NOVEL EXCERPT

It was set in motion on a Thursday night sometime after I got out of a hot bath but before I opened a bottle of eighteen-year-old whisky. I was studying historic paint samples for the house I was building with Garvey Mathers, when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see my father standing there.

I say ‘my father,’ but my father situation was complicated. It was Hula Mayfield at the door that night. He was the closest thing I had to a real father even though there was no blood between us.

My mother left me in Alabama with Hula and his wife Amanda when I was just shy of eight-years-old. It wasn’t supposed to be a permanent thing. She said that she would come back for me but she didn’t. There were a few visits, a few letters, and she made all the right noises, but nothing ever came of it.

And here’s what happened: life went on without her. I grew up. I went to college. I familiarized myself with the business of marriage and the politics of divorce (times three). When I eventually found myself in a Poughkeepsie hotel room, pushing thirty-five with nothing but a bugle-beaded evening bag and a bottle of soured chocolate milk, I called Hula.

I moved back to Langston, Alabama; back to my old room. And, one night at dinner, after listening to Hula and me dissect the failings of my third marriage, Amanda told us, ‘You both need something to do that’ll leave you too tired to think. Something with heavy hammers.’

So Hula bought the cigar factory. The building had been abandoned for the best part of thirty years, left to the elements. Hurricane Lucille stripped the shingles; the gutters sprouted butterfly bushes; and the eaves were clotted with great dirt dauber nests that looked like putty-coloured pan flutes. It wasn’t a job for the faint-hearted but we unboarded the windows and unchained the doors and went to work salving frustration with hard graft.

During the long renovation, we gradually moved in. Each day Hula and I went a little earlier, stayed a little later and by the time the cigar factory was inhabitable, we inhabited it. We’d turned a condemned shell into six apartments, a restaurant and a meeting hall. Hula moved into one apartment. I moved into another. The other four were eventually doled out to our favourite misfits and everyday fools.

It caused a bit of a scandal. Not only because people were in a lather about modifying a piece of Langston’s history, but also because Amanda didn’t move with us. There was nothing contentious about it. Hula and Amanda were still very married; still loved each other; still worked together at Ford’s Feed and Seed. Contrary to rumour, they never discussed separation or divorce. If anything, they grew closer when they lived apart. There were only about four-and-a-half blocks between us and Amanda thought of it as Hula setting up camp in the backyard.

That Thursday night in April, I’d just about decided on Buckram blue for the exterior trim when I answered Hula’s knock at the door.

‘Are you asleep?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah. Are you?’

‘No!’

Hula had greeted me that way, not exclusively but regularly, since I was eleven years old when he’d found me standing in the front yard, middle of the night, wearing pajamas. He asked, ‘Are you asleep?’ To which I answered, hand on my hip, ‘Yeah. Are you?’ Sleep has always been a problem for me, too much, not enough, nightmares, night terrors, but sleepwalking was a particular problem during those years.

I opened the door a little further. ‘You want to come in?’

He used the back of his hand like a trumpet mute, distorting the sound of an exaggerated yawn. ‘No. I’m give out.’

‘It took you long enough.’ Hula had gone to Amanda’s house to rewire a dimmer switch in the dining room.

‘I finished hours ago, but she was in one of her moods.’

I smiled. ‘What’s got her stirred up tonight?’

Hula rested his shoulder against the doorjamb and made a weary face as if the thought of it exhausted him. ‘She’s on about this cruise.’

‘Don’t be such a baby. Tell her you don’t want to go on a cruise.’

‘And, she’s on about this pageant-thing.’

Hula unfolded a Silver Sweetheart Pageant programme from his pocket and hesitated before handing it to me. ‘Amanda wanted me to show this to you.’

The front cover, which featured a glamour shot of a woman seductively clasping the collar of a sequinned blouse, advertised a beauty contest for ladies aged fifty-nine years and older.

 I opened it to a dog-eared page: participant photographs and biographies.

Hula pointed to one photograph in particular.

I looked closer. Judy Willoughby is recently retired and spends her newly-found free time practicing reflexology with her partner, Sherman. She enjoys playing charades, hosting parties, and collecting celebrity memorabilia.

My mother.

‘Retired from what?’ I wanted to know.

‘Troublemaking, I hope.’

‘What is “reflexology”?’

Hula closed his eyes and shook his head.

‘Wonder where she found Sherman?’

‘Where does she find any of them?’

I hadn’t seen mother for about eight months, not since she stopped by the restaurant with a van load of people from some church. They were on their way home from a Christian Entrepreneur Conference. She walked into the restaurant like a newly ascended monarch wearing a tangerine-coloured maxi dress and a throng of bangle bracelets. Hula and I were sitting at his favourite corner booth. Judy raised her hand and waved in our direction. ‘Table for seventeen, please.’ Then, she laughed. The other members of her party fell into a sort of ecstasy as if the Beatitudes were dripping from the corners of her mouth straight into the reservoirs of their deep pockets.

‘How do you suppose she knew about the pageant?’

Hula shrugged. ‘I might’ve mentioned it.’

‘When did you talk to her?’

‘Please. I don’t even remember what I had this morning for breakfast.’

I tried to read him. His brow was smooth; his expression vacillated between amusement and bewilderment. This was his placid way of refusing to divulge information. I’d seen him do this many times which, I suppose, should have been a dead give-away that there was more to the story. I always knew Hula kept secrets from other people but I had no idea how many he kept from me.

I reached out and touched the frayed pocket of his denim jacket. ‘You’re about to lose your spectacles.’

He slipped the glasses through the hole in his pocket and sighed. ‘I spent twenty-minutes looking for them this morning before I realized I was already wearing them.’

‘Get your prescription checked.’

‘I will.’

‘You won’t.’

His smile was tired. ‘I’ll get on. Unless you want to talk about…’ He paused and pointed at the programme.

‘Is there anything to talk about?’

‘Amanda thought it might upset you.’

‘Did you think it would upset me?’

‘I try not to think.’

‘How’s that working out for you, not thinking?’

‘I’ll let you know.’ He took a few steps down the hall to his apartment, unlocked the door, and looked back. ‘Do you have anything else to say to me?’

‘Just goodnight.’

‘Goodnight then.’

I closed the door and poured myself a whisky.