Family of Lies (7 page)

I
HAD NOT BEEN INSIDE A CHURCH SINCE THE
L
AWSONS’ DAUGHTER’S
wedding four months ago. I had been feeling out of place and uncomfortable since I walked in the door of the Baptist church on Third Street to attend Lois’s funeral.

Her mother’s cold reception had made me feel even more uncomfortable. I couldn’t wait to leave, but I couldn’t do that until I completed my mission.

The old woman, who looked like an elderly version of Lois, gave me a guarded look before she adjusted the wide-brimmed hat she wore, which looked like a cross between a cowboy hat and a sombrero. The wig she had on must have been sewed into the hat because when the hat moved, the wig moved with it.

She grunted and began to talk in a slow controlled manner. “Look, Mr. Lomax. I don’t know what’s so important for you to discuss with me that we need to set up an appointment. Before today, I ain’t never even laid eyes on you except on them TV commercials. Now, if Lois owed you some money, that’s too bad. I didn’t sign nothing, so I ain’t responsible for nothing she left behind. I got enough bill collectors coming after me for my own bills. I ain’t got no money, so I ain’t about to pay nobody else’s debts. Not even my daughter’s.”

“Your daughter didn’t owe me any money, ma’am,” I said quickly. “But the sooner we can discuss our business, the better.”

“Well, you need to tell me what business you need to discuss with me and you need to tell me now.”

I exhaled loudly and looked around some more. More people had entered the dining area. There were now almost twice as many mourners present as the number who had actually attended the service. Apparently the latecomers had come to get a plate and, I hoped, to offer their condolences to Lois’s family.

Lois’s daughter, Sarah, had joined some other young people near the exit. For a brief moment, she glanced at me. There was a puzzled expression on her face.

“This is about your granddaughter,” I finally said, still looking around the room. “Ma’am, this is kind of sensitive. If you really need to talk about it now, I suggest we go to a more private location.”

Mrs. Cooper shook her head. “I ain’t going no place with no strange man. Now, either you tell me right here and now what you need to talk to me about and what it’s got to do with my granddaughter, or you can get up out of my face.”

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I didn’t have a choice, so I took a deep breath and formed the words in my head before they slowly rolled out of my mouth. “I think I’m Sarah’s father.”

Mrs. Cooper’s mouth dropped open and she looked at me like I had just insulted her. “It was you? You the one that done it?” she asked, rotating her neck.

“Ma’am?”

“Some horny devil drugged my child and took advantage of her at a party one night. She passed out and when she woke up the next morning she was naked to the world. A few weeks later, she found out she was pregnant. Did you do it?”

Hearing the news that someone had drugged Lois and raped her horrified me. For one thing, it made me angry to think that someone would commit such a vile act. “Ma’am, I didn’t drug your daughter and I didn’t take advantage of her. She was over eighteen and more than willing to have a relationship with me.”

Mrs. Cooper blinked and looked me up and down, frowning and shaking her head. “You look old enough to be her daddy. What in the world did she see in a geezer like you? Why did you fire her?”

“Ma’am, I told you I didn’t fire Lois. One day she didn’t show up for work and she didn’t call to say why. I tried to call her, but the number she’d listed on her application had been disconnected or changed. I don’t know which. She called my personnel office and had the clerk mail her last check to a post office box, and I never heard from her again. I never did find out why she suddenly quit her job without giving me any notice. I didn’t even know she was still living in the Bay Area. I didn’t know she was married, and I didn’t know she’d had a daughter. Now, your granddaughter looks exactly like my late brother’s daughter. Because of that, my affair with Lois, and the time frame, well, what else can I think?”

“You telling me that my daughter lied to me? She lied to me all these years?”

I nodded. “I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

“Why should I believe you? Where you been all this time? How come you never paid a dime to help support Sarah? You just another nigger to me, so why should I believe anything you say?”

“Ma’am, I swear to God I didn’t know about Sarah until I saw her picture in the newspaper. Had I known about her before now and even suspected that I was her father, I would have taken care of her.”

Before Mrs. Cooper could respond, Sarah returned. “Grandma Lilly, you all right? You look upset,” she asked, a scowl on her beautiful cinnamon brown face as she looked at me. She reminded me of a doll with her big brown eyes and pert nose. Her thick black hair was braided and wrapped around her head like a finely woven basket.

“I’m . . . I’m fine, baby,” Mrs. Cooper said. “Sarah, uh, me and you need to talk.”

“We need to talk about what?” Sarah asked, looking from her grandmother to me. “I ain’t done nothing!” Her voice was so loud, a huge man in a black suit and dark glasses walked over and stood in front of Mrs. Cooper.

“Everything all right over here, Sister Cooper?” the man asked, looking at me like he wanted to bite my head off.

“Everything’s fine, Jimmy. Go on back to what you was doing,” Mrs. Cooper said, waving Jimmy away. Then she turned to Sarah with a weary look on her face. “I ain’t said you done nothing, gal. But, uh, this gentleman here, Mr. Lomax, he got something important to tell you.”

“I don’t think we should discuss this here,” I insisted, my hand in the air.

“This man might be your daddy,” Mrs. Cooper blurted out. She placed her hand on Sarah’s arm and began to rub it.

“Nuh-uh!” Sarah hollered. Then she gave me a hot look and stated, “My mama didn’t fool around with old men!”

“Well, she fooled around with me,” I said firmly.

“Mama told me my daddy died in a plane crash!” Sarah snapped. The hot look on her face suddenly looked cooler. “Didn’t he? She gave me a picture of him, and he didn’t look nothing like you.”

“I don’t know anything about that. The picture your mother showed you was probably of a man she knew and he may have died in a plane crash. But he was probably not your daddy. All I know is . . .” I stopped talking and stood up, feeling more robust than I had in weeks. The thought that I had a child had brought out strength in me I didn’t know I still had. A lot of the people, who were still gnawing on fried chicken and snatching rolls like they were pearls, kept glancing in my direction, giving me menacing looks. That scared me. I couldn’t imagine what those people were thinking. Strange things often happened at black folks’ funerals. During the service for my brother, a process server had stormed the pulpit and interrupted Pastor Morris so he could serve him with a summons that one of his creditors had initiated. Two of my rough friends escorted the process server out to the church parking lot and laid open his lip with a well-aimed fist. I didn’t want that to happen to me. “I really do think we should go to a more private place to discuss this,” I said. Two more very large men in dark suits and dark glasses were staring at me now.

“There ain’t nothing to discuss!” Mrs. Cooper hollered, wobbling up from her seat. “Now, if you don’t get out of my face, I’m going to have you thrown out!”

Sarah held up her hand. “Wait, Grandma.” She turned to me with a pleading look. “If you are my real daddy, I need to know.”

“I need to know too,” I replied. The more I looked at this girl, the more I believed she really was my child. She even sounded like my niece and had the same slight gap between her two front teeth.

Another one of the dark-suited men strolled over and glared at me. “Sister Cooper, is this man bothering you?” he asked, removing his glasses. He made the first man look like a choirboy. I stared into the most evil-looking, bloodshot eyes I’d ever seen in my life. His huge hands looked like smoked ham hocks. I was no wimp myself, but this man was at least forty years younger and forty pounds heavier than me. He could have swatted me like a fly.

Before Sister Cooper could respond, Sarah piped in, “It’s all right, Brother Whigham. I think this man is my real daddy.”

“Say what?” Brother Whigham said, putting his glasses back on and looking me up and down.

“Can you leave us alone for a few minutes?” Sarah said in her gentle voice. “If this man is my real daddy, I want to know and I want to know now. Today’s been a real hard day for me, knowing my mama is in that coffin and all. Other than my grandma, she was all I had left in the world. Now, if this man is my daddy . . .” Sarah sniffed and looked at the floor. When she looked up again, there was a strange smile on her face. “Maybe I won’t be so alone in the world now.”

“All right,” Brother Whigham grunted. The hard look on his face had softened, but he was still a man I didn’t want to tangle with.

Right after Brother Whigham slunk back toward the rest of the mourners and the food, Sarah looked at me. “You can prove you’re my real daddy, you know. That DNA thing I keep hearing about on TV would prove it.”

I nodded. “I didn’t want to have this conversation here. Not right after your mama’s funeral,” I began.

“Then how come you didn’t try to find out sooner?” Mrs. Cooper asked.

“Like I told you just a few moments ago, I didn’t even know Lois had a daughter until yesterday when I saw last Friday’s newspaper. I came as soon as I could.” I placed my hand on Sarah’s, covering and gently squeezing it. “I want to do a DNA test as soon as possible. I’d like to get on it
today
if you don’t mind.” I was so anxious to find out the truth, I knew I would not sleep again until I had at least put the wheels in motion. “I’ll take you to a facility where we can have it done. One of my closest buddies is the head technician there, and I’m sure he’ll accommodate us without an appointment. It could take a few weeks or even months to get the results, but I’m going to do all I can to speed it up.” Then I turned to Mrs. Cooper. “If Sarah is my daughter, I will take care of her and I will make sure you are well taken care of too.”

“You still operate all them computer stores?” Mrs. Cooper asked dryly.

“Yes, I do,” I said proudly.

“Brother, you gots to be
real
rich, then. Where you live at? Not in the hood, I bet!” Mrs. Cooper hurled the words at me like rocks. “You probably live in the Marina district or up on Nob Hill or one of them other uppity neighborhoods with a bunch of white folks. You want your friends to know about us?”

“I live in Pacific Heights. And if Sarah is my child, I want the world to know about her,” I stated.

“You got any other young’uns?” Mrs. Cooper asked. “You got a wife? What about them?”

“I don’t have any other children—that I know of. Most of the family I have left still live in Houston where I grew up. I have a very beautiful wife. She’s very understanding and supportive.”

“I hope you still think your ‘very beautiful’ wife is ‘understanding and supportive’ when you tell her about Sarah,” Mrs. Cooper quipped. “My husband left me for a girl who was working as his secretary almost thirty years ago. I’m still mad enough about it that if I ran into her on the street, I’d kick her tail from here to Timbuktu.”

I wondered just how understanding and supportive Vera was going to be when I told her I’d had an affair with a teenager and possibly fathered a child. I wasn’t going to say anything to her about it until the DNA test was completed. If it proved that Sarah was my child, then I’d beg Vera to forgive me. If she did, I would spend the rest of my life making this up to her.

I
MISSED MY MAMA.
S
HE WAS ON MY MIND DAY AND NIGHT.
A
ND WHEN
she wasn’t on my mind, Mr. Lomax was. I liked him. I would have been proud to claim him as my daddy, even if he wasn’t.

Mr. Lomax had told me that it would take a while to get the results of the DNA test. We didn’t hear from him until two weeks later.

Grandma Lilly and I had just come home from church that Sunday afternoon about twenty minutes before he knocked on the door.

Our apartment was located in a twenty-unit building in the crime-ridden district called Hunters Point. We lived on the fourth floor, and every window in our apartment had bars. But that still didn’t stop the thieves. Our door had a dead bolt, but a thief had still pried it open one night when we were at church. He (or she) had walked off with a jelly jar full of coins, a camera that didn’t work, and two packages of frozen smoked turkey necks.

I was kind of embarrassed for a rich businessman who lived in a mansion in one of the wealthiest areas in one of the world’s wealthiest cities to see our tacky little apartment. The living room was only large enough to accommodate a couch and a few end tables. The small color TV we owned sat on the windowsill facing the couch. Our kitchen was just a corner by the door with a stove and a small refrigerator. Grandma Lilly had fried a catfish the night before. You could still smell it and the cabbage greens and pig ears cooking on a stove in our neighbor’s apartment next door.

Mr. Lomax had a big manila envelope in his hand when I opened the door and waved him in. He looked like a high-class banker in his navy blue, pin-striped suit and white shirt and red tie. He had a nice head of hair for a man his age, even though most of it was gray and he had a couple of bald spots on the back. There was a big smile on his face as he pulled a document out of the envelope and handed it to me. I read it as fast as I could and then I started smiling too. “This . . . this DNA report says that out of a
trillion
people, you are the only one who could be my daddy,” I said with a huge lump already forming in my throat. “Uh . . . I don’t know how many a trillion is.”

Mr. Lomax laughed. “It’s more than the number of people on this planet.” He laughed some more. “I’m very happy with this news.”

“I . . . I . . . me too,” I stuttered. I didn’t know what to say next. All this time I thought my real daddy was dead, so this was a moment I had never allowed myself to even think about. “I hope you’ll still be happy when you get to know me,” I said, looking at my feet. We hugged and then we both started to laugh and talk at the same time. “You know, we got the same eyes!”

“Sure enough,” he agreed, patting me on the back.

“Girl, what’s going on out there?” Grandma Lilly yelled from the tiny bedroom we shared across the narrow hall from our bathroom. Before I could answer, she came trotting into the living room. She stopped in the middle of the floor when she saw Mr. Lomax. “What’s going on out here?” she asked with her head whipping from side to side, looking from him to me.

“Mr. Lomax
is
my daddy!” I hollered, waving the piece of paper.

“Lemme see that thang!” Grandma Lilly yelled, rushing across the floor with her stroke foot and arthritic legs, stumbling like a drunken person. She snatched the document out of my hand and started to read. She moved her gnarled finger over each word and muttered under her breath, like a person who had just learned how to read. My grandmother was a real nice lady and all, but sometimes she acted real ghetto and mean. She had had a hard life and had to be a hard person in order to survive. Just like me. She looked at the paper for a couple of minutes, and then she slowly handed it back to my daddy. “Have mercy, Jesus,” she wheezed. “Uh, why don’t you have a seat, Mr. Lomax. I guess we need to talk.” Grandma Lilly nodded toward our lumpy plaid couch. “You want something to drink? It’s after the middle of the month, so all we got left is some Gatorade.”

“No thanks,” Daddy said to the drink. But he eased down on the couch.

“What your wife got to say about all this?” Grandma Lilly asked. She sat down on the other end of the couch, fanning her face and crossing her knotty legs like she always did when she was nervous or excited. I plopped down next to Daddy, and as soon as I did that, he put his arm around my shoulder and hugged me some more. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so special.

“I haven’t told her yet,” my daddy said, rubbing his knee and looking worried. “I’m going to go right home and talk to her about all of this.” He stopped talking, took a deep breath, and looked at me real hard. “Sarah, I’m going to take care of you and your granny from now on. But if you don’t want to have a relationship with me, I’ll understand.”

I gasped. “But you are my daddy! Why wouldn’t I want to have a relationship with you?”

“Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better,” he said.

“Me too. It’ll be nice to get some help with all the bills we got,” Grandma Lilly muttered. “It ain’t easy raising no teenager in this day and age. This girl wants everything she sees . . .”

“You won’t have to worry about that anymore, ma’am.” Daddy leaned over and gave my grandmother a quick peck on the cheek that made her flinch.

My grandmother was still so mad about her husband running out on her she didn’t care too much for men anymore. She wouldn’t even go to male doctors, especially when it came to procedures related to the female body that she had to remove clothing for. She had not been with a man since her husband left, so she had not had sex since then. My dead stepdaddy used to tease my grandmother and tell her that all she needed was a good fuck. She’d always get madder at him for saying nasty shit like that in front of me than she would for him saying it at all.

“Whatever,” Grandma Lilly said, rearing back and screwing up her face as if my daddy had just hauled off and pinched her. He looked away like he didn’t notice what she did next, but I know he did. She brushed off her cheek where he had kissed her. “What do we do now?”

“I’ll be meeting with my lawyer in a couple of days to revise my will. I want to do that right away so that you and Sarah will be taken care of,” my daddy said. All of a sudden, a real sad look crossed his face. “I . . . I . . .” He stopped and stared at the wall. I assumed he was thinking about my mama’s sudden and unexpected death. “We can be here today and gone tomorrow.” He was right. I had lost eight close friends in the last four years to violence. Two of them were sister and brother, shot down like dogs in separate incidents a month apart. When I thought about my future, I didn’t wonder what I’d be when I grew up. I wondered what I’d be
if
I grew up. “My brother and my sister died in accidents,” he added.

“You ain’t got no deadly disease or nothing, huh?” Grandma Lilly asked, looking at Daddy out of the corner of her eye. One thing I could say about old folks was that everybody expected them to say whatever was on their mind. Like little kids, people over forty just didn’t know any better. “Is that why you so anxious to get involved with me and Sarah now?”

“No, I don’t have a disease or anything. But I am anxious to get to know you and Sarah better as soon as possible,” my daddy replied, clearing his throat, looking around. A fat roach crawled up the wall by the door, but he didn’t see it. But a big fly buzzed around his head and then landed on his hand. “Uh, I guess I should be going,” he said, shaking the fly off.

“Don’t you want to stay for supper? I cooked some Chinese mustard greens and smothered a chicken before I went to church this morning,” Grandma Lilly said, nodding toward the kitchen.

“Only if it’s not too much trouble.” Daddy sniffed.

“It ain’t no trouble at all. We just waiting on them corn muffins to get done.” Grandma Lilly got up off the couch and gave me a stern look. “Sarah, get in that kitchen and find a plate for your daddy that ain’t got no cracks in it. And a clean glass so he can drink some Gatorade with his supper.”

Daddy got up off the couch and stood in the kitchen doorway, still talking as Grandma Lilly and I fixed dinner. He told us how he was going to set up a trust for me and how he was going to make sure his accountant paid all our bills, rent, and everything else. He even offered to buy us a brand-new car, but my grandmother never learned to drive and I didn’t have my license yet, so she told him to forget the car. After he’d told us everything he was going to do for us, he stopped talking all of a sudden and he got this weird look on his face. I thought he was having a stroke.

“I have a better idea than me paying rent on this place.” He was talking so fast, he almost lost his breath. “How would you two like to live in a lavishly furnished condominium a few blocks from downtown? I am sure you’d like to move out of this dump.”

I covered my mouth with my hand to keep from laughing. My grandmother’s jaw dropped as she whirled around from the stove with a spatula in her hand. “Dump? Look, Mr. Perfect Negro, this dump here is my home and has been for more than
thirty
years,” she growled, shaking that spatula at my daddy like she wanted to swat him with it. “I ain’t going no place. Now, I’m glad you want to step up to the plate and take care of your daughter, but I don’t appreciate you coming up in here insulting us!”

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean for that to sound as harsh as it did. I would never purposely say anything to hurt you or Sarah. It’s just that . . . well, this is a violent, run-down neighborhood. I wouldn’t want a goat I didn’t like to live over here. I just assumed that anybody who had the chance to leave here would do so lickety-split. Last week alone three people got shot on this very street.”

“Four,” I corrected, my voice cracking. “Last night, the little eight-year-old boy in the front apartment on the first floor was in his bed when a bullet came through the wall from outside and hit him in the back. He might be paralyzed for life.”

“My Lord!” Daddy hollered, shaking his head and rubbing the back of his neck.

I would have left Hunters Point a long time ago if I’d had the chance. I was sick and tired of living in fear. My mama and I used to live in the Mission District, which is just the Latino version of Hunters Point. Our apartment got broken into so many times we stopped locking the door. The man my mother was with then, a man from Mexico, didn’t like kids. So he told her he’d marry her only if she “got rid of” me. Well, Grandma Lilly was glad to raise me. I loved her more than I loved myself and I wanted her to be happy. I swallowed hard and gave her a hopeful look. “I’d love to move away from here, Grandma Lilly,” I admitted. “When that bullet came through my bedroom window last year, you said you hoped we’d be able to get up out of here before you died, remember?”

“Yeah,” Grandma Lilly grunted with a wounded look on her face. “But I never thought we would.” She set the spatula down on the counter and looked at my daddy. “You telling me you’d pay the rent for us to live in one of them fancy places near downtown? I used to clean for a white lady down there, two days a week, until my lumbago got so bad. I could look out her living room window right at the Golden Gate Bridge. The rent in them places must be as high as a Georgia pine tree.”

“I own a condo in one of those buildings: three bedrooms, three bathrooms,” my daddy told us. “You and Sarah can live in it rent-free for the rest of your lives if you want to.”

“You
own
a place over there? I don’t mean to be nosy, but how much do one of them condos cost?”

“Well, the one I own set me back a couple of million.”

“Lord have mercy! You’re going to let us live in a two-million-dollar place for nothing? Heh, heh, heh. I know God is real for sure now.”

“I don’t know any black folks that live in that fancy neighborhood,” I threw in.

“You do now, sugar.” Daddy laughed.

He was such a nice man. I couldn’t wait to get to know him better. I was already proud to be his daughter.

“Well . . . I guess it would be nice for this girl here to live the good life for a change,” Grandma Lilly croaked. “And I would like to know what it feels like to live in a place where I don’t have to worry about no sex fiend raping me.”

From the wide grin on my grandmother’s face, I knew she was just as excited to move into a better place as I was.

“Uh, it’s too bad I’ll have to take two or three buses to get from our new address to that chicken shack I work for over here,” Grandma Lilly pointed out, batting her eyelashes in Daddy’s direction. “I got to work two more years before I can retire.”

“No, you won’t,” Daddy said real fast, shaking his head. “Mrs. Cooper, you can retire right away. As a matter of fact, I insist you do just that. You’ve worked long and hard enough taking care of other folks’ needs. It’s time for somebody to take care of your needs for a change.”

Right after Daddy stopped talking, Grandma Lilly looked at me and winked.

“This junk we got won’t look too good in a fancy new apartment,” I mentioned, hoping Daddy would take the hint and offer to buy us some new stuff.

“Like I said, the condo is furnished. Pack only the things you really need—clothes, pictures, and other personal items. I’ll have some movers come over here to collect and dispose of the rest of this broken-down mess.” Daddy gave my grandmother an apologetic look. “I hope I didn’t sound too harsh again,” he said with his hands up in the air. “I can be pretty blunt at times.”

Grandma Lilly laughed. “Honey, if you going to do everything you say you going to do for us, you can be as blunt as a dull shovel for all I care.” Grandma Lilly rubbed her palms together and pursed her lips. She always did that when she was happy. I hadn’t seen her look this happy since she won a hundred dollars in a bingo game last year.

I laughed, too, but I was still kind of sad inside. I was afraid that my new life might not be the life I wanted....