Georgia sky was throwing up streaks of murderous, ludicrous color. The color entered the car, turning Anton’s face and hands golden. He lowered his window, hoping for some evening cool, but the air was still heavy with heat, and he raised it again, escaping into the artificial coolness of the air-conditioning. He drove through a small town and then on an open stretch of road with fields on either side. Next he saw a few cows, and later, a few horses dotted the landscape, their bodies dark and vivid against the green fields. He passed a marsh, wood storks rising and fluttering in the distance, and the sight was so magnificent that he slowed down to watch. A little while later, he saw a patch of purple coneflowers that made him suck in his breath. Georgia, in its tender, maternal beauty, drew him in her embrace again, softening the memory of his encounter with Flynn. He remembered what Juanita had told him about moving north when he was a year old. Had Nana encouraged or resisted her migration? Had Mam thought about it much, how she would cope in a new place where the snow covered the ground for five months out of the year? What she would miss and what she would be happy to forget? Had she considered what it would be like to live with Betsy, who had just gotten a clerical job at the Higbee’s department store and who herself might not want too many reminders of her old life? What had it been like for this young woman, who’d had sex with an older man but had never tasted alcohol, who had just finished a semester of community college but had never seen the inside of an airport, who was about to leave her mother and the only home she’d known, to move to another city that she hoped would be kinder to her bastard son than the small, cruel place she was leaving behind? It hit Anton hard, how much of her story he didn’t know. How much catching up they had to do. This was why he was going back to her, to learn more of her story.
As for his own story, how much of it would he share? What would he tell her about Carine? How would he describe his relationship with David and Delores? Would it hurt or please her to know that he was the soft spot in their hearts, that they loved him as much as she did? Could he confess to the princely comforts of his life without insulting hers? Did he dare tell her that he probably spent more on books and dinners out than she earned in a month? Was David right? Would their blood tie prove to be thicker than the acute class differences between them? There was so much he didn’t know. But he was going to find out. In the end, that was the best thing he could say about himself—that he was ready to find out. At long last, he was willing to be a son. Oh, he had been a son to David and Delores, of course, had shone for them and made them proud. But what Juanita would require from him would be harder. Because what she would require was honesty, an absolute lack of pretense. Carine was the only other person in his life who had required this degree of nakedness from him, and he had dumped her. But Juanita was in his life now. And he could no more dump her than he could chop off his own hand.
Suddenly, he wanted all of them, wanted to gather them up—David and Delores, Juanita and Carine and Katherine, Uncle Connor and Brad—and place them in an orchestra that would play the music of his life. He wanted to leave out none of it—not the trombone, not the cello, not the cymbals or the violin. Synthesis. He needed a fusing together of all the strands of his life: past and present, black and white, poor and rich. He had lived for so long with pieces of his life missing, and as he drove through downtown Ronan and past the diner where his mother worked, it came to him what he must do, what he had come here to do: take her back with him. For a little while, maybe. Or for a long while. That decision, along with every other that she would make from here on out, would be hers. That much, he was sure, he could give her, the ability and the means to make her own decisions.
He stopped at the only red light in town, and as he sat there, he saw it: Sometime tonight, he would propose it, maybe over dinner, maybe when they’d returned home and she was preparing the couch for him. Come with me, Mam, he would say. Now that I’ve found you, it would be unbearable for me to leave you again. It would destroy me not to have you in my life. And I do have to go back, because I have a race to win. I wouldn’t care so much for myself, but you see, there are a lot of people who are counting on me. There are kids who dropped out of college to work on my campaign. There are old ladies in nursing homes who have sent me five dollars each month. And here’s the thing, Mam. I think I have it in me to be a good governor. You know, people always want their politicians to be father figures. I won’t be. But what I think I can be is a damn good son. A responsible heir, a sober custodian of what belongs to them. Because it ain’t my state or my dad’s. It’s theirs. And you know who reminded me of that, Mam? You did. It’s knowing that I can learn to be a good son to you that gives me the confidence to think I can do this job.
Anton smiled to himself as he drove past the fields that his forefathers may have tilled, and toward his nana’s house.