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“Soon as you want.”
“God, I love the way you think sometimes,” she said, and she kissed me.
“Get a room, you two,” Nana Mama cracked as she eased into a lawn chair near us.
“We were talking about doing just that,” I said.
“TMI, as Jannie says,” my grandmother said, and she waved us off.
“You happy you came back to Starksville, Nana?” Bree asked.
“I’d be some kind of ungrateful wretch if I wasn’t,” Nana Mama said. “This is like the story of the prodigal son, only I’m living it. Honestly, Bree, I could die right now and it would be perfectly fine by me.”
“Not by me,” I said.
“And not by me either,” my father said, coming up behind her, bending down, and kissing her on the cheek.
Nana Mama usually made a fuss over public displays of affection, but she put her hand on her son’s cheek and closed her eyes, and I had a flash of her when she must have been very young and holding her newborn child in her arms.
My dad’s cell phone buzzed. He stood up, dug it out, and read a text. He looked at me, and then at my grandmother.
“I’m afraid I haven’t told you all of it,” he said. “How I came to be Peter Drummond and all.”
That was true. He’d been very evasive about that part of his life.
“You going to tell us?” Nana Mama said.
“In a minute,” he said. “First, there’s someone I want you all to meet.”
Chapter
102
My father came back holding hands with Reverend Alicia Maya, who looked absolutely radiant in the last full rays of sunshine.
“Alex,” my dad said, “Mom. I’d like to introduce you to my best friend, the woman whose love saved me. My wife, Alicia.”
For the umpteenth time in the last two weeks I got tears in my eyes.
“I’m so sorry I had to lie to you that day in the cemetery,” Reverend Maya said, coming to me and holding my hands. “But your dad thought that things would be better for you if you just went on believing he was dead. He considered his chance to see you a gift from God, and he said that was enough for him. But after you’d left Florida, he realized it wasn’t enough. He wanted to know you, to be a part of your life. To do that, he had to come back and face Bell and destroy the life he’d made for himself.”
The story came out from the two of them as the day ebbed toward twilight, and everybody at the party stopped to listen.
Reverend Maya found my father just the way she’d told me, weak, homeless, and limping into her church one day. She’d allowed him to sleep there. She’d provided him with counseling and helped him battle his addictions.
“Through Alicia, I found God and have been sober for thirty-four years,” my father said. “I was guilty of abandoning you boys, and you, Mom, but I was terrified of what might happen to me and to all of you if I ever returned to Starksville.”
Reverend Maya said, “He confessed it all to me one night about a year after he started living in the church. He told me about seeing Marvin Bell kill your mom, about being arrested and shot, surviving the gorge, recovering with the help of his beloved Clifford. I told him I believed that God would forgive him.”
“Is that when you fell in love with him?” Nana Mama asked.
“No, love came later, after the war, when I realized how close I’d come to losing him.”
The night my father met Alicia Maya, he had fake papers that identified him as Paul Brown. But shortly after he confessed to the reverend his true identity, a tragic miracle occurred.
A nineteen-year-old named Peter Drummond came into the Reverend Maya’s church seeking counsel, just as my father had a year before. Drummond told her that he was an orphan and had been out of foster care in Kansas City for less than a year. He’d been homeless, and so, on a whim, he’d enlisted in the Marine Corps.
“He said he’d made a mistake,” Reverend Maya said. “That he never should have enlisted and that he knew he was incapable of handling the pressures of war, especially of killing other men.”
