The Kindest Lie(68)
He laughed. “You must’ve learned that shit in college. Psychology, right? Some book about a hundred ways to get inside the mind of a broke brotha? Am I right?”
The bottle of Bud swung in Eli’s hand when he talked. Ruth threw up both hands in surrender, hoping he’d see she had come in peace.
“Look, I’m sick of you feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not the only one with problems. I haven’t told anyone this, but there’s a guy on my job that I trained and now he’s getting better, high-profile assignments.”
“Damn. Them white people be tripping. Sorry about that, sis. But at least you still got a job.”
“How are you so sure they’re white?”
Eli twisted his mouth into a smirk as if he didn’t need any confirmation. Her eye roll must have told him he’d guessed correctly.
“Hey, Eli?”
“What’s good, lil bit?”
“Do you ever feel like life is getting ahead of you, like you can’t control what happens anymore? I mean, it’s your life, but somebody else is pulling the puppet strings. Nothing is the way it used to be or the way it should be.” She knew she wasn’t making much sense, not even to herself. Her thoughts jumbled in her head.
Eli glanced at his phone. “I know where I should be right now. On the plant floor. The smell of hot steel all around me. All those machines coming alive in my hands just like a good woman. I can still hear the buzzing and other sounds in my head. Sometimes, they wake me up in the middle of the night. It’s like they teasing me, you know.”
Even the memory of the plant made his face glow, and then that flame was extinguished just as fast. Ruth ached for her brother to regain everything he had lost.
“Cassie should be by your side through this thing. She’s your wife, the mother of your children. One thing I can say about Mama is that she stuck by Papa when he got sick. She hung in there till the end.”
Eli took a swig of his beer. “Mama’s a soldier, man. Ride or die. Now, Cassie. She took it real good in the beginning, rubbing my face, whispering sweet words in my ear. You know how y’all women do. Talking ’bout how she loves me more than biscuits and gravy and I would always be her husband no matter what. That’s what she said until the bill collectors started calling. Then I started smelling some other brotha’s sweat on her.”
“I didn’t know,” Ruth said, her hands tightening around her bottle. She thought about Xavier and how she’d really handle it if he got demoted at his company, or worse, let go. You like to think you know yourself and those closest to you, but you don’t until you’re tested.
“Like I told Cassie, she saw my lack, not my love. Then she had the nerve to try to keep my kids from me.” Eli smashed a peanut shell in his fist and his whole body shook, as if to shed the memory.
He’d never opened up to her like this before, but then again, she’d been a kid most of the years they’d spent together. Men kept their hurt tucked away deep on the inside. If it rose high enough to spill out of them, they ran it off on the basketball court, drowned it in a bottle, or buried it deep inside a woman. But they rarely talked it out.
Ruth gripped her brother’s arm and forced him to look at her. “Don’t let that happen. Fight for my niece and nephews. I know how much you love them, and I’ve seen the way they look at you. Like you drew every star in the sky by hand.”
He made a gurgling sound as if he were speaking underwater. “There’s nothing like having your kids in your life. When I miss weeks with mine, it’s like years, you know.”
Keeping her eyes on her beer, Ruth said, “I know it’s not the same, but I’ve tried for eleven years to convince myself that I could just go on with my life not knowing anything about my son. I was fooling myself.”
Eli threw his head back. “Here we go. You still digging, ain’t you?”
“Does the name Stanley DeAngelo mean anything to you?” She studied his face.
Unexpectedly, he nodded. “Yeah. A lawyer. Kind of shady. That cat had a reputation for being a fixer. Bribing judges and shit. Made problems go away, if you know what I mean. Got locked up for some years, I think. Why?”
Papa’s legacy helped Eli get his job at Fernwood. Still, even a misdemeanor followed you. What if her snooping blew this adoption fraud case wide open and people started asking questions because she came to town asking them first? Even if it was long ago and for a minor offense, Eli already had a criminal record, and now she knew he’d done time on gun charges. If he were implicated in another crime, would anyone ever hire him again? But she needed answers.
Swiveling on her bar stool to face her brother, she said, “Did DeAngelo have anything to do with my baby?”
He appeared genuinely surprised by her question. “What? Hell, no. Let me tell you. Mama took care of the adoption. I don’t know what lawyer she went through, but I can’t see it being him. She not crazy.”
She believed Eli when he said he knew nothing about a connection to DeAngelo, but her intuition nagged at her. “Okay. Maybe. Maybe not.” She nibbled on a few peanuts underneath the cracked shells on her brother’s napkin.
Alcohol lubricated her brother’s tongue, this she knew. He used to let secrets slip all the time—once revealing a foreclosure on an uncle’s swanky new house, another time exposing a cousin’s extramarital affair. Right now, he was just drunk enough to tell her the name of her son.